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CHAPTER 2 Compromised Free Markets in El Periquillo Sarniento TEACHERS, ALBUREROS, AND OTHER SHOUTERS For many readers, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) by José Joaquín Fern ández de Lizardi (1776–1827) represents one of the first true ‘‘Americanizations ’’ of a European mode—in this case, the picaresque. Benedict Anderson points out that the pícaro’s traditional social fluidity allows him or her to travel freely across social and class boundaries in order to scrutinize the assets of the new land, its ‘‘hospitals, prisons , remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes,’’ thereby offering a cross-sectional inventory of an essential Mexican nationhood (Imagined Communities, 30). Like Humboldt’s Essai politique (1811), El Periquillo takes stock of the new Republic, determining what is valuable and to whom it belongs. In a similar vein, Antonio Benítez-Rojo sees Lizardi’s novel as an instrument of class solidification, reflecting Lizardi’s ‘‘desire to build a solid bourgeois home for the criollo,’’ the caste of American-born Spaniards perpetually stuck just below Iberianborn Spaniards in the hierarchy (‘‘José Joaquín,’’ 338). Indeed, a sense of responsibility to the patria, especially to his criollo class, unifies all of Lizardi’s work. Lizardi wished his headstone to read that he had served his patria as best he could; like the Venezuelan statesmanscholar Andrés Bello (1781–1865), he envisioned this contribution as that of a national educator. All of Lizardi’s works—from his voluminous journalistic output to his broadsheet diatribes, his ‘‘mood pieces’’ like the Cadalso-like Noches tristes (1818), and his satiric novels like Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832) and La Quijotita (1818)—take to heart the Horatian imperative to please and instruct. They are brimming with the wish to be representative and educational. The purpose of El Periquillo Sarniento, as for most of Lizardi’s work, as Benítez-Rojo puts it, is ‘‘to correct the moral defects he saw among the middle class criollos’’ (‘‘José Joaquín,’’ 331). Lizardi’s educational mission, however, goes beyond correcting moral defects. Indirectly, his educational goal is to teach criollos their role and their limits in society. Yet we find a remarkable exception in the middle of El Periquillo’s project to educate the decent middle class: there is also a frank and realistic depiction of Mexican street life. The novel’s ‘‘photographic’’ representation of the everyday life of cardsharps, beggars, and prisoners forced into military service has often earned El Periquillo the rubric of costumbrismo in the grand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish tradition of artists like the painter Francisco de Goya and the writer Mariano de Larra. When Perico first descends into the underworld of rakes and hucksters, he is led by his old schoolmate Januario, a vulgar Virgil who, like Perico, is a criollo fallen from his proper place in society. When Januario tells Perico that he will instruct him in ‘‘los términos más comunes y trillados de la dialéctica leperuna’’ (354) [the most common and tested terms of the rude dialectic], this dialéctica leperuna turns out to be a rich archive of plebeian and regional dialects, cadences of street denizens (léperos), technical vocabulary of shysters and journeymen, beggars and highwaymen, and even the occasional phrase in Indian languages. Discussing this unique dimension of the novel, Jean Franco claims that the main agenda is control: it intends to subjugate the voices of the masses under what she calls ‘‘the Golden Mean of the mercantile society, in which it is necessary to have a certain mutual trust among all the contractual participants.’’ The street voices, according to Franco, are commodified. They are like ‘‘different products in a store,’’ ultimately owned by the paternalistic narrator who writes, after his conversion , from a place of middle-class stability (‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa ,’’ 33).1 I would agree with the observation that the dynamics of the novel echo those of the marketplace. But I would add that—instead of being like the products for sale in a bourgeois almacén—the colorful voices within El Periquillo reflect a more nuanced, and changing, commercial landscape. The patronizing storekeeper/narrator that Franco sees in this jumble of competing sounds does not quite possess the unchallenged voice of the master, for that is changing as well. The vulgar voices of El Periquillo are in an uneasy coexistence with its high-minded sermons.The novel is full of virtuous characters’ longwinded attempts to instruct Perico (and the reader); but...

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