Manifestos in Postrevolutionary Mexico: Opposition, Imposition, and the Comprimido Estridentista

The years following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) witnessed energetic debate at all levels of Mexican society concerning the future of the nation. Utilizing the notion of “political fictions,” in this article I claim that a tension between two competing political fictions was laid bare and can usefully be examined through analysis of manifestos from this period. Building upon previous scholarship on this genre, I show how manifestos arose from institutional crisis and served as both the voice of the oppressed and as the bully pulpit of political elites in Mexico. Iconcludebyanalyzinganartisticmanifesto, the ComprimidoEstridentista (1921), which is an early attempt to synthesize these two political fictions. Foreshad-owing one of the central concerns of the postrevolutionary state, this unusual text attempts to institutionalize the promises of the Mexican Revolution.