Times of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice, and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City
Idioms of Sacrifice in Mexico
The cultural history of sacrifice in secular societies did not begin to be written before the narrative of progress and of the disenchantment of the world had lost some steam, and nationalism was exposed as a kind of religion of rationality and progress. In the case of Mexico, the history of secular sacrifice is less developed due to the pervasive sense that the nation is always about to cross over the threshold to modernity. By 1900, the educator Justo Sierra was able to lead a concerted effort to demonstrate that Mexico had moved from being a society in a constant state of revolution to a society in evolution. Yet, fifty years later, following a social revolution, Octavio Paz, who was by then one of Mexico’s leading lights, still located Mexican society on the brink of modernity.1 Even today political modernity is trumpeted as a recent arrival, born only with the “triumph of democracy” in the national elections of 2000.
Mexico’s Prophets of the Advent of Modernity have generally invoked the violent past as a catalog of sacrifices, including the deeds of the nation’s visionary martyrs and its innocent sacrificial victims alike. Sierra rejected revolution as a useful or positive mechanism when he wrote as a pundit during the precarious early years of national stability: “Is the Indian less of a slave? Is the Creole more free? Are the Indian and the Creole richer? If we had developed in peace, would we not have acquired the same level of progress that we enjoy today, but without the ruins that litter our soil . . .?”2 Nevertheless, he argued passionately against the alleged futility of earlier revolutions when he wrote his triumphal national history twenty years later in 1900. At this point, Sierra was no longer concerned to avoid revolutions (ironically, there seemed to be none on the horizon), but he wished to forge a credible plot for a progressive national history and gain respect for Mexico abroad:
There has not been a foreign historian or publicist writing on Mexican affairs who failed to impute the origin of our bloody quarrels to the measureless ambition of the political coryphées and the depravation of a people unworthy to live under the beneficial and fecund shade of freedom and democracy. These judgments were accepted . . . as a pretext for unjust aggressions, for the most irritant abuse of force and the disavowment of all right as though Mexico stood outside of the laws that shelter and protect the civilised peoples.3
Thus, with the gradual attainment of stability and hegemony, the revolutions of the past were portrayed as inevitable and useful, and they could finally be laid to rest as heroic sacrifices rather than as the festering and contentious political legacy of selfish caudillos and their witless followers.
From the early years of Mexican historical writing, Christian ideas of sacrifice were in constant use. Heroes were cast as examples of self-sacrifice, of the “sacrifice of the God,” whose acts gave birth to the nation. For example, in an early work decrying the role of violence in Mexican history (1870), the influential writers Manuel Payno and Vicente Riva Palacio described Miguel Hidalgo, father of the nation, in the following terms: “Hidalgo is a beam of light in our history, and the origin of light is God. Lightning, before breaking out, is nothing, but it is from that nothing that the world itself broke forth. Hidalgo has only one description: Hidalgo was HIDALGO. He was born to the world and to history on the night of 15 September 1810 [the night of Hidalgo’s Cry of Independence]. On that night a people, too, was born.”4 Images from the Christian repertoire were also deployed for other heroes, such as José María Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, Melchor Ocampo, or Cuauhtémoc. However, in this early work of Mexican Whiggish history, there was not yet a sacrificial trope available for framing deaths of innocent people, who were portrayed only as victims of reprehensible violence. As national history was consolidated, however, the deaths of innocents also came to be seen as sacrifices for the nation, and the Aztec idiom of sacrifice—in which human victims were slaughtered in order to fertilize the earth, stabilize the elements, and maintain the power of the god’s chosen people—provided an effective framing device for their role as propitiatory victims.
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Notes
- Justo Sierra, Mexico, Its Social Evolution, trans. G. Sentiñón, 3 vols. (Mexico City: J. Ballescá, 1900); Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (1950; reprint, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981). All translations from Spanish texts are my own.
- Sierra, “Las revoluciones” (26 October 1878), in Periodismo político, ed. Agustín Yáñez (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1948), 172–74.
- Sierra, Mexico, 1:317.
- Vicente Riva Palacio and Manuel Payno, El libro rojo (Mexico City: Diaz de Leon y White, 1870), 89.