More than thirty years ago, many of us believed that Mexicans were abandoning nationalism and the canons of Mexican identity. We think that the typical Mexican whose corpse had been dissected by many writers was being buried. Perhaps, as in a story by Edgar Allan Poe, a corrupt but still active body was being buried. Perhaps we gave him up for dead before time and the crypt where the national identity was deposited became a protective chest that prolonged his existence. I wonder today if three decades ago we did not leave in the air the bad conscience that something had escaped from that perhaps poorly closed crypt. Paola Vázquez Almanza's extraordinary journey through half a century of ideas, attitudes and emotions around the theme of Mexican national identity leads to a brilliant suggestion. From a statement by Alfonso Reyes, she tells us that she has the feeling that a body was left in the cellar. Yes, it's true, reflections on national identity seem doomed to leave a skeleton hidden in the closet. Luckily a talented essayist like her has arrived to make the disturbing story of the long agony of what we stop being but that still overwhelms us.
The book locates the decline of national identity in 1968 and takes as its first indication the publication in 1970 of Octavio Paz's Posdata , where the writer emphatically declares that "the Mexican is not an essence but a history", which unleashed the fury of the philosopher Emilio Uranga who, in defense of President Díaz Ordaz, launched a string of insults at the poet. The lawsuit of those who defined the soul of the Mexican in the 1950s heralds the decline of national identity, a decline that Carlos Fuentes cannot stop with his 1971 book, Mexican Time . Nor did the populist fuss of Presidents Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo stop the erosion of nationalism.
Paola Vázquez examines each of the last five decades in which Mexican culture develops, always placing it in the world context. If the seventies harbored a crisis of cultural legitimacy, in the eighties an era of mutations opened that fractured Mexican identity and opened a process of resignification. The cultural signs changed rapidly and disorderly in a wild dance. Paola Vázquez skillfully captures this hubbub of ideas and events through her unique style of linking - as a sequence of photographs - with brief portraits or vignettes of events, characters, movies, songs, books, sports competitions, and political occurrences, all of which It crystallizes in an album that brings together the moments of history as a succession of memories.
In the 1990s, the government stopped being the main issuer of identity discourses. There was a kind of explosion of narratives about identities and difference was exalted more than equality. The neo-Zapatista uprising in Chiapas fueled the indigenous imagination. It was staged, as Paola Vázquez says, "a return to identity Aztlán wearing shiny Nike sneakers and a CD player around his waist that plays 'Las flores' by Café Tacvba at full volume". They were times of weariness of the political ideas, values and systems of the past, concludes Paola Vázquez. Those were the times when it was discussed whether Mexico suffered a "perfect dictatorship", as Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out. It was the time of the fall of the Berlin wall and the approval of the Free Trade Agreement. The still unexplained murders of Luis Donaldo Colosio and José Francisco Ruíz Massieu occurred.
The first decade of the 21st century was tinged with an obsession: the democratic transition. Perhaps the identity crisis prompted the late arrival of democracy in Mexico. For this reason, it was believed that national identity was left behind and that democracy had buried nationalism and the PRI. It was not so, as was seen in the following decade. The new century appeared dominated by globalization, neoliberalism and unbridled urbanization. But the 2006 presidential elections showed signs that democracy was not yet well established and that the country had to watch the spectacle of two presidents, one real and effective and the other imaginary and supposedly legitimate. That imaginary president, López Obrador, exalted national values and invoked the old myths of Mexican identity. They were signs that there was a skeleton in the closet.
The beginning of the second decade of the 21st century was marked by the celebrations of the bicentennial of Independence and the centenary of the Revolution. And it was not by chance that a veritable flurry of essays on national identity was published around that time by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and novelists who decided to return to the old themes. Paola Vázquez examines them critically to conclude that, possibly, Mexicans no longer need interpreters to explain their multiple and fragmented condition. But there was a return to power of the PRI and a new boom in drug trafficking characters, such as El Chapo Guzmán and Mayo Zambada.
A curious process occurred. Defects in the system were attributed to the character of the Mexican, in such a way that corruption, for example, appeared as a cultural feature of national identity. It is the profile of the Mexican that contaminates political structures. An evil consequence of this process was the spread of disenchantment with democracy. The massacre in Iguala of the students from Ayotzinapa ended up eroding hopes that the democratic transition would open doors that would take us to a new and better world.
Towards the end of the book Paola Vázquez wonders: why continue talking about national identity if the oppressive revolutionary nationalism has almost completely ceased to be one of its ingredients. An important reason is found in the world context in which we live, where xenophobia, nefarious radicalisms and harmful nationalisms swarm. Globalization connects all countries and Mexico is not immune to the game of identity symbols, as shown by its instrumentalization in the now real government of López Obrador. I am not so sure that revolutionary nationalism is as far removed from the political scene as many would like. But Paola Vázquez, furthermore, believes that national identity is indispensable for social cohesion and that it is necessary to recognize "the social need for the existence of a concept of national identity". In any case, she is convinced that "identity myths will still be there and the problem is not whether they should be rejected or not." The important thing is to observe, analyze and monitor them to determine how they organize the world and represent reality. She is interested that new representations of national identity can be nurtured without recourse to old formulas. A way to discover and analyze new expressions of identity, she believes, goes through literature. She prefers to search in novels, rather than in studies on the character of the Mexican, the keys to understanding the country. She is convinced that representations of identity should not be resurrected: it is better to bury or incinerate them. But she soon realizes that skeletons have been left in the cellar.
What are those bodies that have been left in the cellar? Those skeletons can be, as the title of the book suggests, what is left of those who cease to be, and who are hidden in the closet of hidden and shameful things. Or we can go back to the beginning of the book, where Paola Vázquez explains that, to write it, she was motivated by the famous question with which the novel Conversation in the Cathedral , by Mario Vargas Llosa , begins . She reformulates the question: when did Mexico screw up? Perhaps it should be adapted to the myths of the character of the Mexican and say: when did Mexico screw up? Perhaps that fateful moment is the corpse locked in the cellar, it is the shameful secret that is hidden.
Paola Vázquez's book is a splendid search for the springs that allow Mexico to be understood. The richness of the book helps us glimpse many facets of Mexican intellectual life. Especially attractive and remarkable is the audacity of the author in critically examining ideas and opinions whose authors are among us and perhaps will read this book.
When Paola Vázquez saw the design project for the cover of her book, she told me that she did not like it and that it did not reflect the content of the book. The cover shows a young Sor Juana with long legs, attractive, barely dressed, with very high-heeled shoes and riding a huge spanner. Certainly the cover does not describe the content of the book but its author, an intelligent and creative woman who uses a powerful tool to disarm her environment and who is not afraid to take off her academic clothes to search the letters and the arts for the keys that you need the nuts that you will have to turn over and over again.
Those who stop being . Paola Vázquez Almanza. XXI century Editors. 429 pages.
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Author: Paola Vázquez Almanza.
Editorial: 21st century, 2019.
Format: softcover (429 pages).
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