Enrique Florescano
Memory, Myth and Time in Mexico. From the Aztecs to Independence.
Chapter 5
October 1997
ISBN 0292724853

Creole Patriotism, Independence, and the Appearance of a National History

There is a notable difference between the historical discourse of the pre Hispanic age and that of the viceroyalty. Whereas in ancient Mexico the ruler defined what to recover of the past and maintained almost absolute control over its interpretation and means of dissemination, in the viceroyalty there is a multiplicity of means of collecting, interpreting and disseminating the past, with the peculiarity that each of these discourses differs from and even opposes the others. In contrast to the single discourse of the past that the ruler of ancient Mexico produced, in the viceroyalty there is a fragmentation of the historical memory and a varied and conflicting interpretation of the past.

The dominion that the rulers exercised over the production and dissemination of the past and the existence of a single protagonist in the historical narration determined the unity of historical discourse in the pro-Hispanic era. The protagonist was a people or ethnic group united by one language, one origin, and one territory. This is the unity that the Conquest broke. Spanish domination sought to create larger integrated political units (the viceroyalty or kingdom of New Spain), but in fact, it shattered the unity of the aboriginal groups by dividing them into hundred of towns without any connection between them. In addition, by gathering in one territory peoples of different languages and cultures and introducing ethnic groups that were foreign to the original population, Spanish colonization fragmented the old social unity. In fact, the viceroyalty came to be a disintegrated mosaic of contrasting peoples, ethnic groups, languages, and cultures, disseminated in an extensive territory with poor communication.

This primordial disintegration was deepened even more by the shock of contradictory historical memories that the Spanish domination brought on. To the initial confrontation between the Christian conception of historical happening and the indigenous groups' mythic conception of time were added the new and divergent interpretations of history produced by distinct social groups that sprang out of colonization. As was seen previously, next to the providential and imperialist discourse disseminated by the chroniclers of the Spanish Crown, there appeared the mystical and apocalyptic discourse of the Franciscans and a historical project that, instead of exploiting the Indians and the silver mines, contemplated the creation of a monastic community dedicated to the praise of God and the founding of a church similar to that of the primitive Christians. A little later, specific and exclusive discourses were developed by each of the religious orders, by the official chroniclers of the empire, by the chroniclers of the viceroyalty, by the chroniclers of the cities. The specific discourses of the Indian towns were also present, which, beginning with their slight individuality, sought to reconstruct their blurry memory of the past and to establish solidarity that would reconcile their destroyed past with their continually menaced and difficult present.

The presence of different conceptions of time and historical development and the continual collision between opposing historical memories favored the development of hybrid discourses, likewise particular to the new social groups. The incomprehension that has prevented recognizing the characteristics of the historical discourse of the descendants of the old Indian nobility or the historical memory of the new Indian towns or the discourse of the Creole group is perhaps explained because they are discourses that come from hybrid social realities, from a mix of different cultural traditions, and because they are discourses that reveal their own historical projects, different from the ethnic and cultural roots that originated them. The discourse of the descendants of the old Indian nobility is based on original indigenous texts, but it is expressed in European narrative forms; it adopts as an explanatory line the Christian conception of history; it is directed to readers who know Spanish; and it seeks to serve the particular interests of the Indians who collaborated with the Spaniards in the domination of the Indians themselves. This mixture of ambivalent and contradictory interests is observed in the processes of recovering historical memory of the Indian towns reestablished or created during the viceroyalty. In this case, apparently the towns had accepted the Conquest, the Christian religion, and political and social domination to the extent that their memory and doily practices struggled to incorporate European values into their most deeply rooted tradition, converting these values into Indian presences, or into values that made indigenous life and traditions legitimate. Nevertheless, when these attempts at indigenizing the foreign were rejected by the Spanish authorities, the rebirth is immediately seen of the indigenous mythic consciousness, the explosion of primitive religiosity, and a mobilization of all of the forces of the community to reach its objectives, to the point that the refusal to accept the miracles declared by the Indians leads to a radical subversion of the previously accepted religious and political order and, finally, to the definition of their own totally indigenous historical project.

