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

Acknowledgments

In June 2007 I was the recipient of a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (ahrc) research grant amounting to more than£610,000, which funded the three-year project on “The Pronunciamiento in Independent Mexico, 1821–1876” (2007–2010). It paid for the salaries of two research fellows and a database developer and covered the cost of two PhD studentships. It also funded the research team’s travel expenses to and from Mexico, including the expenses that were incurred in the organization of three major conferences held at St. Andrews in June 2008, 2009, and 2010. This generous award allowed me to put together a vibrant research team focused on producing a major online relational database that includes transcriptions of over fifteen hundred pronunciamientos (see http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronunciamientos/) and publishing four volumes (three edited and one monograph) on different aspects of this phenomenon. The first of these volumes came out in 2010, addressing the origins, nature, and dynamics of this practice. The second was published in 2012 and concentrated on who adopted this form of insurrectionary politics and why, noting how it evolved from 1821 to 1868. Needless to say, I am extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Without the ahrc’s funding, this extraordinary project would never have taken place. Thanks to Acknowledgments xiv Acknowledgments the ahrc the third of three planned international conferences was held in St. Andrews, 11–13 June 2010, bringing together the St. Andrews–based research team and a formidable group of international scholars. This book contains the findings of a selection of the papers that were presented. I would like to thank St. Joseph’s University, the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potos í, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Instituto Mora, California State University at San Bernardino, and the Universities of Leeds and Warwick for the financial contributions they made toward the travel expenses of their respective speakers. The conference went ahead (only after the delegates were allowed to watch Mexico play South Africa in the inaugural match of the 2010 World Cup) and was extremely lively, generating intense discussion. Thanks are due to the late Michael P. Costeloe, Paul Garner, Brian Hamnett, Francisco Parra, and Guy Thomson , all of whom kindly chaired the sessions and generously contributed their thoughts to the dialectics unleashed by the conference . Likewise I offer my sincere thanks to those speakers who, although not included in this volume, offered suggestive papers on different aspects of the memory, commemoration, and representation of the Mexican pronunciamiento, in particular Germ án Martínez Martínez and Natasha Picôt. As always, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and the School of Modern Languages at the University of St. Andrews for their unwavering support and collegiality . I am indebted to our former student Elspeth Gillespie for her assistance during the conference and to our extremely diligent conference secretary, Barbara Fleming. Thanks are also due to Salvador Rueda Smithers and Hilda Sánchez at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City for providing us with a digital Acknowledgments xv image the painting entitled Discurso cívico en la Alameda and for ensuring that the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia authorized its use on the cover of the present volume. And my gratitude extends, as ever, to my wife Caroline and our children for being so incredibly patient and supportive. Last but not least, I must thank Bridget Barry and her first class editorial team at the University of Nebraska Press, including Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant, Joeth Zucco, and Sally E. Antrobus . It was a real pleasure to work with Nebraska on my Santa Anna of Mexico (2007), Forceful Negotiations (2010), and Malcontents , Rebels, and Pronunciados (2012). I am delighted that we continue to work together. I thank Bridget, in particular, for believing in this project and for supporting the publication of the books it is generating. ...