Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910

7: Buen Gusto and the Transition to Nation: 1830–1850

136 Chapter Seven Buen Gusto and the Transition to Nation 1830–1850 Magali Carrera As discussed in the introduction to this volume, buen gusto encompassed more than a visual style, operating to cohere colonial subjects of the viceroyalties and, subsequently, citizens of emerging nations around a sense of collective selfhood. Buen gusto, then, operated differently at different times, reflecting ongoing sociopolitical transitions. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, buen gusto would inform the corporate identity of New Spain’s Creole elite, who sought to maintain and certify their Spanish heritage as intricately embedded in the unique landscape and history of the Americas. Distinguishing themselves from españoles as well as naturales americanos (indigenous groups), Creoles envisioned a unique and complex socio-physical environment in which they interacted to construct and cohere an amalgam identification of españoles americanos. By the early nineteenth century this identity of español americano was no longer fully viable because, in the wake of independence, it implicitly invoked Spain. Thus, rather than identifying with a Spaniard identity in a local environment, Mexicanos, as citizens of the nation, had to be linked to the emerging geopolitical boundaries of the nation. Buen gusto would continue to operate to discern and refine the cultural content of these boundaries and emphasize connections to international culture. 137 Magali Carrera Mexican publishers demonstrate this redefining of Mexico’s cultural content in association with the critical discernment of buen gusto in history-writing projects of the 1840s. In 1843 William Hickling Prescott, an influential U.S. historian, published The Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortés.1 The three-volume, twelve-hundred-page work, which included six illustrations, utilized diverse sources from previous centuries as well as materials from contemporary historians. Popularized through multiple editions and translations, this epic story of the conquest resonated with international readers as Prescott materialized ancient Mexico’s conquest and subjugation by Spain through the intense visual imagery described in the text. Two Spanish translations of the Prescott work would be published in Mexico City almost simultaneously beginning in 1844.2 Vicente García Torres published Historia de la conquista de México, con bosquejo preliminar de la civilización de los antiguos mejicanos y la vida de su conquistador Hernán Cortés (1844–1846), described as “escrita en inglés por William H. Prescott, autor de la historia de Fernando e Isabel.” For this two-volume edition , Lucas Alamán, a Mexican diplomat, politician, and historian, added extended commentary in numerous footnotes. Thirty-four plates were interpolated throughout the pages of the text. Ignacio Cumplido, another well-established publisher, also produced an edition of Prescott’s history, titled Historia de la conquista de México, con una ojeada preliminar sobre la antigua civilización de los mexicanos, y con la vida de su conquistador, Fernando Cortes (1844–1846). Prescott’s original text filled the first two volumes of this edition and a third volume contained seventy-one annotated plates. The images within each edition were diverse, including archaeological objects , maps, portraits, and historical reconstructions.3 The configuration of the illustrations in Cumplido’s edition, however, was distinct from that of García Torres’s edition. Rather than being arranged as discrete plates inserted into the text, the images in Cumplido’s edition were aggregated into a single volume, arranged serially. Instead of just illustrating textual references, this arrangement allowed Cumplido to guide the reader’s understanding of the comprehensive story of the ancient cultures and conquest through a visual narrative. This essay traces the development and deployment of an emerging civic dynamic of acute perception and discernment linked to buen gusto that appeared in Ignacio Cumplido’s publications of the 1840s, in particular, the 138 Chapter seven gazette El Museo Mexicano. Here, good taste was deployed to promote critical intellectual competences that led the reader to higher levels of understanding and, at the same time, through shared capabilities, linked her or him to a community of citizens of the nation and the world. Buen gusto’s operation of critical discernment was both a perspective and a methodology that Cumplido would deploy in the Historia de la conquista de México publication project in order to not only cohere the volume’s numerous images but, more importantly, assist the reader’s understanding and visualization of the history of...