A Life Together: Lucas Alamán and Mexico, 1792–1853

Abstract

On the first page of his monumental biography of Lucas Alamán, Eric Van Young admits that the historian, politician, and entrepreneur—exceptionally intelligent but haughty, severe, and inscrutable—cuts a rather lackluster figure among the swashbuckling generals (Antonio López de Santa Anna), adventurous clergymen (Fray Servando Teresa de Mier), and romantic Liberals intent on saving the world (Valentín Gómez Farías, Lorenzo de Zavala) who made up Mexico's founding generation. Historians have, apparently, felt as put off by Alamán as did many of his contemporaries. Despite his looming large over the first decades of Mexico's postindependence history, we have, perhaps with the exception of José C. Valadés's solid 1938 biography, but snippets of Alamán's life and work, partial (in both senses of the word) images of an eventful existence: that of Mexican conservatism's sinister éminence grise, born reactionary and intolerant; the forward-looking architect of Mexico's first development bank; the nostalgic chronicler of Mexico's colonial past and contrarian critic of its independence revolution.A Life Together provides an efficient remedy to this fragmented vision. It painstakingly reconstructs the life of a man whose path mirrored the narrative that he manufactured for the nation: “from youthful promise, optimism, and experimentation following independence” to “chaotic adulthood” and, in the end, “crisis and near death” (p. 3). There are many reasons why it is fortunate that this laborious task was taken up by Eric Van Young, the most obvious being his evocative, witty prose. But as a historian of independence, he is less obsessed with ideology and the inexorable, timeless, and not particularly useful Liberal/Conservative divide that many nineteenth-century scholars rely on. His interest in markets and economic structures underpins his thorough analysis of Alamán's constant, probably exhausting efforts to keep his family in the style expected of them, which took up more of his time and energy than his intermittent incursions into politics. Van Young carefully parses don Lucas's activities as a bold but unsuccessful businessman and diligent administrator of Hernando Cortés's “feudal remnant”: the defender of Cortés's mortal remains against angry mobs and of his patrimony against both radical politicians intent on avenging the conquistador's crimes and insolvent, sometimes devious tenants. Van Young's reading of Alamán's meticulous, well-documented historical work productively draws the lines that informed the way that Alamán thought, what he wrote as a historian, and what he did when in power.Van Young does not set out to rescue Alamán from those who have maligned him. His carefully drawn portrait is captivating but not endearing. Van Young highlights the civil servant's capacity for systematic thinking and follow-through and the rookie minister's ability to keep things from falling apart despite his temper, his own conception of sovereignty, the topography of power, and the equivocal positions adopted by politicians of all stripes. He also shows how Alamán's impatience—with popular politics on principle, needled by what he saw as incompetence, frivolity, or posturing—and his need to micromanage everything—probably inevitable in someone who thought that he knew better—undermined his endeavors. Don Lucas suffered no fools—unless he had to work for one (President Guadalupe Victoria, the rather obnoxious Duke of Terranova and Monteleone) or forge a political alliance with another (the irritatingly ubiquitous Santa Anna). His rigidity did not place him above some very dirty politics, such as the “shameful proceedings” surrounding Vicente Guerrero's execution (p. 471). The author traces the strong fatalism that undergirds Alamán's visions but also reveals his persistence, his willingness to get back into the political fray when so many of his contemporaries had exited the scene, by describing his increasingly desperate attempts to wring a well-ordered polity out of “the most complete anarchy” (p. 170).Van Young's assessment of Alamán's career, attentive to context and change over time, is nuanced and suggestive, even if, perhaps too often, he looks for the features of an old and bitter man in the young politician's features. The alleged founder of Mexican conservatism embraced no unyielding principles or hard political programs; he was motivated “less because of what he feared to lose than because of what he had lost already”; he was a “situational monarchist” rather than a true believer (pp. 15, 602). Alamán appears, first and foremost, as “a practical man in politics, in business, even in the writing of history” (p. 333). A Life Together thus allows for a more balanced interpretation of a controversial character as it destabilizes many of the frameworks that structure our understanding of independent Mexico. Van Young's portrait of one of its most exceptional denizens, a complex man engaged in many things, invites us to reimagine the turbulent politics of the nineteenth century.