Death

and the Idea

of Mexico

Claudio Lomnitz

!
ZONE

BOOKS

NEW YORK

2005

CHAPTER NINE

Death and the Mexican Revolution

The Resistance of the Souls Durin9 the Porfiriato

The conditions of caudillismo as we have descrlbed them begin
their metamorphosis after the liberals' triumph V> 1867, and particularly under ~orfirio Diaz (1876-19.11). Thelconciliation between liberal and conservative factions that followed the French
intervention is well known. It found its most eloquent expression
in rhetorical gestures and overtures to the dead. Indeed, triumphant liberal intellectuals such as Vicente Riva Palacio and Manuel
Payno took special pains to memorialize both liberal and conservative victims of Mexico's civil wars. 1 Presidents Juclrez, Lerdo,
Gonzalez, and Diaz followed suit.
The careful consecration of a stabilized version of national history was reflected in the mortuary ritual of the period: in a blossoming patriotic death cult, characterized by lavish state funerals;
in honors paid to dead heroes of opposed political factions; and
especially in the successful-concentration of the illustrious dead
in the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres at Mexico City's newly
established municipal cemetery at Dolores. 2 The honored dead,
after all, could no longer talk back, while the living were appeased as they basked in public recognition. It is at this point that
the state effectively consolidated its ability both to consecrate
heroes and to avoid their defilement.
In 1900, the image of national concord was such that the Porfirista poet Juan de Dios Peza could credibly exalt the immortality of the nation and paint civic strife as but an episode of the past:
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Todo lo muda el tiempo;

Todo lo cambian los aiios;
SOlo el pueblo no pasa,
ni envejece,
Ni muere, ni olvida, ni es ingrato.

El cielo azul y diafano;

OF THE NATION

AND

THE MEXICAN

REVOLUTION

Time changes everything;

Everything changes with the
years;
Only the people doesn't pass,
nor age,
Nor die, nor forget, nor be
ungrateful.

Toldo ayer del estrago y de

Ia muerte;
This blue, transparent sky,
1Hoy dosel de Ia paz y del trabajol3 Yesterday's canopy of havoc and
death,
Is today' s awning of labor and
peace!

The mood of national reconciliation in peace, work, and science rested on a pantheon of heroes that included mortal enemies
and reconciled them under the national banner. Diaz incorporated onetime rivals such as juarez, Lerdo, and erstwhile supporters of Maximilian. Maximilian himself was not included, because
he was a foreigner, but Juarez did set aside funds for the widow of
his indigenous general Tomas Mejia, and Maximilian's story itself
was romanticized soon enough.
As state control of the dead and of national history was consolidated, however, the role of the dead in the opposition press
grew. It is, indeed, in this period of increasing stability that journals such as El hijo del Ahuizote began to make a regular habit of
printing calaveras to pass judgment on the firmament of public
fignres and on the regime itself:
The entire republic is a giap.t cemetery, and there are thousands of
niches here that justify our opinion.
First. The grave of dignity. Rest in Peace! ...
Honesty! May the earth fall upon you lightly.... You died suddenly, and in your place they have built a monument: this is a time of
hypocrisy.
Morality! You lie here.

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DEATH

D. PonFU.Do P:ERPBTuo.
Fn8 un ferocM Sacarre4l
quo roin6 on aiglo cabal
metii!'> en nn ehiqnihuite;
Mnri6, y P?r l1ien 6 por mat
No hny qnten el cetro le quite,

EL SUJI:GRO D:a:

D.

PxRPSTIJO.

Sir~i6

4 Jm'i.rez, eirvt6 6. Lcrdo,

y 8. Gonr.S.le&, y 6. Porfirio,
y basta' al otero; y fui tan enerdo1

que ohr6 con 'l.odos .de aooerdo

jtJC dobld como un liriol

y . __

EL CO)l:ZRCIAN'tB xN xllrai:suNoa.

De Rerlfn y de LondOn
cont,"at6 pan gr.1nd~ al credlto,

del qne nos t.m1o un tril!dn1

y ruuri6 do un i.trRCOn
de fiambrc, a) pagar E-1 rMito.

Figure 9.1. Top row of a calavera sheet, led by Don Porfirio and his father-in-law, Manuel Romero Rubio, in
1 hijo del Ahuizote, November 2, 1890 (courtesy of Hemeroteca Nacional).

And where is liberty? Here, under this tombstone. lts epitaph

was carved at the workshop of Belen prison. 4

Sheets and sheets of satiric calavera epitaphs were the counterpart of the official death cult. They denounced the corruption of
the regime and its politicians and the misappropriation of heroes
past, particularly Juarez, who had been placed at the core of the
new state cult: "Let's dry the tear that runs down our cheek at
the memory of this patriot, gather our emotions, and with a loud
voice curse the tyrants once again!" 5 A host of specters haunted
the Porfirian state; there was a latent sense that the official death
cult was a shell 'game and that the souls meant to sleep under the
bronze and marble were lurking somewhere else, and perhaps
demanding their due.
Porfirian progress in particular was haunted by the dead,
despite the government's ecumenical effort to'unite all factions
in death, to nationalize the dead. Porfirian industry, peace, and
progress brought mechanized killings to Mexico: railroad accidents, mass deportations to labor camps, ethnocidal campaigns in
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DEATH AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

areas that underwent rapid incorporation into capitalist export

In what appears to be a modern version of the same idea, Po-

production, violent suppression of labor strikes.

sada's Gran pante6n de calaveras depicts a cemetery visit to Mexico

City's Pante6n de Dolores on the Days of the Dead. Visitors come

Diez caches jalaba la locomotora
Nllmero cincuenta y cuatro,
Y su maquinista era un extranjero,
Causa de tanto quebranto.

Locomotive number fifty-four

Was pulling ten cars along,
Its engineer, who was a
foreigner,

in a tram to see their brethren. As in the classical vanitas theme,

Caused all of this grief.

Tres caches quedaron de los de
tercera
Todites hechos pedazos,
Y por dondequiera nomis se veian
Cabezas, piernas y brazos. 6

Only three cars of the third

class remained
All torn into pieces
And everywhere you could see
Strewn heads, legs, and arms.

