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The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and

the Imagining of Community

Article  in  Journal of Historical Sociology · October 2006

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00003.x

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Journal ofHistorical Sociology Vol. 1 No. 1 March 1988
ISSN 0952-1909

The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of

the Past and the Imagining of Community*

ANA MARIA ALONSO

Abstract Social memory is integral to the creation of social meaning:

representations of the past are central to the symbolic constitution of social groups
and social identities. This paper examines the production of effects of truth and power
in both official and popular historical discourses in Mexico and demonstrates how
representations of the past configure the imagining of community (social memory:
official/popular historical discourses: nationalism; revolution: hegemony: Mexico).

I. The Positive Sense of Ideology and Historiographies'

Hidden Hermeneutics: the Production of Effects of Truth in
Historical Discourses
How are histories ideologically constituted?' Whoever has been part
of an historical event in the making will be aware that at the time,
what is most salient is the amorphousness and confusion of rapidly
shifting action, framed by a welter of impressions, by a chaos which
is itself an index of the extraordinary. Those caught up in this film
without a script try to improvise a plot line which will allow them to
meaningfully orient their actions. Snatches of interrupted dialogues
hang in the air but to the ubiquitous question, What is happening?,
no clear reply emerges.
Such was our experience of history-as-action during an event
which occured one Saturday in October of 1983, while we were
engaged in fieldwork in the rural town of Namiquipa, Chihuahua,
Mexico. We were just sitting down to lunch with the local doctor and
her family when suddenly, the quotidian ceremony was ruptured by
sounds which we at first confused with the backfiring of trucks but
which we soon knew to be gunshots. My colleague and I managed
to run outside before our friends locked their doors and drew their
curtains.
A throng of people was hurtling down the main street. First came
children, crying and screaming, their faces contorted by a rictus of
terror. Then came women, dressed in their Sunday best, some
clutching babies, many without shoes yet seemingly impervious to
the rocky, rutted surface which gouged their feet and limited their
movement to an uncertain lunging forward. Last came men, several
bleeding from the head, barely able to stand, propelled onward by
others. One of them, though covered in blood, was clearly trying to
34 Ana M a r i a Alonso

organize the exodus and mitigate the panic, bellowing unheeded

directions to the crowd which continued to surge ahead,
disappearing around the bend of the road which led out of town. He
heard our shouted question, ‘What is happening‘?‘and yelled back,
They are killing people in the plaza!’ ‘Who?’ The state police!’
Running toward the plaza, from which the multitude was running
away, we stopped to help one of the wounded.2This elderly man was
sitting frighteningly still on the curb, while blood gushed from his
head and ran down his body.3 His male relatives told u s he’d been
clubbed by the state police. When we finally reached the plaza, all
was still. No bodies were to be seen. The state police was assembled
in front of the municipal office buildings. But the trucks stopped at
crazy angles in the surrounding streets, the high-heeled shoes
scattered throughout the square, and the tear gas which still hung
in the air and had us coughing and choking, bore witness to the
extraordinary and to the disorder which distinguishes it from the
everyday and serves as the sign of one type of ‘historical event‘.
Obviously, the preceeding historical description is ideologically
constituted in several respects. Here, I am using ‘ideology’ in
Ricoeur’s positive sense of a symbolic system which provides a code
of interpretation for social action and relationship (Ricoeur 1978).
To paraphrase Tristan Tzara, irrtransforming action into text, I have
waved the baton and made the categories dance, I have classified
practice, cut it into sections, channelized it (cf. Tzara in Motherwell
1951:78).4All histories, whether spoken or written, are produced in
an encounter between a hermeneutics and a field of social action
which is symbolically constituted, even though at the time of the
action, the meanings embedded in practice may not be clearly or
fully evident to the consciousness of actors5Much of this encounter
takes place ‘after the fact’; histories are retrospectives because the
contours of the past are finally delineated and fxed from the vantage
point of the present. Thus, the contingency of history-as-action is
always mitigated by the backwards gaze of history-as-
representation which orders and explains, which introduces a
teleology hardly evident at the time of the original events.
Yet historiographies tend to conceal the effects of this gap between
past and present. between contingency and necessity, occluding the
process of interpretation and the conditions of its production, and
re-presenting historical action as an objective and transparent
‘given’, a s ‘what really happened’. Historiographies hide their
hermeneutics and create an illusion of unmediated reality through
several strategies which, though unconsciously deployed, are
nonetheless effective. In this project, language, whether spoken or
written, conspires with history-making. Not only does the fixity of
the printed word or the freezing by repetition of the spoken word aid
 The Effects ofTruth 35

the work of simplification and reification but also, it helps to

establish the authority which re-presentations require if they are to
be seen as representative. Public language, through its very
publicity, acquires a measure of truth and legitimacy. Here, we will
limit the discussion to three of the major discursive strategies
deployed by both oral and written histories to create ‘effectsof truth
and to transform partiality into totality. Such strategies play with
framing, voice and narrative structure.
Re-presentations of the past, whether professional or popular,
printed or spoken, are defined as specific sorts of performances or
texts through a series of framing devices. The way such
reconstructions are framed configures their truth value by bringing
into play the ideologically constituted status of different forms of
knowledge. For example, since Balzac’s studies of French society in
the nineteenth century are framed as novels, they have a different
truth value from that accorded to scholarly treatises on the same
subject which are framed as histories. This is because in Western
society, histories are conceived as being about ‘facts’ and novels
about ‘fictions’. Thus, Balzac’s account is viewed as being less
factual than that of our imaginary historian who has ransacked the
archives for data and amply footnoted his text. Since my own
historical description deploys a rather literary style, though it is
overtly framed as ‘history’,it might be viewed as less ‘objective’,less
‘accurate’than one which replaced the figurative language with the
colorless, impersonal and purportedly value-free prose so
generalized in the social sciences.
Obviously, the ideological valuation of forms of knowledge varies
from society to society and from group to group. An apt illustration
of this point is provided by a third example of modes of framing. The
text in question is a popular counter-history of a peasant rebellion
which took place in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century
(Chavez Calderon 1964).6The author, son of one of the peasant rebel
leaders, frames his narrative as a counter-history whose truth
resides in its popular origins. He denies the factuality of official
histories of the same events because they are written by
professionals who lack direct, experiential knowledge of ‘what really
happened’ and rely instead on written sources which articulate the
partial and distorted views of state functionaries. By contrast, the
truth of his counter-history rests on its being framed as a faithful
transcription of the spoken narrative of the sole surviving eye-
witness of the totality of events, his mother. And as the author asks,
‘would a mother instruct her sons with the truth or with lying
words?’
To summarize the argument thus far: the epistemological status
of re-presentations of the past is established through a multiplicity
36 Ana M a r i a Alonso

