Alonso - 2004 - Conforming Disconformity

Conforming Disconformity: Mestizaje,
Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican

Nationalism
Ana Mara Alonso
University of Arizona
The word in language is half someone elses. It becomes ones own only when
the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent. . . . And not all
words . . . submit equally easily to this appropriation. . . . Many words stubbornly
resist. . . . It is as if they put themselves into quotation marks against the will of the
speaker.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
The Taste of Theory

Discussing the emergence of a contemporary, global aesthetics, Robert Stam
notes:
If the nationalist discourse of the 1960s drew sharp lines between First World and
Third World, oppressor and oppressed, post-nationalist discourse replaces such bi-
nary dualisms with a . . . spectrum of subtle differentiations. . . . Purity gives way
to contamination. . . . Colonial tropes of irreconcilable dualism give way to post-
colonial tropes drawing on the diverse modalities of mixedness. [1998:1]
My Google search for mestizaje turns up 53,200 hits, mestiza yields 81,200
hits, and mestizo is the big winner with 142,000 hits.1 More frequently used as
adjectives rather than as nouns, these latter terms evoke a certain sensibility that
confounds the exotic with the familiar, the past with the present, and that values
mixedness in everything from cuisine to bookmarks, from dress to multimedia
endeavors, and from household furnishings to scholarly articles. Taste informs
theory as well as consumer habits.
Words have the taste of a profession, Bakhtin writes (1981:293). The term
hybridity has acquired the taste of South Asian subaltern and postcolonial studies
(Ashcroft et al. 1998:116121). Although its current flavor is shaped by a critical,
politicized sensibility, this has not erased the traces of an earlier history (Young
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 19, Issue 4, pp. 459490, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.

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459
460 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
1995). Mestizo and hybrid have overlapping semantic ranges, despite their dif-
ferent etymologies. Both terms originally denoted the stigmatized offspring of
parents classified as different along ethnic, racial, and status lines; hence, both
terms are marked by accents of conquest and inequality.2
Mestizo has long had the taste of Latin American studies. Mark Millington
(2001) comments that, until recently, Latin America was marginalized in post-
colonial studies. Whether it should be included is still a contested issue. Jorge
Flor de Alva, for example, argues that colonial and postcolonial are only
applicable to indigenous groups in Latin America and not to the nonindigenous
elites who took power after independence (Millington 2001). I do not find this
argument persuasive. Postcolonialism in Latin Americaa paradoxical condi-
tion marked both by a rejection of the colonial past and by colonialisms con-
tinuing and pervasive tracesis not just applicable to indigenous people; in-
stead, it characterizes Latin American societies as whole systems of stratified
relations.
Moreover, the ethnoracialized subjectivities of Latin American elites cannot
simply be reduced to European or even white. Elites in Mexico have traced
descent not only from Europeans but also from indigenes. Even the criollos, the
colony-born descendants of the Spanish who occupied the second rung of the
colonial ethnoracial system of stratification, were distinguished from the Euro-
pean Spaniards (peninsulares) by geographic racism. Numerous Latin American
intellectuals (who have viewed their societies as postcolonial for nearly two cen-
turies) have addressed the paradoxical location of criollos, who are subject to
European and U.S. racism, on the one hand, and are racist toward those of African
and indigenous descent, on the other hand, and the even more ambivalent location
of mestizos and mulattos.3 Hence, the texts of the Mexican revolutionary intel-
lectuals Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, which I analyze here, form part of
a broader pan-Americanism that has a long history of critical engagement with
colonialism and the paradoxes of hybridity.
Hybridity and mestizaje are not so much the natural product of an us
meeting a them but rather the recognitionor creationof an us and a them
(Dean and Leibsohn 2003:6).4 As Marisol de la Cadena stresses, mestizos are
not simple, empirical hybrids, a plain result of biological or cultural mixture of
two (formerly discreet) entities. Rather they evoke a complex conceptual hybridity
inscribed in the notion of mestizo itself (n.d.:4), a notion that has been a product
of long-term, unequal dialogues in social fields of domination, exploitation, and
subjectification.
In this article, I will place hybridity and mestizaje, studies of the former
British colonies, and studies of the former Spanish colonies, into a much needed
dialogic relation. My article, part of a longer study, will trace some of the links in
the complex genealogy of mestizaje, examining how racial and cultural mixing
has been represented in discourses of 20th-century Mexican state intellectuals and
in the postrevolutionary project of aesthetic statism,5 which I argue represents
an authoritative form of intentional hybridization.6 Gloria Anzalduas (1987)
concept of mestiza consciousness has affinities with the concept of hybridity
developed by Homi Bhabha (1995a, 1995b) or Robert Young (1995) in postcolonial
AESTHETICS OF MEXICAN NATIONALISM 461
studies; it has become a staple in scholarly discourse on intercultural processes,

transculturation, and the heterogeneity of identity in the Americas. I argue here
that Anzalduas mestiza consciousness and Bhabhas or Youngs extension of
Bakhtins discussion of hybridization to claim a subversive, destabilizing potential
for colonial and postcolonial modalities of mixedness, more generally, are both
problematic.7
Mestizaje and Social Memory

The critique of Spanish colonialism and the revaluation of Mexicos Aztec
past by intellectuals began with the efforts of criollo nationalists in the 17th cen-
tury; after independence in 1821, the legal basis of colonial racial categories was
abolished. This anticolonial social memory, which gave the Aztecs pride of place
as the first Mexicans and critically reexamined colonial racism, was further de-
veloped by some 19th-century Liberal artists and intellectuals after La Reforma,
Mexicos Liberal revolution of the mid19th century spearheaded by Benito Juarez,
Mexicos first indigenous President (Portal Ariosa and Ramrez 1995:5160; Rico
Mansard 2000; Tenenbaum 1994:133137; Widdifield 1996:1013). The Reforma
was also known as Mexicos second independence because one of its goals was
to destroy remaining colonial institutions. The regime of the dictator Porfirio Daz
(18761911) represented itself as the historical heir of Mexicos second indepen-
dence. However, postcolonial ambivalence, among other factors, undermined the
critical strand of the Liberals project.
The histories of mestizaje and hybridity intersected during the 19th century.
Mestizaje in Latin America became a key example in European theoretical de-
bates about hybridity: Were hybrids fertile? Did the products of such unions lead
to new intermediate stocks? Or, as the influential racial theorist Robert Knox
maintained, were all exotics doomed to degenerate through the effects of
climate or mixed unions, or both (Young 1995:16)? These debates and, in par-
ticular, Spencerian sociology, which affirmed that hybrid societies were unstable
and disorganized (Young 1995:19), greatly influenced Latin American elites (Helg
1990:37), leading them to view mestizaje as a particular instance of the more gen-
eral problematic process of hybridity that was being discussed internationally.8
Sadly, comparison between their own countries and the United States led some
Latin Americans to attribute U.S. cultural, political, and economic development to
Anglo-Saxon racial purity and to U.S. policies that marginalized Native Amer-
icans and blacks from the nation (Helg 1990:38). This belief in the presumed
superiority of the European impacted Liberal and Porfirian projects of nation-
state formation, resulting in efforts to whiten Mexicos population through
immigration and to incorporate the Indian into the nation through a model of
development that resulted in the agrarian dispossession of rural communities
and the destruction of local political institutions (Gutierrez 1999:173; Knight
1990).
Postcolonial ambivalence was also expressed in quotidian materializations of
nationalism such as Porfirios project to beautify the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico
Citys central boulevard. Under the leadership of General Vicente Riva Palacio,
minister of development, this project, begun in 1877, aimed to materialize the

Liberal version of history in the public monuments of Mexico City; the walk down
the Paseo de la Reforma, which led from the heart of the old Aztec capital and
current seat of government, the Plaza de la Constitucion, to the residence of Pres-
ident Porfirio Daz in Chapultepec Park, became an education in social memory
(Agostoni 2003:77114; Tenenbaum 1994:135). A statue to Cuahtemoc, the Aztec
ruler who died fighting the Spaniards, was erected at the first glorieta (roundabout)
in honor of this first defender of Mexican nationalism. From there, in a Liberal
allegory of Mexican history, Cuahtemoc flowed into the Father of Mexican Inde-
pendence, Miguel Hidalgo, into heroes of the Reforma, and into the residence of
then President, Porfirio Daz (Tenenbaum 1994:141). Yet Cuahtemocs idealiza-
tion as the first defender of the Mexican nation also included the depiction of his
features as white while the Greek details on his costume indexed the affinity of the
Aztecs with the European ancestors of the West (Tenenbaum 1994). Overall, post-
colonial revisionist history exalted the dead Indians of the past. Their descendants,
Indians and indomestizos, continued to be stigmatized.9
Ten years of revolutionary warfare (191020) destroyed the Porfirian state in
Mexico and the old alliance between state functionaries, white European-oriented
landed elites, and foreign capital. Mexican society was left sharply divided along
ethnoracial and class lines, fragmented by the multiple sovereignties of regional
strongmen and of local communities. The sovereignty of the new revolutionary
state was perceived to be threatened by the U.S. policy of Manifest Destiny, which
proclaimed the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over mongrel nations such as Mex-
ico and impelled Americans to pursue territorial conquests aggressively and to
seek the spread of civilization among barbarians and savages (Martnez
2001:56).
Mestizaje in the Discourses of Revolutionary State Intellectuals