What characterizes these discourses is that they are memories of the past and particular conceptions of history that, in addition to being founded on what is unique and distinctive about the group, reject or are unaware of the historical presence and the memory of the past of other groups. In the viceroyalty not only is there no single conception of the historical process that dominates or integrates others, but all those that are put forth by the different groups conflict with and negate each other. In this sense, these contradictory discourses faithfully express the social disintegration and deep division that separated the settlers of New Spain into antagonistic classes, groups, and ethnic enclaves. Politically and culturally, this presence of multiple memories of the past and of opposing interpretations of historical development was the principal obstacle to integration into one nation with a common memory, to creating a nation unified by a shared past.

In this battle among different memories of the past, only the Creole group attempted to create a common memory of the land it shared with other ethnic groups; it was also the only one that proposed to make the memories and historical traditions of the other ethnic groups its own.

The Formation of Creole Patriotism

The first Creoles, because their position and prestige were based on the deeds performed by their forebears, were proud of their Hispanic ancestors. Their social and economic situation rested on the prestige of being Spanish and the descendants of conquerors. This original support of being Creole fell into crisis when the crown attacked the basis of their economic and social position (the encomiendas) and set up in the viceroyalty a bureaucracy of Spanish functionaries that excluded the Creoles from positions of leadership. At the end of the sixteenth century, Creole resentment of the continued deterioration of their social position was expressed in a bitter animosity toward the gachupines, the Spaniards who came to build America, remained a few years, and returned to Spain rich.

To this frustration created by the contradiction between the aspirations of the Creoles and the realities of their era was added the problem of identity. The Creoles were Americans by birth and from the second generation they wore so by destiny: their lives and aspirations could be fulfilled only in the land where they had been bum. To be Creole became a problem of identity when the Creoles had to present evidence that the land they claimed as a right of inheritance was truly theirs. The Creole consciousness had its first moment of instinctive affirmation in the act of rejecting the gachupin, but the consciousness of creating a specific social group, with a common identity and aspirations, was formed through a more complex process of progressive physical, social, and cultural appropriation of the strange land that had been imposed on them as their destiny.

To conquer and to populate, not just to administer, was the motto of Cortés's men and of the successive waves of Spanish colonists. Also, the size of the territory, its ecological diversity and very rich human variety forced a few thousand Spaniards to spread out throughout the land and to establish mines, haciendas, workshops, artisans' shops, monasteries, ports, settlements, and cities that radically transformed these spaces. This characteristic of Spanish settlement turned even the first generation of Creoles into an Indianized generation of Spanish ancestry, but strongly influenced by Indians and mestizo foods, customs, and way of life. In contrast to the other European colonists who settled in America the first groups of Spanish colonists felt they owned the land they populated, both materially and culturally, for no one else had created that new economic and social reality that they called New Spain.

This appropriation of the land by works and deeds was completed by an appropriation carried out through the conscience. At the same time as the Spanish language became the principal communication vehicle of the inhabitants of the vice royalty, the Creoles subjected it to a constant process of Americanization. The first chroniclers stressed the contrast between the harsh speech of the peninsular Spanish and the more florid, delicate, and high-sounding language of the Creoles, as well as the notable differences of tone and accent of the Spanish spoken in New Spain. In a fashion parallel to the creation of distinctions of what was properly Spanish, in the Creoles there was an emphasis on the inverse process of approximation to the ground, geography, and traditions of American lands.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Creoles found in the pre-hispanic past and the exuberant American nature two distinctive elements that separated them from the Spaniards and affirmed their identity with the land that protected them. In this century, the chroniclers, particularly Juan de Torquemada, Carlos de Sigüenza, and Agustín de Vetancurt, praised Indian antiquity and offered an exalted presentation of the natural riches of American lands. In the Monarquia Indiana by the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada, the pro-Hispanic past is raised to the level of classical antiquity, even when Torquemada considers the Indian religion, as do Sahagún and Gerónimo de Mendieta, as a perverse product of the devil. But for Torquemada, the pagan essence of the Indian was redeemed by evangelization: "the [Indians'] things lasted until the trumpet of the divine voice sounded, which was for the Christians to come, with evangelical law and our people's conquest of these peoples, because God wished that they be divided so that those who were to conquer them might better come in." Torquemada compares Cortés to Moses, who freed the children of Israel from paganism, and presents the missionaries as the providential redeemers of a humanity that had fallen into the hands of the devil. According to this interpretation, the true founders of New Spain were then the friars who started their missionary task in 1524, not the conquerors.

