Nations and Nationalism 7 (4), 2001, 521±531.

# ASEN 2001

Monuments and nationalism

in modern Mexico
D. A. BRADING
Centre of Latin-American Studies, History Faculty Building,
West Road, Cambridge CB3 9EF

ABSTRACT. A key feature in the cultural repertoire of Mexican nationalism has been
the excavation and reconstruction of the archaeological sites and monuments of the
pre-Hispanic past. They afford tangible witness to the foundations of Mexican history
and the putative existence of the Mexican people in the civilisations of Mesoamerica.
Although in the colonial period creole patriots identified the Aztec empire as their
classical past, it was not until the Mexican Revolution that archaeological sites and
monuments were integrated into the nationalism that accompanied and characterised
that movement. The chief author of this cultural turn was Manuel Gamio, a pro-
fessional archaeologist and liberal nationalist, whose extensive writings thus demand
attention. But although he emphasised the grandeur of the pre-Hispanic civilisation,
he advocated the complete incorporation of the contemporary Indian peasantry into
the Mexican nation.

Patriotic Monuments

In 1990±1 the Mexican government mounted an exhibition at the Metro-

politan Museum of Art in New York entitled Mexico: Thirty Centuries of
Splendour. Staged at a time when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988±
94) was negotiating the entry of his country into the North American Free
Trade Agreement, the exhibition presented a spectacular range of artefacts
derived in equal measure from the three great periods of Mexican history ±
the Mesoamerican empires, the viceroyalty of New Spain and the independ-
ent republic. In the catalogue, itself a handsome monument of 750 pages,
Octavio Paz averred that despite the peculiar heterogeneity of the cultures
which had produced these artefacts, nevertheless, a perceptive eye might
observe `the persistence of a single will . . . a certain continuity . . . not the
continuity of a style or an idea, but something more profound and less
de®nable: a sensibility'. The contemporary nation-state was thus the legiti-
mate heir of 3,000 years of history (Paz 1990: 4).
But in Posdata (Paz 1970), written in the shadow cast by the massacre of
students at Tlatelolco in 1968, Paz fixed upon a different kind of continuity.
Had not the decision of HernaÂn CorteÂs to build the capital of New Spain
522 D. A. Brading

amidst the ruins of Mexico-Tenochtitlan perpetuated the dominance of the

capital city over the country it ruled until the present day? Moreover, so Paz
argued, there was a continuity in the manner in which political power was
exercised. What were the modern president and the Spanish viceroy but the
Aztec tlatloani writ large? In these three manifestations there could be
observed the same authoritarian, centralised form of government. To illumine
his argument, Paz pitched upon the National Museum of Archaeology, a
magnificent building, in which all the variegated cultures of Mesoamerica
were presented as antecedents of the Aztec state, the array of exhibition
rooms converging upon the central hall where the Calendar Stone and other
monuments of Mexico-Tenochtitlan were presented as symbols worthy of
veneration. In effect, the museum was a secular temple built to celebrate the
foundation of the Mexican state in Tenochtitlan (Paz 1970).
The role of pre-Hispanic artefacts in Mexican culture was signalised by
Ignacio Bernal, the first director of the National Museum, who praised the
creole savant, Antonio de LeoÂn y Gama (1735±1802), as the first archae-
ologist (Bernal 1980), for it was the discovery of the Calendar Stone and the
monstrous, serpent-girt figure of the goddess Coatlicue in 1790 which had
impelled LeoÂn y Gama to draw upon his knowledge of classical Nahuatl and
provide the first systematic interpretation of the Aztec calendrical system.
The importance of these two monoliths, which had lain undisturbed under the
ZoÂcalo, Mexico City's main square, since the Conquest, was emphasised by
LeoÂn y Gama's clerical censor, who exclaimed that although `enlightened
philosophers' in Europe had located `the Indian nation at the level closest to
that of the beasts and the most stupid brutes . . . this single feature of Indian
culture will dispel all such gross errors' (LeoÂn y Gama 1792: unpaginated
preface). In this context the role of these artefacts was to provide physical
substantiation of the eloquent defence of native civilisation advanced in the
Ancient History of Mexico (1780±1), published in Italian by the exiled Jesuit,
Francisco Javier Clavijero (Clavijero 1964 [1780±1]). Confronted with the
works of William Robertson, Guillaume Raynal and Corneille de Pauw, who
had dismissed the natives of the New World as witless savages and classified
the Incas and Aztecs as at best advanced barbarians, Clavijero purged
previous chronicles of their baroque speculations and boldly presented the
Mexican realm in neo-classical strain as an exemplary culture, endowed with
the full panoply of institutions, laws, concepts and literature. In effect, con-
centration on the grandeurs of pre-Hispanic civilisation had always figured as
a major theme within the variegated repertory of creole patriotism.
The political significance of the creole identification of the Aztec empire as
the foundation of their patria became manifest during the insurgency against
Spanish rule launched by Miguel Hidalgo, a country vicar, in 1810. The
patriot journalists and chroniclers who promoted the movement soon devel-
oped a rhetoric in which contemporary royalist repression was denounced as
the equivalent of the cruelties of the sixteenth-century conquerors. Con-
versely, insurgent leaders were compared to Monctezuma and CautheÂmoc,
Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico 523