The massification of death went alongside vast transforma-

'
i

tions in the organization of production- industrialism, booming

agribusiness in sugar, henequen, rubber, vanilla, cattle- as well as

ern version of the vanitas painting. Vanity here is not an attribute

new forms of governmentality: model prisons, hospitals, schools,

and urban projects. These dramatic changes generated a self-consciousness, a sense of the heaving recklessness of the times, a feeling that surfaced to consciousness in a new kind of identification

with the dead or, one might say, in the strong pull of the dead on
the living, a pull that was more intense than in any previous
period. Jose Guadalupe Posada is the artist who tracked this sensation with the greatest creativity.
Posada's Gran pante6n de calaveras is a striking depiction of
death in times of progress .(figure 9.2). In some respects, the
engraving appears to reproduce the old vanitas theme that was
perhaps most obsessively enunciated in the sixteenth-century
Capuchin Chapel of the Bone in Evora, Portugal, a church that is
decorated with human bones from floor to ceiling. Indeed, it is
the bones themselves that greet the visitor: "Nos ossos que aqui
estamos. Pelos vossos esperamos (We, the bones who are here, are

just waiting for yours]:'

the living are already skeletons, whether they know it or not. At

the cemetery, the living skeleton and the dead skeletons confront
each other with a gaze of recognition.
Several elements subtly depart from traditional vanitas images.
First, and contrary to the standp.rd baroque imagery, the gaze of
the living is returned by the dead. If the living can be said to be
already dead, so, too, are the dead in their way still living. The
strewn skulls of the dead have their own field of vision. They are
witnesses. Second, the living and the dead recognize each other as
skeletons, that is, as already part of the past. Just as the dead haunt
life with their gaze, so, too, are the living always knowingly already
skeletons, always already touched by death, obsolete. The tram
and the modern cemetery are the cherry on the cake of this mod-

'

of the individual (who is presented not in his or her fmery but as

an entirely bare skeleton); it is, rather, an attribute of the age.
The identification between the living and the dead produces a
distancing, disaffection, or lack of identification with the age on
the part of the living. The era becomes brutal, petty, or ridiculous, according to the occasion. ln another image, Choque de un
electrico con un carrojunebre (figure 9.3), one of Posada's many
accident scenes, a tram destroys a funerary wagon, heaving the

corpse of a very urbane gentleman onto the street. Death itself,

with its slow cortege of honors, is a casualty of modernization:

the community no longer stops for the dead, but goes about its
business, riding on the engine of progress and destruction.
The national government did its best to control and bring together the remains of the dead, and thereby lay claim to an objectivity and impartiality, to the transcendental serenity of the immortal nation. In 1900, the pro-government paper El imparcial put
this forward with-clarity, precision, and a dose of triumphalism:
"Now that hatred has been extinguished and consciences have
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DEATH AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

quieted down, now that the heat has ceded its place to impassivity, and proof, data, and documentation have replaced eloquence
and rhetoric, now that there is a new method for this form of
knowledge, now is the time to reconstruct the nation's history."7
However, in the very act of scienti(ic dissection, historical reconstruction, and monumentalization, the state displayed its vain

obsolescence.
Time ran on aimlessly toward death, and it was in a hurry.

Figure 9.2. Jose Guadalupe Posada, Gran pante6n de calaveras.

Indeed, the vanity of the age was no longer best exemplified in

the airs of the rich and the fair, though these, too, were certainly
present. The greatest vanity was the forward-looking pretensions
of the era. Progress was the greatest of the vanities, and it touched
both the rich and the poor.
The cyclists of Posada's Calavera "Las bicicletas" are all skeletons (figure 9.4). In an almost identical version of this same
engraving, Posada labels each bicycle with the name of a Mexico
City newspaper. The forward movement of technology and history, represented here by the bicycle (which was a novel and very
bourgeois article of leisure at the time), is in fact only transporting skeletons, transporting people who are in every way like their
ancestors except in their ridiculous insistence on racing.

Progress is just a merry-go-round. But while those who ride it

are in some ways already dead, already behind the times, already
skeletons, the intended victims of progress are still, momentarily,
alive.

The detainees about to be sent to Valle Nacional, where they

will die of hard labor and disease in a matter of months, are still
living (figure 9.5). 8 They still have their faces. But they will soon
be dead, very soon be dead.
In sum, if the Diaz regime tamed internecine conflict and

b'rought mortal enemies together in a grand official funeral,

under an opulent monument of marble, the era as a whole was

haunted. Displaced ways of life, the wrenching movement of capitalist expansion, modern statecraft,-ahd the mechanization of

death all brought the dead back as witnesses, ghosts, and omens.
Rumors of the end of the world haunted the era of progress.
Figure 9.3. Jose Guadalupe Posada, Choque de un eltktrico con un carro fUnebre.

'

'i

'

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DEATH AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

Figure 9.4. Jose Guadalupe Posada, Calavera "Las bicicletas."

Figure 9.5. Jose Guadalupe Posada, Deportados af Valle Nacional.

Revolutionary Violence
They say that about a million people died in the Mexican Revolution. Some died of hunger, others of sickness. Some died in battles
between modern and well-equipped armies, others were killed in
raids or hung as suspects. Sometimes foreigners were targeted,
their properties pillaged and their integrity violated. Other times,
villagers rose up in arms and killed in acts of popular justice.
None of these forms of violence was entirely new to Mexico.
The principal novelty was the deployment of efficient mechanized killing, with its infrastructure of machine guns, modern
artillery, and troop transportation by rail. Indeed, episodes such as
the Battle of Celaya (1915), where General Alvaro Obregon defeated General Pancho Villa, were in some ways Mexico's equivalent of the great Civil War battles in the United States; they were
Mexico's most brutal confrontation with industry in the service
of death.
Other forms of killing had an older genealogy. The hanging
of peasants and ragtag revolutionaries had already been used in
earlier campaigns: in the punitive expeditions against the Totonacs of Papantla, the Maya of Yucatan, and the Yaquis of Sonora,
for example. 9 Another staple of revolutionary violence, the firing
squad, had been deployed to great effect at independence, and
much more recently in the wars of the Reforma and during the
French invasion. Great figures had faced the firing squad, including the liberal Melchor Ocampo and the conservatives Miram6n
and Mejia, not to mention Maximilian of Hapsburg himself.
Finally, the violence of the village revolt, with its basic staplesburning the local archive, unlocking the county jail, and killing
unpopular caciques- had a lineage that can be traced back to the
colonial period. 10
However, a few true novelties connected to the violence of the
revolution deserve some attention. The scale of the killings was
unprecedented, and it reflected in a perverse fashion the depth of
Porfirian progress. The Mexican Revolution was the first Mexican
war in which troops moved massively by rail. It was the first war
funded by a booming export economy (guns for cattle, guns for

DEATH

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IHE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

oil). It was the first Mexican war that relied heavily on movement
and trade on the U.S. border. It was also the first to use photogra
phy and film as mechanisms of publicity.
Thus, when the agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata was killed in
an ambush in 1919, his body was laid out for public viewing in the
regional capital Cuautla. Rather than destroy or mutilate the body,
as officers would certainly have done a century earlier, General
Gonzalez ordered that the,corpse "be injected and then pho
tographed, and that the pictures be remitted to the capital."" Bet
ter to preserve the body for public identification than to defile it
to horrify the immediate group of spectators. Proof of death was
now mass-mediated. So was proof of power and military strength.
Tbe armies of Pancho Villa and Obregon routinely brought pho
tographers with them, and sometimes film crews, in order to
mobilize public opinion or garner international support. 12
Finally, subtle transformations surrounding political killings
are pertinent to our approach to the history of death in Mexico.
Until the Mexican Revolution, there were two principal ways of
organizing a military execution: hanging, which was carried out
unceremoniously and mainly used to leave a corpse behind as an
object lesson; and execution by firing squad, which often involved
some sort of judgment, and perhaps a moment to pray or even
make a final wish.
In addition to procedural differences, the two forms of execu
tion often indexed distinctions of class or military rank, with the
hanging or casual shooting (or mass firing squad) reserved for the
clases infimas and the rank and file, and the individual execution
before a firing squad generally reserved for notables and officers.
In politically delicate cases, such as the executions of Iturbide and
Guerrero, summary trials and firing squads were organized far
away from the centers of public opinion, but they were still key to
any claim of honor and legality.
During the Mexican Revolution, a relatively new form of execution also achieved notoriety: the political assassination. Porfirio
Diaz's strategy of national appropriation of dead enemies was
well known and well accepted at the time the revolution broke

Figure 9.6. One of Posada's "End of the World" series connected to the 1882 comet.

