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Mexico: Biography of Power
A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996
By Enrique Krauze
Chapter One: The Children of Cuauhtemoc
The pyramidlike monument to Cuauhtemoc on the Paseo de la Reforma is decorated with symbols of various pre-Hispanic cities: the friezes of Mitla; the columns of Tula; the cornices of Uxmal; the shields, war dresses, and weapons of Tenochtitlan. Porfirio Diaz had unveiled the monument at a ceremony held in August of 1887. Seated on a chair that recalled the throne of the Aztec monarchs, he listened to laudatory speeches in Spanish and poems in Nahuatl that acclaimed "the feats of Cuauhtemoc, the last of the Aztec emperors, and the other caudillos who distinguished themselves in defense of their Nation." Cuauhtemoc (whose name means "Falling Eagle") had led the Aztecs in their final, furious resistance to the conquistadors of Cortes after the death of Emperor Moctezuma, who had welcomed the Spaniards. At either side of the monumental complex, impressive bas-reliefs show climactic episodes in the life of Cuauhtemoc. The events chosen for portrayal are his imprisonment and his torture. In the scene of the imprisonment--based on the testimony of Cortes himself--Cuauhtemoc puts his hand on Cortes's dagger and asks to be killed. The other relief depicts his further sufferings. After the fall of Tenochtitlan in August 1521, despite white-hot irons pressed to the soles of his feet, Cuauhtemoc refuses to reveal the location of Moctezuma's treasure.
Raised high on the pedestal of the monument, the statue of Cuauhtemoc, with its haughty expression, exemplified the neo-Aztec fashion in academic art, a style that had been growing steadily more popular since the victory of the Liberals. Paintings and sculptures would portray Indians with Apache faces and Apollonian bodies draped in Roman togas, participating in idealized scenes of "the ancient world." The Aztec past had such ornamental appeal that the first Mexican brewery, which opened in the industrial city of Monterrey in 1890, was named Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc. It used a drawing of the statue as its trademark.
Ideological manipulation of the ancient past was an old Mexican custom. When they consolidated their empire, the Aztec emperors took the codices recording their true nomadic origins and had them burned. Then they had history rewritten to link them directly with the Toltecs--the great classical civilization of Mesoamerica--and the mythical founder of that culture, Quetzalcoatl. They were familiar with the abandoned cities of Teotihuacan and Tula, "coming from a time that no one now can describe." They called the Toltec culture "our possession, that which we must preserve." The Porfiristas, conscious of the power of history as a source of legitimacy, had taken the same route as the Aztecs. Crossing out their Catholic and Spanish origins, they were stretching a bridge toward the Aztec world.
The rewriting of history was not the only way to maintain an Aztec presence, in support of the present order. Even the practice of erecting statues to honor great leaders could be traced to the Aztec past. Following a Toltec custom attributed to Quetzalcoatl, who, "when he went away, left his appearance sculptured on sticks and stones," the fourteenth-century tlatoani (emperor) Moctezuma I had ordered his image and that of the powerful Tlacaelel, his brother and counselor, to be carved on the slope of the hill of Chapultepec, "in perpetual memory, as reward for our work, so that, on seeing the faces, our sons and grandsons may remember our deeds and strive to imitate them." Scattered remains of those immense stone sculptures could still be seen in 1910, at the foot of Chapultepec Castle, near the monument to the Ninos Heroes.