The new revolutionary mythohistory of mestizaje revalued mixture in positive
terms and became the cornerstone of a new nationalist project, a state-led cul-
tural revolution that was explicitly anti-imperialist and anticolonial. In defiance of
Anglo-Saxon notions of mixture as degeneracy, Mexican official discourses pro-
moted racial and cultural intermixture as the only way to create homogeneity out
of heterogeneity, unity out of fragmentation, a strong nation that could withstand
the internal menace of its own failures to overcome the injustices of its colonial
past and the external menace of U.S. imperialism.
Revolutionary intellectuals revised the Porfirian narrative of history, imposing
a new teleology that located the beginnings of Mexican history even more firmly
in the Aztec past, rather than the Spanish Conquest, and made the revolution of
191020 (and not the Reforma and Porfiriato) the harbinger of Mexicos sec-
ond independence. They replaced Porfirian progressivism with understandings
of postcolonial history as discontinuity or interruption. Moreover, they critiqued
the social Darwinism that had explained historical process during the Porfiriato
(18761911), arguing that Mendels or Lamarcks philosophies of biology pro-
vided better frameworks for making sense of the Mexican past. Their revised
mythohistorical narratives were the latest rejoinders in a long-term national and

transnational conversation.
Vasconcelos and the Multiplied Experience of History

Jose Vasconcelos (18821959), author of The Cosmic Race (1979) and of the
more sociological The Latin American Basis of Mexican Civilization (1926),10
is probably the best-known exponent of the mythohistory of mestizaje. Vascon-
celos was a philosopher and revolutionary intellectual who identified himself as
a mestizo.11 As secretary of education from 1921 to 1924, he played a key role
in encouraging the development of public art and a mestizo aesthetics, taking the
revolution to every little village by extending public schooling and coining the
motto of the National University, The Spirit shall speak through my race (Knight
1990:102n.1; Miller 1999:4650). His writings have had a profound influence not
only in Mexico and Latin America but also on the U.S. Chicano movement and
Chicana feminism.
Vasconcelos spent most of his childhood in the U.S.Mexico borderlands.
From an Anglo perspective, if racist ideas about Mexicans served to legitimate
the U.S.Mexican War of 1848, in which Mexico lost half its territory, these ideas
only grew more virulent during the course of the second half of the 19th century,
especially along the border (Martnez 2001:5356). As a ten-year-old Mexican at-
tending school in Eagle Pass, Texas, around 1892, Vasconcelos experienced Anglo
racism toward Mexicans on a daily basis. As noted from his autobiography, Ulises
Criollo, Vasconcelos paints a picture of the classroom as the site of a perpetual
battle between Anglos and Mexicans: When it was affirmed in class that one hun-
dred Yankees could chase off one thousand Mexicans, I would rise and say That
isnt true. I would get even more angry when someone would assert, Mexicans
are a semicivilized people.. . . I would rise and say, We had a printing press before
you did. (Martnez 1996:105). These childhood experiences, combined with an
adult understanding of the United States as an imperialist power that threatened
Mexico, shaped Vasconceloss utopian vision of Mexicos future and of its place
in world history.
Gradual accretion had marked the evolution of the United States, peopled by
a homogenous racial stock (Vasconcelos 1926:7) and characterized by a benevo-
lent environment that everywhere supplied the same fertile soil, making it a land
open to the flow of civilization; the tool fit for one place, being simply moved
along in an increased rate of production (1926:8). By contrast, disconformity
had marked Mexicos development, because the process of history has been one of
continuous destruction and substitution of cultures instead of the regular growing
and evolving of one period into the other (Vasconcelos 1926:4). I use disconfor-
mity as a gloss for Vasconceloss vision of Mexican history as a series of layers
composed of materials that do not mix (Vasconcelos 1926:4). In geology, dis-
conformity denotes an unconformity between two parallel . . . horizontal sets of
strata, the lowest set having undergone erosion (Oxford English Dictionary On-
line 2000). For Vasconcelos, the Spanish Conquest had initiated a history of catas-
trophic interruptions in which temporality was characterized by multiplicity and
simultaneity, rather than singularity and seriality: Perhaps there is no other nation
on earth where you can find, in the same accentuated form, a coexistence of human
types separated by centuries and even by epochs of ethnographical development
people different in blood, race, tradition, and habits (1926:3). Colonial violence
and its legacy, the persistence of racial and cultural differences, aggravated by
the influence of a variable, unpredictable environment (1926:7 ff.) had led to this
multiplication of historical experience (Vasconcelos 1926:4). Pervasive and dis-
continuous, heterogeneity had slowed Mexicos progress relative to that of the
United States, making its history a flow of repeated subtractions in which we lose
ourselves (Vasconcelos 1926:7).
Unlike the more commonly used palimpsest, which is wholly centered on
writing and on those who are literate, disconformity captures the discontinuity
of the material traces of Mexicos many pasts in the architecture and monuments
of the capital city as well as between and within ethnoracialized subjects. Discon-
formity (especially in its Spanish form, desconconformidad) connotes uneasiness,
unhappiness, a difficulty in reconciling oneself, in this case, to a history that does
not add up. The mathematics of postcolonial societies is different; under the
signs of multiplication and subtraction, experience is fissured, uncertain, and dis-
connected. Vasconceloss multiple voices and many silences make evident that
the historical process of disconformity and its law of contrast and irregularity
(1926:31) had led to postcolonial ambivalence within the mestizo subject. He os-
cillates between desire and aversion for the heterogeneous components of the self,
between recognition and disavowal, between pride and shame; indeed, he later
repudiated his mixed identity and announced that he was a pure-blood criollo
(Blanco 1977:17).
Vasconcelos argues that the Darwinian and Spencerian orthodoxy of the Por-
firians with its condemnation of hybrids should be replaced by Mendelism, which
he viewed as a more appropriate biological philosophy (Vasconcelos 1926:96).12
Mendels experiments with hybridization in peas were the bedrock of Vasconce-
loss vision and the source of his recurrent botanical metaphors for Mexican na-
tional development. These foundational metaphors, which came to pervade mestizo
nationalism and its visual culture (Hedrick 2003), drew on the organic imagery
of plant growth as well as the trope of grafting as an intentional technique for
stimulating hybrid vigor. Botanical imagery territorialized the nation and its pro-
totypical citizen, the mestizo, rooting both in the fecund earth of America as the
source of indigenous creativity.
Mexico would need more time to ripen its fruit (Vasconcelos 1926:8), but
it would ultimately produce a better crop than the United States: the mestizo will
produce a civilization more universal . . . than any other race of the past (1926:92).
If the process of subtraction could only be properly administered, disconformity
could be conformed, and the course of world history would change.13 The state
would produce mestizaje through an intentional process of cultural grafting and
cross-fertilization; the secretariat of public education became Vasconceloss step-
ping stone for developing a bureaucratic apparatus for the state administration of
culture that has left a lasting legacy.
Vasconcelos predicted the coming of a spiritual and aesthetic new age in Latin
America in which racial barriers would lose their force and ongoing mixture would
lead to an Iberoamerican cosmic race (Vasconcelos 1979). His was not a narrow
nationalist project but one built on what Bolivar called the world-mission of
Latin American union (Vasconcelos 1926:41; see Blanco 1977:115 ff.). With his
practical talents the Anglo-Saxon might excel at industry but his accomplish-
ments would be transcended by the Iberoamerican mestizo with his superior
aesthetic and spiritual sensibility. The difference between the Anglo-Saxon and
Iberoamerican racial types lay in the manner of feeling and in the manner of
expressing our feelings of life, especially in the arts and the aesthetics of the
everyday.14 This is where the soul of a nation could be found (Vasconcelos
1926:1920).15
Vasconcelos describes the mestizo as the hyphen of the meeting point
of . . . Spanish-Indian Tragedy who could not connect fully with the past, being a
unique product, different from either parent (1926:82). However, this same histor-
ical dislocation would enable him to become a bridge to the future (1926:83).16
This future would require the development of a new aesthetic that would not priv-
ilege whiteness at the cost of bronzeness (1926:3840). For state intellectuals like
Vasconcelos, it became a practical imperativeevident in policyto impress on
the minds of the new race a consciousness of their mission as builders of entirely
new concepts of life (1926:95).
Vasconceloss oeuvre rejects Spencerian social Darwinism and is full of valu-
able insights into Mexicos postcolonial condition, despite the presence of a dis-
turbing Nietzschian undertone celebrating the mestizo superman. His writing
was part of his active engagement with the social world, one aspect of a broader
project to transform Mexico and the Americas (1926:8389). Nevertheless, his vi-
talist notion of a cosmic race reconfigures heterogeneity in terms of homogeneity
and thus reproduces much of what he critiques; in this respect, it is not entirely
surprising that in the 1940s, he became editor of the fascist journal Timon. Vas-
conceloss work as a whole is marked by disconformity, caught in a postcolonial
ambivalence about Indians that celebrates their aesthetic and spiritual genius in
the past but reviles their contemporary condition of cultural decline. Indeed, he
characterizes the revolution of 191020 as the defeat of an undesirable Indian
revival (represented by Emiliano Zapatas popular movement) by the stronger
mestizo element of the northern revolutionaries who represented the Mexican
(1926:91).17 The metaphor of the sleeping Indian is a common one in Vasconce-
loss writings as well as those by other mestizophiliacs, implying that indigenous
people lack historical agency and the ability to create a new national culture; only
the stronger mestizo can wake them up. Vasconcelos praises the Spanish ele-
ment in mestizaje and provides a relatively positive view of the contributions of
the Spanish missionaries and conquistadores to Mexican civilization. As Basave
Bentez argues, if mestizo nationalism has two poles, the Hispanicist and the
Indigenist (1992:126,133), then Vasconcelos represents the former rather than
the latter, whereas his contemporary, anthropologist Manuel Gamio, represents
the Indigenist pole.18
Manuel Gamio: Art, Science, and the Forging of the Bronze Nation
Manuel Gamio (18831960), the father of modern Mexican anthropology,
obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the supervision of Franz Boas.
Named director of anthropology by Carranzas revolutionary government in 1916,
Gamio subsequently held a series of government posts related to indigenous affairs
and education until his death in 1960 (Basave Bentez 1992:124125; Nahmad and
Weaver 1990:294316; Portal Ariosa and Ramrez 1995:80).
Published in 1916, Gamios Forjando Patria (Forging the Nation) is con-
sidered today to be the founding work of modern Mexican anthropology (Portal
Ariosa and Ramrez 1995:80). His goal was to contribute to forging a new nation
in relation to an external Otherthe imperialist United Statesas well as to inter-
nal othersthe European oriented, prerevolutionary elite as well as the Indians.
Gamio considered both whites and Indians to be incapable of transcending the
conquest, the act of foundational violence, and its colonial heritage. His view of
the revolution was similar to Vasconceloss: The Porfirian elite was the enemy, the
Indians were the shock troops, and the northern mestizo was the real protagonist
of Mexicos second independence, now identified with the revolution (Gamio
1916:121).
Like Vasconcelos, Gamio revised the prerevolutionary history of the mes-
tizo. Forjando Patria is framed by a prefatory mythohistory of mestizaje (which
commentators have largely ignored), in which Gamio fuses the Greek myth of Hep-
haestus, the blacksmith of the Gods, with Mexican history. His central metaphor,
forging the nation, links meanings drawn from the domains of metallurgy, sex-
uality and gestation, and landscape. In the great forge of America, on the giant
anvil of the Andes, the bronze and iron of virile races have been beaten out across
the centuries (1916:3; this and all other translations are mine). This mythohistory
narrates attempts to forge the nation from pre-Columbian times to the present;
none of these succeeded in fusing the steel of the Latin race with the hard indige-
nous bronze (1916:4; Alonso in press). Olympic men, the heroes of the Latin
American independence movements, grasped the epic and sonorous hammer and
donned the glorious leather apron. . . . They were going to climb the mountain,
to strike the divine anvil, to forge with blood and gunpowder, with muscles and
intellect . . . a pilgrim statue made from all the metals, all the races of America
(1916:4). But the heroes died, and those who followed vainly pretended to sculpt
the statues of the patrias with racial elements of Latin origin only or else exploited
the Indians, using them solely to construct a humble bronze-like pedestal. What
had to happen, happened, and the fragile statue fell repeatedly. Note the similar-
ity between Vasconceloss view of Mexican history as disconformity and Gamios
notion of a continually interrupted and arrested process of forging the nation.
The exhortatory force of Gamios mythohistory lies in its allegorical structure:
The transformations of the narrative are an icon of the historical process, of the key
moments in the painful, prolonged, and frustrated birth of the nation. However,
the text is also allegorical at a more prosaic level; alluding to the failed efforts of
previous regimes to successfully complete a monument to independence in Mexico
Citys main plaza.
The idea of erecting a monument to independencea commemorative col-