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OF THE NATION

out. It is in part for this reason that presidents and faction leaders
preferred the subterfuge of political assassination to legal execution. Between 1910 and 1929, a good number of presidents, presidential hopefuls, generals, and congressmen were assassinated
rather than shot in battle or before a firing squad: Presidents
Madero, Carranza, and ObregOn; Vice President Pino Suarez;
Generals Pancho Villa, Lucio Blanco, Jesus Carranza, Arnulfo
GOmez, and Francisco Serrano; Congressmen Belisario Dominguez and Francisco Field Jurado, among others.
President Francisco I. Madero and his vice president, Jose
Maria Pino Suoirez, were murdered in 1913 after turning themselves in to Victoriano Huerta's farces, before they even reached
prison. Huerta could not afford to keep them alive, even in prison, but he also did not want to try them or have any official ceremony of execution, so he murdered them, and then claimed that
the president and the vice president had been caught in a crossfire
between presidential guards and army troops. The 1919 killing of
Emiliano Zapata, under President Carranza, did not require this
kind of cover-up. It was a military action, and it was justified as an
act of war and because Zapata had been routinely treated by the
press as a criminal rather than as a general. Exdlsior's headlines
put it thus: "The bloodthirsty leader [cabecilla] fell into a trap that
was ably prepared by General Don Pablo Gonzalez." 13 Zapata's
hideout was referred to as a madriguera (animal's lair) rather than
as a general's headquarters.
Nevertheless, the subterfuge and assassination of Zapata did
taint the Carranza government and put it in an uncomfortable
position when Villa's most prominent general, Felipe Angeles,
was captured and turned in rather than "killed in action:' Friedrich Katz provides a telling analysis of the incident:
By capturing Angeles instead of killing him, Sandoval had created a
difficult dilemma for the Carranza administration. They could not
summarily execute him, as they did with the three men of his escort,
who were immediately shot after their capture. Such an execution
would have further discredited the Carranza administration in the

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eyes of Mexican and foreign public opinion. Its image had already
suffered badly as a result of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata only
a few months before:' 14

As a result, a brief military trial was held for Angeles, in a milieu

that the government hoped would be unfavorable to this Villista
general. However, these strategies proved to be a public-relations disaster: "Huge crowds, largely friendly, came to the railway stations of Parra! and Ciudad Chihuahua to witness the
arrival of Angeles and two fellow prisoners .... Committees of
ladies ... supplied Angeles with food, offered him clothing and
even money, and interceded on his behalf with the Carrancista
authorities:' 15
The lessons of the case were clear enough to Carranza and his
successors. Thus Pancho Villa was murdered in 1923, after he had
retired to private life, on the orders of one of President Obregon's
trusted generals, Joaquin Amaro. The assassination was staged in
such a way that Obregon could claim to have had no part in it,
feign outrage, stage a mock investigation, and imprison the paid
assassin (for eight months). Amaro's signed order was discovered
by historians in the 1990s, when all the participants in the event
had long been dead.l6
In his turn, President Venustiano Carranza was murdered in
1920 in a shoot-out designed expressly for the purpose. The assassination was also clearly done at Obregon's command, tho~gh it
was Colonel (and future president) Lazaro Cardenas who actually
sent the tetegram with instructions. As in the Villa case, official
documentation only came to light in the 1990s, when all the relevant actors were dead and buried.
Carranza's burial and funeral dramatized the tensions implicit
in state appropriation of the dead. As in the Madero situation,
there was no legal way to get rid of Carranza, who was president
at the time 6f his assassination, though he was on the run from a
military uprising. Killing him in a military action was the best
choice. At the same time, the commander in charge of the military
action at Tlaxcalaltongo, Puebla, where Carranza was killed, was

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one of Obregon's men, so suspicion immediately fell on Obregon

as the true author of the crime. Colonel Rodolfo Herrero's troops
forced members of Carranza's guard to sign a statement testifying
that Carranza had committed suicide, and government agents
later tried to pressure the doctor who had carried out Carranza's
autopsy into ratifying suicide as the cause of death." Obregon, on
the other hand, ordered Herrero to present himself to the authorities: "General Obregon has declared that he is not willing to
sanction or tolerate this action, which is contrary to civilization
and the moral principles of the revolutionary movement." IS In
short, Obregon tried to wrap himself in a mantle of legality and
mournful regret for the demise of Carranza."
While all of that was happening, Carranza's corpse was moved
to Mexico City by rail for burial. His widow, daughters, and
friends had to organize his funeral in a city governed by Carranza's assassins, and so negotiate state appropriation in a particularly delicate field. The family accepted a massive outpouring of
support for the president. According to Excelsior, the funerary
cortege included more than thirty thousand mourners and was
the largest in Mexican history. 20
Probably in order to avoid the embarrassment of being rejected at the cortege, Obregon was in Puebla during the ceremonies. The widow, in her turn, had Carranza buried in a thirdclass grave at the municipal cemetery of Dolores, and she and her
daughters kept the jar that contained Carranza's heart in their
homes until he received full state honors, twenty-two years later.
When the first bit of earth was shoveled onto the casket, the
crowd began to sing the national anthem. Carranza's remains,
including his heart, were finally transferred to the Monumento de
1~ Revolucion, in a solemn ceremony led by President Manuel
Avila Camacho on February 4, 1942.
During the revolution, political assassination became a way of
maintaining the outward trappings of legality and legitimacy
while consolidating real political power. Assassination also had
the secondary benefit of weaving a net of complicity and silence
within the revolutionary leadership. At the same time, the strat-

egy created a visible fault line between state and nation: a distance that was strategically exposed by Carranza's supporters in
their decision to bury him in the third-class section of the municipal cemetery rather than in either the Rotonda de los Hombres
!lustres or one of the city's wealthy cemeteries. Similarly, the
tombs of Madero and Pino Suarez became sites of pilgrimage, and
they were soon dedicated as monuments to the heroes of democracy. Madero's martyrdom was the rallying cry for democrats
throughout the twentieth century, while loyalty to Madero was a
source of prestige in the contest between revolutionary factions
after the assassin Huerta was ousted from the presidency and into
exile. The state's death cult could easily and readily migrate from
the government to the nationalist opposition.

