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  • El segundo imperio. Pasados de usos múltiples
  • Robert H. Duncan
El segundo imperio. Pasados de usos múltiples. By Erika Pani. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004. Pp. 177. Notes. Bibliography.

As a general rule of thumb, the value of historiographies is often limited to those searching for a quick overview or for graduate students looking for a shortcut in preparing for exams. On the other hand, a minority of historiographies manage to take a step beyond this narrow role and place their subject material into a broader historical context. It is into this latter category of "historiography as history" that Erika Pani's work falls. As a top scholar on Maximilian's Second Empire in Mexico (1863-1867), Pani has undertaken the task "to rescue" the Empire, not as an exceptional episode, but as an integral part of the Mexican historical experience. Pani accomplishes this chore in 124 pages of text plus a comprehensive 53-page bibliography. Divided into seventeen sub-categories, the bibliography comes in especially handy for those interested in pursuing further research on a particular topic. One somewhat ethnocentric complaint, however, is the book's lack of an index; this hinders its usefulness as a quick reference.

The book begins by surveying contemporaneous accounts (both Mexican and foreign) by those who lived through the Empire. It then proceeds to the decades immediately following when Mexican history was placed at the service of the nation. It is here that Pani skillfully reconstructs how various authors fashioned a liberal-nationalist narrative that still echoes in the popular literature today. Cracks in this "official" version, as she explains, only appeared in the mid-1960s when historian Edmundo O'Gorman challenged his colleagues to make the Second Empire part of Mexico's national history.

If criticism is to be made, it involves the book's final chapter and its somewhat hurried treatment of the current literature. While new research trends are examined, they are not well integrated into the argument. Many works of the last couple of decades are unfortunately summarized in a sentence or two (some do not even make it out of the footnotes). Even Pani's own important contributions to the field are glossed over. It is somewhat disappointing that the author's insights are not brought to bear on the contemporary literature as fully as she does with her nineteenth-century [End Page 282] sources. Since it can be assumed that many readers will have particular interest in the current "state of the art," this absence is regrettable.

However, this criticism in no way lessens the quality or value of this work. In the end, Pani's highly readable book tells us as much about the process of historical construction and writing as about the Empire itself. And on that basis alone, it is well worth a read even for those non-specialists who might otherwise pass on Maximilian's empire.

Robert H. Duncan
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, California
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