Well into colonial times, and thanks to the copious and meticulous works of ethnography produced by the Spanish missionaries with the help of Indian informants, the creoles of New Spain also resorted to an ideological manipulation of the past. What arguments could they muster against their ethnic brothers, the Spaniards from the Iberian peninsula, who were given preference in almost all areas of the life of New Spain while the criollos were ranked as second-class Spaniards? They had only one strong claim--they had been "born in these lands," in "our Mexican home." To enrich this single assertion, the mere geographical fact of birth soon came to be nourished with every conceivable item of cultural separation. The creoles, through the force of history, would try to build a case for themselves as legitimate heirs to the land of New Spain. "In the Mexican Emperors may be found," the prolific creole writer and scientist Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora wrote in 1680, "what others had to beg for in fables." Siguenza wrote the biography of the nine Aztec emperors, favorably comparing the political virtues of each with analogous Greek or Roman rulers. In his Ancient History of Mexico (1780), the Jesuit humanist Francisco Javier Clavijero ascribed to the civilization of the Mexicas a classical rank equal to that of Greece and Rome: "The state of culture of the Mexicans when the Spaniards discovered them greatly surpasses that of the Spaniards themselves when they came to be known by the Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Germans, and the Bretons." To prove it, he examined all the areas of ancient Aztec life, weighing their characteristics with an impressive combination of comprehensive sympathy and Olympian objectivity, qualities required more than anything for his analysis of the human sacrifices:
I admit that the religion of the Mexicans was very bloody and that their sacrifices were extremely cruel . . . but there is no nation in the world that has not sometimes sacrificed victims to the God they adored. . . . In respect to cannibalism, their religion was without doubt more barbarous than those of the Romans, Egyptians and other civilized nations but . . . it was less superstitious, less ridiculous and less indecent.In 1794 the priest Servando Teresa de Mier publicly asserted the identity of Quetzalcoatl and the apostle Thomas. Not only did he agree with Siguenza and Clavijero in their view of the indigenous world as a classical past, but he was willing to transfer Christian legitimacy from the three colonial centuries to the Toltec culture. These historical assertions of the Mexican creoles--and idealized identification with the world of the Indians--were bound to play an important role in the War of Independence. The chronicler Carlos Maria de Bustamante, another prominent creole, invoked the "Spirits of Moctezuma and Cuauhtemoc" at the height of the war, in order to proclaim "the renewal of the Mexican empire."
Needless to say, when independence became fact in 1821, the new nation did not reinstate the Mexican Empire. But the country took its name from the original tribal name of the Aztecs, and for the emblem on its flag it used the mythical symbol of the foundation of the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan: an eagle perched on a nopal cactus holding a writhing serpent in its beak.
The mestizo Liberals too put the past to political use. The strange thing was that their opinion of the Indian past was essentially as negative as the view of the creole Jose Maria Luis Mora, father of Mexican liberalism, who ridiculed "the myths of grandeur, prosperity and enlightenment surrounding the ancient Mexicans." Guillermo Prieto, Juarez's friend and poet, felt "the greatest repugnance for the idolatrous religion, the grimly renowned sacrifices, the accursed offerings to the gods [in] the somber and melancholy world of the indigenous race." The radical Juarista, Ignacio Ramirez, said that "it was a time when terror made the whole social body tremble and the people consisted of subjects and slaves."
The later, Porfirian generation softened this vision but did not completely abandon it. In his books and compendia, even in his Catecismo de historia patria, Justo Sierra referred to the "more or less useless civilizations" of the Mexican past, though he tried to emphasize the positive aspects of both heritages--the Indian and the Spanish--and to play down areas of conflict. He pointed to the "extraordinary vitality" of the ancient Mayas and the magnificent mosaic of cultures (Olmec, Tarascan, Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya, Aztec, and dozens more scattered throughout the land) that had constituted Mexico for almost thirty centuries. But he was convinced that the Conquest had been a dramatic step forward on the path of human evolution. Mexican indigenous history presented a "picture of ravenous gods and terrified multitudes, surrounded by sacrificers, everything smeared in black. . . . This delirium of blood had to end."
And yet, the Juarista and Porfirista Liberals identified with the Aztec past through Cuauhtemoc, the young nobleman who had decided to die fighting along with his people rather than surrender to the invader (though his death would actually come later, as a captive of Cortes). But it was a political, not a cultural identification. This patriotic cult of Cuauhtemoc was relatively new. It was only during the nineteenth century, when Mexico for the first time became involved in wars against foreign invaders, that the ruling elites really began to see themselves represented in the last emperor of the Aztecs. The veneration appeared in literature before it entered politics. On Independence Day, September 16, 1839, shortly after the French attempt to seize the port of Veracruz, Ignacio Rodriguez Galvan, a young poet, wrote his Profecia de Guatimoc (Prophecy of Guatimoc). It presented the ghost of the unhappy emperor mourning for the blood spilled by the "European barbarian" who had made
The innocent welcoming bed A home of lust and of horrors.But the poem also announced that vengeance was on its way:
Tremble! Feel yourselves quiver! O kings of Europe! He who deals death, death will be his in return!
