On the Limits of Historical Imagination

Abstract

Over the last decades of the 20th century, the writing of history underwent serious political and epistemological criticism, especially in US academic circles. Yet it remained attached, by its origins, its academic structure, and its goals, to the nation and the state, as well as to unchallenged racial, ethnic, and identities. Over the same decades, however, a renewed idea of Europe-despite its flows and uncertainties-saw an interesting experiment in the conscious rewriting of histories and cultures, re-examining the 19th-century focus on the nation as the central plot of history.1 Almost four decades of documenting a common historical and cultural consciousness for might, in the long run, turn out to be a political and social failure. The constitutional challenge, rapid expansion, and the Turkey factor might in the end make the story of Europe an obsolete tale. Yet the mere effort, and, so far, its consequences in terms of peace, political stability, and economic progress make the effort to create an idea of a more appealing intellectual temptation than keeping untouched the craft of the national historian.Why has the idea of a European-like process of integration not been even remotely considered for and in North America? Can North America become a symbol of a different kind of relationship between Mexico, Canada, and the US, a relationship in which cultural particularities exist but which responsibly assumes a common past and a common future? What is certain is that maintaining civilizational differences-though in the short run intellectually comfortable and academically profitable-is particularly risky and undoable in the long term. The consequences of maintaining and nurturing assumed differences will affect the ' peace, stability, and good standards of living in the region. This is not only because of Mexico's growing inequality and uncertain economic and political future, but also because of the world's violent challenges and the vicious cycles in the US that blend inexorably-if irresponsibly-economic growth, immigration, all sorts of nativisms, notions of national security, and dangerous racio-cultural conceptions of the American identity.NORTH AMERICA: BASIC THESIS ON THE FAILURE OF A SYMBOLNorth America does not have a symbolic, cultural, political, or legal existence. Yet it is the gigantic economic and human fact within which Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the US live without ever discussing it. It resembles a gigantic statue of a medusa-like lady whose name has been lost by history but whose gaze we avoid, knowing that upon looking at those eyes we would see our own.North America has been a timid geographical mark that has paled in comparison to the clearly unconcealed map-not cartographical but moral and racial-known as America. North America has been a geography that is conventionally used in reference to the indigenous people of Canada, the US, and northern Mexico. North America is real when it is about native Americans, a pre-national reality. The cultural-racial dichotomy (Anglo vs. Latin), however, is conceptually mightier than the map of either America as a whole or that of North America as a complex but integrated geographical unit. As in a 19th-century history of civilization, the continent is divided into the nonsense of an and a part, as if such Anglo and Latin races, territories, and civilizations were first, real, and second, locatable in clearly defined cultural and geographical spaces. Three decades of post-new left, post-this and post-that historical and cultural criticism have only re-emphasized these essentials with endless excursions into cultural-racial-ethnical certainties.Today North America is an undeniable commercial and economic reality, though its benefits are still a matter of controversy after more than 10 years of NAFTA.2 Economic integration, however, is a fact that NAFTA only accelerated and institutionalized. …