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Death, Social Contract, and the Cultural Revolution

As Mexico's armed revolution began to wind down, beginning in
1917 and especially after 1920, a time of national reconstruction
began. During this period, which is conventionally dated 1920-40,
new versions of citizenship, social justice, and the social contract
)
were put forth and debated.
In Mexico, the image of a state that originated in a social compact never really resonated with the people. In a way, this is
hardly surprising. The liberals who founded Mexico's constitutions were themselves caught between their desire to promote
individual liberties against corporate powers (the Church, the
army, the indigenous community, the hacienda, the university)
and their rejection of unmediated forms of popular sovereignty
that-would leave the nation prey to demagogues and tyrants, or
worse, to the whims of the mob.11 Caught between the fear of the
plebs and the rejection of traditional corporate power, the liberals
seemed defensive in their exaltation of a constitution founded on
individual liberties, and their actions were easily perceived as a
ruse on the part of the political class.
T)le radical peasant revolutionary Zapata put this most pointedly:

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Of= THE

NATION

[F}reedom of the press for those who cannot read; free elections for
those who do not know the candidates; proper legal proceedings
for those who have never had anything to do with an attorney. All
those beautiful democratic principles, all those great words that gave
such joy to our fathers and grandfathers have lost their magic for the
people, ... [W]ith or without elections, with or without an effective
electoral law, with the Porfirian dktatorship or with Madero's
democracy, with a controlled or a free press, its fate remains the
same as ever. 22

The difficulty of imagining a society built on a contract among

equals is hardly surprising: Mexico was a land of searing poverty
and arbitrary justice, debt peonage, and caste wars. As if to confirm all of this, the U.S. historian Hubert Bancroft scribbled his
impressions of Mexican political society during his visit to that
country in 1883:
The people are not the nation here as with us; the politicians are
absolute. There is no middle class, but only the high and the low, and
the low are very low indeed, poor, ignorant, servile and debased, and
with neither the heart or the hope ever to attempt to better their
condition. I have traveled in Europe and elsewhere, but never have I
before witnessed such squalid misery and so much of it. 23

The views of other foreign visitors were not much different, even
in the heyday of Porfirian prosperity. True, foreign commentators
lavished praise on the most visible badges of progress (the railroads; the theaters, paseos, and pavilions; the elegant mounted
police; the bon ton of the cientifico bourgeoisie), but the underbelly of dramatic inequality rarely receded entirely from view.
Thus the anthropologist Frederick Starr, who worked in indigenous communities for years in this period, wrote:
(Indians 1 cannot understand why anyone should come to them
unless he has designs against them. They are afraid of being robbed of
land; they suspect new forms of taxation; they fear that they may be

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forced into milit~ry service; they fear lest they be made to labor on
distant plantations for foreign owners. These fears are based upon
old experience, and on the whole are not without foundation. 24

'
In addition-to persistent, and perhaps even growing, inequalities, the idea of refounding the Mexican state on a social compact
was hindered by the institutional weakness of the state itself. As
Fernando Escalante has demonstrated, the weakness of the state
as an institutional structure, and the comparative strength of the
political class, made the citizen an exalted figure of utopian political rhetoric rather than a building block of an actually existing
political order. 25
However, if the construction of the state on the shoulders of
an enlightened citizenry was an incredible fiction to most of Mexico's population, the fantasy of reforming society from the state
seemed more credible, at least to some.
From the wars of independence forward, Mexico, like most of
Spanish America, came to be known beyond its borders principally as a limd of revolution. This was the case to such a degree
that the evolutionism adopted as an official philosophy during the
Porfiriato had an altogether different set of resonances in Mexico
from what it had in Europe or the United States. Rather than a
justification of imperial supremacy and racial hierarchy, Mexican
evolutionism underwrote a program of progressive development
under conditions of peace. The legitimation of racial hierarchy
was in some ways an ancillary benefit (for the elites), but certainly not the ideology's principal attraction: Mexicans had their
own effective, homegrown ideas of social hierarchy that long predated evolutionism. 26
Evolutionism's principal attraction was its rejection of revolution as a viable mechanism of social change. Evolutionary ideas
about race provided a language with which to frame progressivism.
Thus the famous educator Justo Sierra denounced revolution-decades before the publication of his triumphal Mexico, su evoluci6n
social in 1900: "Is the Indian less of a slave? Is the Creole freer? Are
the Indian and the Creole richer? If we had developed in peace,
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would we not have acquired the same level of progress that we

enjoy today, but without the ruins that litter our soil. .. ?" 27 Indeed,
for the later (and better-known) Sierra, independent Mexico's
greatest triumph was precisely its transition from cyclical revolutions to an era of sustained progress and evolution.

However, despite the frequency and number of Mexico's socalled revolutions, not one of them had a feature that is a key
characteristic of modern revolutions: not one of them had a "terror." By this I do not mean, of course, that Mexico's nineteenth-

century revolutions were lacking in violence and brutality. By

"terror" I refer instead to a phase in which a triumphant revolutionary faction that conceives of itself as a vanguard uses its newfound control over the state to organize massive persecutions and
executions of civilians as a strategy to revolutionize society. The
"terror" is, very specifically, the use of the state as an instrument

of revolution against a backward society. France under Robespierre is of course the classic example, but the Russian, Chinese,

and Cuban revolutions also had their terrors in this sense.

The fact that Mexico's nineteenth century had only scattered
and localized instances of state terror, and no cases of properly
revolutionary terror, is highly significant. Katz has pointed out
that the only clear-cut cases of state terror in Mexico's nineteenth
century were the Indian wars: against the Maya, against the
Apache, in Chiapas after the 1864 rebellion, in Papantla, in the
Huasteca, among the Yaquis of Sonora ... 28 These instances of
violent repression and extermination accompanied either projects

of colonization or the changing forms of land use and labor

exploitation required for new capitalist exports, or else they were
violent responses to local rebellions that were often spurred by
the perception of a weakened state. In short, we do not find
wholesale attempts to revolutionize society from above. Nineteenth-century Mexico provides many examples of state terror,

DEATH

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REVOLUTION

nineteenth century. On the contrary, leaders like Valentin Gomez

Farias in the 1830s, Juan Alvarez, Ocampo, and Ignacio Comonfort in the 1850s, or indeed Juarez in the aftermath of the French
invasion were all tempted to use the power of the state forcefully
to wean Mexican society of its backward religiosity, its sloth, its
superstition, its feudalism. If Mexico's nineteenth-century revolutions did not have their terror, it was not for a lack of ideologists,
but rather for lack of a modern state with which to carry out
these ambitious reforms.
The liberals of the Reforma in the 1850s, for example, had a
sufficiently radical program of reform to inspire its share of Robespierres: the expropriation of all Church property and the banning
of all public expression of organized religion and religious education affected not only the Church but also society. Moreover, the
wars of reform had their share of acts of desecration: burning of
churches ancY assassination of priests. However, rather than a terror, the moment of liberal triumph was closely followed by programs for national reconciliation.

