This paper was presented at a meeting on the centennial University of California at Irvine on 22 November. Deeply appreciate the invitation and Legros Horacio Avelar Idelber, Cecilia Méndez Alvaro Kaempfer and the opportunity to share their work.
Among the many experiences offered by the Mexican government to commemorate the bicentennial of Mexican independence, was perhaps the most peculiar in the premiere of the film Hell, a film that closes the trilogy of films scathing policy Luis Estrada. Following the logic of the two previous films, Herod's Law and A wonderful world, Estrada has a story questioning the triumphalist narrative of Mexican modernity, this time invoking the penetration of the drug has on the social fabric Mexican life. The film tells the story of Benny, a man that, after returning the United States penniless after years of illegal, joins a local drug cartel, sinking deeper into the structural corruption of the population until, by the need to protect his nephew from a vendetta, ending killed. While much could be said this film, for now I will stop only in the final climactic scene. The film puts us in the center of town, in full celebration of the bicentennial, which is headed by the local cartel kingpin, newly anointed mayor. Half ceremony cry from the audience erupts Benny with an automatic weapon and kills most of the members the podium. The violent disruption of the ceremony country has several levels of referentiality and meaning. On the one hand, Estrada literally raised the idea of \u200b\u200ba narco-state that lies in the myths and rituals of the Mexican as a form of social legitimacy. As shown by scholars like José Manuel Valenzuela, Hermann Herlinghaus and Juan Carlos Ramírez Pimienta, the drug culture has been co-opted in a broad cultural practices tied to the Mexican official, from the musical tradition of the run to the nostalgic discourse of Mexico happy. In fact, in another scene, the lord mayor launches become Benny and other gunmen a speech about the importance of moral values. Second, Estrada staged a violent outbreak of crime in Mexican narrative of modernity and tied to the bicentennial celebration. Certainly these outbreaks have been literal: in 2008, alleged members of the cartel Familia Michoacana threw a grenade into the crowd during the celebration of Independence. The reason for the escalating conflict is sustained by the cartels vendettas amongst themselves and against the government. However, in so far as the violence spreads to become a natural way of living in Mexico, the progressive teleology of the bicentennial celebrations of centuries, and is questioned in the film with a large number of brands over the failure of the various processes of modernity.
The presence of Hell released in the short list under the heading of "patriotic films" could certainly be read as a sign of cynicism latest ruling in Mexico, a deployment thereof Pierre Bourdieu called "heresy consecrated ", typical of so comprehensive a system that is able to finance even their own dissent. However, there are deeper implications of this cultural event. In what follows, I argue that the celebration of the centennial and the bicentennial are part of a broader process that, tentatively, I'll call the "hollowing celebratory", in which the rhetoric Memorial in Mexico has resulted in the de-significance of the historical and political symbols built by a century of official cultural discipline. "Movies homelands" are clearly symptomatic of this. Hell clearly based on the idea of \u200b\u200bexhaustion of the history, where communities whose modernity was at stake come the bicentennial taken by crime, corruption and despair. Accompanying this, the other two films pose radical dissections of both ancient myths. On the one hand, Hidalgo, the untold story of Antonio Serrano , which presents a revisionist biography based on the affairs of the "Father of the Nation", reduces the independence process of the volition of a figure who takes class empathy for their experiences of healing from the provinces. Furthermore, The attack takes Jorge Fons, from a novel by Alvaro Uribe, a failed assassination attempt against Porfirio Díaz. The film can be interpreted as part of a wider review within this decade, which retrieves the image of Díaz as a true source of Mexican modernity (another case is the novel my fatherland Poor Pedro Ángel Palou), with consequent argument that the Revolution was an interruption of the modern military. Although, as demonstrated by John Ochoa in his book on the subject, failure is a central theme of certain cultural narratives on the edge of Mexico's ruling party, called attention to the plurality of film productions, literary and artistic media have used the bicentennial to bring the nonsense of history in Mexico. The fact that the film financed by the state, in full celebration, narratives of failure occurs only speaks of the inability to articulate a meaningful discourse on the history in the public sphere. So we have Jorge Fons, director of the legendary film Red Dawn left in charge of a film apologetic Porfiriato or Felipe Cazals, perhaps the last director left openly in Mexican cinema, presenting a very Chicogrande failed representation of the fall of Pancho Villa. In short, this series of films funded by the State and promoted deliberately historical commemorations are a microcosm of two phenomena that invade the processes of historical significance in Mexico: on the one hand, the almost unprecedented inability of the Mexican state of articular triumphalist historical narrative and, second, the inability of cultural actors to politicize the past or to give a meaning. Therefore, what unites historical films 2010 is its emphasis on in-significant peripheral anecdotal moments of deliberately evading the political potential in the past to tell.