the last Aztec rulers. At the Congress of Chilpancingo Jose Marõ a Morelos
declared that `we are about to re-establish the Mexican empire, improving its
government' (Brading 1991: 578±9). The injustice of the conquest thus be-
came a reason for independence. Although the insurgency was defeated, the
creole leadership of the royalist army eventually chose to break with Spain
and borrowed from the rebels their historical fiction of a continuity between
pre-Hispanic Mexico and contemporary Spanish Americans. The Act of
Independence of 1821 therefore declared that `The Mexican nation, which for
three hundred years has neither had its own will nor free use of its voice,
today leaves the oppression in which it has lived' (Brading 1985: 81±92).
The most potent symbol of the insurgency, however, was Our Lady of
Guadalupe, a miraculous image of a brown Virgin, which had been acclaimed
as the universal patron of New Spain in 1746. The country clergy who led the
rebellion offered the Mexican Virgin to their followers as the banner of their
country and movement. Moreover, the constitution framed by the insurgents
specified that Catholicism would remain the religion of the new republic and
deprived all heretics and apostates of their rights to citizenship. In effect, if
the Indians, mestizos, mulattos and creoles who comprised the population of
New Spain had any claim to be a nation, it was not because they identified
with the Aztecs, but because they were united by their common devotion to
`Our Mother of Guadalupe' (Brading 1984).
But neither the Virgin nor Tenochtitlan had any political appeal for the
radicals who swept to power in the 1850s. Their aim was to incorporate
Mexico into the civilisation of the nineteenth century. In pursuance of this
goal, they confiscated church property, closed convents and clerical colleges,
and when these measures provoked a bitter civil war, separated church and
state, expelled the bishops and exclaustrated all friars and nuns. The French
Intervention and the ephemeral empire of Maximilian of Austria only
increased their determination to break with the past and they displayed no
hesitation in destroying cloisters and convents in Mexico City which had once
numbered among the glories of New Spain. Although the Liberals framed a
federal constitution that vested sovereignty in the people and limited the
powers of the executive, nevertheless political exigencies drove Benito JuaÂrez,
president of the republic from 1858 to 1872, to create an autocratic regime
based on a broad coalition of state governors, the regular army and regional
chieftains. After decades of civil strife and foreign invasion, the Liberals thus
succeeded in creating a state able to command domestic peace and external
respect. If JuaÂrez is still venerated in Mexico, it is because he both assured his
country's independence and created a political system which despite manifold
changes still preserves a recognisable form (Brading 1991).
Although the Liberals at times have been described as nationalists, they are
best regarded as republican patriots. They were Westernisers, not Slavophiles.
The Mexican past held little enchantment for them and they had no theory of
nationality. The minister of justice under JuaÂrez, Ignacio RamõÂ rez (1818±79),
was both an anti-clerical who paraded his atheism and an historical sceptic
524 D. A. Brading