umn surrounded by a group of allegorical figures and topped by a winged victory,
the symbol of republican liberty (Agostoni 2003:106)was first conceived dur-
ing the presidency of Santa Anna in 1843. However, although construction began
in 1843, only the zocalo (base) of the monument had been built before political
and financial difficulties beset the projectthe War of 1848, which resulted in
Mexicos loss of half of its territory to the United States, made the building of
this symbol of independence impossible (Agostoni 2003:177 n. 5). Ironically, the
project was taken up again by none other than Emperor Maximilian in 1865 and
later abandoned. In 1901, the Porfirio regime commissioned a French-trained ar-
chitect who was an aficionado of the Paris beaux arts style, rather than selecting
one who might commemorate indigenous and Afro-mestizo contributions to the
independence movement and to the nation.19 This time, however, the monument
was relocated from the main plaza to the Paseo de la Reforma; where work had to
be suspended in 1906 because the foundations were not strong enough to support
the base or the weight of the column, and it was not be completed until 1910
(Agostoni 2003:106107).
In Forjando Patria and other written or visual works of mestizo nationalism,
allegory is used to critique the way history had been represented and to construct
an alternative narrative that would bring into being what has not yet become his-
tory. The iconic relationship set up between representation and represented makes
allegory a particularly fitting device for postcolonial historical revisionism. Yet
some of the teleology of the Porfirian view is still present: the European element
in the mestizo is associated with the Enlightenment and science, guaranteeing
the nations future (Alonso in press). By contrast, the Indian element grounds the
nations claim to territory, provides a continuity of blood, and roots the nations
history in that of ancient, pre-Columbian civilizations whose art and mythology
is integral to the national soul. Drawing a parallel to Indian nationalism (as dis-
cussed in Chatterjee 1993), I argue that the centrality of the indigenous element,
especially its association with the aesthetic, mythological, and folkloric in Mex-
ican and Chicana/o national and ethnic imaginaries, is linked to an identification
of the interiority and timelessness of the nationits soulwith the Indian.
This interiority was to be made publicly visible through the monuments and com-
memorations created by a postrevolutionary aesthetic statism that could trace its
antecedents back to the 19th century.
For Porfirios regime, the construction of monuments had been part of a
secularizing project shaped by the Liberal vision that the legacy of colonialism
could not be overcome without a major change in the role of the church. The
state would supersede the church as purveyor of exemplary public images and
architecture: Statues of the heroes of national history would replace the saints,
and public buildings and the spaces of state ritual would supplant religious ones.
The importance placed on generating an alternative visual culture in public space
was linked to an understanding of the centrality of the visual in pre-Columbian
civilizations and to the notion that the Church continued to hold the Indians in
colonial thrall with its religious images.
Gamios allegory is motivated by an understanding of the specific importance

of public monuments, art, and visual culture to the formation of the Mexican
national soul, not least because the majority of Mexicos population was illiterate.
For Gamio, the aesthetic provided a particularly suitable way to territorialize the
nation and ground it in the indigenous past:
One of the most interesting and transcendental values of the indigene . . . is that of art,
which is as important, and in some respects, more important as that which characterizes
people of the Americas of European origin. . . . This has several causes, one of which
is that the indigene has been observing and interpreting, via his works of art, the
inexhaustible, natural motifs of the beauty of the geographic milieu in which he has
lived for thousands of years, while the man of European origin is only just beginning
to learn to know and distinguish these motifs, let alone to interpret them. [Gamio
1966:72; my translation]
Yet the indigenes strengths were simultaneously their weaknesses. Their cultural
stress on aesthetic sensibility, based on a spiritual relationship with nature, also
hindered material development; it was incapable of satisfying the exigencies of
contemporary life (Gamio 1966:13). Lacking in science and asleep because
of centuries of oppression, Indians were, according to Gamio, at a lower level of
cultural evolution. If Forjando Patria begins with myth, it ends with anthropology
as the science that Gamio believed would bring the Indian into history. Anthropol-
ogists, allied with the state, would select what was best from indigenous culture
and suppress what was worst, waking the Indians from their sleep and turning them
into citizens. They would dig up the ruins of the great pre-Columbian civilizations
and make their glories known to the nation and the world.
Revolutionary Aesthetic Statism
Public monuments exist not only to perpetuate the memory of dead heroes . . . who
deserve the gratitude of the people, but also to awaken . . . the love of legitimate
glories and also the love of art. . . . To create recreational areas or boulevardes is to
distract members of society with licit diversions within reach of all and allow them to
mingle while avoiding the isolation and the vices which are common in populations
which lack those means of communication.
Riva Palacio (1877)20
State intellectuals like Gamio and Vasconcelos saw Mexicos cultural revo-
lution as a radical break with the past: They wanted to put an end to the slavish
imitation of the European that was the trace of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Rather than mimicking the putatively universal canon of Europe, as past regimes
had done, revolutionary messianism would generate its own mestizo canon, hy-
bridizing the Spanish and Indian to create a distinctive third culture, both as
identity and aesthetic style.
As secretary of education, Vasconcelos sent artists to indigenous communi-
ties to observe landscapes and collect crafts that could serve as examples for a new
nationalist art. He established art schools for proletarians (Blanco 1977:100101)
and commissioned and massively distributed a manual of drawing that abandoned
European canons of forms, models, and harmonies and promoted motifs taken
from the incipient archaeological knowledge about the Aztecs and the Maya and
from the crafts typical of diverse regions of the country (Blanco 1977:101; my
translation). For Vasconcelos, public buildings, the covers of journals, statues,
concerts, all would be constituted as part of a single liturgy on the racial great-
ness of the people that would offer them redeeming images (Blanco 1977:98; my
translation). He considered architecture the noblest of arts, one that pre-Hispanic
civilizations had mastered (Vasconcelos and Gamio 1926:37). This gift, evident
in the artistry of contemporary handicrafts, would enable Indians to produce any
sort of mechanical, industrial manufacture.
And when such a race will get the machinery necessary for large-scale production, we
may be sure that the native instinct for refinement and beauty will leave its imprint
even in the rude results of steel production, in the same manner that today it takes
a refined worker, an artist, to complete and polish the pieces of the most powerful
delicate air-motor. [Vasconcelos 1926:37]
An ardent supporter of the neocolonial style, Vasconcelos saw buildings as

key sites for educating the public and raising their cultural level. As an intentional
counterpoint to the neoclassical public buildings constructed during the Porfiriato,
nationalist architecture from 192030 sought to materialize the mestizo synthesis
through the neocolonial style, developed from native materials and styles during
the three centuries of colonial rule, through a fusion of the Spanish and the Indian
(Olsen 1997).
As director of the Interamerican Indigenist Institute (194260), Gamio ac-
tively supported the development of a mestizo aesthetics rooted in indigenous
visual culture. The science of anthropology was to be the midwife in this
rebirth.21 Combining his conviction that indigenous culture is the true basis
for national identity (1966:14) with his belief in scientific methods, Gamio en-
gaged in numerous experiments, generating methodologies for cultural and
aesthetic representation that have had a lasting impact on subsequent state
practices.
Forjando Patria in Everyday Life: Mexico City as a Living Museum