emptying memorial is, in my opinion, the result of three concurrent processes in Mexican culture. The first is the culmination of co-optation of the culture under the aegis of the State began in the radical centralization of culture under the shadow of Conaculta. Of course, cultural officialdom has always been organic postrevolutionary regimes, but the Conaculta meant a withdrawal of many cultural dimensions of its relevance in the public sphere. The revolutionary culture as shown by several studies over the past three years (Rick Lopez, John Mraz, Andrea Noble, intellectual Nations) is based on the ability of intellectuals to mediate between the ruling nationalist and cultural autonomy spaces generated by the Revolution, which allowed other cultural actors (directors, muralists, writers, etc.) participate actively in both teaching and in performance, according to the well-known analysis of Homi Bhabha, behind the writing of the nation. Thus, the Mexican national culture was peculiarly able to construct meanings socially consensual consensus for significant produced by different processes historical. In contrast, the broad grant to create meaning by Conaculta, from grants to creative artists of all disciplines and ages, to the re-centralization of the mechanisms of distribution and dissemination of many arts (film clubs, theaters, libraries, museums) helped to the annihilation of the traditional public articulation by providing an economic subterfuge allows creators total evasion of the hearings and, therefore, fosters a culture disconnected from public spaces. In addition, the consolidated Conaculta Mexican public space commemorative rhetoric: almost every month in Mexico is celebrated anniversaries birth or death of cultural figures (70 years Monsivais, 80 Carlos Fuentes, 50 of the death of Alfonso Reyes, etc.) intellectual conversation filled the tributes whose function is, again, hide behind any anecdotes substantial discussion of the critical legacy of these figures.
This is accompanied by a second factor, the emergence of the market as a cultural alternative to intelligentsia, which in turn resulted in what Roger Bartra called "posmexicana condition", ie a narrative of modernity that is no longer shaped by the discourses of nationalism to articulate identity strategies based on local-regional and global. In this paradigm, the creative artists and the intelligentsia in general lost ground to the emergence of new forms of media (such as television commentator and radio host) can represent more effectively this condition in urban class middle of the old privileged territories artistic class. Suffice as examples of the impact on Mexican public sphere as Denise Maerker communicators or Ciro Gómez Leyva triangulate Millennium diaries and El Universal, the radio conglomerate Grupo Televisa formula and creating de facto monopolies in the joint intellectual public sphere in the media age. Even the few intellectuals "literary" that have survived this change, as Hector Aguilar Camin and Enrique Krauze, are characterized by their mastery of these media spaces that communicators above, transfiguring the classic practice of the Mexican writer in the form of multimedia development cultural memory.
Finally, the myth of the transition to democracy, which emerged especially after the electoral victory of Vicente Fox in 2000, meant the reconfiguration of the liberal-secular quadrant of revolutionary nationalism in two precise ways . For a hand, Fox began his presidency with two acts of historical revisionism, raise the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the way in his post-election celebration, and replace the image of Benito Juarez by Francisco Madero in the office presidential. Thus, Fox appealed to precisely the idea that his presidency was a foundational act in the manner of Independence and the Revolution, based on an alleged quest for freedom narrative that displaced citizen revolutionary liberalism Juarez as the privileged political configurations Mexican historical imaginary. The rapid public disillusionment with the Fox administration created a fundamental condition for the emptying memorial since, although it was efficient in setting aside the founding narratives of PRI nationalism, a new historical narrative not had time to jell in the public mind. However, unlike the PRI, whose institutional legitimacy depended directly on the character of state realization of the revolutionary ideals, the PAN has not required a historical narrative consisting largely because its very origins in the opposition against Synarchist Cardenas Mexican right places in a fundamentally antagonistic position against both the secularism of the Reformation Juarez as against revolutionary populism. If the official history of twentieth-century Mexico, despite its failures, is primarily the story of a dissociated state of the Church and processes that sometimes even the state itself, meant the nation's symbolic incorporation of large segments of the working classes, the neoliberal and Catholic PAN has a more favorable if that legacy is devoid of any political potential.