of framing devices ranging from the overt to the covert, from the title
of written accounts or the prefatory remarks of oral ones to the type
of language used, figurative or scientific, scholarly or popular. Once
framed as ‘history’.the events and personages of such narratives in
a sense become indexical signs which perpetually point to their
status as realities constituted independently of the process of re-
presentation itself.
A second strategy for establishing the veracity of historical
accounts involves the manipulation of ‘voice’. In my own
description. the voice is that of the observer, of the ‘I’ who ‘sees’: the
authority of this voice relies on our society’s conception that ‘seeing
is believing’, on the privileged access to facts accorded to the ‘eye-
witness’, key to the legitimacy bestowed on ethnographic
description or newspaper reportage and indirectly, on historical
narrative based on primary sources. By contrast, Balzac’s novels
deploy a multiplicity of voices whose ‘truth’ depends on the writer’s
craft, on the ability to make invented speech sound like reported
speech, on fiction’s potential to be ‘true to life’ if not to ‘fact’. Our
imaginary historian’s account might employ the voice of the
impersonal narrator: the effacement of the writing subject fosters
the illusion of a transparent objectivity. Note that by turning words
into things, by naturalizing the texts which form their sources, such
monophonic narratives suppress the polyphony and contingency of
historical action and interpretation, endowing one voice with the
authority which accrues to the discourse which appears to totalize.
Lastly, in our popular counter-history, the voice is split: it is
simultaneously that of the mother who is also the eye-witness, and
that of the native son. Veracity draws on a host of cultural ideals to
establish its authority, from the purity of motherhood, to the
primacy of direct experience, to the privileged access to truth of the
‘I’ who sees and articulates the ‘insider’s’point of view.
Lastly, a third strategy for producing effects of truth in histories
is through the iconism that generally obtains between the narrative
structure of re-presentation of the past and the unfolding of
historical action outside the text or ~ p e e c h The. ~ chronological
ordering of historical narratives is a diagram of the sequence of
actions and events in past time. The use of such iconism is critical
to conveying the illusion of unmediated reality in all sorts of genres
of writing and speaking as well as in the visual arts, where it has
played a major role in concealing the complex techniques and
conventions which underpin ‘realism’ and cause such art to be
subjectively apprehended as an exact copy of the actual (cf.
Gombrich 1969).
Though the point of departure for the preceeding discussion of
history-making was a positive concept of ideology, some of the
 The Effects of Truth 37

language used, including the verbs ‘conceal’, ‘naturalize’, and

‘occlude’, indicates that a negative notion was smuggled in. Re-
presentations of the past are concerned with ‘truthin different ways
and to different degrees. The verification procedures of professional
historiography clearly indicate that the goal is to recover the truth
of the past, insofar as this is possible. But the paradox is that by
hiding its own hermeneutics, by passing interpretive description off
as unmediated factuality, history does a violence to this truth and
becomes ideologically constituted in a negative sense.
Why does history hide its hermeneutics? The answer lies in the
ideological constitution and valuation of different forms of
knowledge in society. In Western society, the hegemony of ‘value-
free’ science has led to the over-valuing of purportedly objective
forms of knowledge: thus, the conditions of knowledge in the social
sciences, in which man is both the knowing subject and the object
of analysis, are often occluded or mis-represented. In rural Mexico,
subjectivity is equated with personal interest and with emotion,
both conceived as barriers to truth: ergo, in our popular counter-
history, the object of knowledge is disingenuously configured as
being independent of the ‘seeing’ subject whose ‘eye’ does not
transform it in any way but instead, reproduces and transmits it to
posterity as a copy whose exactitude is as unquestionable as the
purity of motherhood.8
The paradox is that historical discourses hide their hermeneutics
so as to construct their ‘credibility’and ‘authoritativeness’vis-a-vis
their audiences. History is rhetorical in that it aims to convince and
in order to do so, it is drawn into misrepresenting its project. Like
realist art,historical narrative pretends to be a copy of an actuality
which is ‘naturalized, presented as ‘raw data’, as ‘hard facts’. This
is particularly evident in the fetishism of documents which are
widely assumed to be transparent sources. Yet such artefacts are
social products which are symbolically and politically constituted,
which are integral to the project of the state. So too, the memories
of the peasant mother are conditioned by the broader project of
rebellion in which she was as much a participant as an observer.
Project and memory form an organic unity: in this sense, there is
nothing ‘raw’about any source. Historical description, ‘what really
happened, is not the result of self-evidences which we gather and
string together but instead, the product of a complex interpretive
process which, like any practice, is inflected by broader social
projects, by relations of domination which seep into the private
sphere of even the most ‘civil’of societies. I t is to this intersection of
power and knowledge that we now turn.
38 A m M a r i a Abnso

II. 'What Really Happened': the Intersection of Power and

Historical Knowledge
What happened in the plaza of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, on that
October Saturday in 1983? In the following days, two contradictory
interpretations of Saturday's events emerged and began to vie for
hegemony. These interpretations were crystallized through a
multiplicity of guarded, exploratory, intimate dialogues which
largely took place 'off stage', that is, in what are categorized a s 'non-
public' spaces and context^.^ As an implicit consensus was reached
within the two factions, interpretations were simplified, sedimented,
and fixed through repetition and they began to be aired in
increasingly 'on stage' contexts.
The two factions' is the key phrase in the preceeding paragraph.
The events of Saturday were the culmination of a long battle for
political office between two loosely constituted, shifting factions
within the municipality and their allies outside it.'O The majority of
the inhabitants of the town of Namiquipa proper, who are largely
agricultural petty-commodity producers, supported the candidates
of the PFU, Mexico's official 'party of the institutionalized
revolution'. I I Thousands of poorer agricultural producers and rural
workers favored the candidates of the PST, a nominal opposition
Party.'2
The opposition claimed electoral victory, and though the
consensus was that they had won in votes, they had effectively lost
in deed, since official recognition went, as it generally does, to the
PRI candidates.13 On that Saturday in October, the opposition
planned to symbolically affirm its claim to victory by literally
carrying its candidate into the office of the municipal presidency and
'seating' him in the presidential 'chair', the emblem of political office
in rural Mexico.14 Both interpretations were in agreement on the
lineaments of this broad context. Where they differed was precisely
on 'what really happened when PST supporters tried to translate
their plan, which had been announced days before, into action.
PST leaders and supporters claimed that when they began their
advance toward the municipal buildings, the state police fired into
the crowd, killing several persons. By contrast, PRI supporters
argued that the state police had only shot blanks and that the
casualties resulted when some PST supporters who meant to fire at
state policemen, mistakenly shot their own, gripped by the general
panic which took hold of the crowd as the state police let off tear gas
and began to beat people with clubs.
Two things were especially striking about this process of
interpretation. First, events were consciously defined as 'historical':
that Saturday in October has been made salient in the history of the
 The Efiects of Truth 39