Space is a boundary marker of ethnoracial identity in Mexico. The South and
the rural are coded as Indian, whereas the North and the urban are coded as
Mexican. As Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992) notes, the state has been the key
organizer of public urban space as the site of the spectacles of nationalism. The
monumentalization of indigenous culture as national patrimony is omnipresent
in Mexican cities, particularly in the capitals monuments and plazas, and in the
huge network of museums run by the National Institute of Anthropology (INAH).
Archaeologist Ignacio Bernal, the first director of the National Museum of An-
thropology (MNA), commented that Mexicos national glory lies in uniting its
Spanish and Mesoamerican heritage: This double and rich heritage makes Mexico
into a living museum (Bernal 1990:13; my translation). The exhibitionary com-
plex (Bennett 1995) at the heart of Mexican aesthetic statism extends the notion
of the museum to public urban space as a whole, where state power is conveyed
with great impact through visual spectacle (Bennett 1995). In staging mesti-
zaje (Garca Canclini 1995), the state exercises its power through the aesthetics of
everyday life.
Exemplary Centers: Mexico Citys Zocalo

Mexicos plazas, the nations exemplary centers (Geertz 1973) and meto-
nyms of national and political order, have been central to the public staging of
mestizaje.22 Mexico Citys Plaza Mayor, renamed the Plaza de la Constitucion
in the mid19th century and known today as El Zocalo, is the most important
of these exemplary centers. With each side measuring 200 meters, it is the third-
largest plaza in the world, capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people. A
huge Mexican flag marks this as the center of national political space. The Zocalo,
once the ceremonial heart of the Aztec City of Tenochitlan, today exhibits the
layered configurations of a history of catastrophic interruptions. The only way I
can convey this is by taking you on a virtual walk around the Zocalo, stopping
at the more important loci of memory to provide you with some discontinuous
fragments of the past.
Right after the conquest, the Spaniards began to raze the Aztecs monumental
sacred architecture, initiating the disconformity that was to mark the Zocalo as a
public space for centuries. They left parts of the pre-Columbian structures in
place, depositing their own constructions on top. Much like a male dog urinating
over the scent of those who have come before, Cortes destroyed Moctezumas
palace, located on the Zocalos east side, and built his own over it. Today the
Bell of Dolores, rung as a call to arms by the father of Mexican independence,
Miguel Hidalgo, on 15 September, 1810, hangs above the center of the main
door, where the president of Mexico rings it on the anniversary of this event,
a mimetic gesture that simulates the continuity of past and present, linking the
struggle against colonialism and the politics of the current regime. In 1924, the
architect Carlos Obregon Santacilia was hired to redo the National Palace and
other buildings in the Zocalo in the neocolonial style (Olsen 1997). Diego Rivera
painted some of his most famous murals on the walls of the Palace between 1929
and 1935, in which he depicted his view of Mexicos history and the history of
mestizaje, beginning with the arrival of Quetzalcoatl (for whom the Aztecs had
mistaken Cortes) and continuing to the period after the 191020 revolution. One of
the murals bears Vasconceloss slogan, The spirit shall speak through my race.23
The space in front of the National Palace is today the customary place for political
demonstrations. Soldiers armed with machine guns circulate endlessly to keep
order.
Construction of the Metropolitan Cathedral, on the Zocalos north side, where
an Aztec temple and a huge rack for the skulls of sacrificial victims once stood, was
begun in the 16th but not completed until the 19th century; multiple architectural
styles point to its history of interruptions (see Figure 1).
As Pina Chan notes, an immense monolith of the goddess Coatlicue was dug
up during the leveling and repaving of the Zocalo in 1790:
Figure 1
A view of the Metropolitan Cathedral taken from the ruins of the main
Aztec temple visible in the foreground.
Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gave and took away life. . . . Because she rep-
resents life-in-death, Coatlicue, also known as the Goddess of the Serpent Skirt, is
portrayed headless. In place of a human head, she has huge serpent heads, symbolizing
the earth-bound character of human life. She has no hands; in their place are two more
serpents, in the form of eagle-like claws, which are repeated at her feet. . . . Hanging
from her neck is a necklace of open hands alternating with human hearts. [Ramrez
Vazquez 1968:96]24
At the order of the Viceroy, the statue of the goddess was taken to the patio of the
Royal University for study:
The statue was placed . . . in one of the corners of the spacious patio of the university
where she stood for some time, but finally, it was necessary to bury her again . . . for a
reason no one had foreseen. The Indians, who regarded with stupid indifference all the
monuments of European art, came with a restless curiosity to contemplate their famous
statue. At first it was thought that their motive was a love of nation, proper no less
to the savages than to the civilized, and for the pleasure of contemplating one of the
most renowned works of their ancestors, appreciated even by the cultured Spaniards.
However, it was later suspected that their frequent visits had a secret religious moti-
vation. It was then indispensable to prohibit their entry absolutely; but their fanatical
enthusiasm and their incredible cunning made a mockery of this measure. They waited
until the patio was deserted . . . and quickly left their lookouts to adore their Goddess
Teoyaomiqui. [Rico Mansard 2000:156157; my translation]
Reburied shortly thereafter, Coatlicue was not put on public display again until
the 1880s, when she was incorporated into the Gallery of the Monoliths in
the National Museum, an annex of the National Palace in the Zocalo. Although
established in 1825, just after independence, the museum only became more than
a storeroom during the Porfiriato (18761911), when it was opened to the public
as a site for important cultural events. Aztec material culture, once considered
uncanny or even diabolical by the Spanish, now became transformed into tesoros
antiguos (ancient treasures) and objects of art that bore the traces of national history
(Rico Mansard 2000:164). Archaeological objects became the signs of national
memory and identity as well as cultural ambassadors that could win the respect
of foreigners for a nation that now had its own equivalent of Greek and Roman
civilization (Rico Mansard 2000:179). Coatlicues aesthetic redemption, however,
encountered greater obstacles than that of other objects, because art historians
considered her to be frightful and horrendous (2000:157).
Perhaps the unnerving experience with Coatlicue provoked colonial author-
ities to put the Aztec Calendar Stone, or Sun Stone (disinterred from the Zocalo
in 1790), on display in the Metropolitan Cathedral; if Indians came to worship
it, at least they would be under the vigilance of priests. One of Mexicos most
important national symbols today, this monumental carved basalt piece weighs
over 22 metric tons and measures 12 feet in diameter; in 1885 it was transported
to the National Museum and it now resides in the MNA.25
Somewhat at the expense of Mexicos numerous other indigenous groups,
mestizo nationalism has foregrounded the Aztecs as the creators of the most syn-
thetic, splendid, and expansive pre-Columbian civilization. Today, the disconfor-
mity of the past in what was once the heart of the Aztec (or following contem-
porary Mexican usage, the Mexica) empire has been attenuated by the restoration
of the remains of the Templo Mayor, Tenochitlans most important temple, and
the building of a site museum just off the Zocalo, to the northeast of the Cathe-
dral. The site is visible from the Zocalo and a free view is all that some people
want.
As a living museum space, the Zocalo has the characteristics of a street fair.
Adults stroll freely, swinging their arms, holding hands; children run, expressing
their enjoyment of life. Whereas a normative museum tour heightens our sense of
sight at the expense of making us deaf and dumb, an educational stroll along the
Zocalo is a multisensory experience. I can still conjure up the acrid odor of the
crowds sweat or the sweet smell of corn on the cob, daubed with mayonnaise,
sprinkled with chile and lime juice, and sold by ambulatory vendors. I can hear
the cacophonous mix of musictropical, ranchera, salsa, and rockpunctuated
by the concheros. Wearing elaborate headdresses, the concheros shake the rattles
on their ankles as they move to the rhythms of the drums (see Figure 2).
These dancers have incredible endurance, taking an occasional break only to
pass the hat to a rapt and ever shifting audience. Street vendors hawk sunglasses,
CDs and tapes, and trinkets and souvenirs. A scattering of curanderos (popular
healers) have set up shop, one blowing smoke from burning copal incense over
a sick woman. For working-class Mexicans, the Zocalo is a favorite weekend
destination.
But many do enter the museum, especially on Sundays when admission is
free.
Figure 2
Wearing elaborate headdresses, the Aztec dancers shake the rattles on
their ankles as they move to the rhythms of the drums.
When I visited the Templo Mayor Museum in 2001, I saw groups of

