Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship

1: What Is Historia?: From Oral History and Memory Studies to the Anthropology of History

3 Chapter One What Is Historia? From Oral History and Memory Studies to the Anthropology of History T his book looks at ideas about history in Mexico. My interest in historical knowledge began long before I went to Mexico for the first time in 1991. I enjoyed history classes in a Scottish school and went on to study the subject at Oxford, before traveling to Mexico with the idea of doing my own research. I registered as a visiting student at El Colegio de Michoacán, a postgraduate research center in the provincial city of Zamora in the western state of Michoacán. While at the Colegio, I became especially interested in the 1920s Cristero rebellion, in which Catholic peasants, mainly in west Mexico, had rebelled against the government just established on the back of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). I was also struck by a book written by one of the Colegio’s founders, Luis González y González: a “microhistory ” of his hometown, written in 1968 and reprinted and translated several times since then. After six months at the Colegio, I had the idea of writing a microhistory of the Cristero rebellion. It seemed like a project that I could complete quickly, before continuing my travels or returning to Britain. Things did not turn out so simply and I ended up asking rather more ambitious questions. What is history? What do different people find interesting in history? What value do they see in it, and what do they get from history? And what does it mean to say that places have their history? Chapter one 4 I first went to Tapalpa in April 1992 as a tourist. Tapalpa was a small town that I reached from Zamora by traveling first out of the state of Michoacán to Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, which was the state capital of Jalisco; from there, Tapalpa was a three-hour bus journey to the south. My parents were visiting and The Rough Guide to Mexico recommended the “highland village” of Tapalpa as a place to visit from Guadalajara. That first night in Tapalpa, I talked to a young bartender, Martín, who had much to say about the town’s history, including the Cristero rebellion. He was from northern Mexico and had only lived in the town for a couple of years, but he explained that he had read about it in the life-long diary of a friend of his in Tapalpa, a man 114-years-old. I was intrigued enough about the diary to return to Tapalpa two weeks later. I kept visiting Martín to ask to read that diary, but he never did hand it over. Some six months after that, I interviewed the old man himself. Not only did it turn out that don Chico was only seventy-five years old; when I asked whether he had ever kept a diary, he laughed and said he had never written anything in his life. Although my research had begun with a red herring, I found myself settling into Tapalpa anyway. The town had a resident population of around six thousand. But it felt much fuller during the weekends and summer holidays, when thousands of weekenders visited, mainly from Guadalajara. Together with the town’s quaintness, an attraction was the alpine scenery of the Sierra de Tapalpa—red soil, pine forest—and the cool climate. Forestry, cattle ranching, and agriculture were still important to the Sierra, and over the years I heard a fair amount of talk about land—who owned it and what they did with it. However, many more men worked in the construction industry that was powered by weekenders’ demand for country houses, both in Tapalpa itself and in the surrounding towns and villages. Talk to the Elderly! After a few days staying in hotels, I rented a room in the house of an eightyyear -old lady, doña Julia, the grandmother of my friend Carlos. On the wall of her dining room she had a portrait photo of herself with her twelve sons and daughters: four remained in Tapalpa, four were in Guadalajara, and the other four lived in the United States, where hundreds of Tapalpan men and women also worked, like so many other Mexicans. Doña Julia was very happy to talk of the Cristeros and of those times. Tragically, though, her What Is Historia? 5 first memory...