community of Namiquipa proper by giving it a name, The Day of the

Clubs’ (‘ElDia de 10sGarrotes’).Notice that it was not called The Day
of the Clubbings’, for to do so would focus attention on people’s
having been hurt. And of course, it was not baptized The Day of the
Shootings’.That deaths occurred is something those who supported
the PRI, that is, most of the inhabitants of Namiquipa proper, prefer
to forget. The name is a mnemonic sign which condenses an
interpretation of events and gives the day a historical saliency, but
a saliency which is selective, which highlights some aspects and
obscures others.
Second, whereas the proponents of one or the other view were very
quick to affirm that their re-presentation of ‘what really happened’
corresponded absolutely to the reality of events, they were very slow
to verify their ‘facts’and indeed, they were indifferent to details that
contradicted what they so energetically proclaimed to be ‘true’.l5
Truth’ entered in, but mainly as an ad hoc justification, as a claim
to legitimacy. Its effects were secured through the discursive
strategies of framing, voice and narrative structure we have already
examined. ‘Lie’was the appellation reserved for the enemy’s words
which were as ‘interested’ as one’s own side’s were ‘disinterested’.
What was over-determining these accounts was not an abstract
preoccupation with ‘truth’but instead, a concrete concern with the
power which also produces the effects of ‘truth’.
The intersection of relations of power and historical knowledge is
a highly variable one. In the domain of professional historiography,
‘the interweaving of effects of power and knowledge’ may be
extremely subtle and highly mediated (Foucault in Rabinow
1984:52).In the context of political struggles such as that of The Day
of the Clubs’, power and knowledge are more intimately embraced.
In Spanish, the word ‘poder’has two senses: one approximates the
meaning of the English noun ‘power’ and the other is aptly
translated as the verb ‘to be able to’. The play on words is possible
in Spanish and impossible in English but its sense can be stated,
albeit less elegantly. The ability to know rests on the power to know:
the ‘truths’ and effects of knowledge are also the ‘truths’ and effects
of power (Foucault 1980b).16Nowhere is this more evident than in
national histories.

III. Re-presentations of the Past and the ‘Imagining of

Community’.

The Centrality of History in the Imagining of ‘the Nation’

That ‘the nation’ is ‘an imagined political community’, a
sociocultural construct, is a point which has been eloquently
40 Ana M a r i a Alonso

developed by Benedict Anderson (Anderson 1983). Anderson notes

an affiiity between the national and the religious imagination;
though one vision is sacred and the other secular, both mitigate
death and suffering by transforming fatality into continuity, by
linking the dead with the yet to be born (1983: 18). Nations, he adds,
'loom out of an immemorial past and . . . glide into a limitless future.
I t is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny' (1983:19).
One of the paradoxes of nationalisms is precisely 'the objective
modernity of nations . . .vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of
nationalists' (1983: 14). Though Anderson recognizes the centrality
of histories to national imaginings, this insight remains at the edges
of his argument. Here, we will make it our central concern as we
examine how the imagining of community is configured by official
and popular re-presentations of the past.
Social memory is integral to the creation of social meaning. Social
groups form images of themselves in relation to a set of founding
events and re-enact this shared link to a collective past in public
ceremony as well as in everyday life (Rcoeur 1978:45). Conjoining
present projects and past memories, ideologies of history are central
to the symbolic constitution of social groups and to the creation of
social solidarities (Rcoeur 1978:46).
National re-presentations of the past create felt fraternities both
within the limits of a national territory and across the bounds of a
national time, reckoned in terms of metaphorical genealogy and
historical chronology. The links of nationality are imagined through
an idiom of kinship which is more metaphorical than literal, though
the perennial possibility of a fall into literality has been amply
demonstrated by the national racisms of this century, which have
resulted in the deaths of millions whose misfortune it was to have
the wrong sort of 'blood'." Across space, this 'shared substance',
this 'national blood', makes all men brothers, and through time, it
makes them sons of the same founding fathers: the nation is indeed
one family, one eternal body.18 Death may be 'a clot of emptiness',
the soundless pop of 'an empty can' being opened, but within the
national imaglnation, we are rendered immortal, forever reproduced
through the timelessness of metaphorical genea10gy.l~And the
irony is that precisely this transcendence of mortality through the
sharing of substance between the dead and the yet to be born, has
produced social sentiments so strong that millions have marched to
the grave in the defense of 'nation', feeling that 'to die for one's
country' is a 'sacrifice' both 'sweet and decorous'.
Historical chronologies solder a multiplicity of personal, local and
regional historicities and transform them into a unitary, national
time. They link the experiences of day to day life to events which are
categorized as 'national' and in so doing, lhey reinforce the
 The Eflects of 7‘ruth 41

solidarities of nationality. For example, in Mexico people will often

date occurences in their own purportedly private lives in relation to
the political terms of national presidents.2O
Such national chronologies establish both a historical right to a
specific territory and a temtorial right to a particular history. The
modem Mexican nation is conceived as being as rooted in the past
of the great pre-columbian civilizations as in the history of conquest
and colony. The nation appropriates the totality of the history
enacted in its territory. And as the conflict between Argentina and
England over the Malvinas/Falklands demonstrates, the totality of
the territory dominated during this history is also claimed for the
nation. Territory and history are the privileged political spaces
within which nations are imagined and through which ‘sovereignty’
is constructed.
That nations are configured in relation to the axes of time and
space on which the imagined coordinates of community are plotted
is everywhere evident in the social landscape of Mexico. ‘Sufragio
Efectivo’, ’20 de Noviembre’, ‘No Reeleccion’, ‘Madero’, “Venustiano
Carranza’, ‘EmilianoZapata’: the patronyms of dead heroes and the
slogans of past struggles provide a unitary set of names for streets,
institutions, and communities which links the most remote rural
villages to the greatest of metropoli. This vast iconic structuring of
‘public’social space transforms what was once the terrain of local
and regional autonomies into a homogenized and nationalized
domain, where an objectified official history makes the presence of
the state palpable in everyday life.
The hegemony of modem nation-states, and the legitimacy which
accrues to the groups and classes that control their apparatuses, are
critically constituted by re-presentations of a national past. As
Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks have recently argued, modem
state formation is a social and ideological project in which relations
of power are constituted and legitimated through forms of
knowledge which the national state creates and organizes ‘to mark
and measure the health, wealth and welfare of its citizens’ and to
reproduce itself as the ‘natural embodiment of history, territory and
society’ (Cohn & Dirks 1986:1,2).21 Above all, national history is the
official history of the state, and the ‘determination, codification,
control and representation of the past’ has been central to the
reproduction of state hegemony (Cohn and Dirks 1986:2). The
embrace of power and history becomes even more intimate. And as
Ricoeur points out, the negative aspects of ideology become
prominent as codes of interpretation are mobilized to legitimate
relations of domination, resulting in a phenomenon of political ‘over
value’ through which the excess of the claims of the rulers over the
response of the ruled is dissimulated (Ricoeur 1978:48-49).
42 Ana Maria Alonso