schoolchildren, families, and tourists. In Mexico, unlike Europe (Bennett 1995),
no sharp demarcation exists between the space of the street fair outside and the
museum; museums have been located deliberately in parks and other spaces of
diversion to encourage families to put them on their Sunday itineraries (Ramrez
Vazquez 1968: 29).
The entrance to the Templo Mayor archaeological site is framed by a text
drawn from the Discourse for Independence delivered in 1861 by the prominent
Liberal, Ignacio Ramrez:
Where do we come from? Where are we going? This is the double problem that
individuals and societies struggle without rest to resolve. Once the past is uncovered,
the future can be determined. The seed of yesterday contains the flowers of tomorrow.
If we decide out of caprice to be pure Aztecs, we will end with the triumph of only one
race to decorate with the skulls of the others the temple of the Martyr of the Americas.
If we insist on being Spaniards, we will throw ourselves into the abyss of reconquest.
No! Never! We come from the pueblo of Dolores; we descend from Hidalgo and were
born fighting like our Father for the symbols of Emancipation and like him, we leave
this earth fighting for the sacred cause [of independence]. [my translation]
This marks the Zocalo area as a locus of exemplary (if ambivalent) mestizaje.
The Templo Mayor Museum, consisting of eight halls, was opened in 1987.
Artifacts were found here in the 1970s during the renovation of the underground
public transportation system and later through an archaeological project begun in
1978 and still ongoing today.26 The space just in front of the museum is named
The Plaza of Manuel Gamio, because he was the first scholar to do systematic
excavation at the site.
Designed by the renowned architect Pedro Ignacio Ramrez, this monumental
building reproduces the Templo Mayor of the Mexica symbolically and in the form
of museum displays. To reflect the distribution of their shrines at the Great Temple,
the halls in the south wing are dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and
related to the Sun, and those in the north wing to Tlaloc, the god of rain (see
Museo del Templo Mayor 2004). The circulation of visitors is from right to left,
from the side of the god of war to that of the god of water, and guards reprimand
and redirect those who stray from the discipline of the tour.
When I toured the Museum in 2001, I found almost no references to human
sacrifice; this controversial theme is downplayed in the museum because it has been
used for centuries by the denigrators of the Mexica to point to their barbarity.
Those references I did find were in Hall II. The web and museum accounts of
human sacrifice are similar; the emotionally distanced discourse of science is used
to counter lurid sensationalism; cultural relativism revalues human sacrifice as part
of a complex militarized cosmology. This humanization of those once construed
as barbarians allows viewers to recognize the Mexica not only as the original
Mexicans but also as the primordial part of the contemporary Mexican self.
The last hall in the Templo Mayor Museum represents the conquest as not only
the result of the Spaniards greed but also of their inability to understand a culture
different from their own. One example, drawn from the museums interpretive
texts, states:
Due to the incomprehension of the ideological significance [of Mexica concepts] and
native customs, [the conquest] led to the development of two intentions, two forms of
thinking and being that were different. This determined the destiny of each of the partic-
ipants: the Indian, subjected and exploited, the Spaniard, inquisitor and encomendero.
[my translation]27
An understanding of the ideological significance of Mexica objects and practices is

precisely what the museum provides. As a science, anthropology becomes a neutral
medium for cross-cultural comprehension, for tracing the hyphen between two
forms of thinking and being that were different. In this respect, the experience of
the museum tour, with its compulsory counterclockwise direction has an allegorical
structure that takes us from war to peace and from death to life. As museum visitors
follow the path of the tour, shedding their prejudices about sanguinary barbarians
and coming to understand the complexities of the Mexica worldview, they also
symbolically trace the trajectory of 20th-century Mexican history itself, a history
that has tried to conform disconformity through a political imaginary that stresses
the unity and transcendence of opposites in figurations of the mestizo national
subject and mestizaje. Anthropology has played a key role in this, carrying out
Gamios vision in many ways.28 By providing knowledge of the brilliant Mexican
past that preceded the Conquest (Gamio 192223), anthropology has tried to heal
the split between the Spanish and the Indian, both within the nation and within
the subjective experience of Mexicans. It has provided the basis for a mestizo
nationalism whose goal has been to make Mexicans proud of what comes from
the indigene, replacing exoticism with something that is ours (Gamio 1922
23). In this sense, the Templo Mayor museum is a secular temple of redemptive
science; so, too, is the world-famous MNA.
The TimeSpace of the National Museum of Anthropology

Inaugurated in 1964, the MNA, located in Chapultepec Park, just down the
Reforma from the Zocalo, is a staged synthesis of the national (Garca Canclini
1995:127).29 By integrating elements of indigenous, colonial, and modernist aes-
thetics and reproducing elements of church architecture, Pedro Ramrez Vazquez,
who later designed the Templo Mayor Museum, made the MNA a secular tem-
ple to Mexicaness (Ramrez Vazquez 1968:1530). The dedication plaque of the
museum features Mexicos national emblem, an eagle perched on a cactus devour-
ing a serpent, which is derived from the Aztec legend of settlement. According
to Natividad Gutierrez, this emblem encourages an imaginary association be-
tween the figure of presidential authority and the mythical Aztec narrative of
settlement (1999:78); symbolically, the emblem territorializes the contemporary
nation, rooting it in the time and space of the primordial inhabitants of Mexicos
center. The emblem is framed by a text, attributed to Adolfo Lopez Mateos, pres-
ident of Mexico: The Mexican nation erects this monument in honor of the
great cultures that flourished during the pre-Columbian era in regions that now
form part of the Republic of Mexico. In the presence of the vestiges of those
cultures, contemporary Mexico pays tribute to indigenous Mexico, in whose ex-
pression it discerns the characteristics of its national identity (Ramrez Vazquez
1968:13).30
This dedication provided an interpretative frame for one of the contradictions
of mestizo nationalism that was negotiated within the 1964 vision of the MNA.31
Although it paid tribute to the Mexica past, mestizo nationalism devalued con-
temporary indigenous cultures as vestiges of the past; indeed, state-promoted
indigenist anthropology tried to turn Indians into mestizos; this has been noted
and critiqued by Mexican anthropologists (de la Pena 2000; Friedlander 1975;
Gutierrez 1999; Saldvar 2000; Stephen 2002; Velasco et al. 1970; Villoro 1979).
The errors of Indigenismo have been recognized and attempts to rectify them
are underway, yet there has been little commentary on the complexity of the post-
colonial ambivalence that underlies it and that persists today.
Recall that Vasconcelos described the mestizo as the hyphen of the meet-
ing point of . . . Spanish-Indian Tragedy who could not connect fully with the
past. The hyphen only exists because of a prior gap. Postcolonial subjectivity is
suspended in this space, fraught with a dynamic ambivalence between desire for,
and rejection of, the other in the self. The uneasiness produced by disconformity
gives rise to nostalgia, a longing for wholeness, a desire to reconcile the riven and
fraught dimensions of ethnoracialized subjectivity and social life. Nostalgia is
negatively valued by Susan Stewart, who characterizes it as inauthentic because
it does not take part in lived experience (1993:23). Yet her generalization does
not apply to all societies (Seremetakis 1996). In Mexico, nostalgia is a part of lived
experience, and it is deliberately evoked in lieux de memoire (Nora 1984) such
as the National Museum of Anthropology, which provide spaces for contained