who scornfully dismissed Aztec Mexico as a country so dominated by super-

stition and tyranny that `terror shook the entire social body' (RamõÂ rez 1889:
I, 221±2). What lessons could be learnt from texts which admitted that `the
first Mexican emperor ate his wife during their wedding night and before the
sun rose the next day changed into a goddess'? (ibid.: II, 286±9). But RamõÂ rez
also frankly confessed that the Liberals had failed to create a nation, since the
Indians, who comprised over half the population, `still conserve their own
nationality, protected by family and language' (ibid.: I, 190±1). Since all their
loyalty and concern was devoted to their particular communities, their pueblos,
they could not be described as Mexicans. In effect, the Liberals had created a
state and a republican patria, which attracted the allegiance of the new
political nation that dominated its affairs and profited from its new-found
stability, but they had failed to make citizens out of the peasantry (ibid.).
During the long presidency of Porfirio DõÂ az (1876±80 and 1885±1911) the
Mexican government finally escaped from penury and, thanks to the eco-
nomic expansion caused by foreign investment and foreign trade, found the
means to engage in the construction of public monuments. The road which
connected the castle in the park of Chapultepec to the national palace in the
ZoÂcalo was amplified to form a handsome avenue, lined with the busts of
insurgent and liberal heroes. In 1904, to commemorate the birth of JuaÂrez, a
marble `hemicycle' was erected in the Alameda park, graced with a handsome
figure of a seated JuaÂrez. So too, at the entrance of Chapultepec, a similar
monument celebrated the `heroic children', the military cadets who had died
for their country in the defence of Mexico City during the American assault
of 1847. By far the most impressive of these patriotic monuments was the tall
column of Independence, completed in 1910, which was surmounted by a
golden angel and surrounded at its base by life-sized figures of leaders of the
insurgency, an ensemble that dominated the avenue of Reforma (GarcõÂ a 1911).
Although the Porfiriato, 1876±1911, is an epoch when the cultural elite of
Mexico was dominated by the ideas of Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte,
not to mention Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, nevertheless the 1880s
witnessed a determined effort to reconcile and incorporate the successive
stages of Mexican history within a common framework. In Mexico across the
Centuries (Riva Palacio 1884±9), a handsome collective work of five volumes,
Vicente Riva Palacio (1832±96), a Liberal politician and general, argued that
the most notable feature of the colonial period was the emergence of the
mestizos, the progeny of unions between Spaniards and Indians, a social
stratum which he defined as the most vigorous force in Mexican history. Here
was an emphasis that was developed by Justo Sierra (1848±1912), the first
minister of education and the epoch's leading historian, who distinguished
between the patria, which had been inaugurated in 1810 by the insurgent
heroes, and the nation, which had been born, so he averred, with the first kiss
between HernaÂn CorteÂs and donÄa Marina, his Indian mistress. So, too, Sierra
declared that `the mestizo family . . . has constituted the dynamic element in
our history' (Brading 1984: 64). Moreover, it was Riva Palacio who inspired
Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico 525