Dissimulation is most evident in the naturalization of the

ideologically constituted distinction betweeen ‘the state’ and ‘civil
society’,between the ‘public’and the ‘private’.Gramsci at times uses
’the state’ to designate ‘political society’ and at other times to refer
to ‘politicalsociety + civil society’(Gramsci 197 1). Though some have
found this double usage confusing, it perfectly captures the
duplicity of that neat separation between the realm of the state and
the domain of civil society.22Such a distinction renders invisible the
manifold technologies of power and forms of documentation
through which the state intrudes into the quotidian round and into
our very bodies, through our gender and sexuality, through our
color, through our age, through a plurality of qualities and statuses
which are predicates of the subject ‘1’. The state’s project is ‘both
totalizing and individualizing. It participates in the constitution of
social categories and identities’ (Cohn & Dirks 1986:2). As
Foucault‘s later work indicates, the state constitutes its subjects in
both a political and a phenomenological sense (1980a & b). In all
this, national history plays a critical role. Folk explanations of social
action in terms of national character implicitly recognize the extent
to which subjectivity is configured by national imaginings which are
critically inflected by re-presentations of the past.
In Mexico, sites of production of a national past are monopolized
by the state: as Anderson points out, revolutionary nationalisms
tend to emanate from the state and serve to consolidate its
hegemony (Anderson 1983: 145). Public space, museums,
educational institutions, advertising, political rhetoric, television
and film are among the many loci of official historical production.
Not just print but also, new technologies of communication
articulate the historical images and messages of the state?:’
What distinguishes nationalisms, as Anderson notes, are the
different styles in which they are imagined (Anderson 1983: 15).The
dead heroes whose names baptize public space in Mexico are
overwhelmingly drawn from one of the many domains of the past:
modern Mexican nationalism is above all a revolutionary
nationalism. This will become evident if we leave our main argument
to take a detour through the Museum of the Revolution, a privileged
site in the production of Mexican national history.

The Museum of the Revolution

Dona Luz Corral, the only legitimate wife of the controversial
revolutionary leader Francisco Villa, died in 1982. The house she
once shared with Villa, located in the capital of the Northern state of
Chihuahua, was immediately occupied by the Mexican army,
appropriated by the Mexican state as part of the ‘national patrimony’
 The Effects of Truth 43

and transformed into the Museum of the R e v o l u t i ~ n General

.~~
Francisco Villa, leader of the Division of the North, Mexico’s greatest
popular revolutionary army, had long been banished from center
stage in official Mexican historiography and political rhet0ric.2~In
1915, the competition for national hegemony among the different
revolutionary factions became a ‘war of manoeuvre’ to be decided on
the battlefield. But this war was waged with words as well as guns.
As of 1915, Villismo began to be re-presented and de-legitimized as
‘anaimless, mercenary rowdyism’,as a force of disorder and a threat
to national reconstruction, in the discourse of its enemies, whose
political heirs rule Mexico today.26
However, in 1976, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
government rehabilitated and incorporated Villa into the pantheon
of official, national revolutionary heroes, through a symbolically
pregnant transfer of his headless remains from periphery to center
(Katz 1980:59).27Appropriated by the state for the nation, the
meanings of Villismo were cannibalized, re- valued and incorporated
into a historical bricolage from which a hegemonic ideology has been
built.
One site where the national state’s official ideology of history has
been objectified is the Museum of the Revolution.28Doiia Luz had
turned her home into a monument to Villa’s memory, into a living
museum where the artefacts of Villismo and the personal effects of
Villa were animated by her spoken recollections. Widely known as
‘the house of Villa’, (‘lacasa de Villa’),this space objectified a vision
of revolutionary history which was regionalist and above all, Villista’,
through the medium of artefacts which are mnemonic signs. In
transforming ‘Villa’shouse’ into the Museum of the Revolution in
1982, the Mexican state re-valued the signs of a regional and
popular Villista history, bringing them into a new set of meaningful
relations more in accord with the ‘national interest’, with the
ideological project of state-building.
For anyone familiar with the popular history of Villa and Villismo,
the Museum of the Revolution is full of paradoxes and ironies. For
example, the names of C h i h u a h u a Villistas are juxtaposed with
those of their enemies and all are inscribed together in a monument
to local revolutionary heroes. Not only Villa and his ally Zapata, but
also their most hated enemies and assassins are re-presented in the
Museum. The Revolutionary’ is produced as a unitary domain in
which personal, class and regional enmities and differences are
erased and overcome by a vision of a struggle in which all fought on
the side of ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’, whose privileged
representatives currently control the aparatus of the Mexican state.
Difference is suffocated and dissolved in the all encompassing
embrace of national and revolutionary fraternity.
44 Ana Maria Abnso

‘Revisionist’ histories are currently de-constructing ‘the

Revolution’ and demonstrating that this process of social upheaval
was not unitary but composed of distinct movements with divergent
social projects and even different chronologies (e.g. Katz 1981;
Knight 1980, 1985; Koreck 1985; Alonso 1986a; Nugent 1985).
However, official history continues to articulate ‘the Revolution’ as
a unitary and integrated phenomenon because such a re-
presentation is critical to the imagining of the nation and to the
legitimation project of the modem Mexican state. In the creation of
such an official history, subordinated histories are appropriated and
transformed as they are incorporated into a ‘national’vision.In rural
Mexico, the verb ‘comer’, ‘to eat’, is sometimes used as a metaphor
for domination. The Mexican state has ‘eaten’Villa and ‘regurgitated’
his rehabilitated image as a symbolic element in a historical
bricolage through which a hegemonic ideology has been
constructed, an ideology which constitutes and legitimates
relations of domination.
As the example of the Museum of the Revolution evinces, national
re-presentations of the past feed on local and regional histories;
official history gets fat on the pasts it appropriates and
subordinates. State cannibalism is a transformative process.
Subordinated histories are treated as ‘raw facts’, cooked according
to hegemonic recipes and served up as national cuisine. But what
are these recipes and culinary techniques? How are the histories of
subordinated groups and classes appropriated, reworked and used
to advance the legitimation project of the state?

State Cannibalism: some Culinary Techniques

Many social scientists have agreed that Mexico’s is ‘an inclusionary
authoritarianism’. unwittingly reproducing the view of power and
society articulated by official ideology. For this inclusion of
subordinated groups and classes is above all imagined. As
Guillermo O’Donnell has observed, ‘the popular’, what is ‘of the
people’, is one of the ideological mediations central to the
construction of hegemony in Latin America (O’Donnell 1979).
Hegemonic ideologies appropriate and transform popular histories
through a multiplicity of techniques. The discussion here will
confine itself to three: naturalization, departicularization and
idealization.
Naturalization is a form of reification whereby social actors,
discourses and practices are re-presented as natural essences or
things. The Museum of the Revolution is an apt example since
history is literally articulated through artefacts and the exegesis of
their meanings is naturalized as unmediated description.
 The Effects of Truth 45