My thesis then is that the vast and expensive apparatus celebratory bicentennial of Independence and the centenary of the Revolution, including "patriotic films, the proliferation of historical novels and essays, many of them co-edited by Conaculta, public parades and art exhibitions in almost every museum and public space in the country, are the ultimate point of convergence of these three processes in a public culture incapable of building a meaningful relationship with both the story and with the audience. This, of course, does not mean that there have been attempts by the State to create a consistent official historical narrative, but the official story seems to be deliberately constructed as an attempt to leave behind the social demands articulated to the myths of independence and Revolution in the twentieth century. The clear example is the volume history of Mexico , in which the State distinguished historians invited to lecture over different periods of history. The book had a print run of 250,000 copies and has been distributed at all points of sale of books at an affordable price suamente, 39 pesos or $ 3. The text endorses many of the points of view regarding the history Calderon of Mexico: Enrique Krauze, Mexico in charge of post-88, speaks of drugs as a "necessary war" while the period of the reform laws, which consolidates the secular state, is narrated by Andrés Lira as an arc of the emergence of a "constitutional order" to the establishment of a "liberal conservative", that cliché of Porfirio Diaz, however, well defined doctrine Christian Democrats the PAN. The Revolution, in the most symptomatic of the text, narrated by the historian appears Álvaro Matute as a succession of presidential regimes where shoes are presented as an attempt to return to "traditional community life" and ideologically villismo absent and appears only construct as part of military campaigns. What is noteworthy here, in part, is the tremendous volume irrelevance that has been in historical discussions of the celebrations. Despite their ubiquity, the book has sold very little and has not been commented on a sustained basis in any space of public debate. As an attempt to rewrite history has undoubtedly been a failure, but may be the deliberate failure of a state with little organic relation to the historical discourse.
But History of Mexico contains a meaningful text, which shows how the ruling PAN means emptying memorial of which I speak. In his presentation to the book, President Felipe Calderon raises the goal of the bicentennial, "will commemorate these dates founding festive way, as our story of struggle is a source of pride for Mexicans, but especially in a thoughtful, because we make a balance between the achievements and challenges to meet. " By centralizing the "balance" in the center of reflection, Calderón articulates a conception of history in which the past is dispensable while the ultimate goal of the commemoration is to look at future: "May the memory of such singular events and knowledge of history enshrined allows us to place them on the route of sustainable human development to which we aspire. " In a veiled but clear rhetoric of conservative Mexican Catholicism, this phrase raises two fundamental points: that the revolutionary events are unique (ie, unrepeatable) and that we read primarily as a self-help manual, whose goal is "sustainable human development "in which the discontent and conflict behind a revolutionary process are not relatable. For this is not surprising that there is no particular need of political meaning to the past, since the story only works as a strategy for individual and not as a collective memory or political articulation. After all, under the idea of \u200b\u200bplurality, lies a clear desire for a past void of meaning, able to proliferate only in the speech: "As a logical consequence of the cultural and ideological plurality that characterizes Mexico happily, the reflections will varied, including some found, what good that happens. " The corollary, of course, is that the proliferation hermeneutics of the past, the appropriation of their meanings for a precise policy formulation melts into air.
