Cuauhtémoc's Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico (review)

The Aztec tlatoani (ruler) Cuauhtémoc was tortured by his Spanish captors and hanged at the age of 30 by order of Fernando Cortés in February 1525, during the conqueror's expedition to Central America. We know remarkably little about Cuauhtémoc's life, as it turns out; his biography has to be reconstructed indirectly from sources like Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, or from inference. But we do know a great deal about his afterlife as a symbol of Mexican national identity—in art, literature, public monuments and discourse, historical writing, school textbooks, and so forth—especially during the twentieth century when a cult was built around his shadowy personality and tragic martyrdom. Paul Gillingham has told this story with deep and theoretically informed scholarship, discernment, dry wit, and stylistic panache in a delightful study built around the putative discovery of the Aztec emperor's remains in 1949 in the isolated village of Ixcateopan, in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

Everyone loves the tracking down of a famous hoax. Gillingham's narrative combines elements of a detective story with the deconstruction of nationalist myth-making. The book amply illustrates that cultural history is an ironic project, and the author laughs up his sleeve at the transparent frauds that pile up one after another, but is nonetheless remarkably unpatronizing. He analyzes a kind of erotics of mourning, a necrophiliac cult about bodies, bodily parts, and national identity much written of recently by historians of Mexico, showing that both the perpetrators and supporters of the "discovery" of the bones found Cuauhtemoc "good to think with," in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The central character in Gillingham's story are Eulalia Guzmán, a prominent Mexican feminist, teacher, archivist, historian, archaeologist, and ardent Mexican nationalist who beat the drum for the authenticity of the Cuauhtémoc remains for several years after their discovery in 1949. Also central are Salvador Rodríguez Juárez, self-invented physician, forger, and son of a once-prominent local family in Ixcateopan, and his grandfather, Florentino Juárez, an upwardly striving village cacique whose secret, unpublished journals formed the evidentiary background for his grandson's forgeries of bones, burial site, and more documents in the 1940s. The discovery exploded into a national controversy, generating skepticism about the find from some of the great intellectual figures of the time, including Silvio Zavala, José Vasconcelos, and Alfonso Caso. It also drew the support of the government of Miguel Alemán and was the subject of numerous investigatory commission reports, most of them negative.

Along the way, Gillingham engages in a fascinating exploration of the great nineteenth-century historian Vicente Riva Palacio's possible candidacy as the author of the original fraud but in the end discards it, pinning it convincingly on Rodríguez Juárez. There are interesting resonances with other controversial and spectacular twentieth-century finds—a copper plate with Cuauhtémoc's name on it lying in the tomb itself (think of the famously forged Plate of Brass attesting to Francis Drake's visit to northern California), and even a curse on the violators of the emperor's tomb, which was said to have been visited upon four people (King Tut).

Interesting as the fraud itself and the uncovering of its perpetrator proves to be, there is a deeper level to the story, which Gillingham excavates with subtlety and an impressive knowledge of Mexican history. This is the counterpoint between the intensely local aspect of the fraud and the "uses" to which the Cuauhtémoc myth and cult have been put in irrigating Mexican nationalism. Gillingham explains the intricacies of the rise and fall of the Juárez clan, a dynasty of forgers whose last scion, Salvador, hoped to revive his fortunes, as well as those of Ixcateopan, by making the village the site of a stunning historical find and thereby weaken the political and...