reflection on uncontainable longing.
Postcolonial ambivalence is omnipresent in the MNA. One of the devices
through which it is resolved ideologically is the spatial layout of the museum itself
(Garca Canclini 1995). The dramatic, monumental displays of pre-Colombian
cultures are located on the first floor, which is a giant rectangle that runs from
the outer courtyard and culminates in the Mexica room with the Sun Stone at
its center, recalling the floor plan of a church. Coatlicue is displayed here as the
most important piece in the museum. The ethnographic exhibits are on the second
floor; in 1964, they were located, whenever possible, right above the correspond-
ing archaeological exhibits (Ramrez Vazquez 1968:38). The spatial separation of
archaeology and ethnography distanced contemporary Indians from their heritage,
the true heir of which became the nation. Simultaneously, contemporary Indians
were marginalized from the national project of modernization; they became ves-
tiges of the pastobjects, not agents, of history.32 Hence, the spatial separation
was at the same time a division between past and present: if the Indian past was
located at core of the nation, the Indian present was at its margins (Garca Canclini
1995:129130).
The contrast between archaeology and ethnography was partly expressed in
the different conventions of visual representation characteristic of each floor. Ma-
jor archaeological pieces were displayed as art and set off as treasures to provoke
wonder through the use of lighting and other devices of display. On the first floor,
art historical conventions of display predominated over anthropological ones that
downplay singularity and highlight the typical and quotidian. Here the anthropo-
logical meaning of culture converged with its humanistic sense to honor a high
civilization every bit as advanced as the Greeks and the Romans.
Rather than using displays of artifacts to represent everyday life, museog-
raphers relied on murals, paintings, and miniature dioramas. The diorama is a
recurring representational device in Mexican museology, providing a simulacrum
that prompts an experience in the viewer of really seeing things as they were. In
the Mexica room, there is a miniature diorama of the pre-Columbian ceremonial
complex that we can view only in fragmentary form in todays Zocalo; this model
is intended to provide a simulacrum of one of the Mexicas greatest achievements,
architecture and urban design. The same room has a fabulous miniature diorama
of the pre-Columbian market at Tlatelolco, which had amazed the conquerors
with its wealth, variety, and organization (Ramrez Vazquez 1968:45).
The body is our mode of perceiving scale (Stewart 1993:xii). A miniature
model, especially one as extensive as that of the Tlatelolco market (which measures
12 by 30 feet) inverts our bodies quotidian sense of scale; we now fly over the
objects and structures of everyday life.33 Moreover, miniaturization continually
refers to the physical world (Stewart 1993:45), in this case, to one destroyed by
the conquest but miraculously reassembled in the modern model whose scientific
precision indexes its recuperation of every lost detail. As similes of the past, minia-
ture models provoke a sense of wonder in the viewer who sees the lost secrets
of ancient social life without being seen or found out. The viewer recovers
the wholeness of what has been lost in a detached, omniscient way. One is not in
the scene but above it, feeling an exhilarating sense of detachment, both from
ones own body and from the tiny spectacle below. An absolute epic distance
(Bakhtin 1981:3) characterizes the viewers relation to the past: The miniature
offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized
and generalized in time (Stewart 1993:48). Spatial closure (1993:48) and epic
distance temporarily relieve nostalgia as a subjective sense of recovered wholeness
is fostered by the omniscience of being above it all. As I have written elsewhere,
it is through epic discourses, broadly conceived, that the nation is particularized
and centered, imagined as eternal and primordial, and that nationalist love becomes
a sacralized and sublime sentiment (Alonso 1994:388).
The ethnographic exhibits on the second floor of the MNA used a contrast-
ing set of representational devices that (unintentionally) provoked a much more
ambivalent experience of the place of the indigenous in the nation and in the self.
These exhibits largely displayed the material culture of everyday life, rather than
focusing on singular objects as such, and they employed anthropological conven-
tions of display. The scale of the dioramas on the ethnographic floor was life sized.
In the early 1960s, indigenous people were invited to the museum and asked to
build their own habitats within it; modern objects were deliberately excluded from
their simulations (Ramrez Vazquez 1968:39). Life-sized figures of Indians and ob-
jects from their material culture were added to these habitats, forming naturalistic
dioramas depicting scenes of everyday life such as spinning, weaving, processing
animal hides, cooking, making baskets, all evidence of the resourcefulness of
the Indian villagers (1968: 205). These life-sized tableaux were intended to be
metonyms of indigenous societies as wholes and in this sense, represent a form of
what Stewart calls microcosmic philosophy (1993:130131). She writes, The
connection between the process of stereotyping and caricature is obvious here:
both involve the selection and exaggeration of an element of quality [in this case,
the traditional]. Here we can . . . place the aestheticization of the primitive and
the peasant which underlies much of anthropology (1993:131).
If the miniature fosters epic detachment, the microcosmic but nevertheless
life-sized diorama provokes a very different experience: The figures and objects
are on the same scale and on the same spatial plane as ones own body. This visual
device is compatible with a plurality of points of view and which one a viewer
takes is, in this case, largely shaped by how she or he experiences personal identity
in relation to the indigenous. One can place oneself in the scene as an acting
subject, watching oneself as if in a mirror. One can regard the scene as an ideal-
typical anthropologist, a participant-observer of the ways of life of others. Or one
can jokingly project what I call a proxy of oneself into the scene.
In 1999, before the latest remodeling of the ethnographic exhibits (not com-
pleted until after November 2000), cultural anthropologist Susana Munoz Enrquez
did fieldwork on museum goers perceptions of indigenous people. While on the
ethnographic floor, she frequently observed joking among teenagers doing high
school projects.
It is not that the Ethnographic Halls of the MNA in themselves cause laughter. It is
just that when most young people pass in front of a reproduction of an indigenous
house they jokingly say [to their friend], Look, there is your house. If they see a
mannequin dressed in indigenous clothes they say, Thats how you dress. [2000:43;
my translation]
Munoz notes that although youths affirmed that indigenous people are our equals,
they also felt that their culture is different and the government should help them
so that they can become civilized (2000:47). Postcolonial ambivalence about
the place of the indigenous in the nation and within themselves is evident in
these statements. On the one hand, the youths stressed how important it was for
indigenous people to conserve their traditions for the maintenance of Mexican
culture (2000:46) and expressed anxiety that the basis for Mexicaness was
being eroded by modernity. On the other hand, Munoz characterized their view
of contemporary indigenous people as negative. They depicted Indians as: (1)
living in marginal zones such as mountains and deserts in the provinces; (2) living
in extreme poverty; (3) dwelling in huts made from natural materials, far away from
cities; (4) having a polytheistic and syncretic religion; (5) living according to their
traditional customs; (6) speaking dialects and very little, if any, Spanish; and
(7) ignored and abandoned by a national government that should have been
civilizing them (2000:46). These are all indexes of stigma in nonindigenous,
urban culture, particularly in Mexico City.
Why did these teenagers laugh while looking at the ethnographic dioramas,
at times so hard they had to be reprimanded by guards? Why did they engage in
a form of insulting play in which they projected proxies of themselves into the
dioramas? I think their responses represent some of the forms that postcolonial
ambivalence can take in Mexico. When viewing the dioramas, teenagers resisted
seeing themselves as subjects in the scenes because they had a negative perception
of Indians; instead, they jokingly projected a proxy into the scene, a friend or
relative, someone who was not the self but who was like the self, simultaneously
disavowing and acknowledging their own indigenous heritage (cf. Bhabha 1995a,
1995b).
This ambivalence was not resolved by their experience in the museum. As
I argued earlier, the old ethnographic exhibits distanced indigenous people from
modernity and located them on the rural fringes of the nation. Through an implicit
contrast, mestizos, assumed to represent the bulk of museum visitors, were lo-
cated at the center of the nation and its future. This only reinforced what students
learned from their textbooks: the dominant ethnoracial category was located at
the core of the nation and subordinated ethnoracial identities at its peripheries and
mestizos were the future whereas indigenous people were the vestiges of the
past who needed to be integrated into the nation (Alonso in press; Gutierrez 1999).
Paradoxically, the indigenous was both originary and exotic.
In the MNA, the old Synthesis of Mexica Room, presided over by a por-
trait of the acculturated Indian, President Benito Juarez, expressed this view
quite directly. As described by the famous archaeologist Alfonso Caso in 1968,
this room offered the visitor a panoramic view of the pre-Columbian and Eu-
ropean elements that combine to give Mexico its characteristic unity as a nation
and a culture (Ramrez Vazquez 1968:251).34 The room showed the presence of
traditional indigenous aesthetics in contemporary art, architecture, music, dance,

and literature, conforming disconformity into a fluid, aesthetic harmony. The mes-
sage of the room, according to Caso, was that the Indian has ceased to be a man
attached to his old prehistoric traditions: These were now the patrimony of the
mestizo nation. And it was the state, in the service of that nation, that had re-
deemed the Indian from his vestigial existence and brought him quickly into the
20th century through its indigenist programs (1968:251).
Applied anthropology sought to modernize the Mexican countryside and re-
organize rural space since the time of Gamio (Gamio 1966; Walsh 2000). The role
of indigenist anthropologists in rural development centers, as Saldvar points out,
was to act as cultural brokers, working to eradicate such bad aspects of Indian
culture as monolingualism while reinforcing good aspects such as the making of
arts and crafts (2000:4). Ironically, in helping to consolidate an overtly anticolo-
nial national project that challenged U.S. imperialism, indigenist anthropologists
became caught in the snare of the internal colonialism that was the underside of
mestizo nationalism. New forms of governmentality did not value the elements
of the national mix equally, identifying the Indian with inert tradition and the
Hispanic with dynamic modernity. Indigenism became a top-down ideology that
accorded little agency to Indians themselves (de la Pena 2000; Friedlander 1975;
Gutierrez 1999; Knight 1990; Saldvar 2000; Stephen 2002; Velasco et al. 1970;
Villoro 1979). How could it do otherwise when its very goal of turning Indians
into mestizos was to integrate those it had itself expelled?
The Synthesis of Mexico room no longer exists. Moreover, the entire ethno-
graphic floor has been redone (see Figure 3). The problems of the older museog-
raphy were implicitly acknowledged by the new exhibits, which I viewed in 2001.
For example, a mural done by Luis Covarrubias for the 1964 ethnographic floor
is framed today by the comment: [This mural] represents the artists own vi-
sion, based on the ethnography of the time which perceived Indian communities
as groups isolated from the national context. . . . Advances in ethnography have
obliged us to view such ethnic groups as constitutive parts of the ethnic and cul-
tural diversity of Mexico (my translation).
Conclusion
Major theorists of nationalism have neglected the role of visual aesthetics
in national imaginaries. As I have argued, aesthetic statism has been central to
postcolonial nationalism in Mexico; aesthetics is particularly fitted to conforming
discomformity in a political imaginary, giving visible form to hybridity, regulat-
ing its irregularities, and bringing its conflicting elements into harmony. I have
traced some of the links in the complex genealogy of mestizaje, demonstrating
that aesthetic statism is an authoritative form of intentional hybridization in which
the mestizo point of view frames the Indian and Spanish voices.35
Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that state projects of nation-building cen-
tered on mestizaje have been much less successful than we previously assumed.
Most . . . new [social movements] have arisen to represent the identities and is-
sues (race, ethnicity, religion, gender) suppressed by the nation-building mestizaje
Figure 3
Monos de Calenda used in religious processions by Indians from Oaxaca.
The sign in front of them reads Entry forbidden. Halls under
reconstruction. Inauguration soon.
process (Smith 1996:161; see also Alonso in press). Current mobilizations by in-
digenous people in Mexico against mestizo nationalism challenge state claims to
an indigenous cultural patrimony in the name of the nation and fight for political
representation by their own intellectuals.
Contemporary scholarship has drawn on terms, such as hybridity, mestizaje,
creolization, and transculturation, with little critical awareness of how their com-
plex genealogy might shape current day scholarly uses (cf. Young 1995). Yet, as
my opening quote from Bakhtin suggests, some words, including hybridity and
mestizaje, are not so easily reaccented: many words stubbornly resist . . . it is as
if they put themselves into quotation marks against the will of the speaker.
This resistance is evident in Anzalduas concept of the new mestiza and of
borderlands mestizaje as a subversive, creative force. The new mestiza is the bearer
of an oppositional, hybrid, borderlands consciousness, subsisting in all cultures
[white, Mexican, and Indian] at the same time (Anzaldua 1987:77). She speaks
with a wild tongue in at least eight languages, ranging from standard English
to Chicano Spanish to Pachuco. Indeed, Anzalduas writing shifts from one to the
other; the new mestizas home ground is as much in this hybridized voice as in
Aztlan (1987:5364).
Anzalduas wild tongue is an instance of intentional hybridization. How-
ever, although her hybridized writing unmasks sexism (Mallon 1996) and some
forms of ethnoracialism, it masks others. Like the Mexican rhetoric of mestizaje,
it draws on a mythologized figure of the Indian to stake a claim to a home ground:

