Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship

3: Knowing History, Having Cultura, Being Citizens

33 Chapter Three Knowing History, Having Cultura, Being Citizens H istory is usually about place. Family history has grown in popularity and there are histories of organizations and of such phenomena as slavery, capitalism, and civilization. For the most part, though, what links us to the heroes of our histories is that they lived in the same place. Not every place is deemed worthy of history, though. A nation is one kind of place that has history and the vast majority of academic histories are national. I return to nations later; I am concerned here with the history of towns and cities, which has mainly been told and written by nonacademics . Academic historians who do write the history of towns have sometimes classed their academic attempts as “microhistories” to distinguish them from the “local history” of amateurs; an example is the historian Luis González y González, who inspired my original project in Tapalpa. But I found that Tapalpans took my idea of writing their town’s history quite seriously. When I inquired of the town’s history, most people found something to say even if they then referred me to someone else who knew more. Chapter three 34 I noticed later, however, that ranchos (villages) were not deemed as worthy of history as pueblos (towns). I asked the question, “What is the history of here?” in both towns and villages of the Sierra. The answer differed, of course, from one place to another, but it also differed from one kind of place to another. When I asked the question in Tapalpa, most people had a readymade answer. They gave a kind of potted history of the town. I found the same was true of other towns in the Sierra. When I asked in villages, I found that people also attempted to answer the question, since in principle any place could have a history. However, they did not find much to say—there was no potted history to be told. Nor were they sure that anyone else would know more. Why was history told of towns like Tapalpa, and not of villages? In other words, what was the link between history as a kind of knowledge, and towns and cities as a kind of place? Knowing history gave people something called cultura and towns were considered home to cultura. I will explain what Tapalpans meant by cultura and why they linked it to towns rather than villages , before going on to explain why they considered knowing history to be a sign of having cultura. I focus on the kind of evidence—especially archived documents—that people valued in debating history, following the approach of linguistic anthropologists like Keith Basso (1996), literary scholars like Hayden White (1973), and epistemologists such as Wallace Chafe (1986; see also Stack 2006). I will conclude that having cultura was, in turn, a sign of a good or eminent citizen. The link of citizenship to towns and cities should not surprise us. The word “citizenship,” both in English and in Spanish, resembles and derives etymologically from the word “city,” as my informants sometimes pointed out. Scholars have used the term “urban citizenship” in observing that activists increasingly pitch their struggles in terms of people’s “rights to the city” (Holston and Appadurai 1999). If citizenship is coming to focus on the city, it is returning home; people were urban citizens for many centuries before the rise of the nation-state (Gordon and Stack 2007; Herzog 2007; Sacks 2007; Barry 2000). I say later in the book, though, that the link between history, citizenship, and towns and cities varies from one country to another. In Britain, there is now less of a sense that towns and cities have a history, that they are home to civility, and that civility is in turn essential to what makes a citizen. Urban history and citizenship has survived in Mexico as part of the broad urban-cosmopolitan tradition, once termed the “lettered city,” to which I return in part IV (Rama 1984). Knowing History, Having Cultura, Being Citizens 35 Places That Have Cultura Atacco Was the Town I have said that I was sent to Atacco because I was told the old people might know more of Tapalpa’s history. Atacco was more usually described as the most backward place on earth. In Tapalpa, the people of Atacco were known as indios, meaning poor, stubborn, and ignorant, or...