Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations

Chapter 3. Novels, Newspapers, and Nation, The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

59 3 Novels, Newspapers, and Nation The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Amy E. Wright S erial novels constitute the majority of narrative fiction written in Mexico from the 1840s to the 1870s. While in literary histories these novels are often relegated to a category of inferior literature, I argue that these texts functioned as important instruments for the construction and dissemination of national models, and thus served as a fundamental tool in the early phases of the nation-building process in Mexico.1 In this chapter, I explore the circumstances surrounding the appearance of the first serial novels in Mexico, as written by Justo Sierra O’Reilly and Ma­ nuel Payno, in order to begin to establish the similarities and differences between this occurrence in Latin America and Europe.2 In this transmission of cultural codes, the concepts of nation and novel were intertwined in a relation of near-symbiosis: by the second half of the nineteenth century, “civilized” nations were supposed to produce novels as an increasingly important component of national expression, while novels had their own crucial role to play in the creation of nations. As a form of communication, narrative has been privileged as a powerful mode of persuasion. Communications theorists have proposed that messages provided in narrative form are more effective than direct, didactic persuasion.3 This principle is not by any means a new discovery; in the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals in Mexico, like their Latin American and European counterparts, began to place new value on narrative messages and discuss the merits of the novel as a powerful means for reaching a broad public.4 Conversations between Hispanic classicists and romantics during the first half of the nineteenth century reveal an ideological divide with regards to the fledgling genre. While classicists tended to reject the novel as an upstart genre—an illegitimate mix of the classic forms of epic, drama, and poetry—intellectuals with progressive aesthetic 60 Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America and political tastes more frequently embraced its possibilities in form and function.5 The classicists’ disdain for the novel as a young genre left it open to definition at the hands of the authors who chose to cultivate it. The Mexican intellectual Vicente Riva Palacio quipped that during the 1840s, writing novels in Mexico “was the work of Romans,” referring to the “heroic effort” involved in the difficult and marginalized task.6 Though an uphill battle, it was a worthy one for those with energy and inclination, for the novel’s popularity among readers was impossible to ignore. This made it an appealing vessel for the articulation of progressive visions of nation—a great concern of the historical moment in which the novel entered the culture of Europe and the overseas colonies. Like their European contemporaries, Mexican elites were in search of ways to cultivate a sense of nation within the country’s territorial borders. Official freedom from Spain after the long wars of independence translated into an immediate need to unite a vast territory notable for extreme geographical and cultural diversity. But as daunting as these physical realities were, the internal landscape of colonization was equally imposing. As was the case in the other former Spanish colonies, nation-builders in Mexico were confronted with a populace that had been trained by several hundred years of colonial rule, and the roots of the mental colonization of these subjects went much deeper than the more immediate changes to Mexican laws and political systems would indicate. Thus, the elites faced the monumental task of preparing the horizon for the conception of a cohesive nation in the minds of the Mexican people.7 For the first time, the inhabitants of the lands now called Mexico were to be considered constituents, as opposed to subjects. Thanks to the new Enlightenment forms of thought, often termed in writings of the time as the spirit of the century, Mexicans were thought to be newly liberated from the bonds of oppression and tyranny. The connection between the new republican government and citizens hinged on a common spirit and interests emanating from a so-called inherent national “character,” rooted in the romantic school of thought in vogue among liberal elites of the time (see Achugar’s chapter in this volume). Citizens needed to be able to recognize enlightened government over tyranny, and, in order to do so, they first had be educated in the ideas of “self-governance.” This imperative arose around the middle...