The new mestizas roots are in the language and culture of the civilized Indians
of the Center, the Aztecs, not in those of the so-called indios barbaros who actually
lived in Texas, Anzalduas home ground. The settler colonists of New Spain and
Mexico fought indigenous groups for this land; they were conquerors who were
in their turn conquered by the Anglos. But the mestizos role as colonial agents in
borderlands history is suppressed, as myth papers over the contradictions of his-
tory. In this case, the rhetoric of mestizaje north of the border, like that south of the
border, erases indigenous heterogeneity, constructing a folklorized Aztec Indian
voice as a source of authority and authenticity for its own voice. It also erases
the heterogeneity of non-Indian borderlands people who self-identify as blancos,
rather than mestizos, such as the Namiquipans of Chihuahua or the Hispanos of
New Mexico and Colorado, descendants of the original colonial settlers who are
strongly identified with their Spanish heritage (Alonso 1995; Nugent 1993).
Readings of Bakhtins concept of hybridization as contestatory are based on
a few passages of Discourse and the Novel and are one sided. Other passages
of the same essay suggest a more complex relationship between hybridization
and power. If the authoritative can become contested, so too can the contestatory
become authoritative, especially when linked to state power. This seems more in
keeping with Bakhtins nuanced discussion of the interplay among centripetal and
centrifugal forces in language, culture, and society than with a more dualistic per-
spective. Significantly, Bakhtin argues that when one of the voices in a hybridized
utterance is endowed with more authority than the other(s), it represents these
from its own point of view and inflects the represented voices with its own accents
(1981:359). Although in some instances, the voices of a hybridized construction
may be relativized vis-a-vis each other, making it impossible for any one to be
authoritative; this is not always the case. Authoritative intentional hybridizations
are just as possible as relativized ones; much of this depends on features of the
context such as the authority of the speaker or of the genres of discourse involved
in hybridization.
Whether a hybridized discourse is contestatory or authoritative, then, cannot
be decided in advance; context is critical to assessing the politics of utterances
and often these are too contradictory to characterize in singular terms. Mestizo
nationalism challenged U.S. imperialism and the legacy of Spanish colonialism.
However, it also became canonized as the official perspective although awarding
indigenous groups a secondary place in the nation. Linguistic hybridization, aes-
thetic mixing, and cultural boundary crossing in Mexico and the Americas have
coexisted with ethnoracial inequality and are bound up with it. This is sadly ob-
vious in the postcolonial ambivalence and the interplay between recognition and
disavowal that has marked mestizo nationalism in Mexico and political imaginaries
throughout Latin America.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank the Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, for a Riecker fellowship supporting my research on museums and urban space
in summer 2001. I thank the MNAs director, Dr. Felipe Sols, and the subdirector of
ethnography, Maestro Alejandro Gonzalez, for their helpfulness. Thanks also go to Patricia
Figueroa, Dr. Dora Sierra, and Trinidad Irigoyen. The opinions expressed here are solely my
own. Many people have read different versions of this article and, in particular, I thank David
Killick, Salvador Aquino, Gillian Newell, Aurea Atoxqui, Finn Stepputat, Ann Anagnost,
and Marisol de la Cadena for their helpful suggestions.
1. In European languages, the use of mestizo precedes that of hybrid. As a term
adopted from Spanish, it began to be used in English in the late 16th century to describe the
offspring of a Spanish man and an indigenous woman and was subsequently extended to
include the offspring of any Spanish and Indian union (Oxford English Dictionary Online
2000). Mestizo is derived from mesto, an older Spanish term used to denote hybrid plants
in agriculture (De Castro 2002:18). The etymon of mesto is the Latin mixtus, which meant
partaking of two or more kinds, composite, mixed (Oxford English Dictionary Online
2000).
2. Hybrid and its cognates in the Romance languages derive from the Latin hibrida,
which was [most probably kindred with hubrizo, hubris, qs. Unbridled, lawless, unnatural,
hence], of animals produced from two different species, a mongrel (Lewis and Short 1879).
Hibrida also meant of persons, one born of a Roman father and a foreign mother, or of a
freeman and slave (Lewis and Short 1879). During the 17th century, hybrid became used
in English to refer to the offspring of a wild boar and a tame sow (1623); in 1630 B. Johnson
used it to characterize a woman as wild Irish born . . . and a hybride (Oxford English
Dictionary Online 2000). The botanical sense of the term does not show up in English until
the late 18th century and the linguistic sense does not appear until the middle of the 19th
century, when hybrid begins to be used with greater frequency (Oxford English Dictionary
Online 2000).
3. Cuban writer Jose Mart (185395) argued that the paradoxes of postcolonial racism
and the postcolonial ambivalence that marked attitudes to others as well as to the subjective
experience of the self could only be overcome by fighting all racism, decolonizing cul-
ture, and redressing the structural inequalities perpetuated by Spanish colonialism in the
Americas (English speakers see Mart 2002).
4. Much English-language scholarship on Latin America has used mestizaje in an
uncritical way to refer to real life processes of racial and cultural mixing, rather than to a
construct in political and aesthetic imaginaries of collective identity. From an Anglo point
of view, Mexicans, more frequently than not, are brown mestizos (regardless of whether
they categorize themselves as such); uncritical uses of mestizo in U.S. studies of Mexico
unwittingly have reproduced a complex transnational racist history.
5. This larger project is a book on the place of the indigenous in 20th-century Mex-
ican nationalism as represented in anthropology museums and other key sites of public
visual culture at national, regional, and local levels. I take the term aesthetic statism from
David A. Kaiser, who argues that in Germany, especially as evinced in Schillers ideas,
aesthetic statism sought to connect the aesthetic sphere with the political state, individ-
ual subjectivity with universal reason, and national culture with a universalizing canon
(1999:5).
6. Bakhtins discussion of hybridization in the novel needs to be understood in re-
lation to the conflict between centripetal forces that unify the verbal-ideological world
and centrifugal forces of heteroglossia, a conflict shaped by the degree of sociopolitical and
cultural centralization in a society (1981:270271). Discourse in the Novel analyzes the
different devices used to produce heteroglossia. A hybrid construction is an utterance that
belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but
actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two
languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems (1981:304). Bakhtin distin-
guishes such instances of intentional hybridization from organic hybridization, the
everyday unconscious mixing of languages in speech (1981:358362). Novelistic inten-
tional hybridizations introduce anothers speech into the authors discourse to comment
on it and to create an image of it as a language and belief system (1981:303). Intentional
hybridization does not simply mix voices; it sets them against each other dialogically
(1981:360). Postcolonial scholars such as Robert Young (1995) have based their notions of
hybridity as contestatory and subversive on these passages of Bakhtins oeuvre as well as on
his discussion of authoritative discourse. Bakhtin claims that authoritative discourse is
by its nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid constructions
(1981:343344). But readings of Bakhtins concept of hybridization as contestatory are
one sided. Other passages of the same essay suggest a more complex relationship between
hybridization and power. Bakhtins discussion of hybrid constructions in Dickens Little
Dorrit is a case in point (1981:303 ff.). In example 1, Dickens hybridizes his authorial
discourse with ceremonial speech to parody ceremoniousness; here authoritative discourse
(ceremonial speech) does enter into a hybrid construction, albeit only to be parodied. In this
instance, Dickens is not relativizing the two voices; instead, he is endowing his authorial
voice with enough power to parody authoritative speech. This example puts into question
any simple dualism between authoritativeness and subversiveness. Significantly, Bakhtin
argues that in an intentional hybrid, an image of a language may be structured only from
the point of view of another language, which is taken as the norm (1981:359). When one
voice is endowed with more authority than the other(s), it represents these from its own
point of view and this framing inflects the represented voices. Although, in some instances,
the voices of a hybrid construction are relativized vis-a-vis each other, making it impossible
for any one to be authoritative, this is not the case in all instances. I return to this point in
the concluding section of this article.
7. My engagement with the sensibility I interrogate is from the inside: This article is
itself a mixed text. I draw on distinct forms of evidence that range from philosophical
and anthropological works, to the public visual culture of space, to museum exhibits, to my
fieldwork observations. In code switching among intellectual genres, my eclecticism is not
a product of conscious artifice but a consequence of having lived a mixed-up life. I am a
Cuban exile who does not fit prevailing stereotypes. At various times, I have been assumed
to be Arab, Iranian, Jewish, Irish, French, Italian, Columbian, Argentinean, Chilean, and
Mexicananything but Cuban. When I tell people I am Cuban, they often express surprise
at my appearance or my politics, a response that pains me. I have lived in Cuba, Peru,
Norway, England, Spain, Mexico, and all over the United States. My color shifts from off-
white on the East Coast to brown north of the U.S.Mexico border and white to the
south of it. I dream in Spanish as well as in English and am most comfortable suspended
between both languages.
8. See Young 1995:619, for an insightful discussion and useful summary of these
European theoretical debates.
9. Indomestizo is used to designate mestizos who are of predominantly Indian descent.
10. I have discussed The Cosmic Race, and especially the construction of gender
and sexuality in the text, in greater detail elsewhere (Alonso in press). Here, I will focus
more on The Latin-American Basis of Mexican Civilization that appeared in Aspects of
Mexican Civilization (Vasconcelos and Gamio 1926), which featured a companion piece by
Manuel Gamio, The Indian Basis of Mexican Civilization (Gamio 1926). This fascinating
text, although less well-known than The Cosmic Race, consists of a series of lectures that
Vasconcelos gave at the University of Chicago in 1926 and were reproduced, according to
the publisher, in essentially their original form.
11. Vasconcelos writes I bear a small portion of indigenous blood and I believe that
it is to this that I owe a breadth and intensity of sentiment greater that that of the majority
of whites and one grain of a culture that was already illustrious while Europe was still
barbaric (Blanco 1977:17; my translation).
12. In 1926, Mendels work was still treated with disdain by the broader scientific
community; it was not until 1930 that it began to be taken seriously (Olby 1997). Mendels
experiments showed that hybrids were fertile and could be more vigorous than their parents;
moreover, hybridization could produce new stable varieties of plants capable of reproducing
themselves, even if this process took several generations (Mendel 1865).
13. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, to conform means to bring
into form, to bring into harmony, to bring into accord or mutual agreement, to order,
and to regulate.
14. See Young 1995:1315, for a discussion of type in Europe; for Mexico, see
Stern 2002.
15. Note the parallels here with Negritude, a movement of the 1930s and 1940s among
Francophone Africans and Caribbean people of African descent. In response to white racism,
the exponents of Negritude argued that whites might be superior in science and technology,
but blacks were superior morally, aesthetically, and spiritually. As I argue more fully later
on, a fruitful comparison can also be made to Indian nationalism as discussed by Chatterjee
(1993).
16. When discussing intellectuals interpretations of el mestizo, I use masculine
pronouns in English because they had a male subject in mind; see Alonso in press for
a discussion of gender and mestizaje. Moreover, the reason I do not incorporate African
contributions to the mix is that these are largely disregarded (even when mentioned ) in the
texts and spaces I discuss.
17. Blanco (1977:1314) points out that although Vasconcelos was born in Oaxaca,
he spent most of his childhood in the U.S.Mexico border area. He perceptively argues
that his affinity for the northern versus the southern revolutionaries was shaped by northern
constructions of Indians as barbarians during the Apache Wars, which continued up to
the end of the 19th century.
18. Note that this difference in emphasis between the two authors is indexed by the
contrasting titles of the series of lectures they gave at the University of Chicago in 1926:
Vasconceloss are entitled The Latin-American Basis of Mexican Civilization, whereas
Gamios appear as The Indian Basis of Mexican Civilization (Vasconcelos and Gamio
1926).
19. Most Porfirian monuments were executed in a neoclassical style (Agostoni
2003:92).
20. Epigraph was taken from Tenenbaum 1994:135.
21. Anthropology continues to play a central role in mediating the production of art
in Mexico; for a discussion of this in the Mayan context, see Castaneda 2004.
22. The Plaza of the Three Cultures is more commonly invoked to illustrate the
concretization of mestizaje in public space (Alonso in press). However, the Zocalo is actually
more significant; although few people write about it because it is taken for granted as part
of the everyday forms of nationalism and memory.
23. These murals have been the object of numerous books and articles (e.g., Folgarait
1998; Rochfort 1998), and I have nothing new to add here. I do suggest, however,
that you pause in our walk and go to the Diego Rivera virtual museum at http://www.
diegorivera.com/murals and look at The Great City of Tenochitlan, The Ancient Indige-
nous World, and the three murals From the Conquest to 1930. As secretary of education,
Vasconcelos commissioned many of the murals at The National Preparatory School, just
northeast of the Zocalo; this is where Rivera painted his first mural, The Creation, which
shows the mestizo emerging from a tree rooted into the soil and gives visual expression to
Vasconceloss philosophy.
24. Multiple images of Coatlicue are available on the web; one of the better ones can
be found at http://www.mexic-artemuseum.org/education/dell-edu/history.
25. An excellent image of this piece can be found at the website of Mexicos
MNA, in the Mexica room; go to www.mna.inah.gob.mx/muse1/mna/muse1/muna/mna
esp/main.html.
26. If you go to the website http://archaeology.la.asu.edu/tm/index2.htm, you can take
the museums virtual tour.
27. An encomienda was the term used to denote a grant of land and/or Indian laborers,
given by the Spanish Crown to the colonists as a reward.
28. The public has no knowledge, or only a defective knowledge, of the brilliant Mex-
ican past that preceded the Conquest. Some, the least blameworthy, suffer from absolute ig-
norance; others are misguided by the ridiculous exoticist criterion which makes them devalue
all that is ours and hate what comes from the indigene (Gamio 192223; my translation).
29. Please visit the MNAs web site at http://www.mna.inah.gob.mx/muse1/mna/
muse1/muna/mna esp/main.html. Prior to 1964, the National Museum included the histor-
ical as well as the anthropological collections and was housed in an annex of the National
Palace in the Zocalo. For the earlier history of the museum, see Rico Mansard 2000, Sierra
Carrillo 1994, and Morales-Moreno 1994.
30. This and all other quotes are from Ramrez Vazquez 1968; this is a text put together
by the anthropologists, museologists, art historians, and others who created the 1964 MNA.
The text and its accompanying photographs are structured so as to evoke the prototypical
experience of visiting the museum and are intended to provide a virtual tour.
31. My discussion here is focused on the 1964 vision of the MNA. The ethnographic
exhibits have since been completely redone and the renovated wing was inaugurated on
November 24, 2000.
32. In 1940, the historical collection of the National Museum was separated from
the anthropological collection. Although one finds indigenous people in the displays of the
museums that deal with Mexican history, by and large they are not represented as the makers
of history.
33. A photo of the diorama of the ceremonial center of Tenotchitlan is on the museum
web site in the Sala Mexica under Manifestaciones Culturales. A portion of this diorama is
visible on the MNAs website as well as on a link to the Sala Mexica, Economa. Interestingly,
Hall VII in the more recent Templo Mayor museum inverts the representational conventions
of the MNA. Its diorama of the pre-Columbian market of Tlatelolco is life sized and not
miniature. This diorama is particularly intriguing because its background is based on one
of Diego Riveras murals in the National Palace, La Gran Tenochitlan. As a simulacrum
of a simulacrum, the diorama engenders a visual dialogue among the sites of memory in
the Zocalo (as well as with the MNA).
34. Caso was a pioneering archaeologist, the director of the old National Museum
(193334), the founder and director of the INAH (193944), the rector of the National
Autonomous University (194445), and the founder and director of the National Indigenist
Institute from 1949 until his death in 1970. He was awarded Mexicos National Prize in
Science in 1960 and was the author of books and articles too numerous to list here.
35. My choice of links has been necessarily selective. I have focused on Gamio
and Vasconcelos because their mythohistories of mestizaje and their efforts at cultural
revolution have been foundational. Of course, this does not mean that subsequent thinkers
merely reproduced their ideas unchanged; rather, it indicates that Gamio and Vasconcelos,
the Indigenist and the Hispanicist mestizophiliacs, set the terms for much of the discussion
and policy to come.
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ABSTRACT This article sets up a dialogue between postcolonal theory and