Naturalization disguises the transformations effected on

subordinated histories by turning re-presentations into ‘raw facts’
which cannot be contested. Framing, voice and narrative structure
are all manipulated to conceal the work of reinterpretation in which
power and knowledge are intimately linked. The effects of truth
render invisible the effects of power.
Departicularization is the process whereby historical discourses
and practices are emptied of the meanings which tie them to
concrete contexts, to definite localities, to distinct groups, and
universalized, made the property of all and of no one. For example,
through departicularization, distinct and even opposed social
movements, struggles and projects have been homogenized, unified
and nationalized as ‘the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917’.As the
discussion of the Museum of the Revolution demonstrated,
difference is suppressed, the ‘otherness’ of particular histories is
dissipated. Contradictory social projects are rendered equivalent in
a bricolage in which the signs of subordinated and regional histories
are appropriated and revalued, invested with new meanings which
reproduce a hegemonic national ideology and the relations of
domination it configures and legitimates.
Idealization is the process through which the past is cleaned up,
rendered palatable and made the embodiment of nationalist values.
Death and suffering are purged of terror and pain; fraticide is
transformed into fraternity. It is pertinent to note that the car in
which Villa was assassinated had been conserved by his wife with
its seats stained by blood, its windows shattered, its tires deflated
and its body riddled with bullet holes. For display in the Museum of
the Revolution, the car was refurbished with fresh paint and new
seats, windows and tires. From a mnemonic index which pointed to
Villa’s assassination by the founders of the revolutionary Mexican
state, from a sign of conflict and difference, ofviolence and death, the
car was transformed into a pleasing curiosity, easily integrated into
an historical vision which emphasizes fraternity and which makes
Villa’s assassins and their political descendants the
institutionalizers of the aspirations of the popular movement he
once led.
Pasts which cannot be incorporated are excluded by national
history. Privatization and particularization consign recalcitrant
histories to the margins of the ‘national’, where they are denied a
fully ‘public’voice (Bommes and Wright 1982:266-267).What is too
tough or too ‘rotten’ to cook is deemed unsuitable for public
consumption and removed from the national menu. Relegated to the
realm of private tastes, counter histories which resist state
cannibalism sometimes survive.
In Mexican towns historical discourses are critical to the
46 Ana M a r i a Alonso

imagining of the local community. The coordinates of this 'patria

chica' or 'small nation' are also plotted on the axes of time and space,
of history and temtory. In 'ConflictingViews of State and Revolution
in the Chihuahuan Sierra', Daniel Nugent demonstrates that in
Namiquipa, the rights to land of thecommunity are configured and
legitimated through a local historical discourse which repudiates
the agrarian pretensions of official revolutionary rhetoric and which
defends the sovereignty of the patria chica against the claims of the
national state (Nugent 1986).
Namiquipa was one of the key centers of peasant revolutionary
activity in Chihuahua. The redressal of agrarian grievances was an
important focus of armed struggle in the North.29 As Nugent
observes, the Namiquipenses were among the earliest and most
privileged beneficiaries of the revolutionary state's agrarian reform.
However, they have been less than satisfied with its consequences
because agrarian reform has allowed the state to penetrate into key
aspects of social life in rural areas, trespassing on what is thought
and felt to be the sovereign domain of the local community.
The historical discourse of the Namiquipenses affirms the primacy
of local sovereignty. Rights to land are not established and
legitimated by reference to 'the Revolution' but instead, in relation
to the founding events of a colonial history which pre-dates the
Mexican nation. Not the Mexican state, but the Spanish colonial
administration is deemed to have conferred on Namiquipa its rights
to land. In repudiating 'the Revolution' as the basis for community
rights to land, Namiquipenses are constructing a counter-history
which is an implicit critique of the Mexican state which claims to
have 'institutionalized' 'the Revolution' and bestowed upon the
peasantry its rights to land.
The Mexican state's betrayal of peasant revolutionary aspirations
and agrarian demands is also highlighted in a 'folk song' popular in
central Mexico which constructs a history very different from that of
official discourse. The song, called 'Juan Sin Tierra' or 'A John Doe
Without Land', goes like this:

I will sing you the song

Of a man who went to war
Who was wounded in the mountains
Who just fought to win some land.
Our General told us.
'Fight on with great valor
We are going to give you land,
As soon as we make the Reform.'
Emiliano Zapata said
'I want Land and Liberty,'
 The Effects 0f7’ruth 47

And the government laughed

When they went to bury him.
If they come looking for me
To make another Revolution
1’11 tell them, ‘Sorry, I’m busy
‘Planting the fields of the landlord.’30

Written by the people for the people, corridos such as this one have
long been the vehicle of popular counter-histories. In ‘A John Doe
Without Land’, the ironic contrast between revolutionary promises
and results is a powerful indictment of a state which re-presents
itself as the progressive institutionalizer of the aspirations of
popular agrarian struggles. In this counter-history, symbolic
inversion is deployed to subvert official ideology. The terms of
dominant memory are turned upside-down: ‘the government‘ has
given land and liberty not to the revolutionary peasants, as it
insistently proclaims, but to the new landlords. The Revolution’ is
re- presented as having gone full circle, as having brought about a
return to old forms of exploitation and domination rather than anew,
progressive order.31
Counter-histories such as those discussed above are articulated
in many rural communities in Mexico, both in the North and
elsewhere. But it would be a mistake to conclude that popular
ideology is sui generis and subsists apart from hegemonic
discourses. As the example of The Day of the Clubs’ demonstrates,
popular re-presentations of the past are as capable of reproducing
and legitimating the terms of dominant memory as they are of
contesting and demystifylng them. Thus, ‘the popular’ cannot be
treated as if it were a wholly unified and fully achieved domain,
capable of sustaining memory in pristine isolation from official
constructions of the past (Bommes and Wright 1982:255). Nor can
the officializing historical discourses of the state be analyzed apart
from popular constructions and responses. Popular and official
historical discourses exist in relation to and not apart from each
other.
The relationship between popular and dominant memory is not
fxed but constantly negotiated. Hegemonic ideologies are not
monolithically installed nor everywhere believed in (Bommes and
Wright 1982:207). Dominant memory gets fat on the popular pasts
it cooks according to hegemonic recipes but official cuisine is not
always to popular tastes. Thus, the re-presentations of dominant
memory are as open to popular contestation as to affirmation. What
implications do these reflections have for a concept of ideological
hegemony? Several points emerge.
First, history is the site of an ongoing battle in which power is the
48 Ana Maria Alonso

stake which competing knowledges dispute. Moreover, as Scott

affms, the histories that are produced and contested on this
political terrain are not neutral, value-free assessments but
constructions whose object is ‘to advance a claim, to levy praise and
blame, and to justify or condemn the existing state of affairs’ (Scott
1985:178).The discussion of the competing interpretations of The
Day of the Clubs’ aptly illustrates this point. Thus, the production
and reproduction of ideological hegemony is a n ongoing process in
which official and popular discourses struggle to advance and to
defend social interests and values. Therefore, ideological hegemony
is not monolithic and static, fully achieved and finished but
constantly negotiated.
Second, an analysis of hegemony must examine the social
conditions of ideological production. The articulation of the
dominant and the subordinated is not only effected through
discourses but also through practices, through specific
technologies and forms of organization of power, produced in
concrete sites located both within the state apparatus and in the
domain of civil society. For example, in Mexico, thearticulation of
local communities with wider politico-economic and ideological
structures has been fraught with contention. Resistance has
enabled subordinated classes and groups to defend a terrain which,
if no longer fully autonsmous. nevertheless allows local
communities to keep a measure of control over the total process of
production and reproduction of social life and over the meanings
and values which orient it.32 In Mexican rural communities, this
process is not yet fully dictated by the state or by capitalism. By
contrast, in England, the degree of autonomy enjoyed by local
communities increasingly diminished after World War 11. Locally
bounded patterns of social and cultural reproduction were
significantly dis-articulated both by a massive restructuring in
education, social services, housing, transport and communication
spearheaded by the state, and by a concentration and centralization
of capital which fostered labor mobility (Bommes and Wright
1982~297-298).
Evidently, the sites of production of ideological hegemony are
much thicker on the ground in England than in Mexico. As a result,
in England, popular re-presentations of the past have been more
effectively penetrated by official ones, and local histories are
increasingly becoming particularized versions of national ideologies
rather than alternative discourses which challenge the terms of
dominant memory (cf. Bommes and Wright 1982; Popular Memory
Group 1982). Thus, the problem of the articulation between official
and popular ideology is not simply one of symbolic but also of social
analysis.
 The Effects of Truth 49

