“POR FIN, PASARON YA LAS FIESTAS DEL CENTENARIO”1 CENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS OF MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE IN RAFAEL LÓPEZ’S “COMMEMORATORY” CRÓNICAS Amber Workman University of California, Santa Barbara Perhaps because of his failure to join the distinguished Contemporáneos in the 1920s, Mexican modernist Rafael López has been largely overlooked, despite the abundance and popularity of his works during his time. The year of Mexico’s (Bi)centennial offers an opportune moment to study his literary production, as his poetry and prose often centered on topics of patriotic nature. López’s verses frequently praise Mexican national and cultural icons such as Cuauhtémoc, Nezahualcóyotl, Benito Juárez, José Marı́a Morelos, and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Serge Zaı̈tzeff also observes that “[e]n numerosas prosas de López se nota la importancia que tiene la Patria para él. Es profundamente mexicano y orgulloso de su pasado. Está convencido que el futuro del paı́s depende de la conciencia histórica del pueblo” (44). It is not surprising, then, that descriptions of the centenary commemorations of Mexican Independence also appeared in some of López’s literary work, especially in his crónicas (chronicles) that he penned for major Mexican newspapers such as El Universal. In this article, I examine the literary—often modernist—treatment of the Centenario of 1921 in what I am considering a trilogy of “centenary” crónicas by Rafael López, first published in the Mexico City daily El Universal in his bi-weekly editorial column “Hebdomadarias” between August and October, 1921.2 These writings stand out for their irony, humor, use of language, imagery, and imagination as well as their curious pessimism toward national personages and patriotic themes. Like most of López’s works, these crónicas have received little critical attention, but are interesting to examine as they allow us to glimpse López’s vision of Mexico’s past and present as conveyed through a popular and influential Latin American literary form. The crónica, relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, is often described as hybrid text that combines both journalistic and literary techniques in order to recreate a current or past event. Since the professionalization of journalism in the nineteenth century, crónicas have appeared mostly in editorial columns of Latin American newspapers and literary magazines. Unlike the fifteenth and sixteenth century crónicas de Indias (by Hernán Cortés, Bernal Dı́az del Castillo, and others, who were more interested in writing history rather than literature) the modern crónica can C 2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 47 The Latin Americanist, December 2010 be highly fictionalized (almost to the point of the short story, although the “reality referent” remains) and often makes use of a narrator who recreates the event from a highly subjective, often first-person perspective and often with an ironic tone. Meant to entertain as well as to inform, the crónica allows writers to both report and to comment on virtually any topic of interest to them, even those that are seemingly unremarkable or “unnewsworthy ”. The crónica also tends to function as an important means of influencing public opinion and collective memory, often assuming an “unofficial” stance that calls into question the all-encompassing explanations of knowledge that Jean-François Lyotard called “metanarratives”. It is precisely this questioning nature of this literary form that allows it to serve as a means of recovering “popular memory”, as pointed out by Geoffrey Hartman: Ese es quizá uno de los elementos más interesantes de la crónica: la recuperación de la memoria frente a los relatos oficiales o las narrativas hegemónicas. De algún modo, la crónica se sustenta en contra del poder de la amnesia colectiva, en contra de los ocultamientos que la historia oficial promueve. Por ello, la crónica ejerce un trabajo de contramemoria: crea espacios propicios en la otra memoria de la nación. (cited in Salazar n.p.) Similarly, Álvaro Ruiz Abreu refers to the literary form as: “una guı́a orientadora” and notes that “[El] lector habitual del periódico, sin apenas advertirlo...