In a lucid article, "Narrating the Neoliberal Moment", Claudio Lomnitz argues that one of the impacts of neoliberalism in the culture is too much history. This article primarily concerns the emergence of Enrique Krauze as a public intellectual after the death of Octavio Paz and in the context of the transition from PRI to PAN. At this time, Lomnitz argued, "history Became the principal source of stock images in Mexico's public Discourse. It Politicians and public Intellectuals Provided with a succint and abbreviated moral vocabulary and with a set of images That Could handily stand in for long-standing arguments Entire events or doctrines. " I would argue that the bicentennial, as I have presented so far, is the ultimate point of articulation of this surplus in history, in which the proliferation of verbal and visual signifiers of the historical in the nineties resulted in the inability to produce instances cultural meanings, due in part to the organic with the hegemonic discourses of State of the images themselves in history, played incessantly on the television programs of Clio, the emergence of historical-themed soaps (like the eagle's flight, based, again, in the life of Porfirio Díaz) and the multiplication of historical reflections in newspapers and magazines. One could supplement this by saying that the complicity of the media structure of the country with the neoliberal process enabled these goods also became significant, without departing too far from the ideological correctness of the new state, contributed to the maintenance of semantic gap. Thus, one could say that the process identified by Lomnitz lies in a shift from state capture history, ranging from the traditional rule on the meaning, always maintained a certain degree of political definition, a significant ownership of the same because the images themselves become State property and the market becoming irrelevant resemantization processes at the level of significance. As a literal example of this may be the enormous amount of historical novels appeared in the last two years, returning to historical figures and events one by one, and promising "stories ever told." In all cases, from the Zapata Pedro Ángel Palou and his flirtations with homosexuality, to the Benito Juarez Eduardo Antonio Parra, novels iconisation contribute to the individual figures of history as significant, without providing a narrative that allows new interpretations their socio-political events. In this way, the icons of history becomes a constructed script, almost as cliché Derrida, in the infinite play of signifiers that never get fixed at any significance beyond the form itself.
symptomatic Another dimension of the formal ruling of Mexican history is the privilege of intellectuals and Krauze and Hector Aguilar Camin and give the institutions of contemporary Mexico narrative frame: the important thing is not the product of a political ideology or historical consistent but the control of the vehicles themselves of representation of these ideologies, the Political parties, the electoral process, historical images, etc. Institutionalism of the Mexican center-right and is based on this operation. In The invention of Mexico, the book written about the celebration, Aguilar Camin defines the Mexican Revolution as "The catalog of beliefs and institutions that fill [his] bag." He then denounced the historical memory of the Revolution as a series of "lessons of national history that drags the memory of the country," glorification of violence, election defeat, defensive nationalism, pedagogies of resentment and victimhood, founding lies " . As an antidote to this, Aguilar Camin a story advocates that instead of "glorifying" the conflict to focus on the institutional achievements of the country. As we can see from this brief example is the celebratory emptying hire a project of radical shift in the country into an era in which the revolutionary ideals are left behind to support an institutional partnership that is clearly hierarchical. To co-opt significant and produce a collective failure to bring new meaning to revolution and independence in terms of cultural and political memory, the technocratic intelligentsia of Mexico in organic relation to the discourse of democratic normality of PAN, pose a story based on the intellectual construction of the state, and the exclusion of inequality and conflict as fundamental structures of social and political life. The broad consensus that this view of Mexican history yet has found some intellectuals in counterpoints that are not identified publicly with the right and have a more positive view about the inequality. In Blame for Mexico, another book written about the commemoration, Pedro Angel Palou argues that the erasure of the indigenous past and the consolidation of liberalism formed the basis of historical processes that ultimately institutionalize after the Revolution. Palou point is however opposite to that of Aguilar Camin, the story focuses on the institutionalization is what prevents us from thinking the country in a plural and democratic. While the book does not stop Palou participate in clearing-ante celebratory excess of history is hard to write without it, "no less an attempt to give new meaning to the nineteenth century from spaces that resist co-optation of cultural signifiers neoliberal era.