Third, as Scott comments, ‘a hegemonic ideology must, by

definition, represent an idealization which . . . creates the
contradictions that permit it to be criticized in its own terms. The
ideological source of mass radicalism is, in this sense, to be sought
as much within a prevailing ideological order as outside it’ (Scott
1985:317).33Thus, contest is still possible even where the
penetration of official ideology is extensive.
Fourth, a potential disjunction between the representations of
official rhetoric and the meanings embedded in lived experience
defines a possible space for the emergence of popular counter-
histories. Such a disjunction between the meanings of official
discourse and those of practical experience is highlighted by the
popular song, ‘Juan Sin Tierra’: in a society where the state loudly
and continuously proclaims that agrarian reform has been
successfully concluded, revolutionary peasants and their
descendants continue to work the fields of the landl0rds.3~Such
counter-histories de-naturalize the re- presentations of dominant
discourses; official ideology is construed as an inversion of the
meanings embedded in day to day life.
This disjunction between the re-presentations of official ideology
and popular practical experience cannot be viewed as one between
symbolic forms and a pre-symbolic ‘real life’. As Ricoeur stresses,
‘the so-called ‘real’ process already has a symbolic dimension’
(1978:51).The gap between hegemonic rhetoric and lived experience
emerges when official ideology becomes what Ricoeur calls ‘a
secondary distortion of [the] symbolic constitution of social reality’
(1978:51).
To summarize: the production and reproduction of hegemony is
an ongoing process which is subject to negotiation and contest as
social groups struggle to advance and defend competing claims,
values and interests. History is a central focus of social contest
because the meanings of the past define the stakes of the present.
Popular and official memory exist in relation to each other; this
relation is not fxed but is constantly shifting as the contours of the
social terrain on which it is negotiated are redefined.
In analyzing the construction of social memory, it is important to
pay attention to the sites where it is produced and disseminated, to
the circuits of power and knowledge. The monopoly of ‘public’spaces
and ‘on stage’ contexts is critical to the reproduction of a dominant
memory which ‘privatizes’ what it cannot incorporate and
transform. Subordinated counter-histories are by and large
marginalized, relegated to a molecular, ‘off stage’ existence, and
identified with particular groups rather than with society as a whole.
Only hegemonic discourses can claim to speak in the voice of ‘the
nation’. Counter-histories articulate the voices of peasants, women,
50 Ana M a r i a Alonso

workers, ethnic groups, but never the voice of a n all encompassing

imagined community.
IV. Conclusions
One of the points I have tried to demonstrate and comment on in this
paper is Rcoeur’s observation that meaningfulness is neither fully
linked to the present agent nor totally contained in the present time
but inextricably interwoven with social memory (Ricoeur 1978:46).
The relation between meaning and memory is an internal one. As
signs become imbued with the memories of social groups’ lived
experiences, they become revalued. Such mnemonic signs are
constantly deployed in day to day life and one’s ability to use and to
interpret them is indexical of one’s membership in a social group.
The use of a multitude of signs which condense and telegraph
memories particular to specific social groups is part of what gives the
living discourse of such groups its character as a distinct socio-
ideological language in Bakhtin’s sense (Bakhtin 1981).
A second point I have tried to establish is that histories are
ideologically constituted. Re-presentations of the past are organized
by interpretive schemes and by discursive strategies which produce
effects of truth. In order to be credible, histories have to be
authoritative: effects of truth are also effects of power. The
naturalization of historical discourses is critical to their authority:
the work of interpretation effaces itself and disguises the traces of
its social production as history becomes ‘what really happened’. Yet
the past is neither transparent nor given: ‘what really happened’ is
a focus of conflicting interpretations.
Though knowledge is never *value-free’,the relation between
historical discourses and effects of power is mediated and variable.
Power and memory are most intimately embraced in the
representations of official histories which are central to the
production and reproduction of hegemony. The negative aspects of
ideology become prominent in the constitution of a dominant
memory which is concerned with ‘truth’ only insofar as its effects
advance the legitimation project of the state.
The imagining of ‘the nation’ is central to this legitimation project.
Here. history plays a prominent role as the coordinates of
community are plotted along the axes of time and space. National
histories transform fatality into continuity, contingency into
destiny. By linking the dead to the yet to be born. national histories
mitigate mortality. Moreover, by making history the locus of the
unfolding of national destiny, such discourses introduce a teleology
which overcomes contingency and which gives significance to the
past which prefigures the present. National histories are key to the
imagining of community and to the constitution of social identity.
 The Effects of Truth 51

The stakes in the struggle to define the past are indeed great: thus,
social memory is a central site of political contest.
My conclusions support those of the Popular Memory Group:
‘Political domination involves historical definition. History - in
particular popular memory - is a stake in the constant struggle for
hegemony. The relation between history and politics, like the
relation between past and present, is, therefore, an internal one: it
is about the politics of history and the historical dimensions of
politics’ (1982:213). Thus, histories are not about a past which is
dead, which is finished and behind us, but instead, about a past
which lives in and has significance and consequences for the
present. As Raymond Aron remarks: The past is never definitively
fmed except when it has no future’ (in Stoianovich 1976:35). Social
remembering is a profoundly complex, active and ongoing process
in which different interpretations of the past engage each other and
struggle for dominance.
If the present configures the meanings of the past and the past
those of the present, then the shared object of both history and
anthropology is this relation between past and present (cf. Popular
Memory Group 1982:240). The interpenetration of meaning and
memory implies that history and anthropology have a common
ground. However, the ideological constitution of histories and the
historical constitution of ideologies can only become a shared
concern if positivist and empiricist orientations are deconstructed
by a critical hermeneutics of the conditions of the production of
social scientific knowledge. However, as Ricoeur stresses, our
reflection can only be partial since we are simultaneously the
subjects, in both a political and a phenomenological sense, and the
objects of our own understanding; the critique of ideology is a task
which we must always begin but can never conclude (Ricoeur
1978:59).

