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F E S T I VA L A Vigorous Mexico Arising revolution day, the twentieth of November, is one of Mexico’s most important patriotic festivals. On this day every year Mexicans remember and celebrate la Revolución. This day commemorates specifically November 20, 1910, the date selected by Francisco I. Madero for the popular uprising against the dictator Porfirio Díaz. As a commemorative festival, the twentieth of November became an instrument of civic education: “this experience constitutes one of the essential ties of our nationality,” stated the civic yearbook of Mexico City. Through this annual celebration the people of Mexico were and are engaged “in the task of constructing a worthy and sovereign country.”1 In the rites and words devoted to this day, la Revoluci ón was and still is integrated into the religion of the patria. Civic holidays and celebrations serve a number of purposes. Commemorative festivals are designated, fundamentally, to present the past to the present. On these days orations, symbols, and rituals transmit the dominant myths of a society, reaffirming and reminding its members of their historic identity, shared values, and common understandings.2 Mirabeau spoke to their power: the best way, he noted, “of acting powerfully on men in the mass is by means of public festivals.”3 Commemorative festivals also reshape the past (that is, the representation of the past) to meet the needs of the present. Collective memory is transfigured as well as transmitted so that the past can better sanction the particular (most commonly, the dominant political) arrangements of the present.4 Official memory is rarely evenhanded in its recollection of the past. On the contrary, “commemoration silences the contrary interpretations of the past.”5 Holidays are thus used to strengthen patriotism and social solidarity, enhance the legitimacy of the state, and reinforce the popularity of a leader, a party, or a government. Like their religious namesakes, civic “holy days” are separated from everyday, normal time. This temporal segregation, and the ritual activity marking the boundaries, divides the sacred from the profane. Historical events, heroes, and places are imbued with a store of profound collective 99 4 meaning that the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminality,” the scene and time “for the emergence of a society’s deepest values in the form of sacred dramas and objects.”6 The regular recurrence of the special day, the symbolic communication of the day’s rituals, and the festive celebrations staged in sacred centers affect popular memory, imagination, and emotions and constitute a powerful tool of political manipulation. It is not surprising , then, as Evitar Zerubavel writes, that “gaining control over the calendar has always been essential for attaining social control generally.”7 Commemorative festivals in certain countries in the twentieth century have been transformed by states into mass political spectacles:8 monumental symbolic dramas and visual performances that often include rituals, parades , festivals, and sporting events.9 Rituals are nested within spectacles to invoke the “sacred” origins of such imagined communities as nations. Festivals encourage popular celebration and participation, while parades provide intense visual and sensual communication by means of colorful banners and flags, soldiers in formation, and bands playing stirring marches. Sporting events, finally, display a society’s vigor in the present and promise for the future.10 Spectacles are many-layered, complex acts of political persuasion.11 All of these elements in time became integral parts of the spectacle organized by the Mexican state to commemorate the anniversaries of the initiation of the Mexican revolution. This civic holiday, however, the twentieth of November, was born as a subdued day of remembrance. For nearly two decades, Revolution Day was nurtured by voluntary associations and virtually ignored, or at least neglected, by government. During the socalled institutionalization of the Revolution, at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the Mexican state took control of and transformed the commemoration of la Revolución. Within only a few years the twin traditions of pilgrimage to the tombs of the martyrs and musical-literary veladas (soirées) were supplanted by what La Prensa in 1937 called “a great spectacle.”12 For more than sixty years the Mexican state has employed the language of symbols in impressive spectacles to present the picture of a nation created by its revolutionary history and unified in the realization of its revolutionary values. The dominant image in this history of spectacles is that of a vigorous Mexico arising out of a...

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