Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship

Introduction

xi . Introduction , The British actor Stephen Fry launched a recent campaign called History Matters by noting that “historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade.” He goes on to note that many feel that history has fallen victim to “a new and bewildering contempt for the past,” or has been besieged by imperial guilt, until it turns into “one long, groveling apology.” Then Fry changes tack: “Against this we measure the exponential growth in the public appetite for history.” History has never had it so good—history books, TV channels and programs, blockbuster films, reenactments , museums, websites, magazines, and so on. What is history? And why do people find it interesting? This book takes those questions to Mexico, where I spent the best part of five years listening to conversations, attending events, and reading leaflets, newspaper articles , and books. But I had begun asking questions of history before going to Mexico, during my undergraduate studies in history at the University of Oxford; or even earlier, during history classes at school in Scotland. My research in Mexico led me in turn to the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed a PhD in anthropology but also took history courses. I take note of the differences in ideas of history in all those places, including at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, but I end up claiming that there was xii introduction much in common in Scotland and Mexico, and at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the editors of a special issue of the journal Public Culture, with the suggestive title “The Public Life of History,” reach a similar conclusion to that of Stephen Fry. Academic historians may be on the defensive, they argue, but public history is thriving (Attwood et al. 2008). My doctoral research also took me to California, where I looked at ideas of history among Mexican migrants and found quite similar ideas among Anglo-Californians. Of all the things I could say about history in Mexico, I focus on one thing. My Mexican informants felt that knowing history could give a person public status or authority; it could help to make him or her stand out as a good or eminent citizen. That is the focus of this book and the main task is to explain why. Knowing history seemed to make for good citizens, but what was it about history that did so? What was involved in knowing history and who was good at it? And what did people gain from being good citizens? It is not only in Mexico that history is linked to citizenship. The British historian John Tosh (2008) writes that history has been paired many times with citizenship, over the centuries and across continents, even if the nature of the link has varied considerably. Not only is history in the curriculum of schools across the world, but applicants for U.S. citizenship take an exam that includes questions about American history; the British government has moved in a similar direction, and includes history in the book that it publishes for citizenship applicants (The Home Office-Life in the UK Advisory Group 2007). Governments believe that historical knowledge is a good index of the potential of both natives and immigrants to be good citizens. Governments have tended to see history as a source of national pride and integration; others such as Tosh believe that nurturing “historical thinking” could make for a more critical citizenry (Tosh 6). Much has been written already about national history and citizenship; the focus of this book is instead on the history and citizenship of towns and cities. I observed in Mexico that people talked (and wrote) of their towns’ histories and not just of Mexico’s history; they also had a strong sense of being citizens of their towns and cities as well as of their country. I will suggest that urban history and citizenship had a stronger presence in Mexico than in the United Kingdom. However, scholars have found varieties of urban citizenship elsewhere in recent years (Holston and Appadurai 1999; Sassen 2002; Isin 2007). Fewer scholars have written of urban history, but the history of towns and cities that I describe was not unlike the Colombian xiii introduction local historia described by Nancy Appelbaum (2003), the German Heimatgeschichte described by John Eidson (2005), and the histoire de ville of the Zairean intellectual Tshibumba by Johannes Fabian (1990...