the construction of an impressive monument in the avenue of Reforma

dedicated to CuautheÂmoc, in which the last Aztec emperor was depicted as a
neo-classical hero. Equally important, when the Mexican government decided
to enter the International Exposition, staged at Paris in 1889, they chose to
represent their country by a pavilion built in neo-Aztec style. It was at much
the same time that the government created a national inspectorate of
monuments and archaeology and provided some funds for the excavations at
Teotihuacan, the great pyramid site of ancient Mexico, which eventually
succeeded in clearing the great mounds of their cover of natural vegetation
(Tenorio Trillo 1996).
It was not until the advent of the Mexican Revolution, 1910±20, however,
that the pre-Hispanic past and its monuments became an integral part of the
cultural ideology of the Mexican state. That explosion of civil war and
peasant mobilisation was both preceded and accompanied by an upsurge in
nationalism, which found expression in doctrines as diverse as Social
Darwinism and romantic idealism. Intellectuals united to denounce the
sterile aping of European values which had characterised the Liberal Reforma
and advocated measures that were often justified by appeal to pre-Hispanic or
colonial precedent. That Mexico was essentially mestizo became an article of
faith among nationalists. Indeed, AndreÂs Molina EnrõÂ quez (1868±1940)
argued that only the mestizos were true Mexicans, since creole landowners
were European in cultural affiliation and Indians were bound by the
parochial loyalties of their pueblos. It was Molina EnrõÂ quez who inspired the
famous Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which vested primordial
ownership of all land within the republic in the nation and empowered the
state to destroy latifundia and distribute land to all communities which
required it. The same Article also revived the principle of collective tenure of
lands held by Indian pueblos. Revolutionary nationalism in Mexico was thus
committed both to radical social reform and to the enlargement of state
power. Among its wide-ranging and often contradictory cultural objectives
was the incorporation of the pre-Hispanic past as the foundation of national
history, a subject to which this article now turns (Brading 1984).

Nationalist Archaeology

The task of incorporating archaeological monuments and artefacts into the

primary repertoire of Mexican nationalism was undertaken by Manuel Gamio
(1883±1960), a pupil of Franz Boas at Colombia University. Under the
auspices of the International School of Archaeology established by Boas in
Mexico City, in 1912 Gamio conducted excavations at San Miguel Amantla
in Azcapotzalco, where for the ®rst time in the American hemisphere he
employed the method of stratigraphic analysis to uncover the sequence of
cultures that had inhabited the site. It was thanks to the success of that
project that he became director of the International School and then director
526 D. A. Brading

general of Archaeological Monuments (GonzaÂlez Gamio 1987). Although he

eschewed any participation in the revolutionary con¯ict that then raged, he
welcomed the victory of the constitutionalist coalition headed by Venustiano
Carranza. And indeed, in 1916, he published Forjando Patria, `Forging a
Mother-country or Homeland', in which he insisted that the great aim of the
revolution must be to create `a powerful country and a coherent, de®ned
nationality' (Gamio 1960 [1916]: 183). At the outset, he frankly admitted that
if Mexico was judged by the standards of Germany, France and Japan, the
conclusion must be that it did not as yet constitute a true nation, for it lacked
the four de®ning features that all nations must possess: a common language, a
common character, a homogeneous race and a common history. The chief
obstacle here was the Indian communities, which by reason of their distinct
languages and poverty still formed a series of pequenÄas patrias, small home-
lands, whose inhabitants did not participate in `national life' nor exercise their
rights as citizens (Gamio 1960 [1916]: 8±12). Yet these pueblos still housed
three-®fths of the republic's population. To transform their condition and
incorporate them into the nation, so Gamio argued, it was necessary to
employ the twin disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Through their
combined resources the original character of native civilisation could be
de®ned and the degree to which it still survived could be ascertained. Only
through the assistance of these studies could the means be found to convert
Indians into Mexicans and thus create a nation based on `racial equilibrium,
cultural fusion, linguistic uni®cation and economic equilibrium' (Brading
1988: 82±4).
In 1917 Gamio became director of a Department of Anthropology organ-
ised by the Ministry of Agriculture, and from that vantage point he organised
a multidisciplinary group of social scientists who excavated and reconstructed
the pyramid zone of Teotihuacan and, furthermore, conducted an ethno-
graphic survey of the population of the surrounding district. The site was
cleared of rubble and the pyramids restored to their original symmetry. The
ceremonial centre of the city was expertly surveyed and the mound called
the Ciudadela was excavated to reveal a temple dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the
great serpent heads which protruded from the pyramid attesting to that cult.
Careful plans and photographs of all work in progress were carefully pre-
served. Equally important, in 1922 Gamio published a handsomely illustrated
two-volume survey entitled The Population of the Valley of Teotihuacan,
which presented the findings of his research team (Gamio 1922). In mere five
years, Gamio thus succeeded in converting the monuments of a city, which
had fallen into ruin in c. AD 600, into the most persuasive symbol of the
grandeur of Mexico's pre-Hispanic civilisation. The imposing scale of the
pyramids evoked comparison with their counterparts in Egypt. To popularise
his work, Gamio published a tourist guide to Teotihuacan, designed to attract
visitors, both Mexicans and from abroad. In all this Gamio thus inaugurated
what was to become a distinctive branch of national industry, the recon-
struction of ancient monuments and their sites, a craft industry financed by
Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico 527

