En el artículo se ofrecen algunas reflexiones acerca de la escritura de biografías. Se utiliza la vida de Lucas Alamán, el gran estadista conservador e historiador del siglo xix, como estudio de caso. Se propone la posibilidad de echar mucha luz sobre la vida, las obras históricas y la postura política de Alamán mediante un análisis de su memoria autobiográfica, escrita durante la década de 1830 y nunca publicada. En este documento se revela la preocupación del personaje por la pérdida de estatus social y fortuna de su familia, y su tendencia a entender la historia del México independiente en términos de fracaso.
The Spanish American wars of independence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century have traditionally been a staple of Latin American historiography –think only of the hagiographies of many of the leading caudillos, the political histories of the era, and the historia patria tradition more generally. In recent years, however, there has been something of a boom in the literature as Latin American, United States, and European scholars have revisited the period and its antecedents from a number of new perspectives. Among the most salutary influences have been newer forms of social and cultural history emphasizing not only structural (that is, long-term socio-economic) factors, but also the lives of common people and the interventions such groups make in large political events, as well as anthropologized studies of peasants, in particular, and the problematics of large-scale guerrilla insurgencies. Most of these approaches are represented to some degree in this new anthology edited by Christon Archer, one of the leading modern historians of Mexican independence. The essays by contemporary scholars are drawn from published books and journal articles which originally appeared between 1968 and 1996, each introduced by a brief editor's paragraph setting them within a broader context. Although the emphasis in this interesting mixture of essays and primary-source readings is firmly on the military history of Mexico and the Bolivarian republics (Central America, Chile, and Argentina are left out, but one cannot do everything and hope for any depth of treatment, after all),
Within the rapidly expanding historiography on the "invented traditions," "imagined communities," and "hegemonic" state- and nation-building projects of modern polities, a growing number of scholars have looked at public celebratory life in Mexico from the colonial period to the present. The public panoply of patriotic and religious ritual has been richly reconstructed empirically, and analyzed as state pedagogy, an appropriated festal vehicle for popular protest, a juggernaut of social and political control, deep cultural text, and so forth. Both co-editors of the anthology under review have made significant contributions to this virtual sub-genre in recent years, David Lorey with an ongoing project on secular political holidays in the twentieth century, William Beezley with similar work of his own on the nineteenth century and as co-editor of an earlier, foundational collection of essays on cognate themes, Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (1994). Beezley and Lorey have produced a fascinating volume here on public observances of Mexico's Independence day, 16 September, since the years immediately following the Mexican colony's separation from Spain in 1821. The essays are for the most part empirically rich, evocative of the eras they portray, and of more than sufficient sophisticated conceptualization to speak to ongoing debates in political and cultural history about the function of public rituals not only as instruments of elite hegemonic projects, and as venues for struggle over public memory and national identity, but also as opportunities for the expression of more exuberant popular ideas and forms of subaltern resistance.
In September of 1810, with a sudden flash of violent rebellion (preceded by months and years of salon conspiracies), the white native-born provincial elite of New Spain began the protracted and painful process of winning political independence from Spain. Although by about 1816 much of the country had been pacified by royal arms, pockets of rebellion continued to smolder and flare throughout the following years. The birth of modern Mexico itself finally occurred in 1821, owing as much to fortuitous political circumstances in Spain as to the military and political manipulations of Agustin Iturbide, the Creole adventurer who consummated the country's independence and briefly became its emperor. Programmatic pronouncements by the Creole and mestizo leadership of the independence movement abound in the form of pamphlets, constitutions, decrees, short-lived newspapers, captured correspondence, etcetera, and provide us with a reasonably clear view into the complex ideologi- cal process of political separatism from Spain. At least in the early years of the independence struggle, however, the insurrectionary armies were manned not primarily by Mexican-born whites or racially mixed groups, but by Indian peasants from rural villages all over the central parts of the country.
Intellectual disciplines, very much like human beings, have life cycles. They are conceived and born, they progress through childhood, adolescence, and youth, they reach maturity, they enter old age, and some even die. Even if in the present case the simile is a grandiose one, and if the field of Mexican rural history can hardly lay claim to the status of being a distinct intellectual discipline, the main point nonetheless holds. After a long period of gestation and a halting but promising infancy, the field is standing firmly on two feet. It has a problemática—a set of questions, something resembling a research strategy, and a conceptual framework (much of it admittedly borrowed); it has an identifiable corpus of literature, and its practitioners recognize one another. Yet how mature is it, and where is it going? The purposes of this article are to review the development of the historiography on rural life in colonial and early national Mexico published during the last thirty years, focusing central attention on the study of the hacienda; to assess some of its findings, problems, and growing pains; and to make some suggestions as to where those working in the field might invest their energies in future. Within the overall topical organization of the essay, the literature on the classic Mexican hacienda is examined from thematic, theoretical, and methodological vantage points. These treatments are complementary rather than redundant because the questions historians ask, the explanatory schemes they use, and the sources and methods they rely upon are intimately interrelated, and such a prismatic analysis of a body of literature helps to point up its strengths as well as its weaknesses.