This has usually been chalked up to the fact that the leadership
of both the liberal and the conservative camps belonged to Mexico's elites. This argument, however, is not convincing: there are

plenty of cases of fratricidal struggle within Mexico's elites before, during, and after the Reforma. The reason for the rapid transition from triumph to reconciliation, with no intervening terror,

is, rather, that the state the liberals conquered did not have the
institutional wherewithal to launch aggressive top-down reforms
of communities and families.
The Mexican state of the 1820s, 1850s, and even 1870s could
not rely on an efficient system of communications within the
country; there were no real national institutions other than the

This lack of a terror cannot be explained with reference to the

ideology of the leadership, either of independence or of the
progressively more radicalized liberals and Jacobins of the mid-

Church and 'the army, and the army relied heavily on local militias. Civil society, though increasingly organized, was not horizontally integrated to any great extent. As Fran~ois-Xavier Guerra
has convinqngly demonstrated, the central state relied on a precarious and loosely cobbled together network of alliances. 29 It
was no doubt for this reason that triumphant liberals made the

394

395

but no proper case of revolutionary state terror.

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Church their target: it was easier to defeat a formal organization,

formidable though it might be,. than to stage an assault on the
decentralized network of communities and families that constituted Mexican society.
What we have in the Mexican case is thus a long history of revolutions that might have liked to have had their terrors but lacked
the means to carry them out. It is no doubt for this reason that the
revolutionaries of 1910 saw themselves as working within a revolutionary tradition rather than as inventing the revolution out of
whole cloth. Thus the 1917 constitution was framed as an
amended version of the 1857 constitution. Advanced though the
document was, it did not pretend to have the world-historical significance of France's Proclamation of the Rights of Man or Russia's October Revolution. Rather than as an entirely novel
invention, the Mexican Revolution saw itself as a time of reckon-

ing, as the culmination of a century-old process.

It is true that, like so many of its sisters, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 thought of itself as giving birth to a "New Man:'
Unlike his flashier siblings, however, Mexico's New Man would
be, for the most part, about the same as Europe's or the United
States' Already Existing Man. For instance, Salvador Alvarado,
Yucatan's revolutionary firebrand, represented the Mexican
people as a slumbering giant, and the revolution as a sort of alarm
clock that would make the people rise not to some new worldhistorical era but to its place at the table of progress:
If we, the lucky inhabitants of this privileged land, keep sleeping, if
we are not strong, aggressive, and enterprising in the exploitation of
our fabulous wealth, take heed- other races more enterprising,
aggressive, and tenacious will come, and whether we like it or not,
they will take what is tolay ours, our lands, forests, livestock,
homes. They will have shown more force in the struggle for survival,
and our children will shine their shoes. 30

However, continuities-between revolutionary ideology and

liberalism, positivism, or evolutionism should not detract atten-

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REVOLUTION

tion from the originality of the Mexican Revolution, with respect

to either Mexico's own history or world history. If the ideologues
of 1917 saw themselves as completing the work of their liberal
forebears, their revolution ~as nonetheless the first to provide the
leadership with the infrastructure to carry out these reforms (if
only partially). Nor was Mexico's revolution lacking in international siguificance: if it was merely the instrument for emerging
from colonial degradation, its agrarian reform and oil expropriation shaped one of the most innovative postcolonial states on the
contemporary world scene.
It is only because the Mexican Revolution had its true moment
of societal reform from the state that historians agree almost
unanimousl,y in extending the revolution beyond its armed phase
(1910-20), all the way to 1940. No one extends the dates of the
revolutions of independence, of the Reforma, and of the French
intervention beyond their military conclusions. The Mexican
Revolution is thought to have "concluded" when the intensity of
its projects for societal reform finally began to quiet down."
That Mexico's revolutionary awakening involved refounding
the state is reflected in the uncanny number of parallels that revolutionaries drew between their revolution and the Spanish conquest. These are sometimes very explicit, and sometimes implicit.

For example, the anthropologist Manuel Gamio framed revolutionary indiaenismo as a second conquest: "We believe that if

[Latin Americap] governments persist in pressuring and disdaining indigenous.people, as they have done in the past, their failure
will be absolute and irremediable. But if the countries of Central
and South America begin a new conquest of the Indian race, as
Mexico has done, failure will turn into triumphal success." 32

Jacobin att~cks on the Church and popular religion struck a

similar chord. Relying on the very same language that the Franciscans had used to uproot Mayan idolatry, Salvador Alvarado sought
to eradicate Yucatan's false religion in his saint-burning campaign.
"Once the idol is dead," he said, "the cult is finished:'ll Ironically,
it was now the revolution that played "true faith" to Catholicism's
"idolatry." If the devil had once misled Maya and Aztecs with that
397

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DEATH AND THE MEXICAN~ REVOLUTION

mockery of truth that was idolatry, the Church now misled the
people with the false truths of religion. If Spaniards had instilled
the fear of death and hellfire in order- to create the state, the revolutionary state could only be created by wrenching death from the
hands of false religion. What goes around comes around. If Mexico's state had originally been founded on religion and conquest,
its new state would be erected on science and revolution.
In this matter, Tabasco's Tomas Garrido Canabal was entirely
explicit: "As long as man worships deities and believes in ...
an afterlife, he will remain mentally shackled and the enemy of
his own liberation." 34 Revolutionary "defanatization campaigns"
in Yucatan, Veracruz, Tabasco, Michoac3.n, and Sonora cast the
teacher in the role of priest, the law in the role of God, science in
the role of religion, and work in the role of the religious cult,
while Catholicism now stood in the role of idolatry and superstition. In an uncanny replay of the Spanish conquest, the new state
sought to supplant the old:

sors and enshrine a rational state. The colonial state had been
founded on the idea that Mexicans owed a spiritual debt to their
colonizers, who were therefore owed tribute and privilege. This
spiritual debt was based on trickery, on false religion. Now was
the time to expropriate the heirs of these foreigners and their
new foreign allies.

