The Archaeological Symbol: Heredia’s Volcanic Pyramid and Mesoamerican Deep Time

Abstract

The Archaeological Symbol:Heredia’s Volcanic Pyramid and Mesoamerican Deep Time Carlos Fonseca Suárez He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. —Walter Benjamin, Excavation and Memory The archaeological paradigm could be summarized as follows: knowledge happens the day after the catastrophe, as a search for erased origins. An article on the Mesoamerican archaeological imaginary could then very well begin by discussing the aftermath of an earthquake. The earthquake that struck Mexico City in the early morning of September 19, 1985, razing through the city’s modern landscape, fracturing the country’s modern spine, left the city exposed to the terrible logic of its archaic modernity. What the earthquake exposed was the end of that phenomenon of economic development that, from the 1940s until the 1980s, saw the entrance of Mexico into the landscape of the modern world, a socio-economic phenomenon that had been adequately called the “Mexican miracle.”1 The catastrophe exposed the fault lines of the project as such: in the fissures of the city’s architecture one found a concrete metaphor for the economic crisis [End Page 269] that had assaulted Mexico at the beginning of the decade. Nowhere was this unearthing clearer than in Tlatelolco. There, the shock waves brought to ruin the Nuevo León Building, part of the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelco, the largest apartment complex in Mexico City, built in the 1960s by the architect Mario Pani, whose name had turned into a symbol of the Mexican miracle. Tlatelolco: the name stands for the violent cracks inherent within Mexico’s modernity. The social catastrophe that had been the 1968 massacre of Tlalelolco, where hundreds of student and civilian protesters were killed, was concretized by the earthquake’s disassembling force: the cracks in the Nuevo León Building were evidence that Mexico’s miracle was plagued with deficiencies and corruption. Soon, a discourse of civil society emerged, led by the voice of Carlos Monsivaís which soon found echoes in the more literary interventions of José Emilio Pachecho’s poem “Las ruinas de México” and Elena Poniatowska’s Nada, nadie. It would be in the aftermath of such discussions, as an aftershock of the catastrophe, that Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, an ethnologist and anthropologist whose work revolved around the question of the indigenous presence, would find the grounds upon which to base his concept of a “México profundo” in opposition to that of the “México imaginario.” The book, México profundo, was released in 1987, amidst the atmosphere of social unrest produced by the horrible earthquake, as a call—in the natural language of archaeology and geology—for a recognition of the deep indigenous strata of Mexico. Bonfil Batalla’s strategy was to bring back the concept of Mesoamerica: Let us start from a basic fact: one of the few original civilizations that humanity has created throughout all its history arose and developed in what today is México. This is Mesoamerican civilization, from which derives all that is “Indian” in México [ . . . ] Every schoolboy knows something about the precolonial world. The great archaeological monuments stand as national symbols [ . . . ] That renunciation, that denial of the past—does it really correspond to a total and irremediable historical break? Did Mesoamerica really die, and are the remaining Indian populations simply fossils, condemned five hundred years ago to disappear because they have no place in the present or in the future? (3) Bonfil Batalla’s argument against the fossilization of Mesoamerica, against its petrifaction in national museums, spirals around itself only to end up reifying the concept it wishes to place in question: the “Mesoamerican Mexico” can only be thought of under an archaeological discourse of depth and fossils, of monuments and digging, of origins. As I will soon attempt to show, this is no coincidence, but [End Page 270] rather accords with the logic of catastrophe and reconstruction, of catastrophe and excavation—namely, the archaeological paradigm of history—that surrounds the nineteenth-century discourse of ruins in Mexico. The “México profundo” that emerges amidst the ruins of the 1985 earthquake is the Mexico whose archaeological modernity must be found in dialogue with the...