Celebrating Insurrection: The Commemoration and Representation of the Nineteenth-Century Mexican Pronunciamiento

4. The Political Life of Executed Pronunciados: The Representation and Memory of José Márquez and Joaquín Gárate’s 1830 Pronunciamiento of San Luis

To commemorate the dead is part of human culture. To commemorate the fallen, those violently killed who died in battle, in civil war or war is part of political culture. —reinhart koselleck and michael jeismann A s was the norm for the majority of successful pronunciamientos in San Luis Potosí, they ended in celebratory acts which included Te Deums, ceremonial lighting of the streets, and repiques, the pealing of church bells. Indeed it is the political importance of post-pronunciamiento fiestas and celebrations that is the focus of several chapters in this volume.1 The other outcome of the pronunciamiento practice, and the focus of this chapter, was failure. In that case the general trend was the peaceful yet forceful negotiation and pacification of the pronunciados. However, in San Luis Potosí on 17 November 1830 the pronunciamiento deviated somewhat from the norm, ending in two executions , around one hundred imprisonments, and at least one self-imposed exile. Despite the pronunciamiento’s failure, it nevertheless went on to provide a celebratory act of sorts. And it is from the fatal outcome of this particular pronunciamiento that I draw my line of inquiry, specifically the political lives of the two executed pronunciados or, more bluntly, the dead bodies of Colonel kerry mcdonald Four. The Political Life of Executed Pronunciados: The Representation and Memory of José Márquez and Joaquín Gárate’s 1830 Pronunciamiento of San Luis The Political Life of Executed Pronunciados 75 José María Márquez and Lieutenant Colonel (and former deputy ) José Joaquín Gárate. Dead bodies, as several scholars have suggested, are potentially loaded sites of political profit and thus are especially useful and effective symbols for revising the past.2 In the modern age, the Christian meaning of death subsided, making way for meaning to be established in purely social and political terms.3 In this vein, like so many dead bodies, they can become more virulently politically charged than are the living, being used and manipulated in a variety of ways, including their use as effective political symbols, whereby they are called into the service of a given polity. Given that crises in political authority often led to the seizure of politicized corpses as symbolic capital, it is important to bear in mind that postcolonial, independent Mexico was going through a tumultuous period of marked transformation, reconfiguration, and change, of which the practice of the pronunciamiento was a manifestation.4 The political profit gained from the commemoration of corpses also lent itself to the process of establishing political legitimacy during these periods of upheaval. Using the theoretical framework of dead body politics, in the chapter I explore first how the bodies, as a site of political profit, were used by their contemporaries, and second to what extent this treatment, together with their participation in the pronunciamiento, influenced their reception within the traditional and current historiography . By focusing on the memory and representation of the political dead in the form of executed local pronunciados, I also enquire as to why the actors who partook most heavily in this practice have almost all been forgotten, or perhaps intentionally sidestepped, by the regional historiography, and draw conclusions about the often ambivalent nature of the historical selection process of these actors. 76 McDonald How the Dead Bodies Came to Be: The Historical Context In the first decade of Independence Colonel José María Márquez was the most notorious and active pronunciado of San Luis Potos í. Although it is far from certain whether he instigated every pronunciamiento, his military participation is clear. His consistent political goal in partaking in the pronunciamiento was federalism , albeit of a more progressive strand, but the consistent outcome was failure. Not one of his original pronunciamientos was successful, yet Márquez never found himself exiled (for long) from the state, nor severely punished, but rather in ever more favorable situations, thanks to the local government’s willingness to negotiate with and placate him. The explanation for the executions can be found in the historical context in which they took place, reflecting the attitudes and political turmoil of the late 1820s and early 1830s. It was a time of unparalleled fright in the history of the nascent independent country as the threat of social dissolution, experienced in the populist War of Independence, was echoed in the Acordada rebellion and the Parián riot...