Notes
* A short version of this paper was presented at the 1987 annual meetings
of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, in the session
on The Ideological Constitution of Histories organized by Martha Lampland
and Catherine Verdery. The ethnographic and historical research on which
this paper is based was camed out during 1983-1985 and was supported
by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Inter-American
Foundation. In producing a final draft, I have benefited enormously from
the comments of Daniel Nugent.
This paper focuses on history as historiography, as re-presentation of
the past rather than as social action. The discussion of the ideological
constitution of histories will be limited to the role of ideology in the creation
of retroactive reconstructions of social practice. The modus operandi of this
paper is greatly indebted to Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of ‘ideology’and
52 Ana M a r i a Alonso

parallels his discussion in that the point of departure is a positive concept

of ideology (Ricoeur 1978). Following Ricoeur, negative modifications of the
concept are gradually introduced. This paper is also indebted to David
Schneider's A Critique of the Study of Kinship, an example of a new genre
of anthropological writing which de-naturalizes 'ethnographic authority'
and renders it problematical by de-constructing the author's own
ethnographic descriptions and making them an object of analysis
(Schneider 1984). Finally, and as the title makes evident, the reflections
presented in this paper have also been influenced by Michel Foucault's later
work (e.g. Foucault 1980a & b).
The radically 'other' orientation of our running is one index of our
peculiar status in this community and of our singular perspective on social
action as 'participant observers' from another society.
This man later died as a result of his head wound.
As the extent of this transformation makes evident, the analogy of
'action-as-text' reifies social action and endows it with a fdty, with a closure
and coherence which practice often lacks.
For instance, in our historical description, the observed order of exodus,
(iconic to the order of re-presentation), was not the product of contingency
but of a norm which prescribes that children should be the first to run to
safety and men the last.
This is a history of the famous rebellion of the town of Tomochi,
Chihuahua, whose inhabitants managed to repel several of the federal
army expeditions successively sent to repress them before they were finally
defeated at the end of 1892. One of these federal army expeditions returned
to base without even giving battle, since the commander was so drunk he
mistook corn plants for rebels and after ordering his soldiers to attack a
cornfield, triumphantly declared his victory over the 'disturbers of the
public peace' who had dared to defy the federal and state governments. My
colleague, Daniel Nugent, and I located a grandson of Cruz Chavez, the best
known of these rebel leaders,and we had several long conversations with
him in which he articulated his own grandmother's version of the history
of Tomochi.
' 'Iconism' is a term drawn from C . S . Peirce's semiotic theory. For those
not familiar with Peircean terminology, an icon is a sign which represents
its object by virtue of some resemblance to it. An index is a sign which
'points' to its object, that is, which refers to the object that it denotes by
virtue of some real connection to it (a weather vane; a pointing finger). For
an excellent discussion of Peircean semiotics and its relevance to an
anthropology of meaning, see Singer 1984.
' Note, however, that the units of historical description and observation
in this text are not presented as 'facts' but a s 'deeds' ('hechos'; pp of the verb
hacer, 'to do'. 'to make'); thus, even though the re-presentation of these
'deeds' is construed as transparent. the events of history are still conceived
as the product of social action and relationship and are not fetishized as
'things'. As a result. the author is able to deliver a trenchant critique of the
fetishism of written sources as 'raw facts'.
The use of the concept 'off stage' is taken from Scott 1985. Such a
concept of what is 'private', 'off-the-record', 'between you and me'. is quite
useful in understanding processes of interpretation formation in societies
in which the spoken word is central, in which histories are created in speech
instead of print. 'Gossip' is framed as this sort of intimate, non-public
discourse which can later be disowned. What is crucial in the generation of
hegemonic interpretations is the transition from 'private' to 'public' forms
 The Effects of ?hcth 53

of discourse, a transition which can be effected molecularly and informally

in ‘private’and semi- ‘public’spaces, such as the home and the street, or
more directly and formally in fully ‘public’ sites such as town squares,
dance halls and auditoriums, or through ‘public’ technologies of
communication such as radio. Obviously, what is ‘public’ and what is
‘private’ varies from society to society and is ideologically constituted.
Insufficient attention has been paid by anthropologists to this process of
negotiation of meaning, carried out through dialogue, in which historical
subjects play an active role. Monolithic, static, notions of culture have often
led us to attribute consensus where there is argument, and to ignore the
active role of social agents in producing and reproducing the meaningful
contours of the world they live in.
lo The stakes, of course, were much greater than political office which was
seen as the means for implementing broader social projects. For the
opposition rank-and-file, the project included the realization of an equitable
and equal land re- distribution and the regaining of popular, local control
of municipal administration, which for decades has been the puppet of
national and state government and the official party. Opposition leaders
had far less radical aims; the PST has been ‘coopted by the PFU for years
and is little more than a ‘loyal‘‘left’opposition. Those who supported the
official party candidates in Namiquipa proper did so because a ‘native son’
(hijo del pueblo) was on the slate as the stand-in (suplente) forthe president
and they hoped to use him as a sort of ‘hidden hand’ within the system to
advance the interests of their community over those of others. The support
of many of the farmers who effectivelycontrolled their parcels of land for the
official slate was also defensive; the agrarian demands of the opposition
were seen as a threat to their own rights to land.
Somewhat confusingly, ‘Namiquipa’is simultaneously the name of the
municipality, of the nominal town formed by a series of nominal
neighborhoods strung out along 10km. of river, and of the ‘head
neighborhood, which I call ‘Namiquipa proper’, which has a population of
aproximately 2,000. This form of baptizing ever larger and more inclusive
territorial, administrative and social spaces with the same name as the
center is generalized in Mexico. It makes these increasingly broader
domains icons of a center which claims sovereignty over all the spaces
which share its name and thus, are imagined as part of the same
community. Conflicts of sovereignty between ‘neighborhoods’ and the
center, Namiquipa proper, often focus on naming; thus, the members of the
‘neighborhood’of El Terrero indexed their separatist ambitions by dropping
‘Namiquipa’from the name of their community. Note that state capitals
share the name of their states, and the national capital shares the name of
the nation. The implications of this ‘equation of the seat of rule with the
dominion of rule’ are many (the phrase is from Geertz 1980:13).
Economic class is by no means the only factor in the formation of these
factions. Locality, personal ties of loyalty to friends and to kin, and
ideologically significant distinctions such as ‘insiders’ (originarios) vs.
‘outsiders’ (foraneos), figure prominently here.
l3 In ‘private’, even low-level PFU functionaries recognized that the PST
had won the greatest number of votes and that the PRI had ’stolen the
elections’ (robarse las elecciones). Elections in Mexico are not a means of
recruiting candidates for political office. Their main function since the
revolution of 1910-1920 has been to reproduce the hegemony of the official
party through the staging of a spectacle for the national and international
audiences, a spectacle which dramatizes a normative vision of the system
54 Ana Maria Alonso

