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

Most students of Mexico are familiar with the story of Cuauhtémoc’s bones, though they may be hazy about the details. At first glance, it seems the stuff of comedy. In 1949, documents surfaced in the remote and impoverished village of Ixcateopan, in the rugged southwest Mexican state of Guerrero, bearing the surprising news that the last Aztec emperor was buried there, more than 1,000 miles from where he met his fate at the hands of treacherous Spaniards. Digging under the altar of the village church, a group of bumbling amateur archaeologists soon discovered what they believed to be his tomb, and Mexicans all over the country enjoyed a bout of patriotic revelry. Unfortunately, a commission of experts examined the documents and bones and declared them to be poorly staged fakes, igniting a raucous controversy that pitted zealous leftists, nationalists, and indigenistas (advocates for the indigenous population) against professional anthropologists and archaeologists. The tomb’s defenders were incensed by the experts’ findings; some of them suggested that the experts should be shot as traitors.

The episode of Cuautémoc’s tomb has long needed a skilled sleuth not only to investigate the details but also to analyze what they reveal about modern Mexican nationalism. Gillingham rises admirably to the challenge, leaving few stones unturned in this work. He even manages to detect the perpetrator of the celebrated forgery—a late nineteenth-century villager named Florentino Juárez, whose aim was to enhance his village’s prestige and political clout. Gillingham presents readers with many colorful characters, including the tomb’s irrepressible champion Eulalia Guzmán, a historian so swayed by indigenista passions that she held Aztec human sacrifice to be a slander invented by the conquerors.

Most importantly, Gillingham expounds at length on the “uses of Cuauhtémoc,” concluding that the emperor’s symbolism was too diffuse to yield much in the way of coherent meaning. Leftists saw him as a symbol of resistance, while nationalists tried to turn him into a bland symbol of national unity. Gillingham’s analysis complicates standard notions of nationalism, which often posit that nationalist symbols are foisted on ordinary people in order to foster support for the state. Ordinary people, however, do not necessarily understand those symbols as elites intend them to; sometimes—as in the case of Cuauhtémoc’s tomb—they even turn out to be the producers of those symbols.

The book’s weaknesses are few and minor. Gillingham can be wordy at times, though even his digressions tend to be fascinating. The book’s first chapter is a narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico that might be more detailed than necessary and surprisingly conventional, based largely on Spanish chronicles. Gillingham rejects most of the innovative recent work about the conquest by such scholars as Restall, Townsend, and Brooks, which has raised intriguing questions about the reliability of those chronicles.¹ Gillingham even endorses the notion that the Aztecs mistook Hernán Cortés for the returning god Quetzalcoátl. Since that idea has been repeatedly debunked and has largely fallen out of favor, Gillingham could have been more generous with the reasoning behind his endorsement. Myth creation is, after all, his topic.

Gillingham is able to cover a remarkable amount of ground in this volume, from the agrarian history of Guerrero to the work of Mexican literary titans like Palacio and Payno.² He has clearly read voraciously in multiple disciplines, and his book manages, starting in the microcosm of Ixcateopan, to cover an impressive amount of Mexican history. He writes with a wit and elegance that is regrettably rare in academia. The book is worthy of a large and admiring audience.