A generation later, after their defeat of the French interventionist troops and the execution of Maximilian (descendant of the same Hapsburgs whose conquistadors had defeated the Aztecs), it was possible for the Liberal republicans--led by their Indian President, Benito Juarez--to feel that Galvan's prophecy had been realized and that Cuauhtemoc had finally been avenged. In 1869, two years after his triumph, Juarez himself unveiled the first monument to Cuauhtemoc, a small bust on a boulevard in the outskirts of the city.
The regime of Porfirio Diaz not only seized on the historical parallel between the Aztecs and the republicans; it converted indigenism, and particularly the mystique of the Aztecs, into an effective state ideology, with great collateral benefits to culture and knowledge. Never before had the government given so much support to Mexican archaeology and the study of what Justo Sierra called "the aboriginal cultures." Sierra wrote that, before the Porfirian era, "our ruins were dying. They were the ruins of ruins." Under Diaz, the State again became trustee of the Indian ruins, responsible for saving them, for protecting, conserving, and restoring them. Don Porfirio ordered the reconstruction of well-known sites, among them Mitla, in his native Oaxaca, where he had played as a child, and financed explorations to search out and excavate other areas. He sent delegations to display pre-Columbian antiquities at international exhibitions, founded the Trust for the Inspection and Conservation of Archaeological Monuments, placed a ban on the export of artifacts and monoliths and provided for their proper exhibition by renovating the National Museum. And he encouraged research, the teaching of ethnology and archaeology, the diffusion of information, all of which was reflected in a magazine of high scholarly quality, the Anales del Museo, which was published throughout the Porfirian era. It was due to the sponsorship of Porfirio Diaz that the Seventeenth International Conference of Americanists was held in Mexico City during the Centenary Fiestas.
The speech Sierra delivered at the inauguration of that event reflects the real stance of his time toward the indigenous past. Years before, at a similar meeting, he had said, "I come from a land that has here and abroad been called the Mexican Egypt; an immense necropolis where various civilizations rest in their successive levels." In 1910 he mentioned with pride the "centuries turned to stone by the crude and interesting remains" and praised the recent reconstruction of ancient sites under the auspices of President Diaz, that "great venerator of our history." He then invited the Americanists, and particularly foreign archaeologists, historians, and ethnologists, to investigate ancient Mexican civilizations. But Mexico, Sierra implied, had more urgent duties. In 1910, "this country has not lost an ounce of its religious devotion to its history . . . [but] it lives as if possessed by a fever for the future."
During the era of Don Porfirio, "the religious devotion to history" bore fruit in academic circles where the indigenous past of Mexico was examined with the same committed interest that scholars had devoted to the ruins of Egypt. The enthusiasm would broaden knowledge of the past, but in the political arena it was placed at the service of "the fever for the future," officially encouraged by the State. Ignoring the cultural plurality of pre-Hispanic history, the Porfiristas completed the identification of their State with the powerful and centralist Aztec Empire and with its clearest symbol: Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor. And he became, in official legend, the first and archetypal Mexican caudillo, the founder and symbol of Mexican nationalism, the remote ancestor of the country's present tlatoani, Porfirio Diaz.
The principal pre-Hispanic cultures were dead (though not without leaving their traces) in such essential areas as religion and political organization, but other aspects were very much alive, modified by contact with the Western world yet also capable of altering whatever they came to touch. During almost four centuries, Mexico had become a fascinating and dynamic laboratory for the ethnic and cultural convergence known as mestizaje (mixing), even if not all the Indians wanted or were able to become part of this experience.
