La culpa de México: La invención de un país entre dos guerras by Pedro Ángel Palou (review)

In the period immediately preceding the 2010 bicentennial celebration of independence in Mexico, there was something of an editorial scramble to satisfy public demand for historical knowledge. State and private publishers commissioned seasoned novelists, journalists, and historians to produce a vast catalog of fiction and non-fiction works that rendered the past available for consumption. The quality of these books was at times uneven, but in many cases these publications did not simply reimagine the past but instead, contemplating the present, paused to ask how and when Mexico, as a modern state, strayed so far from the idealized course that early liberals had envisioned. This was a loaded question: amid the celebratory fervor, these writers were willing to pit the reality of violence, poverty, and impunity against the spectacular and triumphal narrative espoused by the federal government. One of the most insightful and brutally honest books during the period was Pedro Ángel Palou’s La culpa de México. In the opening pages, Palou describes his book as “una historia narrativa del siglo XIX mexicano … que nos responda con seriedad cuándo se jodió México” (12). This, of course, is no small order and the abrasive language of that proposition, the violent joderse, speaks as much to Palou’s pessimism about the current state of affairs in Mexico as it does about the potential minefield that he treads upon. Discussing failure is anathema to Western reckonings of national identity. But the willingness to recognize and identify the mistakes of the past constitutes a healthy step toward making sense of the present. This premise invites a series of introspective reflections about the historical process and our willingness to confront our own demons: how do we narrate failure in a truthful, meaningful way that neither whitewashes the mistakes of the past nor becomes wholly mired in them? How do we tell an honest, coherent, and compelling national story about a century of missteps? The answer to these questions leads, in turn, to the Band-Aid question: do you pull the bandage slowly and carefully, or do you rip it off and get it over with?

Palou takes the second option: without mincing words he locates the genesis of Mexico’s failure in the flawed implementation of foreign ideologies, particularly the vaguely defined and highly malleable concept of liberalism. He points out that this term, however we are used to defining it, has been employed to cover a variety of contradictory notions about Mexican society and to justify individual political positions. “No hay dos liberalismos más separados que el de Ignacio Ramírez, el Nigromante, y el de Octavio Paz. Incluso en intelectuales contemporáneos casi estrictos como Carlos Fuentes y Carlos Monsiváis, el término quiere decir cosas muy distintas” (11). Throughout the book, Palou demonstrates that liberalism was “un ideario exógeno y una forma de modernidad importada” that had been adopted by local elites to protect their own interests to the detriment of others. Enamored by the prosperity of the Western powers, and desiring to obtain the same wealth for themselves in the newly independent nation, these criollos and mestizos attempted to implement models of social organization that were out of touch with the particular idiosyncrasies of postcolonial life. Indeed this ersatz liberalism “barría con el pasado indígena y así se olvidaba de todas las formas de comportamiento que consideraba bárbaras” (10). In short, according to Palou, the foundation of Mexico’s contemporary problems is rooted in a lack of self-esteem: “nos quisimos otros, negamos nuestro carácter mestizo, colonial. Nos olvidamos que en toda modernización que viene de fuera la sociedad, como bien afirma Bolívar Echeverría, se polariza y que, justo al defender su identidad, no puede otra cosa que dividirla” (163).

In presenting this case and evidence in its support, of which there is plenty, Palou...