Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship

4: Skewing of History: Who Could Know History?

47 Chapter Four Skewing of History Who Could Know History? I heard a lot of people in Tapalpa and Atacco say they wanted to produce a history of their town but remarkably few ever got around to it. That was in part because it was trickier than it seemed. Federico’s group was interested in history as part of their attempt to make cultura at home in Atacco—to make Atacco seem like more of a town. But they found it harder than expected to come up with a history, which led me to reflect on what was so difficult. History was skewed. I do not just mean that it reflected the interests of elites, as many scholars have argued. I show in part IV that what was told as Tapalpa’s history did indeed reflect elite interests, especially of Tapalpa’s “old” families. However, I argue in this chapter, in the spirit of scholars like Walter Mignolo (2000), that history was skewed in a more fundamental way. Tapalpans understood history itself—the whole genre or way of talking and writing about history—in a way that favored those people who were in a position to make a good job of it. I was one of those people. By historia Tapalpans understood a kind of knowledge that fit their model of public debate, which I described in part I, and rested on the kinds of evidence that I described in the previous chapter, especially archived documents. I was in a reasonably strong position to produce the kind of history that they valued, because I had studied Chapter four 48 history at university and could travel and gain access to archives. I focus in the second half of the chapter on others who were well placed to produce good history, including don Lupe, Fajardo, and a regional chronicler Federico Munguía. I begin, though, by looking at the difficulties faced by Federico’s group in Atacco in producing good history, even to their own satisfaction, and so to claim cultura and be recognized as good citizens. A brief comparison to Apache narratives of place will help to illustrate the way in which history is skewed, in the Sierra and in the world beyond (Stack 2006). Not Good Business In 1992, the group in Atacco had looked to history to help their hometown of Atacco recover from years of decline. Federico, Andrés, and others from the group began to record the talk of Atacco’s old people, keeping the tapes in a small library together with a few photocopied documents. By 1995, Federico suspected that their quest for Atacco’s history was not paying the expected dividends: “We’ve seen that history isn’t good business,” he said. Andrés persevered , but he likewise felt frustrated, History was, for Federico’s group and for others, a particular kind of knowledge. It was expected, as we have seen, to bring authority to those who mastered it. That was how Federico’s group hoped to restore some confidence and pride in Atacco’s residents. However, it was not easy to harness that power. The group could not simply “create” a history to make authority for themselves . They understood history as a genre that was to be mastered; they measured their own history against the criteria of that genre and found it wanting. The history sought by Federico’s group was, as we have seen, a history of place. Places can be objects both of which and in which something can be known. One implication is that something can be known of one place but not from within that place. That can happen when the evidence is lodged in other places, such as in distant archives, and when the know-how for turning that evidence into full-blown knowledge, such as narrative history, is also somewhere else. Struggling with History The group found Atacco’s history difficult to come by. There were few if any architectural remains of the urban Atacco that they sought to recover. Skewing of History 49 The dusty churchyard in Atacco, where kids propped up tombstones to play soccer, stood in contrast to Tapalpa’s paved and well-conserved plaza. While Tapalpa’s old church was built of solid and permanent stone, Atacco’s church was built of the all-too-ephemeral adobe with wooden timbers. It offered little in the way of civic status, past or present...