In 1910, one-third of the total population of 15 million was still of pure Indian stock. They were members of different "nations," like the Tarahumaras in the mountains of Chihuahua, the Mayos and Yaquis in the fertile valleys of Sonora and Sinaloa, the Coras and Huicholes in the mountains of Nayarit, the Tarascos in the hills and along the lakes of Michoacan, the Mazahuas, Nahuas, and Otomis scattered throughout the mesa of central Mexico, the Tzeltales, Tojobales, Chontales, and Tzotziles in Chiapas, the Zapotecs, Mijes, Zoques, Huaves, and Mixtecs in Oaxaca, the Huastecos and Totonacos in Veracruz, the Mayas in the Yucatan peninsula. In the center and south of the country, Indians made up between 50 and 75 percent of the population, and some regions were almost entirely Indian. More than a hundred indigenous languages and dialects were still spoken.
The fact that the Indians had survived was equally apparent in many provincial towns and even in the capital itself, but the Porfiristas--dedicated admirers of the dead Indian--cared little about studying or learning from the present, living Indian and even less about identifying with him. The Indian was the burden of the Mexican nation.
Several centuries earlier, the opposite had seemed true. The Indian then had been seen as the hope of Mexico. In each age, the dominant value system would dictate the way in which the indigenous races were perceived and interpreted. During the sixteenth century, it was the great Spanish theologians who became involved in the debate over the Indians. Never before in the universal history of conquest had men argued so heatedly about the moral and theological implications of their enterprise.
The imperialist interpretation of the Conquest (stridently represented by Juan Gines de Sepulveda) justified the war against the Indians on the grounds of their allegedly natural vices and defects: They were subhumans, sodomites, barbarians, cannibals, cowards, idolaters, liars, and depraved idlers. Their backwardness prevented them from freely submitting to the law; they were "slaves by nature."
Totally opposed to this position was the Dominican Bartolome de las Casas. (He was its greatest opponent, but he was by no means alone. Among others, his fellow Dominican Francisco de Vitoria--one of the most distinguished theologians and jurists of sixteenth-century Spain--had written, "It chills the blood to hear the assertion that Indians are not men but apes"). The tireless Las Casas crossed the ocean eight times in his efforts to document the worthiness of the pre-Columbian civilizations and the evil of their destruction by the conquistadors. In his many writings, he examined various features of pre-Columbian life, including the worship of idols and human sacrifice, to argue for their value on not only a natural but a religious level.
Las Casas had irritated the landowners in his own diocese of Chiapas by denying them the sacraments if they refused to liberate their Indians. And he had collected many testimonies to Spanish mistreatment of the Indians. With his Apologetica historia sumaria, he produced an original study in comparative ethnography, based on the writings of the first Franciscans and very much including his own experiences and the oppression he had witnessed on the islands of the Caribbean.
His goal was to show that the pre-Columbian cultures were not only comparable but in many ways superior to other ancient pagan cultures. The stoic instructions delivered by Aztec fathers to their sons; the beauty and sophistication of their arts; the precision of their astronomical observations, and their use of a calendar system to record the passage of time; the elaborate organization of their government, education, army, religion, trade, and legislation--all more than met the great Aristotle's own prescriptions for a civilized society. Las Casas even saw the ritual of human sacrifice as a twisted, satanic but ingenuous exaggeration of a fervent desire to serve God. And he argued that their worship of idols was a favorable preparation for a later devotion to Christianity. After presenting all his research and reasoning, Las Casas proposed that the Indians be given back their lands, arguing that if his advice went unheeded, they would eventually rebel against the tyranny of Spain.
The Franciscan friars in New Spain did not go to such extremes. They saw the Conquest as the design of Divine Providence. But like nearly all the other friars and priests, they agreed that the Indians were a perfect flock for the labor of conversion.
The Franciscans together with members of other mendicant and preaching orders (Augustinians, Dominicans, Jesuits, Carmelites) and representatives of the regular (or "secular") clergy carried out the "spiritual conquest" of Mexico during the three centuries of colonial rule but especially in the decades immediately following the Conquest. Many of them shared their lives with the Indians in every corner of the country from Yucatan to remote California. The padrecitos (beloved fathers), as the Indians soon came to call them, were at the heart of one of the most extraordinary chapters in the religious history of the West: the conversion of millions of Indians to Christianity. In part a response to the Indians' sense of spiritual deprivation (they had been "orphaned" by the collapse of their divinely sanctioned governments, the overthrow of their powerful gods), the conversion was no rational decision, though the Indians learned the new prayers and dogmas. And even though the missionaries, especially in the first decades, not only offered spiritual Support and genuine love but also zealously persecuted Indians who continued to worship "idols," the Indians never entirely gave up their old beliefs. Catholicism (unlike North American Protestantism) could eventually accommodate elements of the older religions, accepted tacitly and often in the dress of Christian saints.