Numerous church buildings ~ere burned to the ground, dynamited,

or demolished, sometimes by schoolchildren wielding pickaxes.
Some states banned religious nomenclature for towns, streets, and
shops. But the most controversial acts of desecration involved the
destruction of religious symbols, especially the images of saints,
which were torched and smashed to pieces by revolutionary quemasantos, often during obligatory PNR rallies or school festivals.
Many states outlawed public religious ritual, such as processions, pilgrimages, the celebration of saints' fiestas, and bell ringing. Even
Mass became a clandestine activity, illegally celebrated in private
homes. 35

There was in this exercise of ~ympathetic magic a will both to

re-create and to reverse the social order. Spain had enslaved the
Indians, tearing them from a state of nature that was closer to
scientific reason (and, for the communists of the 1930s, to scientific socialism), and led them astray with their false religion.
Now was the time to burn the false idols of the colonial oppres-

Death, Revolution, and Neeative Reciprocity

The idea of a reversal OF inversion of the prerevolutionary order
is significant, for if the old order was desecrated through revolutionary violence, the imagery of death and of the dead proved
useful for figuring the new social order. This is particularly so
because the revolutionary order was framed in constant reference
to social justice and to justice in the retributive, compensatory
sense. The revolution's "social justice" was not so much about
equality before the law as about leveling the playing field. Because
the origins of these inequalities were found in colonialism, the
revolution was framed aS awar of national liberation.
A few examples can clarify this: agrarian reform in Zapata's
Plan de Ayala was cast as a law of restitution. Labor laws, too, were
framed in the same spirit: capitalists had violated basic workers'
rights; they would now have to pay compensation. In the 1917
constitution, ownership of Mexico's soil and subsoil is said to
originate in the nation: expropriation (for instance, of oil) was,
again, really only restitution. Accordingly, foreigners were submitted to particular strictures in Mexican property laws.
The new social contract was not a pact among equals, and the
new revolutionary order was not a stable arrangement between
brothers. It was instead a regulatory and compensatory mechanism to level the field between the exploiters and the exploited.
It was a frame for ongoing negotiation between competitors
who could not eliminate one another, who were brought together
by fate rather than love, a bit like Mexico and the United States.
Indeed, the radical government of Lazaro Cardenas, which was the
peak of state-led revolutionary reform, was characterized by revo
lutionary concessions to radicalized popular groups (aararistas,
399

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workers, teachers) and by its willingness to turn power over

peacefully to a more conservative faction. This, in the end, was
the secret of the comparative mildness of Mexican revolutionary
terror. 36 Mexico's new contract was thus meant to be not eternal
but rather a new stage for negotiation and tolerance between
these rivals.
Death and the dead proved very useful for imaging this new
dynamic arrangement. The precedents of Aztec sacrifice and the
brutality of the Spanish conquest were always available to provide
modern violence with its coat of arms: indigenizing it in the one
case, associating it with colonial domination in the other. During
the Porfirian dictatorship, liberal opposition occasionally relied
on Aztec sacrifice as an image of state arbitrariness and bloodlust,
while conservative critics did the same for earlier generations of
liberals. Thus, to Francisco Bulnes, the "physical and moral ap
pearance" of the liberal president Benito Juarez was "that of a
god in a teocalli, inexpressive on the humid and reddish rock of
sacrifices:' 37
During the Mexican Revolution and the years that followed,
this same genealogy was taken up by foreign commentators (see
fignre 9.10). 38
The problem that revolutionary governments faced with reference to Mexico's national image was quite considerable, and it
would have been truly severe had the revolution not been contemporaneous with the great butchery of the First World War and
the internationally far more objectionable Russian Revolution.
These ameliorating circumstances gave revolutionary governments, intellectuals, and sympathetic foreign commentators room
to frame revolutionary violence in an idiom other than that of
Aztec savagery.
The most obvious countef-narrative framed revolutionary violence as redress of the violence of conquest. Within this framework, Mexican history could be figured as a child of violence and
death, and revolutionary order as a space of competition and
coexistence between the- oppressors and the oppressed. One
panel of Rivera's 1923-24 murals at the Ministry of Education is

DEATH AND -fHE MEXICf"N

REVOLUTION

perhaps the best expression of the new position (reproduced as

figure 1.5 in the Introduction, page 47). In this painting, a popular
urban celebration of the Days of the Dead, attended by Rivera
himself, is pr~$ided over by a dead band. Among the members of
the band we have both antagonistic social types (worker, peasant,
capitalist, soldier,plergyman) and identifiable revolutionary heroes
and antiheroes: Zapata (front and center) and Huerta (behind him
'
on the right).
The image can be said to nationalize death in a new way. As in
the Porfirian death cult, death in this mural presides over the
Mexican populace as a whole. The leveling function of death
allows Rivera to construct a baroque tableau, where ancient enemies and friends preside equally over the fiesta of the living.
However, Rivera's image acknowledges a tense harmony in all of
this, a form of coexistence-in-competition between the classes.
Moreover, because this panel follows an earlier one that represents the indigenous commemoration of the fiesta, which is a
solemn ceremony of respect for the dead rather than a Dionysian
orgy of blood, the genealogical link with the indigenous civilization is inverted. The violence of the conquest unsettles the indigenous world and gives rise to the modern history of Mexico, a
history that culminates in revolution.
The fact that the revolution was regarded not as the end of
class struggle in Mexico but as a framework for renegotiating
connections between the classes helps us understand why Mexican death imagery became so important in the decades between
1920 and 1960. Like Leon Trotsky's "permanent revolution," the
Mexican Rev.olution recognized its provisional character; unlike
the Russian case, however, reform occurred within a capitalist system and therefore could not afford to eliminate either antagonist
in the capital-labor relationship. Mexico was a backward country;
the revolution provided a new point of entry to modernization
but not the ultimate triumph of either the Indian or the proletarian. Within this context, images of the social order, and especially
of a social contract or agreement between the classes, oscillated
between two poles, one of which was egalitarian and founded on

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DEATH AND THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE NATION

reciprocity (in either a liberal or a communist formulation), the

other of which had the Spanish conquest as its model and was
based on negative reciprocity.
By "negative reciprocity" I mean relationships of exchange built
upon forced extraction, rape, or assassination. For many writers
and artists of the period, the revolution was not a simple dialectical
resolution of the violence of the conquest; it was instead a diffusion
of this form of exploitation.

Death and Revolutionary Heeemony, 1920-60

Two general kinds of arguments are offered to explain the predominance of, or even obsession with, death in Mexican culture
in the postrevolutionary period. The first strand sees the phenomenon as the natural precipitation of two death-obsessed cultures (Spanish and Mesoamerican) coming together on violent
grounds. Barbara Brodman's study of death in Mexican literature
takes up this line of argumentation: "Death as a way of life was an
element inherited from both mother cultures [Spanish and Indian]
and sustained by four centuries following the Conquest in which
'Mexico experienced more violence to life than any other country
in the world."'" This point of view seems to have consolidated
around the intellectual invention of lo mexicano, especially in
social psychology and philosophy, though it was also a staple of
literary criticism and art criticism.40 It had become dominant by
the 1950s and went more or less unquestioned until the 1980s.
The second strand, which emerged in the 1980s, sees postrevolutionary death obsession as an aspect of a national mythology
rather than as a true reflection of popular character. The groundbreaking work for this line of argumentation was Roger Bartra's
La jaula de la melancolia (1987; The Cage if Melancholy), which
views the cult of death as an aspect of the melancholic sentiment
that is the very driving force of national mythology, a sentiment
that displaces the "national soul" to the receding horizon of "tradition:' Within this broad umbrella, there have been several more
specific arguments about t~e ways in which death was mythologized in the postrevolutionary period. The most elaborate of
402

Figure 9.9. Alejandro Casarln, "zNo ha concluido aUn el culto a\ dios Huitzilopochtli?" in E/ Padre Cobos:
Peri6dico a/egre, campechano y amante de decir indirectas ... aunque sean directas, March 11, 1869, p. 103.
lithograph, 21.5 x 30.5 em (courtesy of Museo Nacional de Arte).

