The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (review)

Much has been written by historians and anthropologists about notions of masculine honor—by its very definition one facet of the construction of gender roles more broadly—in Latin American culture, often in the context of domestic life, criminality, gender relations, and so forth, but less often in relation to historical processes of nation and state building.¹ Pablo Piccato has given us a major study of honor in the construction of the Mexican public sphere in the last third or so of the nineteenth century, the period corresponding to the immediate pre-history, rise, and consolidation of the Porfirio Díaz regime, whose fall in 1910-11 was marked in 2010 by the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Piccato makes a completely convincing case that "masculine honor was the keystone in the building of a modern public sphere in Mexico" (4). Honor was the basis of political legitimacy, in which there had been a vacuum for much of the early republican period, and was an essential attribute for men who would speak in the name of the public, whether as print journalists, politicians at the rostrum, or public intellectuals. In the eyes of thinkers after mid-century, Antonio López de Santa Anna was the quintessential hyper-masculine figure who through his chameleon-like changes in political stance abdicated any claim to be a man of his word (hombre de palabra), while Benito Juárez embodied republican virtues, personal honor, and patriotism. Making highly adept use of memoirs, novels, and newspapers, among many other types of primary sources, and telling his story in a complex but stylishly wrought prose, Piccato has produced a study that is both a very good read and highly thought-provoking. This is not a book to be read with long pauses, however, since the argument and deployment of evidence are cumulative and the thread easily lost if broken, despite the somewhat segmented structure.

The most important venues for talk by public men about their own honor, for the testing of honor against widely held elite templates of this singularly masculine virtue, and for the airing of conflicts, were newspapers and the dueling field. The first four chapters deal with press juries (panels of prominent citizens selected to try accusations of slander, subversion, and immorality between journalists and citizens) in the period between 1868 and their abolition in 1882, with the culture of combat journalism, and with congressional, journalistic, and public reaction to President Manuel González's (1880-1884) ultimately successful scheme to recognize and consolidate Mexico's long standing public financial debt to Britain. The last two chapters provide a fascinating glimpse of prominent Mexicans on the field of honor, focusing especially on the well known 1894 duel (virtually the last of the age) between Francisco Romero and José Verástegui, which reprises with variations Piccato's account earlier in the book of the even more famous fatal encounter between Ireneo Paz and Santiago Sierra in 1880. Although for many readers the accounts of the English debt crisis and dueling will be the most interesting parts of the book, the chapter on combat journalism, although necessarily a bit more diffuse, is equally insightful. Here Piccato points out that among journalists reputations, connections, and honor were valued over material wealth, and that poverty (what one might call the Cyrano de Bergerac model) came to be seen as a sign of independence and integrity, and therefore underwrote the credibility of public men. Journalism was a theater of masculinity in which the main object was not the communication of news in any modern sense, but the propagation of opinion, and the demonstration of style and honor itself.

Along the way Piccato makes major contributions to the analysis of such cultural and political themes as the nature of public opinion, literacy, the practices of journalism in particular and publishing more generally, and Bohemian and student life in Porfirian Mexico...