Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810-1920

3. Unsolved Mysteries of Civilization: Banditry in the Mexican Novel

3. Unsolved Mysteries of Civilization Banditry in the Mexican Novel The novel is nothing more than a way of initiating the people into the mysteries of modern civilization and of gradually educating for the priesthood of the future. —Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, 1868, quoted in Jean Franco, Introduction to Spanish American Literature The fight would be to the death, without truce or mercy: the bandits did well to tremble, for Martín Sánchez was the personification of the people’s anger. —Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, El Zarco, the Bandit (1901) Foreign travelers were hardly unique in their fascination with Mexican bandits. The Mexican people were also so captivated that banditry became one of the most common themes in literary and popular culture during the nineteenth century. Outlaw tales abounded in the oral tradition, especially in the corridos (ballads) that entertained the unlettered rural and urban poor.1 Bandits also became a staple in the literature of the elites, particularly in the romantic novel. Two factors hastened the rise of the literary bandit. For one thing, bandit narratives excited the sentiments of writers and readers who had been steeped in the aesthetics of romanticism. This alone might have assured popularity for the fictional bandit, but the turbulent social realities of nineteenth-century Mexico imparted these figures with an even stronger discursive appeal. The persistence of real-life banditry seemed to defy, and even burlesque, efforts by the elite classes to civilize their nation. This gave the subject of banditry considerable utility Unsolved Mysteries of Civilization 98 for liberal authors, who believed they were producing a nationalizing literature for postcolonial Mexico. The project of crafting a nationbuilding narrative corresponded to political struggles to forge the nation -state. In the context of postcolonial Mexico, the articulation of a nationalist narrative involved more than simply imagining the future; it also required novelists to criticize the conditions that undermined progress. To Mexico’s romantic novelists, the literary bandit served this purpose. As a consequence, Mexican authors did not come to praise the bandit, but to bury him.2 Like Anglo-Saxon travel writers, Mexican novelists deplored the reality of banditry in Mexico. However, the latter were less prepared to ascribe banditry to innate defects in the Mexican national character . Painfully aware of their nation’s failures in the nineteenth century, they even agreed with Anglo-Saxon writers that banditry represented a form of debased masculinity. However, they could not accept the sweeping generalizations that characterized much of the Anglo-Saxon narrative. Mexican writers situated the bandit in a broader historical context and insisted that outlawry and other symptoms of backwardness were the negative heritage of Spanish colonial rule. They accepted the need to forcefully suppress bandits, but they also insisted that Mexican society could be redeemed. For this reason, their construction of the literary bandit mobilized notions of gender, ethnicity, and class in greater nuance than did Anglo-Saxon travel narratives. From the inception of the novel in Mexico, liberal thinking shaped its development and therefore the making of the literary bandit. This was a consequence of the protracted struggle between liberals and conservatives from 1821 to 1867. The contending factions projected their political discord onto the sphere of literary culture, with conservatives more devoted to neoclassicism than were liberals, who embraced romanticism. Since conservative writers tended to eschew the novel as a vulgar mode of narrative, the novel spoke in a voice that was radical and populist until 1867. If afterward the liberal voice grew conservative, this was the result of liberal dominance in politics and reconciliation with conservative intellectuals. After 1867, liberals came to realize that stability and modernization required unity of the Unsolved Mysteries of Civilization 99 national elite. During the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), this transpired under the hegemony of a liberalism infused with the positivist spirit of “order and progress” and an abundance of foreign capital. The Porfirian elites conjured the expansion of railways and telegraph networks to support economic growth based on the export of raw materials and commercial agriculture. However, their success in creating an export-driven economy also required the expropriation of the peasantry and the exploitation of urban and rural proletarians. The lower classes responded to their impoverishment with strikes, rebellions, banditry, and other forms of resistance. Meanwhile, the literary elite repositioned itself around a program to wean the masses from traditional culture and transform them into obedient, educated...