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37 2 Ensayo de un crimen and El hombre sin rostro Early Critiques of Nationalism during Mexico’s Transition to Modernity TheDecadeofthe1940s:MexicoEntersModernity M anuel Ávila Camacho, whose term ran from 1940 to 1946, was the first of Mexico’s modern capitalistic presidents. During his administration, an economic strategy of industrialization and accumulation of capital—known as “developmentalism” (Babb 105–13), “balanced development” (Cline 253–62), or “moderation ” (Niblo 75–147)—was set into motion. Ávila Camacho’s agenda facilitated the transition to nonmilitary governments, with his successor Miguel Alemán being the first civilian president in the postrevolutionary era. The foremost goal of both leaders was to usher Mexico fully into Western modernity.1 In order to do so, they emphasized the need to leave behind the armed violence and tensions that had arisen among various political factions due, in part, to the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. During Ávila Camacho’s administration, trade agreements were established with the United States, and Mexico declared war on the Axis powers in support of its neighbor to the north. Alemán consolidated the changes begun by Ávila Camacho, imposing antiunion and anticommunist policies that marked a dramatic shift from the socialist leanings of the Cárdenas administration (López 576–77).2 Mexicanness, which heretofore had mainly been linked to the countryside, now took as its frame of reference the city, specifically la capital, Mexico City. This shift appears in film and literature as a fascination with the metropolis and the artifacts of modernity, as well as through a persistent questioning of nationalism in its new setting, a setting very much removed from the foundational narrative of previous decades . The recontextualization of Mexicanness in an urban setting im- 38 ArtfulAssassins plies a dichotomy between Mexico’s desire to enter Western modernity and its obligation to safeguard the “pure inner space” that supposedly set it apart as a non-Western nation. This tension generated in philosophy and cultural studies an extensive series of works that not only reflected upon the relationship between postrevolutionary Mexico and Western culture, but also on Mexico’s place in the modern world. One of the most important of these studies was Leopoldo Zea’s El positivismo en México (1943), a text that reveals the particular circumstances of a nation that, beginning in the nineteenth century, has displayed a marked tendency to imitate European modes of thought that, although considered “universal,” are in the final analysis incompatible with the Mexican reality. Zea’s book was followed by a number of studies on Mexico and Mexicanness.3 According to Emilio Uranga’s 1962 analysis titled “El pensamiento filosófico,” from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s the “topic of Mexicanness was so thoroughly examined that it simply collapsed under the weight of so many studies” (553). Decades later, Roger Bartra offered an even more critical view of this series of analyses, which, in his opinion, “tried unsuccessfully to provide studies of Mexicanness with a scientific basis” (The Cage 5). Painting in postrevolutionary Mexico ceased to focus on the countryside in favor of the city. The space that now symbolized the nation in Mexican art was an urban, industrial space, constantly in motion and lacking the presence of the populace en masse. One example of this trend is Juan O’Gorman’s La Ciudad de México vista desde el Monumento de la Revolución (Mexico City Viewed from the Monument of the Revolution, 1949), which I will analyze shortly. Carlos Monsiváis notes that in Mexican literature there is a movement in the 1940s to “abandon the ‘folkloric,’ and to retain it as merely an occasional passion. Between heated debates over the death of the Mexican Revolution, a metaphor created by the journalist Carlos Denegri (symbol of the predatory power of the press) manages to leak out: the Revolution got off its horse and got into a Cadillac” (“Sociedad y cultura” 270). Sara Sefchovich calls this moment in Mexican intellectual history “la hora de los catrines,” or “the time of the dandies”: “The dandies have triumphed in reality and in literature. The country is walking along the road of modernity, leaving behind the indigenous peoples, the peasants, the legends, the common folk, and even the Revolution” (319). Sefchovich is referring here to the failure of the Revolution as an emancipatory movement, not as a theme for literature, since the novels of this era take up the Revolution with a revisionist bent. Mexico’s entrance into...

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