Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo, and Popular Culture (review)

Like the casta paintings of the Bourbon period, Lotería de figuras, a bingo-style game developed throughout nineteenth-century Mexico, portrayed social types and icons to fashion the “essence of national identity” (p. 52). Through an intricate system of parody and satire, participants in the lotería game interacted with a stylized taxonomy of playing cards that drew on well-known political and religious iconography. Lotería players engaged the game’s representation of national images from their local and regional perspectives, thus attributing vernacular meanings to a national diversion. In this judiciously researched and elegantly crafted study, Beezley examines how lotería and other mimetic expressive cultures—plays, almanacs, independence celebrations, and itinerant puppet theater—emerged from and expressed shifting social, economic, and political ideals and attitudes of Mexican elite and popular classes in the tumultuous post-independence period.

The work opens with a terse preface in which Beezley both excoriates critics who demand “blatant references to fashionable theories” and celebrates the liberating merits of a “good story” (p. viii). The main body of the book consists of four chapters that recount in exquisite detail the contents and circumstances of Mexican cultural practices between the independence and revolutionary wars. Throughout the work, Beezley emphasizes the historical tensions that existed alongside developing collective memories during this period. In the context of a weak and diffuse national government, popular sources represented Mexico and Mexicans along diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic lines. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and accelerating during the second half of the Porfiriato (1876–1910), official campaigns sought to construct a homogenous, Europeanized representation of the population that would give the country a more modern and cosmopolitan appearance. These competing visions, Beezley argues, ultimately set the stage for the 1910 revolution.

While Beezley does an excellent job of articulating and analyzing the often slippery and fluid multiple discursive meanings of mimetic acts at the local, regional, and national level, he also is careful to underscore the material dimensions of these organized expressions. The paying popular audience, in a sense, was the artistic and ritual works’ “Invisible Hand,” which determined the failure or success of the enterprise. There would be no consumption if the production and distribution of the plays and celebrations did not resonate with the emerging national subjectivities of the spectators.

One critical area that future scholars of nineteenth-century Mexican national identity might consider exploring further is the way in which the Mexican nation developed in relation to the outside world. While Beezley does examine the enduring European influence on state rituals and Mexico’s official government participation in world’s fairs at the end of that century, more could be said about the international and transnational influences on the country’s inchoate national identity. For example, the United States’ imperial acquisition of Mexican territory following the war of 1846–1848 forced Mexican internal and transnational migrants to reconsider their relationship with the nation-state. In cultural expressions such as corridos (ballads), individual migrants articulated their experience of movement and dislocation at a time when the federal government attempted to fix the borders of the national space.

This piece will serve scholars and students alike as a primer on the vast and complicated subject of national consolidation and identity formation in nineteenth-century Mexico. Much of the topic’s theoretical and historiographical debate and discussion take place in the notes. Primary documents (excerpts from almanacs and theater works as well as a menu) are reproduced in various chapters and in an appendix. This clearly written work deserves a wide and interdisciplinary readership.