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17 this essay is the first in a series of studies on how the pre-Columbian past has been collected in different moments in Mexican history and what has been the relationship between these forms of knowledge and policies toward Indians. On the one hand, these studies examine forms of ordering the preColumbian past (that is, modes of knowing, organizing, and interpreting artifacts). On the other, they study forms of containing disorder in the corresponding Indian presents (that is, modes of subordination, control, and counterinsurgency). Idealized perspectives of the pre-Columbian period have had contemporaneous views that denigrate and undermine historical Indians (the many recent pages on the political insufficiency of the Zapatistas is one of the many instances). Indian resistance includes both passive forms of rejecting Westernization as well as armed rebellions. In studying forms of creating order and containing disorder, we must keep in mind what I call “writing violence in colonialist discourses.” This concept suggests a definition of Latin American Subaltern Studies that would develop an inventory of the Culture of Conquest that continues to produce subalternity, while simultaneously defining the terms of a discourse that could dialogue with other rationalities to those dominant in the “West.”1 Subaltern studies therefore would retake the histories of uprisings, insurgencies , rebellions, and national identities without subjecting them to the criteria that privilege moments where elites have organized them according to their political programs. This perspective would enable us to break away from teleological schemata that situate the meaning of the past in terms of approximation to (a questionably more developed) modern present. We would thus avoid Pre-Columbian Pasts and indian Presents in Mexican history 2 Rabasa-text-final.indd 17 4/27/10 9:57 AM 18 PrE-CoLuMBiAN PAsts AND iNDiAN PrEsENts iN MEXiCAN history privileging an elite “third world” intellectual cadre that would have immediate access to subalterns. Quite the contrary, it would register the signs that inscribe “me,” the “third world” intellectual (or, for that matter, the “first world” sympathizer) as a collaborator of colonial discourses. As John Beverley has put it: “Subaltern studies begins with a critique of the adequacy of any intellectual construction of the subaltern since, nolens volens, the constitution of the intelligentsia itself and intellectual discourse and its institutions is not unrelated to the production of subalternity itself.”2 Colonialist writing practices, then, do not just pertain to the (early) colonial period; rather, they inform contemporary modernization programs that folklorize forms of life and deplore the loss of old—thereby confining Indian cultures to the museum and the curio shop. In the span of a decade after the conquest of Mexico, Mesoamerican civilizations came to be conceptualized as a form of antiquity by missionaries and crown officials. War, the burning of books, the persecution of spiritual leaders forced a way of life into clandestinity. Indigenous cultures, in the lingo of the early missionaries, became antiguallas (ancient history, old customs)—an array of cultural practices that Indians held in esteem regardless of their proscription by the Catholic Church. Paradoxically, the missionary’s impulse to eradicate (to extirpate idolatries and superstitions) was intimately bound to a will to preserve (to resurrect the grandeur and moral order of old). Mexican historiography of the pre-Columbian period has been from its inception Janus-like: it at once has preserved a memory of old and severed contemporary Indian “presents” from history. (This exclusion from history should be understood as constituting a mode of “living history” rather than as verifying a recalcitrance to modernity). Ancient Mexico is conceptualized as dead—which does not exclude a ghostlike continuity that forevermore threatens the social order or progress—and becomes a patrimony of the patria (the fatherland) as early as Fray Diego de Durán’s Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme (ca. 1580) and of the nacíon (the nation) since the Independence from Spain in 1821. It is not so much a question of Indians having historical significance only insofar as they could be integrated into the Church or the nation, but of using their history against them. Colonialist discourses first proscribe Mesoamerican cultures and then reduce the effects of the destruction —the Indian “presents”—to shadows of the ancient grandeur.3 Mexico’s Clio, from the reconstruction of the pre-Columbian world in the Codex Mendoza (ca. 1540) to the collection of past and present indigenous artifacts in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City...

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