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1911–1913 “Every event’s name is itself an interpretation.”1 mexican revolutionaries carried on an uninterrupted discourse of memory during the 1910s and 1920s. From the beginning of the revolutionary movement, these voceros de la Revolución, a rather thin but widely scattered stratum of insurgent literati, wrote about recent events as a singular historical phenomenon. They agreed on many aspects of contemporary history and, as a result, constructed la Revolución Mexicana as an imagined force and invented tradition in Mexican history and political life. Political factionalism , however, produced a number of fundamental disagreements about the past. Different revolutionary movements created distinct revolutionary traditions within la Revolución, and these competing and often hostile revolutionary traditions characterized Mexico’s new political culture . Still, imaginings of fraternity in the 1920s, in the form of a “revolutionary family,” accompanied the process of political consolidation. Edmundo O’Gorman began his classic “inquiry into the historical nature of the New World and the meaning of its history” with this unusual challenge : “The most important problem concerning the history of America is the need of giving a satisfactory explanation of the way in which America appeared as such on the historical scene.” For O’Gorman, the way in which America “appeared as such” involved a process of invention more than discovery . America did not emerge “full-blown as the result of the chance discovery ” but “developed from a complex, living process of exploration and interpretation.” O’Gorman’s fundamental point is that the meaning of important and complex events is never self-evident; they are and have to be imagined, invented, and constructed, “within the framework of the image of reality valid at a particular moment.”2 This approach can usefully be followed with regard to the events that enveloped Mexico during the second decade of this century. What follows here is a new kind of history of the Mexican revolution, an account of the way in which la Revolución appeared and developed as such on the historical scene and came into historical being.3 37 1 Madero, his followers, and the revolutionary critics invented the first, enduring representations of the Mexican revolution in the discourse of memory that began upon their triumph in the spring of 1911. Their accounts of the rise of political opposition and the insurrection against President Díaz did not mirror a reality exactly but created one, la Revolución, by organizing meaningful perceptions abstracted from a complex experience .4 This is not to say that Maderistas and other revolutionaries produced an image of the past that was wholly untrue or even greatly distorted. The events surrounding and following the 1910 rebellion were sufficiently complicated and ambivalent to admit a variety of interpretations and a diversity of meanings. Novelists throughout the decade, Mariano Azuela best of all in Los de abajo, presented images of chaos and unexplained or unexplainable events. “You ask me why I am still a rebel?” one of Azuela’s characters asks. “Well, the revolution is like a hurricane: if you’re in it, you’re not a man . . . you’re a leaf, a dead leaf, blown by the wind.”5 Politicians, however, have to find meaning and invent it. The invention of la Revoluci ón by Maderistas and their rivals entailed the mythic reconfiguration of the immediate past.6 Mexico’s past is littered with numerous revolutions, yet all Mexicans know that la Revolución refers to the one that began in 1910. They know that this particular set of events was one of the great revolutions of world history, a revolution that significantly transformed Mexico for the better. This term has long been taken for granted, viewed as a transparent tag, an obvious description of the objective reality of a portion of the Mexican past. It has, in fact, always been more evocative and emotive than descriptive. “It almost seems that the word ‘revolution’ itself,” writes Reinhart Koselleck , “possesses such revolutionary power.” In Mexico, especially, it became the “magic word.”7 It was not always so in Mexico. During much of the nineteenth century, “revolution” referred to both grand and petty political and social upheavals that could just as likely bring forth pernicious results as beneficial ones. The French Revolution had more detractors in early Republican Mexico than sympathizers, and the insurrection led by Father Hidalgo in 1810, being closer in time and space, was even more controversial.8 We would expect the conservative thinker Lucas Alamán...

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