the Mexican state and justified by the joint aims of recuperation of past
glories and attracting mass tourism.
Not content to exhibit the past, Gamio sought both to analyse and reform
the present. The ethnographic survey of Teotihuacan dealt with a multiplic-
ity of themes, ranging from agriculture, land tenure and diet to religious
practice, folk-lore and medicine. Governing the entire project was Gamio's
conviction that contemporary Indians preserved, albeit in eroded form, the
culture of their ancestors. Both in its material base and in its intellectual
presuppositions, native civilisation exhibited a resilient identity, its config-
uration much the same as it had been at the time of the Spanish conquest.
Although only 5 per cent of Teotihuacan inhabitants spoke Nahuatl, crude
physical measurements revealed that some 60 per cent of the populations
were Indians, with the remainder mainly mestizo. In his approach Gamio
drew on the work of Franz Boas, who had strenuously argued against the
explanatory value of race, seeking to replace it by the concept of culture. It
was for this reason that Gamio always referred to Indian culture or civili-
sation and rejected any suggestion of ethnic inferiority. At the same time, his
team found evidence that popular diet was barely sufficient and lacked the
tonic qualities necessary for the expenditure of prolonged physical energy,
since average calorie consumption was more close to that of the Egyptians
than of the Europeans. In effect, if the contemporary Indian peasantry
appeared to be sunk in rural idiocy, their backwardness could be attributed
to material poverty, lack of education, poor diet and isolation from national
life (Gamio 1922).
The chief remedy for native ills was land reform. In a clear echo of AndreÂs
Molina EnrõÂ quez, he observed that whereas the Spanish laws of the Indies had
protected native land tenure, by contrast the Liberal Reforma had effectively
stripped the Indian peasantry of its land. `The constitution of 1857', he de-
clared, `is of foreign character in origin, form and basis' (Gamio 1960 [1916]:
172±83). In the survey of Teotihuacan's agrarian structures undertaken by
Lucio Mendieta y MunÄoz, the implications of these observations were spelt
out. The district had not benefited from independence and after the Reforma
the villagers lost the access they had hitherto enjoyed to common lands. As
it was, a mere seven haciendas owned 90 per cent of the available arable
land, the remainder divided between 416 proprietors. Yet the haciendas only
housed some 371 resident peons, so the bulk of the rural population lived
scattered amidst thirty villages, their dwellings usually surrounded by sub-
stantial gardens. Employment took the form of day-labour on the neighbour-
ing estates, or of migration on a seasonal basis. The only remedy was to break
up the haciendas and to distribute the land to the peasantry. But Gamio
strongly advocated that Indian communities, and not individuals, should be
the recipients of land, thus reviving the pre-Hispanic and colonial pattern of
collective tenure (Gamio 1922: II, 448±70).
The rural population would also benefit, so Gamio argued, by the revival
of artisan industry in textiles, ceramics, lacquer and metalwork. Although
528 D. A. Brading