The conversion of the younger generations was especially important to the missionary fathers, and as a result, they put great energy and fundamental, constructive effort into basic education. Men like Fray Pedro de Gante ("the first who taught them how to read and write") learned the languages of the Indians and devoted their lives to instructing the young.
A mixture of benevolence, paternalism, social concern, and intolerance shows up in the vivid report dispatched (on August 27, 1529) to the king of Spain by Franciscan and Erasmist Fray Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico:
We are very busy with our continuous and great work in the conversion of the infidels of whom . . . over a million people have been baptized, five hundred temples of idols have been razed to the ground and over twenty thousand images of devils that they adored have been broken to pieces and burned. . . . And . . . the infidels of this city of Mexico, who in former times had the custom of sacrificing each year over twenty thousand human hearts to their idols, now make their offerings to God instead of to the devils. . . . Many of these children, and others who are older, know how to read, write, sing and sound the proper pitches for singing. . . . They watch with extreme care to see where their parents hide their idols, and then they steal them and faithfully bring them to our friars. For doing this, some have been cruelly slain by their own parents, but they live crowned in glory with Christ. . . . Each one of our monasteries has next to it a house in which children are taught and where there is a school, a dormitory, a dining hall and a chapel for devotion. . . . Blessed be the Lord for everything. . . .The spiritual conquest used many methods, but the fathers nearly always relied on the senses and on the appeal of the arts, almost never on arguments directed at the intellect. They allowed the Indians to sing and dance before the Christian images as they had before their gods. They gave them sacramental theater, music and choirs, mural paintings, elaborately impressive church facades and altarpieces. Rather quickly, the Indians' initial distrust and the missionaries' initial intolerance would both soften. A true encounter would become possible: the embrace that established Mexican spirituality.
The encounter went both ways. The missionaries educated the Indians, but they also began to learn about them and value their culture. The most outstanding study was The General History of the Things of New Spain, a complete encyclopedia in twelve volumes on every aspect of pre-Columbian Aztec life, originally compiled in Nahuatl over a period of more than thirty years by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun (1499?-1590).
He used detailed questionnaires, patiently collected oral and pictographic testimonies from elderly "informants" in various parts of the country, critically compared their information, and then ordered it to be copied down and translated into Spanish. He was assisted by a number of young Indians who in time would become important translators from their own language into Spanish and Latin. Modeled on the Natural History of the Roman historian Pliny, the work moved from the "supernatural" to the "natural" level. In the first section (a detailed description of the religious ideas of the Aztecs, their ceremonies, their common practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism) Sahagun demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that the Indians were possessed by Satan. The "Mexica" were a people damned "because God hates idolaters more than any other kind of sinner." But Sahagun's attitude changed drastically when he turned to the "natural" sphere, where almost everything seemed to him worthy of admiration: the rigorous and ascetic education transmitted by the elders to the young at home and in schools with "arguments of excellent moral doctrine," the beautiful architecture and political organization of Tenochtitlan, "which was another Venice," their "very pleasing and even very mystical" style of song, their poetic "excellences," their "marvelous language and very refined metaphors and admirable admonitions." Indeed, "The Indians were so trampled and destroyed, they and all their things, that no sign remained of what they were before. And so they were considered barbarians and people of low degree. . . . When truly . . . they are ahead of many other nations that are arrogant about their degree of refinement."
Vasco de Quiroga--a secular priest who adapted the ideas of Thomas More's Utopia with considerable success to the Indians of the ancient Tarascan Empire in Michoacan--said that the indigenous people were like "soft wax" without a sign of "arrogance, ambition or covetousness." All they lacked was faith "to become perfect and true Christians." Quiroga--though unusual for the unique quality and endurance of his achievement--is perhaps the most outstanding example of the missionary love for the Indians, in his case free of intolerance, strongly constructive, but still protectively paternal. In Spain he had been a judge in a morisco area (inhabited by Moors forced to convert to Catholicism--or leave the country--when Ferdinand and Isabel completed the Christian Reconquest of Spain). He had shown respect and tolerance toward the moriscos, and he brought the same qualities to Mexico.
