Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico by Horacio Legrás (review)

Rather than focusing on the perceptible hierarchies imposed upon culture by the Mexican post-revolutionary state through its ruling ideology, Horacio Legrás takes the absolute contingency of the revolution, and the suspension of institutional life, as the point of departure for his study Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico. The disarticulation of the dogmas upon which the Porfirian order rested allows Legrás to revisit the remarkable importance of culture during the process of state formation and during its consolidation, in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively. In terms of historical implication, this book is akin to the wave of revisionist works on the Mexican Revolution that have questioned the paradigm of a monolithic revolution since the 1970s by highlighting its heterogeneity, and by bringing into discussion the dynamic and multifaceted character of Mexican nationalism during the early years of revolutionary settlement. Hence, the originality of this book does not rest in its historical approach but in its theoretical significance for understanding modern Mexico through the lens of deconstruction.

With Derrida's Specters of Marx in mind, Legrás asks whether and how Mexico could have "inherited" its revolution, and whether it is possible for us, skeptics of national origins, to conceive the Mexican Revolution as a transformative inheritance rather than as a passive transmission of institutionalized images of the past. Legrás's response to this inquiry involves the assumption that social reality cannot be understood outside the realm of textuality. The case of the Mexican Revolution provides a fertile ground to carry out this approach, since this revolution, and the cultural crusade that followed its armed phase, produced an archive of boundless proportions that has been subject to multifarious interpretations. "How can we reach the uniqueness of the revolutionary past if everything we discover about it adds another layer of meaning that removes us from the center?" Legrás asks in the first pages of this book, to make it clear that his concerns are far removed from those favoring archival objectivity (3). The author delves into Mexico's revolutionary archive with a post-structuralist sense of language and meaning, and encounters a wide expanse of interpretative possibility regarding a topic that one might have considered exhausted.

Textuality, characterized as "A mood, a way of behaving and understanding the world" (3), is not only the main attribute defining Mexico's revolutionary archive but also the principle behind Legrás's interpretations of modern Mexico. Each chapter interconnects a myriad of cultural productions, social actors, public performances, architectural structures, philosophical and ideological trends, and sociopolitical and academic practices. Legrás approaches this corpus through relationships based on contiguity, and by means of textual analysis that privilege aporia and ambivalence over causation and agreement. Throughout the book, he highlights a series of paradoxes, including the one surrounding the culture/revolution divide, in order to display a horizon of struggle and confrontation over the goal of creating a shared national community after the revolution. The transmutation of life into politics, the inclusion of the indigenous population as the index of the nation's "negative within", the existential impasse of the public within the private, and many other challenges brought about by the revolution, were all deliberated through the mediation of culture among the most diverse sectors of society and through opposite fronts and ideologies. Hence, culture, and not revolutionary violence, became the compelling force behind the cluster of works, social agents, and practices that became modern Mexico. Contrary to the characterization of Mexico's national culture as official ideology or as the product of a lettered class, Legrás shows that, during the 1920s and 1930s, this culture was complex, paradoxical, and most of all, marked by the passion of revolutionary action at the moment of its inscription.

In order to propose an analytic of the textuality of the revolution, Legrás performs a veritable archeology of modern Mexico...