most of these crafts had originated in the colonial period, nevertheless they
also preserved pre-Hispanic forms and techniques. In the nineteenth century
this `national industry' had suffered from the ill-advised establishment of
mechanised factors. To demonstrate how artisan crafts could be revived,
Gamio actively encouraged villagers in Teotihuacan to produce an impressive
range of products that could be sold to tourists as they entered the archaeo-
logical site. Moreover, to assist this campaign, Gamio launched a frontal
assault on the canons of neo-classical art which had governed academic art in
Mexico until the Revolution. Was there not, he queried, an impressive simi-
larity between the guiding principles of cubism and Aztec art? The most
cursory inspection demonstrated that the art of pre-Colombian civilisation
was as beautiful and original as anything produced in Mexico in subsequent
centuries. Equally important, Gamio asserted that modern Mexican artists
should seek inspiration in these pre-Hispanic sources, since they would then
produce works that would be more accessible and appealing to the contem-
porary native population (Gamio 1960 [1916]). In effect, he here anticipated
the famous Declaration of Principles issued in 1922 by a group of leading
Mexican artists, which proclaimed that `The noble work of our race, down to
its most insignificant spiritual and physical expressions, is native (and essen-
tially Indian) in origin . . . the art of the Mexican people is the most whole-
some spiritual expression in the world and this tradition is our greatest
treasure' (Siqueiros 1975: 21±4).
To emphasise Gamio's insistence on the enduring influence of native civil-
isation, his encouragement of pre-Columbian art, his sharp critique of classical
liberalism and his advocacy of collective land tenure for Indian villages: all
this suggests that Manuel Gamio was a typical romantic nationalist, deeply
influenced by the `historical particularism' of Boas (Brading 1984: 82±3; Harris
1969: 250±315). In the last resort, however, he conceived himself as a social
scientist who sought to deploy his professional expertise in service of the
Mexican people. In liberal, positivist vein, he later wrote: `In human evolu-
tion we observe that scientifically governed activities have followed an
ascending curve in their development', whereas `in activities or intellectual
manifestation bereft of the scientific character which are merely conventional,
emotive and sentimental, their irregular evolution cannot be described
graphically by an ascending curve but only by one which alternatively
descends and ascends' (Gamio 1960 [1916]: 106). Science was sustained by an
international caste of savants. It followed from these principles that Gamio
found little of value to preserve in contemporary Indian society other than its
artistic and craft production. He probed native culture in the spirit of a
pathologist analysing the physical decay of his patient. It was for this reason
that he was adamant that Indians should be encouraged to learn Spanish,
since otherwise they would remain dwelling as `foreigners in their own
country'. Indeed, he expressed the hope that the use of native tongues would
slowly wither away, observing that `this decadence . . . is beneficial to national
unification' (Gamio 1926: 130).
Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico 529

Nowhere did Gamio display his liberal nationalist credentials more obvi-
ously than in his bitter indictment of Catholicism, asserting that `the imposition
of this religion was the chief cause or one of the most important causes . . . of
the pronounced and continuing decadence of the native population both in
the colonial and contemporary epochs'. Disdainful of the sixteenth-century
Franciscan missionaries, he was not impressed by their observance of `the
sombre rules of the misanthrope of Assisi' (Gamio 1922: I, xliv±lx). What was
the current religion of the Indians but `a coarse polytheism . . . a strange
hybrid of superstition and idolatrous religious concepts' (Gamio 1926: 110)?
The peasantry persisted in expending their exiguous income on religious
fiestas and church adornments, their devotion abused by the parochial clergy
who charged high fees for all their ministrations. At the same time, the natives
employed folk-medicine to cure their ailments or else prayed to absurdly
dressed, often sanguinary images of the saints whose very crudity corrupted
their sensibility. By way of remedy, Gamio recommended that the other
religious faiths and other clergy, such as Protestantism and its pastors, should
be implanted in the region and that masonic regional lodges and other civic
associations should be organised. Later, he expressed the hope that through
education the government would be able to extirpate the pernicious influence
of the Catholic Church. To comprehend Gamio's animus, it should be recalled
that the church had rejected the Constitution of 1917 and that during the
1920s a fierce civil war engulfed the country, caused by anti-clerical legislation
(Gamio 1922: I, xcix).
Although Gamio was the founding father of state-inspired indigenismo in
Mexico, in the last resort he was a Westerniser, a liberal nationalist whose
goal was the assimilation and integration of the Indian peasantry into a
modern mestizo Mexican nation. However, he laboured to provide that
nation-state with a glorious cultural ancestry based on an historical landscape
distinguished by any number of grandiose archaeological sites. In effect, he
revived the emphasis on the pre-Hispanic civilisation which had formed an
essential part of creole patriotism, but substantiated it by excavation and
reconstruction of imposing monuments. Moreover, the definition of the
nation as essentially mestizo added significance to the resurrection of ancient
Mexico. As for the contemporary Indian communities, Gamio was commit-
ted to their regeneration and eventual assimilation, as was demonstrated by
the following observation:

