Abstract
This article examines the representation of provincial political culture and practices in selected fictional works of two prominent Mexican writers of the late nineteenth century: Emilio Rabasa and Heriberto Frías. Particular focus is given to Rabasa's portrait of a fictional pronunciamiento, a widespread form of political protest and negotiation in nineteenth-century Mexico that has recently been subject to historiographical re-evaluation, and Frías's exploration of the 1893 rebellion of Tomóchic. Rabasa's fiction supports the development of a political system that imposes the national will upon the unruly provinces by portraying the pronunciamiento as a destructive and chaotic practice, founded in the political ignorance of its participants. Frías's work, on the other hand, questions the validity of the national enterprise by framing the Tomóchic rebellion as the consequence of a national political system that had disengaged with local and regional voices.
Highlights
La revolución se desenvuelve sobre la idea, conmueve a las naciones, modifica una institución y necesita ciudadanos; la bola no exige principios ni los tiene jamás, nace y muere en corto espacio material y moral, y necesita ignorantes (Rabasa 1972, 167-8).Juan Quiñones, the protagonist of Emilio Rabasa’s novel La bola (1887), so rejects the idea that the violent rebellion he took part in during his youth, in the fictional Mexican town of San Martín de la Piedra during an earlier part of the nineteenth century, had been a legitimate part of provincial political culture
Quiñones repudiates his youthful conviction that he had been an informed and patriotic citizen fighting for a principled cause, and instead concludes that he and other participants in the rebellion had been duped by the self-serving, manipulative caudillos that dominated the political life of his local community purely for their own ends
Rabasa’s novel, narrated from the vantage point of the late nineteenth century, when Mexico was governed by Porfirio Díaz with an unprecedented degree of stability in the national government, offers a condemnation of the political culture of an earlier era, to which many contemporary commentators, and subsequent historians, attributed political turmoil, civil war, and a lack of national progress
Summary
Juan Quiñones, the protagonist of Emilio Rabasa’s novel La bola (1887), so rejects the idea that the violent rebellion he took part in during his youth, in the fictional Mexican town of San Martín de la Piedra during an earlier part of the nineteenth century, had been a legitimate part of provincial political culture. The rebellion represented in Frías’s novel is not a pronunciamiento, it is useful to compare Tomóchic with Rabasa’s work due to the contrasting vision of the appropriate balance between local, regional, and national politics that the novel contains.
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