DEATH

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these is by Carlos Monsiviis, who, like most contemporary critics, singles out one dimension of Mexican death obsession: "the

Mexican's" alleged indifference to death. For Monsivais, this

myth originated in the stoic attitudes of military men during the
Mexican Revolution, celebrated in Mexican corridos, and was then
turned into a "national characteristic" during the postrevolution-

ary period, given a genealogy, and codified in high culture by

Octavia Paz in his Labyrinth '![Solitude, and then transformed into
an object of mass consumption and tourist art.41

These two strands- death obsession in Mexican high culture

as a condensation of popular attitudes toward life and death, and
death obsession as a nationalist appropriation and distortion of
popular culture- are equally true, but they are also equally limited. Neither argument adequately explains the morphology of
postrevolutionary death obsession, why the theme brought together disparate and sometimes philosophically opposed artistic
tendencies, or why death obsession in Mexican culture declined
between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Perhaps a good point of departure for acquiring a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon is Paz's 1949 affirmation that modem Mexican death was sterile, that it lacked
eroticism:

Figure 9.10. "Mexico 1913-the Lust for Blood Is Bred in the Bone," in Frederick Starr, Mexico and the

United States: A Story of Revolution, Intervention, and War(Chicago: Bible House, 1914), p. 3.

In a world that lacks transcendence, that is closed in on itself, death

in Mexico neither gives nor receives; it consumes itself and satisfies
only itself. Thus our relationship to death is intimate, more intimate,
perhaps, than that of any other nation, but it is devoid of significance
and lacking in eroticism. Death in Mexico is sterile; it does not fertil~
ize or engender, the way that the Aztec or the Christian death did. 42

Paz means here that, unlike earlier Catholic and Aztec practice,
contemporary Mexico did not sublimate death as a sacrifice.
Whereas for Mexico's Indians death was directly tied to fertility,
and whereas for Christians the dead could act as advocates for the
living once they were in heaven, contemporary death was in itself
futile, meaningless.

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Paz's view on the de-eroticization of Mexican death is incomplete, however, and a closer inspection of this matter leads to an
understanding of the ways in which death was culturally elaborated in the postrevolutionary period. Mortuary eroticism has
two principal strands: the first is the attraction that a fusion with
the earth or with timelessness ("eternity") holds in the face of
life's suffering. This "fatal attraction" also involves the sense of
transgression that comes with taking one's leave of the imperious
dictates of the living. The second form of mortuary eroticism is
the sublimation of death in ideas of transcendence. Whereas the
first form portrays death as a release, the second dwells on the
power over life attained after death.
Paz's argument focuses on the second form of eroticism: his
main point is that the "solitary Mexican" of the late 1940s left the
Indian and the baroque Catholic worlds behind but had not yet
embraced modernity as a project of his own. As a result, "the Mexican" could not construct his own transcendence. Because he had
no future, and because the Christian afterlife was sinking in the
cultural horizon, sacrifice had ceased to be anything but a futile
gesture: "the Mexican" had nothing to sacrifice for, no belief in the
afterlife, no wholehearted embrace of modernity. This is what Paz
meant when he claimed that death in Mexico lacked eroticism.
Paz thus framed his argument on death in connection to
socially dominant ideas regarding the future, and his statement in
fact does not touch the first form of eroticism described above
(death as release). His diagnosis was that at the time of his writing
(the late 1940s), Mexicans were still insufficiently committed to
modernism, to its universalist potential, to have built an image of
a collective future worth sacrificing for. In this context, familiarity with death was both the result of Spanish and indigenous traditions and the effect of a lingering tradition that refused to die
but could no longer live.
A literary representation of this condition can be found in the
works of Juan Rulfo, particularly in his story "Luvina," about a
town that is a waiting room for death. 43 Its inhabitants live suspended in a timeless vigil, kept in place only by the claims of their

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dead. The dead, with their bllnd passions, have made_ life sterile
for the living, and in the fa-ce of this sterility death has become
insignificant, "lacking in eroticism," as Paz would have it.
In Pedro Pciramo, Rulfo's protagonist, Juan Preciado, returns to
Comala, his hometown, to seek out his father, the cacique Pedro
Paramo. Unlike Luvina, whose inhabitants are waiting for death,
Comala is populated entirely l;>y ghosts, all of whom are the chil
dren and the women of Pedro Paramo. Juan Preciado's return to
his father, to his home village, is itself death. It is also the discovery
of a community founded on what I called "negative reciprocity";
founded on rape, on elopement, on murder; founded on the universal paternity of the cacique Pedro Paramo, on the loose identification between half brothers, between bastard children and
spurned lovers. life both in Luvina and in Comala is suspended in
the present. Not even death can awaken it. Like purgatory, the present is a prison. In this, the Mexican death obsession of the early
and mid-twentieth century is distinct from the dominant colonial
model. In Rulfo's writings, there is no future, even in death. 1bus,
for both Paz and Rulfo, the weight of history is a fetter to life.
A comparable issue is explored by Eraclio Zepeda, a writer
from Chiapas, in his story "Benzulul" (1959), where the Indian
Benzulul feels that he will never rest, not even in death, if he keeps
his Indian name. Only if he takes the name of the ladino cacique
EncarnaciOn Salvatierra will his soul find peace: "EncarnaciOn Salvatierra is gonna die good. He's not going to wander at night. He's
not going to be haunting; he's not going to be crying. He's got a
name! "44 In this story, Benzulul seeks the more modest form of
mortuary eroticism that I identified: death as a release from life's
travails. Yet the character fears that if he keeps his Indian name, his
soul will continue to wander; not even death will release him.
Benzulul changes his name to Salvatierra, but upon hearing of this,
the cacique hangs him dead. For trying to change his station and
future, Benzulul dies like an Indian.
Two facts are significant in all this: first, the sense that a break
with the past was necessary in order to have a life that included a
future; second, that the dead, that the past, still held the living

