Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico

Abstract

Cara Anne Kinnally's Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts builds on the premises of Benedict Anderson's seductive nation as imagined community paradigm and constructively destabilizes them. She examines the literature of “Greater Mexico,” conceived as a capacious “contact zone” riddled with ethnic and class tensions and warped by the presence of a contentious border and the disproportionate weight of the United States. She explores how some elite Mexicanos imaginatively reconstructed this space and their place within it. They took up their pens, not to forge a nation but to envision a relationship between the United States and Mexico that was founded not on antagonism, usurpation, oppression, and hopeless asymmetry but on cooperation and common interests. Others, having remained on the other side of the painful line drawn in 1848, laid claim in writing to being white, civilized, and modern enough to be welcomed as valuable US citizens.Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts uncovers visions of Greater Mexico that are both surprising and revealing: bolstered by shared beliefs about racial and cultural hierarchies, patriots and would-be mediators called not for resistance but for harmony paired with the preservation of distinctiveness, for assimilation and annexation. Lorenzo de Zavala advocated for the “fortunate conquest of civilization” through the spread of US influence on its backward, volatile neighbor (p. 57). In 1848, as Yucatán was devastated by a violent Maya rebellion, Justo Sierra O'Reilly lobbied for annexation. The melodramatic novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Eusebio Chacón—the former's written in English, the latter's in Spanish—were authored by self-conscious natives of Mexico's “lost territories” and drip with adventure, romance, and poetic justice. Their dignified Mexican protagonists are ethnically and ethically superior and stand in stark contrast to the uncivilized, racialized others—decadent Spaniards, wild Indians—and the Anglo hypocrites who play the novels' villains.Kinnally's intelligent reading of the diverse artifacts contrived by these Mexicanos—a travelogue, diaries, correspondence, and novels as well as, tangentially but with fascinating implications, public monuments—captures, as she well points out, the messiness of a nineteenth century of unstable boundaries and shifting allegiances, marked by violence, economic and social transformations, and political experimentation. She is also right to stress that their visions of Mexican and Anglo harmony, “intercultural negotiation, and hemispheric solidarity” were premised on “problematic concepts of culture, class, race, and belonging that actually excluded large segments of America” and were not the exclusive patrimony of the imperialist, hegemonic republic and its oppressive majorities (pp. 160, 126). Nonetheless, her ingenious if flawed artificers remain trapped, not in teleological narratives but in our assumptions about what drove Latin America's men and women of letters in the century that followed independence.Thinking of Latin American novelists as monomaniacally obsessed with plotting the nation can crowd out their other—perhaps more important—motivations: artistic aspiration, wanting to tell a good story or to sell books, wanting to legitimize, convince, intimidate, antagonize, mobilize. Identities—multiple and overlapping, in both literary and political discourse—were strategically constructed and displayed. They could rarely be contained by the modern, monolithic, all-absorbing nation. Kinnally's thoughtful analysis offers us a glimpse of these tensions and diverse aspirations, but they unfortunately often remain on the sidelines. This is perhaps especially true of the politicians she surveys through a single literary product. Thus, in his exile narrative, Lorenzo de Zavala calls for bolstering Mexico's democratic institutions and economic development through US influence, activated by settlers from the North. When in 1836 the “enterprising guests” who had settled in Texas broke off with his patria, he joined theirs as the Lone Star republic's first vice president and perhaps its most successful Mexican immigrant (p. 60). Two generations later, in doing what she thought was her patriotic duty, his granddaughter fought to preserve Texas's Hispanic and Catholic cultural legacy.Similarly, in the midst of popular rebellion, the nation—whether he conceived it as Mexico or Yucatán—was not foremost on Justo Sierra O'Reilly's mind. His willingness to hand over Yucatán's sovereignty—to the United States in the first instance, but to some other great power if that failed—stemmed less from a sense of shared white republican identity than from desperation. The visions sketched in the novels considered are less calculated but equally complex. If Chacón hoped to contribute to New Mexico's enlightenment and integration through his “entertaining literature,” Ruiz de Burton—twice an outsider, as a woman and a Californian—seemed more intent, in her efforts to reveal “qué gran humbug es esta Yankie nation,” on tearing down a nation than on building one up (pp. 97, 132). Kinnally does us a great service in dismantling a static Mexicano identity, inevitably rooted in antagonism and resistance. By further excavating the “forgotten futures” that she has brought to light, we will surely uncover some unexpected, stimulating pasts.