Quiroga began to create the "hospital-towns" (pueblos-hospitales) in 1532. At Santa Fe, near Mexico City, he acquired land and installed a group of Indian families in ten houses that shared a common patio, a Church, and cells for the friars. Santa Fe rapidly expanded: seventy houses, several orchards, fields of maize, wheat, barley, and flax, pens for animals and poultry. Years later Quiroga extended his experiment to the lake towns in the old Tarascan region of Michoacan. There he founded Santa Fe de la Laguna, where his utopia put down strong roots and began to multiply across what is now Michoacan.
Each town would center around a "hospital" in the medieval sense of the word, an institution that would welcome not only the sick but also the poor, the hungry, and even travelers in need of a place to stay. Within the hospital-towns, the main features of life were the practice of religion, work in the fields, and the learning of skills. Children were required to go to mass and catechism, taught to read and write in Spanish, and trained in a specific craft: bricklaying, tanning, carpentry, metalworking, ceramics, or textile production. Three kinds of authority were recognized: natural authority (the Indian patriarchs), the principales elected by vote of the heads of each household, and the rector (community priest). The use of domestic servants was not allowed, and collective cooperation was encouraged in the fields and in public projects.
These hospital-towns were an economic and social success. In a short time Quiroga established almost a hundred new communities in different parts of Michoacan. To avoid both internal and intercommunity competition, Quiroga assigned one trade or craft to each town, thus creating a network of exchange all over the Tarascan area.
Not only was Quiroga's basic idea for the hospital-towns drawn from Thomas More's Utopia, but so were a number of his specific measures: communal and family-style organization, authority of the elders, community use of the produce of collective work, elimination of private ownership of land, and the idea of trade apprenticeship.
In Patzcuaro, in 1540, Quiroga, who was now bishop of Michoacan, established the Colegio de San Nicolas, a seminary where creoles and mainland Spaniards studied side by side with Indians and mestizos. His hospital-towns survived throughout the colonial period (despite some attempts to seize their lands). In 1776 they were functioning under the same rules laid down by Quiroga in 1563.
In 1996 the town of Santa Fe de la Laguna still exists as an Indian community, with the same hospital and church built by Quiroga. In the Tarascan area many communities still practice the same crafts assigned to them by the bishop. And in other towns the hospitals still stand, enduring emblems of a man venerated by the descendants of those Indians who called him "Tata Vasco."
Fray Julian Garces, another famous missionary father, wrote in a letter to Pope Paul III: "[The Indians] are remarkably good-natured . . . modesty and composure is their nature . . . if they are ordered to sit, they sit, and if they are standing, they remain standing, and if they are kneeling, they kneel. . . . Who can doubt that, as time moves on, many of these Indians will become very saintly and will shine with every virtue?" It is believed that Garces's letter had a direct influence on the papal bull Unigenitus Dens (issued in 1537), which stated that the Indians were endowed with reason and souls and could therefore become Christians. But the influence of Bartolome de las Casas on the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians (1542) was even more extensive and important. "Humanity is one," Las Casas had said. In the great debate on the human nature of the Indians, the Spanish Crown gave complete and conclusive support to the position of Las Casas against Sepulveda, declaring that the Indians were "free vassals."