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firmly in their clutches. That the countryside is the primary location of the dead is also significant. The Labyrinth '!f Solitude, El
llano en llamas, Pedro Pciramo, and even "Benzulul" were all written at a time when urbanization in Mexico, though rampant, was
still incipient. Mexico's lack of commitment to modernity could
be experienced as a disproportionate weight of the countryside
on the nation as a whole.
Looked at from this perspective, the generation of the 1960s,
always suspicious of the older generation's sublimation of things
Mexican, had more in common with Paz and Rulfo than they
often cared io admit. The light touch of the so-called aeneracion
de la onda is in certain respects the triumphal moment of urbanized modernity, of a Mexico that was no longer buried under the
weight of its dead.
What these writers lacked in historical gravitas, they made up
for in their breathless discovery of the new urban metropolis.
Free at last from the clutches of History, with its solemn custodians all dressed in black, this generation could, at last, turn its back
on necrophilia and celebrate other forms of eroticism: girls of the
Palacio de Hierro, Acapulco playboys, rock and roll, or, in more
proletarian versions, the Mexican cumbia and the jotonovela, with
feminine curves protruding out of every frame. For the generation of the 1960s, intellectual parricide was the only way to
accede to their rightful inheritance: the construction of new lives,
with new meanings, with new futures, required a break with the
master narrative of Mexican history, a narrative that had, for the
most part, been created only to call for its own destruction.
Mexican consumer culture was so voracious, and its embrace
of modernization so joyous, that it 'Yas capable even of consuming
Mexican death obsession, presented no longer as Dionysian popular revolt, or as the blind and deaf brutality of history, but rather
as a curiosity, an icon of identity. The new intellectual generation's suspicion of death obsession as mere invention, as an illintended distortion of revolutionary popular culture in favor
either of tourism or of the Mexican state, is a distortion but not
an invention.

'

~EVOLUTION

The source of the misconception th~t Paz, Rulfo, and the rest
of them were engaged prirtcipally in inventing Mexican curios
can perhaps be discovered through a very one-sided examination
of the early work'of Carlos Fuentes, a writer who was caught
between this generation and the iconoclastic generation of the
1960s and whose work is frequently guided by totalizing impulses. Riding on the tail of the revolutionary wave, Fuentes
aspired to put together an encompassing narrative of Mexican culture. Rather than restrict his exploration to his own subject position (as later writers of la onda such as Gustavo Sainz and ] ose
Agustin did), and rather than write about a people he knew
closely (as Rulfo and Rosario Castellanos did), Fuentes took in the
whole of Mexico, in a play of generations, classes, and regions;45
In Fuentes's La regiOn mds transparente, this historical synthesis
finds its climax in a collective death scene. In Mexico City, on the
eve of Independence Day, the revolution dies- "Llegas en el
momenta en que se abren en Mexico todas las posibilidades de la
fortuna personal; la revoluci6n estci enterrada"- and it dies in an
explosion of death and spent hopes, betrayal and fireworks. Independence Day is thus observed by the individual deaths of various
characters in the novel, and becomes itself a kind of wake for the
Mexican Revolution. The dead, in short, are no longer the remainder or result of the historical process; they become, instead,
its symptom or sign.
In Rulfo's work, the violence of history, its overwhelming
power, is lived experience, not "the Revolution" as it was told in
political proclamations or history books. Indeed, the revolution as
such is not directly mentioned in Rulfo's works. What we have
instead is a world inhabited by ghosts (in Pedro Paramo) or by
villagers who refuse to live, who refuse to leave (in "Luvina").
Readers in Mexico City may identify these specters with the revolutionary process, but Rulfo refrained from doing this and stuck
to constructing a delirious world of experience.
In Fuentes, on the contrary, the dead stand in for the weight
of the national myth itself. Death is the diaanostic sian of the
national myth, a sign of its continued vitality. Thus the climactic

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death of the servant child is witnessed by Ixca Cienfuegos, the

novel's narrative guide and conscience, who pronounces a kind of
funerary prayer that uses this death to confirm the continuing relevance of Aztec time:
The red doe will take us by the river. ... Ixca bit his teeth, bent his shoulders in a prayer which he did not know how to voice. "Now we stand upon
the regenerated earth, the same earth which dropped us, we are returned
to earth. We have not abandoned it, it is all a sepulcher. We have journeyed. We enter the new irifernos, at the placefrom which we departed."46

One might argue that by taking up the reflexive themes of the

generation of the 1940s and 1950s, Fuentes's narrative obfuscated
the present: death was no longer the weight of the past so much as a
badge of authenticity that lent a much desired gravity and solemnity
to a new urban lifestyle. The extension of the creative impetus of
the 1920s and 1930s, or of the introspective writings of the 1940s
and 1950s, into the generations of the 1960s and beyond required
a transformation of history as experience into history as symbol.
The culture industry then moved very quickly to turn symbol into
trinket, and in the resulting ennui the generation of the 1980s felt
tempted to declare the death of death.
Nevertheless, the line of succession we have just traced casts
a shadow of suspicion on current proclamations concerning the
~ythiflcation of death. It is true that since the 1960s, death rarely
mterrupts modern life in the form of either romance or indifference, but death is now very often figured as the eruption of an
occult or buried strand of Mexico, as a practical demonstration that
modernity's alleged trinmph is_~artial, inconclusive, incomplete.
The death of the modern at the hands of tradition is a reminder of
the limits of collective dreams and the bourgeois origins of these
dreams. The image of the dying revolution, celebrated with assassi~ation, treason, and death in a drunken haze, confirms the cyclical
time of the Aztecs for Fuentes:' Just a few years after the first edition of La reai6n mcls transparente, the image of the Cuban revolution, violently awakening the bourgeoisie from its world of fantasy

on New Year's Eve, becam"-a paradigmatic example of the retUrn of

death as the triumph of a hidden reality over dreams of an Americanized modemit/'
The dynamics of death in modern Mexico were intuited quite
early in Jose Revueltas's writings. 47 Revueltas contrasted the
sentiments of the dying rna'! with those of his loved ones. In "La
frontera increible," the wretched, incommunicable agony of a
dying man is interpreted by the family, friends, and priest who
surround him as a peaceful, "good" death. In "Lo que solo uno
escucha," a violinist has an epiphany, and his wife understands it
as a symptom of approaching death. She does not want to tell her
husband that he will die, and the incompatibility between their
two sentiments (elation and epiphany versus pity and fear) becomes a chasm that separates them. These two stories are studies
in the loneliness of dying, a theme that would later be developed
in a sociological vein by Norbert Elias. 48 From a historical perspective, however, they can be read in a different key: the suffering of agony and death may be silenced by a society that wishes
only to collect its inheritance and get on with life. On the other
hand, death as epiphany, death as truth, also produces its distance
from routine, from the everyday, from those who know that a
commitment to truth is only the omen of death.
Both of these situations occurred in the 1940s and 1950s: the
discovery of the essence of revolutionary caudillismo, by writers
such as Martin Luis Guzman and Mariano Azuela, was an epiphany,
a moment of truth that was also the swan song of the revolution.
The revolution's agony, its tortured death pains were solitary and
private in Mexico's Luvinas and Comalas, while attendant kin
sang praises to the revolution and rushed to claim its inheritance.

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