Historical Arguments: Carlos Salinas and Mexican Women Writers

Widespread suspicion concerning the legitimacy of Carlos Salinas' win in the 1988 elections stimulated Salinas and the PRI to recognize opposition victories for the governorships of Baja California and Guanajuato. This relationship of cause and effect does not appear in the Salinas administration's version of official history, produced in 1992 as part of the Libros de texto gratuitos (free textbook) series for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Those history textbooks omit any mention of the 1988 election scandal and focus instead on Salinas' narrow triumph and the fact that three principal candidates split the vote. The textbooks indicate that because Mexican politics have been pluralized since 1988, as manifested by the opposition governors, the Salinas presidency coincides with an improving democracy. Ironically, Vicente Fox's win in the presidential elections of 2000 shows that the history textbooks correctly predicted a political transition for the country. Even so, the books met with public opposition and were destroyed. Apparently, their content—a revised national history that deemphasized the heroes of the Mexican Revolution and the Niños Héroes, the heroic defenders of Chapultepec Castle against invading United States troops, along with other modifications such as an acknowledgement of the violent repression of the 1968 demonstration in Tlatelolco—failed to satisfy an audience eager for change and yet reluctant to surrender the national myths and omissions that the PRI endorsed.

In his analysis of the 1992 textbooks, Dennis Gilbert reports that Salinas and his secretary of education and successor, Ernesto Zedillo, were intimately involved with the revised official history. Both politicians read the texts in manuscript form and selected the cover design. The textbooks' withdrawal revealed factionalism in the PRI and precipitated Secretary Zedillo's resignation. At one point, it seemed that Zedillo's chances of becoming president had been spoiled as a consequence of the textbook failure. However, were it not for this accident of (official) history, Zedillo would not have fulfilled the requisite time spent out of office prior to nomination in March 1994, when he was chosen to replace the assassinated PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Nonetheless, the risk he and Salinas took with the textbook project and the resulting controversy suggest the weight of official history in the Mexican public arena and the extent to which the Salinas administration was determined to revise the official version of Mexico's past. That determination can be seen in other Mexican cultural arenas of this period as well. Carrie C. Chorba notes that the Niños Héroes became an "unviable icon" during the Salinas administration's negotiations with the United States over the North American Free Trade Agreement, quietly disappearing from paper currency in addition to their decreased importance in the 1992 history textbooks (6). Andrés Oppenheimer also remarks on the Boy Heroes' lessened role in the textbooks, but notes a second motivation for the textbooks' withdrawal: the "suggestion that the armed forces were responsible for the 1968 massacre of students at Mexico City's Tlatelolco Square." Although estimates differ, Oppenheimer cites calculations that the 6.8 million books cost some $4.05 million (121).

To calculate the magnitude of the Salinas administration's attempt at historical revision, Gilbert identifies themes that distinguish the controversial 1992 texts from history books created in the 1960s under the administration of Adolfo López Mateos and in the 1970s under Echeverría. In contrast to prior official PRI history, Salinas and Zedillo's texts praise Porfirio Díaz. Critics of the 1992 textbooks objected not only to the newly benevolent portrayal of Porfirio Díaz' thirty-one year dictatorship, but also to the relatively positive evaluations of traditionally maligned historical figures such as Agustín Iturbide and Antonio López de Santa-Anna. The need for new textbooks implied fragility in the PRI's platform, because a revised official history admitted the irrelevance of policies that dictated previous understanding of Mexico' s past.

More generally, the new official history reveals the constructed nature of historical interpretation. Thus, the division between "fictional" and "non-fictional" texts seems potentially negligible, and comparison between textbooks and fictional...