Latin American studies. Although some forms of intentional hybridization are con-
testatory, others, such as the aesthetic statism that developed in postrevolutionary
Mexico after the 1920s, are authoritative. Moving from the works of foundational
thinkers such as Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, to the centrality of art in
the policies they engendered, and to subsequent manifestations of aesthetic statism
in the exemplary centers of urban space and in anthropology museums, the article
traces some of the links in the genealogy of mestizo nationalism in postrevolu-
tionary 20th-century Mexico. [hybridity, postcolonialism, aesthetics, nationalism,
Mexico]

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Conforming Disconformity: Mestizaje,

Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

The Taste of Theory

studies; it has become a staple in scholarly discourse on intercultural processes,

Mestizaje and Social Memory

minister of development, this project, begun in 1877, aimed to materialize the

Mestizaje in the Discourses of Revolutionary State Intellectuals

mythohistorical narratives were the latest rejoinders in a long-term national and

Vasconcelos and the Multiplied Experience of History

The idea of erecting a monument to independencea commemorative col-

Gamios allegory is motivated by an understanding of the specific importance

Revolutionary Aesthetic Statism

Riva Palacio (1877)20

An ardent supporter of the neocolonial style, Vasconcelos saw buildings as

Forjando Patria in Everyday Life: Mexico City as a Living Museum

Exemplary Centers: Mexico Citys Zocalo

When I visited the Templo Mayor Museum in 2001, I saw groups of

An understanding of the ideological significance of Mexica objects and practices is

The TimeSpace of the National Museum of Anthropology

as the National Museum of Anthropology, which provide spaces for contained

traditional indigenous aesthetics in contemporary art, architecture, music, dance,

it draws on a mythologized figure of the Indian to stake a claim to a home ground:

Rico Mansard, Luisa F. F.

ABSTRACT This article sets up a dialogue between postcolonal theory and

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