The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity

Three. Nation and Lamentation: The Catalysis of Mexicanidad

nation and lamentation t h r e e Those dead, on their feet, let them stand, I turn to their shadows, like white clouds, With the ray of the sun resplendent, That with laurels they may crown Their immortal brows. I sing, and I sing to their glories, See, that if fortune wickedly robbed them Of the pomp that crowns victories, The tones of divine honor, Yet destiny bequeathed to us their bright names. —guillermo prieto, From “poem, read in the Forests oF chapultepec, commemorating the battles oF the 8th and 13th oF september, 1847” Angry and traumatized by a staggering military defeat, many Mexicans poured their recriminations, self-criticisms, and apologias into personal histories and essays about the U.S. American invasion. They blamed the United States, they blamed opposing Mexican factions, and they blamed themselves as they struggled to explain a profound challenge to their nation and to their own identities. Few, however, wrote war fiction or poetry. Compared to the midcentury publishing juggernaut in the United States, Mexico’s imaginative literary landscape offers relatively little regarding la guerra fronteriza, or la inThe Catalysis of Mexicanidad 1   The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War vasión norteamericana, as it was also known. But herein arises a paradox. In the United States, the abundance and patriotic fervor of wartime novelettes and unabashedly nationalistic propaganda flared with a sharp intensity, but the war itself quickly slipped from the foreground of the U.S. American imagination . In the United States, the U.S.-Mexican War did not substantially alter or make permanent any new national meanings, in part because the war was preconceived , and then reconceived after the fact, as an affirmation of an already established national purpose; and it is worth noting also that the particulars of anti-Mexican thought and sentiment had been brought to a sharp focus in the mythification of the Alamo battle of the 1836. Instead, the U.S.-Mexican War’s elision from the collective U.S. American memory testifies to a denial of the war’s contingent particularities, which conflicted with an already established national ideal, details that characterized not just the war but also the presence of Mexico and Mexicans in U.S. history. In Mexico, however, the anti-essentialist disturbance that troubles texts like Lowell’s The Biglow Papers runs unchecked in war-era writings, indicating how the conflict troubled the national literary projects in the literatures in both countries. Moreover, Mexican editorials and other forms of agonistic expression fed directly into la Reforma, the nation-forming urgency that swept Mexico in the 1850s and established the liberal political ideology that would eventually overcome conservative-monarchist reactionaries.1 This is not to say that Mexicans remember the invasion in simple opposition to a U.S. American amnesia. In Mexico, the war gave full view to a failed national project, and thus precipitated the calls for and efforts on behalf of a new nationalism, a new narrative that would consolidate the Mexican state, which had, as Lomnitz and others have noted, lingered in a generally fractured condition following the revolution against Spain.2 But many Mexican writers have themselves elided the war in favor of a story that sees the beginning of contemporary Mexican liberalism in other events, such as the presidency of Benito Juárez, a Zapotec native who became president in 1858, temporarily lost control during an invasion by France in 1863, and regained it in 1867 with the expulsion of the French and the execution of Maximilian.3 Thus, in Mexico, writers have suppressed the U.S.-Mexican War’s role in fostering a desire for national belief, and I am here locating Mexican literary nationalism in works such as El Zarco, by Ignacio M. Altamirano, an author who emerges in the following analysis as having his own indirect but nonetheless germane link to U.S.-Mexican War literature. As Ernst Renan put it in 1882, nations become nations in part through the narratives of loss.4 Rather than a matter of historical awareness, the key difference between the United States and Mexico Nation and Lamentation 1   lies in that in Mexico, the defeat by the U.S. American forces acts as catalyst toward nationality, because nationality—and I draw again on a view put forth by Homi Bhabha—emerges from a perceived moment of dislocation, or disruption , the sense that one must reconstruct an identity amid...