Stories That Make History

From covering the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1985 earthquake to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, Elena Poniatowska has been one of the most important chroniclers of Mexican social, cultural, and political life. In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines Poniatowska's writing, activism, and political participation, using them as a lens through which to understand critical moments in contemporary Mexican history. In her crónicas—narrative journalism written in a literary style featuring firsthand testimonies—Poniatowska told the stories of Mexico's most marginalized people. Throughout, Stephen shows how Poniatowska helped shape Mexican politics and forge a multigenerational political community committed to social justice. In so doing, she presents a biographical and intellectual history of one of Mexico's most cherished writers and a unique history of modern Mexico.

Paz’s A Draft of Shadows: Rewriting the Past, the Present and the Self

Pasado en Claro (A Draft of Shadows) was first published in 1975. This long poem is the mental journey Paz embarks upon in pursuit of his own personal paradise. This article focuses on three of important concepts Paz explores in this poem and in his literary output as a whole: the scope of language, memory and otherness. In the case of language, and its expression in poetry, Paz’s most eloquent pages can be found in The Bow and the Lyre (1956), but especially in The Monkey Grammarian (1970), the account of another journey, through language and the acts of writing and reading. As a personal attempt at regaining a mythical past, A Draft of Shadows affords a view of both the vast narrative of Mexican history and Paz’s personal retelling of his own past. A journey like this is only possible via the winding path of memory, its expression in language, and an identity created as it follows its own trail.

De Le livre rouge a El libro rojo: la mexicanización de un proyecto literario francés

The article peruses the influence of Le livre rouge (1863) in Vicente Riva Palacio’s and Manuel Payno’s El libro rojo (1870). It expounds how those responsible for El libro rojo, instead of just copying the French model, adapted it into a certain written and visual representation of history: violent, liberal, and providential. The article’s structure follows the Mexican version’s four innovations: martyrological hagiographies were elaborated instead of disquieting biographies; lithography, of greater expressive power, was substituted for the engraving technique; a taxonomy of violence was discarded in favor of a periodization based on the spillage of blood; lastly, the oeuvre was endowed with a liberal optimism absent from the French text. Thus, El libro rojo is situated within a context of transatlantic influences, which highlights its uniqueness, and illuminates the liberal and triumphalistic representation of Mexican history.

Romanticism in Mexico

During the nineteenth century, romanticism became central to how Mexicans engaged in practices of self-definition. Romanticism in Mexico was an intellectual and artistic movement that was at once autonomous and connected to transcultural influences. As evidenced by the works of historians and literary scholars, as well as novelists, politicians, poets, and antiquarians from the period, romanticism was gendered in terms of women’s participation and representation, and in themes such as love, family, virtue, domesticity, and eroticism. Women were critical to the transmission of romanticism in quotidian practices of attending theater and opera, hosting salons, and instilling appreciation for poetry and the natural world in their families and their communities. Romanticism also exercised a profound influence on how Mexicans thought about ethnicity, race, and nationalism. In their quest for a unique national identity, Mexican intellectuals looked to the indigenous past and celebrated mestizaje as the foundation of Mexico’s cultural patrimony, even as they persisted in exclusionary practices toward their indigenous and casta compatriots. Romanticism offers a fruitful area to reevaluate well-studied themes of Mexican history, particularly its complex relationship with nationalism, modernization, gender, and the politics of ethnicity and race.

Juárez, Maximilian, and the French Occupation of Mexico

A tumultuous period in Mexican history began with the Reform Movement of President Benito Juárez, followed by the French invasion and installation of Maximillian as emperor, the defeat of his troops by the liberal army, and the restoration of the Mexican Republic in 1877. Although most of the basic facts of these events are not in dispute, the narrowness of the lens used to examine them is. Some data have been systematically ignored by national historians, and there are also contradictory interpretations of the published historical data. One common reflection on this period is the depiction of Maximilian as liberal whom some argue contributed in a positive way to Mexico. However, some Mexican scholars dispute this. The other widely held belief is that Benito Juárez can be credited with the restoration of the republic and the betterment of the working poor and indigenous. Although criticism of Juárez is uncommon in official circles, where he is idolized, some Mexican scholars are more skeptical of these claims. The missing or generally ignored data concern the contribution of the United States to the defeat of the French and Austrian armies, which is not mentioned in any survey texts and is minimized in most articles. The fuller inclusion of these data coupled with a closer look at the contributions and failures of both the Maximilian and Juárez regimes provides a clearer picture of the epoch and generates new insights.

The Formation of Historiography and Public Opinion in Mexico in the 19th Century

В статье анализируется становление мексиканской историографии в XIX веке. Автор отмечает существенное влияние на формирование мексиканской исторической и общественной мысли таких ключевых событий независимой истории молодого мексиканского государства, как Война за независимость, борьба за сохранение территориальной целостности страны, либеральные реформы, гражданская война 1854–1860 годов и буржуазно-демократическая революция 1910–1917 годов. Эти проблемы прежде всего нашли отражение в первых исторических национальных исследованиях. Будучи важными государственными и общественными деятелями, первые мексиканские историки не ограничивались хронологическим описанием исторических событий страны, а стремились к формированию концепций мексиканской истории с учетом особенностей ее развития и значения автохтонных традиций. The article analyzes the development of Mexican historiography in the 19thcentury. The author underlines that the Mexican War of Independence, Mexican liberal reforms, the civil war of 1854–1870, and the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1910–1917 are key events whose influence on the formation of Mexican history and public opinion cannot be underestimated. The above mentioned milestones of Mexican history were investigated by the pioneers of Mexican historiography. Being prominent political and public figures, the pioneers of Mexican historiography did not only describe the chronology of historical events, but sought to develop a concept of Mexican history that would rest on Mexican traditions and peculiarities of the country’s development.

Voices of Mexican history in Sophia Segovia's novel «The Murmur of Bees»

The article examines the novel by the Mexican writer Sofia Segovia «The Murmur of Bees», published in Russian in 2021. The novel, written in the genre of Latin American "magical realism", describes the dramatic events of the period of "revolutionary caudillism" that followed the Mexican revolution of 1910—1917. The novel, which is a literary discovery of the year, provides an interpretation of revolutionary events that is unusual for official historiography.

The Ungovernable Female Agency

By following McNay's conceptualization of agency and adapting Mills' feminist stylistics, this chapter examines the creation of female agency and subjectivity in the Mexican political drama Ingobernable [The Ungovernable]. The series has two complete seasons and 27 episodes so far. The plot revolves around the actions of five women, who can be identified with their unexpected and unanticipated as well as disobedient and resistant behaviors at varying levels. Each woman has different relations with power; however, all aim to engender change within the established order. Here, the author proposed a multi-layered method for analyzing female agency and subjectivity in the series by weaving the analysis through women archetypes from Mexican history and argued that female agency is created through audacious and cautious actions in Ingobernable which exists in-between these two action-based tensions.