The New Laws became the moral charter for the founding of New Spain and the historical basis for the relationship between the dominant power and its weakest subjects. Without denying the Indians' natural equality, the Crown recognized that the Indians had less power than the Spanish colonists and therefore placed them under a system of permanent protection. A charitable state, ruled by Christian morality, was expected to correct all the injustices the Indians had suffered. The viceroy was given the title of "Protector of the Indians," and they could lodge a complaint with him at any time. Indigenous authorities, mores, and practices were to be respected, provided they did not violate the Catholic religion. The Indians should be encouraged to form separatist communities and "republics," and they ought to have absolute ownership of their communal lands. To forestall any danger of encroachment on these lands, they were forbidden to deal commercially with their immediate neighbors. A special court was set up--the Indian Tribunal--to adjudicate controversies with Spaniards. Those Spaniards who employed Indians were ordered to convert them, treat them well, supply them with food, lodging, clothes, medical attention, and a priest, and pay them in real money. Of course the New Laws, as noble as they sounded, did not prevent the exploitation of Indian labor, but they did put an end to the concept that Indians were property and natural slaves of the Spaniards.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a politician close to Porfirio Diaz claimed that "one white immigrant was worth more than five Indians." Although other writers of the Porfirian age held similar views they generally based their negative portrayal of the Indian purely on character and custom (the so-called innate Indian qualities, like obsequiousness, apathy, distrust, hypocrisy, unproductiveness, and timidity).
Except in a very few cases, they did not make direct claims of racial superiority--for which any one of numerous examples in recent Mexican history would have been refutation enough. But Benito Juarez was, of course, the best of all. What other country in the Americas could boast of having had an Indian President? And yet this isolated case was counterproductive. Here was an Indian who had risen to the height of power entirely through his own efforts. Surely this proved--to the most influential writers of the time--that only the march of progress, the hard, cruel process of natural struggle and selective assimilation, could gradually rescue the indigenous races. Emilio Rabasa recorded years later that "no special effort was taken toward civilizing the Indians, nor did we know what that effort might be, which might lead through direct action to the transformation of the race."
By 1910 the Porfirian intellectuals had in fact come to agree, though they may not have realized it, with Gines de Sepulveda and the imperialist school of thought about the Conquest. They condemned precisely those characteristics of the Indians that the missionaries had believed would ensure their redemption. Francisco Bulnes, an acid polemicist and shrewd historian, wrote:
The Indian is disinterested, stoical and unenlightened; he despises death, life, gold, morals, work, science, pain and hope. He dearly loves four things: the idols of his former religion, the land that feeds him, personal freedom, and alcohol which induces morose and silent deliria. He is a man who ought to dress in a shroud and give away his magnificent teeth, since he does not laugh, talk or sing and almost does not eat. . . . Why work if he cannot own anything? After he had just been robbed by the Conquistador, along came the friar, the cacique, the municipality, the small-time lawyer, anyone at all. The Indian belongs to everyone who wants to dominate him.Justo Sierra, as a young man, had heard Juarez propose his own radical solution to the problem: "I wish that Protestantism would become Mexicanized and convert the Indians; they need a religion that would make them read instead of wasting their savings on candles for the saints."
Justo Sierra himself was less extreme. His generous imagination sought a way in which to shape another kind of religious influence. He thought the secret might lie in treating the Indians as they had once been treated, in attempting their "social redemption" by applying a modern version of the evangelical work of the Franciscan friars in the sixteenth century. He felt that this civic mission--compulsory education--would work miracles. Rabasa had raised the question, "What good is school? The Indian who may know how to read and write has gained nothing by it. What will some other Indian gain if he learns to read and write?" But Sierra would not agree. With all the strength of his religious soul, he would die believing in the redemptive power of education. New missionaries would be needed though, to spread the gospel of learning; and under Porfirio Diaz, they were nowhere to be found.
For the Porfiristas, the dead Indian was a fossil from a remote and symbolic past, almost totally alien to their everyday experience. The living Indian was his real heir, all that really remained of him, but the memory of the dead Indian served the political purpose of legitimizing the State, while the living Indian was a blemish on the landscape of modern, progressing Mexico. To hide the flaw, Diaz even banned the wearing of traditional white cotton clothes for Indians within the boundaries of Mexico City.
During the Centenary Fiestas, Porfirio Diaz took all the foreign envoys to visit the ruins at Teotihuacan, climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, dined with them in the "Porfirio Diaz Grotto," and was photographed standing next to the Aztec Calendar Stone, that petrified symbol of the past. But behind the life and times of the "great venerator of the past" was a very different truth: The arrogant Mexico of 1910 had turned away from its deep, indigenous roots.
Copyright 1997 Enrique KrauzeHarper Collins Publishers
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