The extension and intensity of that folk-loric life exhibited in the great majority of the
population, eloquently demonstrates the cultural backwardness in which that popula-
tion vegetates. This archaic life, which moves from arti®ce to illusion and superstition,
is curious, attractive and original. But in all senses it would be preferable for the
population to be incorporated into contemporary civilisation of advanced, modern
ideas, which, if stripped of fantasy and traditional clothing, would contribute in a
positive manner to the conquest of the material and intellectual well-being to which all
humanity ceaselessly aspires. (Gamio 1922: I, liii)
530 D. A. Brading

Within the margin of this folk-loric life, Gamio obviously included all the
manifestations of popular religion.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

At the close of his introduction to the catalogue of the 1990 exhibition in New
York, Octavio Paz invoked the eagle and the jaguar as symbols of the dualism
that af¯icted Mexican history, only then to ®x upon Our Lady of Guadalupe
as a sublime mediator and as `the bridge between the Old and New World'
(Paz 1990: 37±8). Already, in 1978, he had signalised the Virgin's enduring
in¯uence (Paz 1978). The whole thrust of Liberal and revolutionary Mexico,
so he asserted, had been to destroy New Spain and to dismiss the colonial
period as a mere interregnum between pre-Hispanic civilisation and the
secular republic. But neither the radicals of the nineteenth century nor the
nationalists of the twentieth had succeeded in destroying devotion to the
brown Virgin. She had served as a banner for the insurgents of 1810 and for
the Zapatista peasants in 1910 and no matter what their politics or beliefs,
class or caste, all Mexicans still venerated the national patron. He added: `her
cult is intimate and public, regional and national. The feast of Guadalupe, the
12th of December, is still the central date in the calendar of the Mexican
people' (Paz 1978: 49). Indeed, he frankly admitted that `after two centuries
of experiment and failures, the Mexican people only believes in the Virgin of
Guadalupe and the National Lottery' (ibid.: 50).
It was in 1975±6 that a new basilica was built at Tepeyac to house the image
of Guadalupe, since the old, colonial sanctuary was threatened with collapse.
The new structure was a vast tent-like building, designed to accommodate a
congregation of over 10,000 people. It was here in 1990 that John Paul II came
to beatify Juan Diego, the poor Indian peasant, to whom, so tradition tells us,
the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531 and on whose cactus cape she miraculously
imprinted her image. In recent years millions of the faithful travel from as far
abroad as California to offer their homage to their patron and mother. When
Mexicans visit Teotihuacan they engage in historical tourism, encountering
the grandeur of a civilisation which once flourished in their country and which
may well have been created by some of their ancestors. It enlarges their sense
of nationhood. But when Mexicans visit Tepeyac they undertake a religious
pilgrimage and on entering the sanctuary encounter the numinous presence of
an image that has been venerated in unbroken succession since its appearance
in New Spain. There they receive comfort and reassurance and their sense
of belonging to a nation whom the Mother of God has chosen for special
protection is strengthened. The doctrines and emphases of revolutionary
nationalism proved efficacious in Mexico for several decades but are now
often questioned or dismissed as irrelevant commonplaces. Compared to the
enduring religious power of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the political and cultural
symbolism of Teotihuacan dwindles (Elizondo 1997).
Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico 531

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