and permits the PRI/government - self-styled heir of ‘the Revolution’ and

its demands for ‘effective sufkage’ - to renew its legitimacy by seeming to
secure the active consent of Mexican citizens through ‘democratic’means.
For more on this and on the emergence of a disloyal electoral opposition in
Mexico in recent years see Alonso. 1986b.
l4 In popular parlance in rural Mexico, to take political office is to ‘sit
oneself in the chair’ (sentarse en la silla). Notice that this language evokes
images of the monarchic throne and indexes that access to office is not
secured through elections or other ‘democratic’ procedures but through
those strategies effective in ‘authoritarian’ systems.
l 5 The extent of this indifference is particularly evident in the following
example. A couple who upheld the view that the state police had only used
blanks, themselves pointed out to us a hole in the plaster by the door of the
wife’s parents home, from which they had extracted a dum-dum bullet.
State policemen had fired at their son and nephew, who were watching the
events in theplaza from the vantage point of the house’s roof, mistaking
them for members of the opposition. Despite this detail, the couple
continued to affirm the same interpretation, asserting that the bullet must
have got there in some other fashion, that it did not come out of the barrel
of a state policeman’s gun. They were not consciously aware of any duplicity
or disingenuousness on their part in refusing to interpret the bullet as an
index signifying that the state police did use real ammunition.
l6 Were the title of Foucault’s PowerlKnowledge to be translated into
French, it would contain the same play on words as the Spanish, poder/
saber.
That the use of kinship terms is more metaphorical than literal is
evident in nations’ provisions for the ‘naturalization’of the foreign born, who
are welcomed into the embrace of the great fraternity despite differences in
‘blood’.
For the concept of ‘shared substance’ see David Schneider, American
Kinship, 1980. Schneider’s concepts of ‘shared substance’ and ‘code for
conduct‘ might productively be used to analyze subjectively apprehended
differences between nationals and the naturalized.
I9 The morbid images are from a poem, The Death of Bobo’, by Joseph
Brodsky, translated by Richard Wilbur.
*O This points to the saliency of ‘the Executive’ in the Mexican state
aparatus and recalls the dating by reference to kings characteristic of
dynastic states and the ‘official nationalisms’ they later formed.
21 On this point see Corrigan and Sayer 1985; this is a n excellent,

theoretically grounded discussion of state formation as a social and

cultural process. For the importance of myth and ritual in the 19th century
dynastic ‘theater’ state in Bali, see Geertz 1980. A comparison of the
imagining of community in such dynastic theater states and in modem
national states would be quite interesting; whereas myth and epic are of
central importance in dynastic theater states, history is key in modem
national states.
22 Institutional analyses of the state are partial and superficial because

they take this distinction as a point of departure: the state aparatus is by

no means the only site of state power, even if it is its most visible
manifestation.
23 Moreover, in Mexico, the connection between historians and the state
is highly visible and immediate; most intellectual producers work directly
for the PRI government in some capacity. The role of intellectuals in
producing and reproducting hegemony is evident.
 The Eflects of Ikuth 55

24 Those surviving Villistas who had shared Dona Luz’s home were
’relocated’by the PRI government.
25 I use ‘popular’to mean ‘of the people’. The Division of the North was the
most militarily powerful vehicle of the popular revolutionary current to
develop between 1910 and 1920. In 1915,when the struggle for hegemony
among the different revolutionary factions and movements became acute,
Villismo represented the only serious threat, on a national scale, to the
conservative and reformist bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies
which banded together under the Constitutionalist umbrella. The
hegemony of the Jacobin wing of Constitutionalism only became possible
afterVillismo had been militarily defeated and ideologically neutralized.
Villa was allowed to surrender and retire to ‘private life’ in 1920. In 1923,
when he threatened to disturb the orderly succession of ‘the Sonoran
dynasty’, Villa was assassinated; his murder was planned by Obregon and
Calles, founding fathers of Mexico’s current ‘revolutionary family’. For the
best discussion of Villismo, consult the works of Friedrich Katz listed in the
bibliography. For anthropological and historical analyses of peasant
participation in the popular, revolutionary Northern movement see Alonso
1986a; Koreck 1985: Nugent 1985.
26 The phrase ‘aimless, mercenary rowdyism’ is Alan Knight’s: Knight

correctly observes that Villismo has been caricatured by the writers of

official history (Knight 1980:19).
27 The mausoleum in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua, Mexico, which Villa

had built for himself during the revolution, and in which he wished to be
but was never buried, is empty and neglected, desecrated by vandals and
used by gardeners, who groom the park where it is located, to store their
tools. The well kept park grounds present a significant contrast to the
decaying mausoleum. Also note the contrast between the decay of the
mausoleum and the refurbishing of Villa’s house once it had been
transformed into the Museum of the Revolution. Because the mausoleum
continues to be a symbol of Villa and Villismo, it is consigned to decrepitude
and oblivion; since it has not yet been appropriated by the state, it remains
‘privatized’,well off the paths of national and foreign tourists. Were the state
to cannibalize it, the mausoleum would probably be transformed into the
tomb of the ‘unknown revolutionary’, the most perfect paradigm of the
national hero since his very anonymity makes him the apt symbolic vehicle
for national imaginings.
28 The transfer of Villa’s body from ‘the North’ to ‘the Center’ as well as the
objectification of official history in Villa’s Northern home is also a
continuation of the state’s strategy of incorporating the recalcitrant North
into ‘the nation’. Even after it was transformed from a frontier into a border,
the North continued to imagine itself as a distinct, regional community; its
membership in ‘the nation’ has always been contradictory and ambiguous.
While Northeners consider themselves ‘Mexicans’they also highlight their
own unique identity through statements such as ‘the North is another
country’ (‘el Norte es otro pais’). For a perceptive discussion of Northern
resentment of the Center and the role of this ideological horizon in the
current political conjuncture see Krauze 1986.
29 However, the agrarian basis of the Northern popular movement is
widely denied. For studies which document the importance of agrarian
conflict in the Northern popular movement see the works of Katz, Koreck,
Nugent and Alonso cited in ihe bibliography. For a contrary view, see Knight
1980.
30 This comdo is quoted in translation in Hellman 1983:238: the
56 Ana Maria Alonso

translation of the title is my own. For an interesting collection of

revolutionary corridos and a perceptive and informative commentary on
such popular songs, see Simmons 1957.
31 On the importance of symbolic inversion in the constitution of popular
counter-ideologies and in the demystification of oficialdiscourses, see
Alonso 1987.
32 See the excellent discussion of the politics and meaning of ‘cultural
survival’in Turner 1986 for this usage of the concept of control over the total
process of production and reproduction.
33 Though 1 have cited Scott on a number of points here, my overall view
of hegemony differs from his in important ways: cf. ’Hegemony and
Consciousness’, Scott 1985.
34 This disjunction between rhetoric and practice is becoming more
visible and pronounced as the politico-economic crisis in Mexico worsens.
Actually, this divorce is so extreme that Daniel Nugent, Fernando Estrada
and myself have labelled it the phenomenon of the ‘two Mexicos’. Popular
counter-discourses are now so at variance with official ideology that Nugent
has concluded that there is an ideological disjunction between the state and
popular levels (1987). The ideological hegemony of Mexico’s PRI
government is being undermined more and more and the legitimacy of
authority is seriously questioned by diverse social groups and classes.

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