until two days ago, I thought to conclude this paper with a reflection on this last point. However, before yesterday I had the opportunity to see the tape Revolution , a set of ten short films by new directors released Mexicans in Mexico this weekend as a continuation of the "patriotic film." The reason I had access to this film was due to the peculiar form of movie distribution. Produced by Canana Films, the company Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the film was released simultaneously in the private rooms of cinema, Televisa and YouTube, in an effort to give prominence to the film last weekend and to avoid piracy. Like any collective work Revolution is rather irregular, but has some moments of brilliance that give a glimpse, albeit briefly, cultural symbolization possibilities beyond the excess of history and emptying celebratory I've spoken here. The films deliberately evade historical re-enactment from its focus on different margins of contemporary bet on the construction of new signifiers that articulate the historical memory of the exhaustion of the traditional archive. A great example is the "company store" Mariana Chenillo where, after referring to the model shop where Porfiristas estates paid in kind to employees, introduces us to a supermarket worker whose salary is paid in part with coupons. In articulating the past in an area directly connected to the urban experience of neoliberalism, playing factually existing structure of economic exploitation, Chenillo a need to repeat the revolutionary gesture in presenting the return of one of its central causes. Celebratory emptying is presented by Rodrigo Plá formally in a short film fascinating. Pla's film introduces us to a mayor who invites a grandson of Pancho Villa to the celebrations of its people. Since the first event, the people's political apparatus prevents the grandson talk, taking as a figurehead to a number of events, from a popular concert until the inauguration of a hospital. Plá has literally one of the points that I presented before -The use of history as a significant part of the state to tell parts of his brief as a series of official photographs of the mayor shaking hands with the grandson in different events. The invocation of history as advertising strategy and file of the revolution as a legitimation of the state are present. The very idea of \u200b\u200bcelebration is attacked by another director, Carlos Reygadas. In a plotless short entitled "This is my kingdom," Reygadas presents a dinner hosted by him and filmed in a documentary. The dinner takes place in a vacant lot in Tepoztlan and their assistants are members of the Mexican upper class and a group of poor farmers owners of the lot. After presenting the guests as a class set of figures radically disconnected from the poor who are in front, the party gradually becomes chaos ending in the destruction of an old car that ends become a huge bonfire. In the unlikely style symbolized Reygadas, the short allows two interpretations: as an allegory of a revolutionary institutionalization began as party elites and ended up as a mess, and as a sign of a celebration vacuum itself is unable to mean anything and ends chaos.
These three short films show us ways in which the filmmakers evade the revolutionary file images and vocabularies and allow new languages \u200b\u200bof cultural interpretation from the significant gaps left by the significant ambiguity of the neoliberal state. Despite my radical skepticism in the ability of Mexican culture to restructure the public relevance achieved in the revolutionary years, after seeing Revolution I can not conclude on a note-active. My immediate impression after seeing some of the short is that in a time when literature has become a highly commercialized production or self-referral, depending on the author, the most successful art ceased to aspire to the public dimension of murals and that the history books produced meanings nonsense, some new managers are experimenting with possible languages \u200b\u200bof political art to come. The film is a vehicle ambiguous in this respect I can that is responsible for two fundamental readjustments in national culture class. In the golden age was a vehicle of cultural democratization from its ability to appeal to the popular classes and high alike. In contrast, neoliberalism, as I try to show in a book I hope to finish soon, film radically shifted to the middle class, becoming perhaps the fastest-cultural genre is given to cultural readjustment posmexicana condition. However, since the film is likely to prosper as an industry, the process Privatization has allowed the emergence of voices like those of some directors Revolution using market resources to fund proposals that depart from the dictates of the subsidy symbolic creation in Mexico. In these terms, and with this term, the short film that impressed me most was "The priest Nicolás hanging" by Amat Escalante. The film, shot in black and white, begins in the wilderness with a boy and a girl who found a priest hanging from a tree, and burned body of his altar boy at his side. The priest speaks of an armed group hung in there and killed the acolyte burning him alive, to which children responds that the armed men burned down his village and taken to adults. So much for historical reference seems clear: the short is set in such a way that looks like a recreation of the Christ War and its characters victims of federal Calles, a narrative which, incidentally, has been recovered from the right as part of his attack to secularization. However, towards the end of the short, Escalante gives a masterful twist: the priest and the children come to a modern highway, demanding money in the street to end up eating something at a McDonalds. The subtext, of course, is that the atrocities committed against them could be committed by drug dealers or military incursions plague the contemporary Mexico. Without commenting directly on this, as would Luis Estrada, Escalante constructs a visual language that reconstructs the radical violence woven into the historical experience of Mexico. In a sense, the filmic language of Escalante, which avoids turning the film into the pulpit to denounce Luis Estrada, produces the antithesis of the institutional discourses of Aguilar Camin, an expression of the brutality that underlies the two moments of liberal modernization of Mexico : the secular Calles and neoliberalism. While the artistic language of the shorts Revolution is in the best, in the formative process of an art future, possibilities and potential that has to imagine another form of culture. Following the concept of Jacques Rancière, productions like seem announces Revolution's promise of a new distribution of sensitivity that allows the overcoming of the celebratory culture and empty today, has become the bicentennial and the centennial in a symbolic obstacle more to the necessary reinvention of Mexico.
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