The Mexican Aristocracy: An Expressive Ethnography, 1910-2000 (review)

In his latest book, Nutini turns his attention to the history and expressive culture of Mexico City's most elite inhabitants. The author's larger project is ambitiously interdisciplinary. The Mexican Aristocracy is, in fact, a sequel to Nutini's The Wages of Conquest (Ann Arbor, 1995), a book charting the expressive history of Mexico's ultra-elite from the 1600s to the 1900s. Together these volumes promise an anthropologically grounded, diachronic examination of aristocratic culture. The book under review, however, proves a disappointment, falling into a common interdisciplinary trap—the unwillingness to fully engage fields outside the author's discipline. In this case, Nutini fails to ground his ethnographic analysis in a thorough assessment of Mexican historiography. Hence, his larger claims concerning the Mexican aristocracy's historical evolution and bleak future rest on shaky foundations.

Nutini's description of aristocratic culture during the work's "ethnographic present" (1990–2000) represents the best portion of The Mexican Aristocracy. Rooted in extended discussions with a dozen informants and 157 additional interviews, the author provides an incisive discussion of how aristocrats interact; manipulate notions of race, status, and beauty; practice religion, and engage the larger social world. His analysis of shrine-like patrician homes as heirloom installations palliating aristocratic status insecurities is particularly interesting. In these passages, Nutini also forwards his central claim that the Mexican aristocracy has entered a terminal phase of its existence as an identifiable cultural group. The author suggests that present-day aristocrats, overtaken economically by a new culturally independent plutocracy and a general democratization of Mexican society, face a stark choice: Either they must embrace "embourgeosiement" and assimilation within the parvenu elite, or confront cultural disintegration and downward social mobility. According to Nutini, in either case, their unique expressive culture and social organization verges on extinction.

Whereas Nutini engagingly describes aristocratic behaviors stemming from unease vis-à-vis Mexico's nouveau riche and striving upper-middle class, his informants' idealized interpretation of Mexican society in the past skews his analysis. This misapprehension is most evident in the author's conception of the hacienda as the quasifeudal foundation of aristocratic preeminence, and his overestimation of the aristocracy's past cultural dominance and the social distance between plutocrats and aristocrats throughout Mexico's history. Neither The Mexican Aristocracy nor its predecessor satisfactorily engages the last twenty-five years of historical scholarship. Nutini's assertion that post-Revolutionary land reform initiated the aristocracy's denouement simply contradicts a raft of studies on haciendas, mining, commerce, and elites during the colonial and national periods.

Nutini highlights three periods of aristocratic "renewal" (the 1630s, the late eighteenth century, and late nineteenth century), but argues that social climbers from these periods entering the aristocracy experienced thorough patrician acculturation. Status, wealth, and hacienda ownership, however, has never been as stable as he suggests. Successful elite lineages have always depended on periodic infusions of fresh blood and new wealth from the upwardly mobile. Nutini himself notes considerable late twentieth-century intermarriage between old and new elites, but identifies it as a symptom of collapse rather than renovation. If we could return to these renewal phases and conduct ethnographic research, we would probably find déclassé aristocrats criticizing arriviste cultural pollution, lamenting lineage degradation, engaging in behaviors inspired by their fading status, and bemoaning the collapse of the "true" aristocracy. In short, what Nutini may be documenting is yet another period of elite social transition with its concomitant expressive representations.