In tam, Agustín de Vetancurt reached the conclusion that the New World was superior to the Old in natural resources and beauty. For his part, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora repeatedly confessed "great love, which I have owed to my homeland," and with that patriotic spirit for his place of origin, he gathered codices, collected archeological pieces, and defended the kings and cultures that flowered in Indian antiquity. He added a new argument to the impulse to separate New Spain from its familial link to the conquerors: he identified the Indian god-hero Quetzalcóatl with the apostle Saint Thomas, to support the idea that the gospel had been preached in America many years before the Conquest. Furthermore, following Torquemada, Sigüenza y Góngora saw in the laws and ancient Mexicans' ways of governing political virtues like those of the kings of classical antiquity. So convinced was he of this that on the occasion of the arrival of a new viceroy, he had the audacity to build a triumphal arch decorated with the figures of Indian kings and sages. He later reiterated this message in his Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe: advertidas en los monarcas antiguos del mexicano imperio, con cuyas efigies se hermoseó el arco triunfal

In addition, toward the end of that century and during the first half of the eighteenth, the Guadalupan devotion became a generalized patriotic cult. In 1757 Pope Benedict XIV declared the "universal sponsorship" of the Virgin of Guadalupe over New Spain, and around that time the new collegiate church building of Guadalupe was constructed. Already converted into official patron of the Mexicans, Guadalupe will enjoy in this century a generalized cult and fervor, to such an extent that the "devotion to Guadalupe eclipsed the devotion to Jesus." The majority of the sermons, the most emotional acts of faith, the new sanctuaries, and many other religious actions were aimed at exalting the image of Guadalupe as patron and protective goddess of a patriotic religion and to consider her shrine in Tepeyac as the seat of the Universal Church "because it is in the sanctuary of Guadalupe where the throne of Saint Peter will come to find refuge at the end of time." For these Creoles, obsessed with exalting the values of their homeland, the sponsorship of Guadalupe converted Mexico into a new Rome.

Principal devotion of the Jesuits, of a good part of the mendicant orders, and particularly of the high and low Creole clergy, the Virgin of Guadalupe was also the center of the popular mass cult. Periodic visits and processions to Tepeyac, theatrical representations of the appearance of the Virgin to Juan Diego, and folk imagery elevated the Guadalupe cult to the highest seat of honor of Mexican religiosity and reproduced the name of the Virgin in hundreds of new altars, sanctuaries, shrines, brotherhoods, toponyms, and names of persons.

It is not, then, by chance that indigenous antiquity and the Guadalupe cult were the attractions that captured the imagination of Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, an Italian gentleman who visited Mexico between 1736 and 1743 and for the rest of his life was tied to these two axes of Creole patriotism. Boturini's stay produced three important results. First, obsessed with knowing and explaining the history of the ancient indigenous cultures, he undertook a laborious search for codices and written testimony that in seven years made him the possessor of the greatest documentary collection on ancient Mexico that had been gathered in New Spain. Second, Boturini was one of the first enthusiastic admirers of La scienza nuova (1725), the work by Gianbattista Vico that set forth a revolutionary interpretation of the development of human history, taking as example the ancient history of the west. Influenced by this new interpretation of the historical process that Vico divided into three ages (that of the gods, that of the heroes, and that of human beings), Boturini decided to apply Vito's conception to the Indians' ancient history in Mexico. With this purpose, he wrote his Idea de una nueva historia general de la América septentrional and planned to write a Historia general de la América septentrional, which he did not finish. In Boturini's Idea, the methods of new European philosophy are applied to discover the origin and development of Mexico's ancient culture.

Third, in addition to his scientific obsessions, Boturini was attracted, without a doubt, by his relationship with the Creoles, by "a superior impulse" to investigate "the prodigious miracle of the appearance of our patron Guadalupe." To that end, he gathered a great number of documents on that topic. Converted to a devotee of Guadalupe, he promoted in Rome nothing less than the coronation of the Virgin, an enterprise that, since it did not take into account the patriotic and religious zeal of the inhabitants of New Spain, led him to exile and the loss of his extremely valuable collection of historical and religious documents.

At mid-eighteenth century, the Creole attempts to recover the indigenous past and other intense forms of religiosity wore the center of a devastating attack by some of the most influential authors of the European Enlightenment. Between 1749 and 1780, the Count of Buffon, Abbot Raynal, Cornelius de Pauw, and the distinguished Scottish historian William Robertson proclaimed a peculiar degeneration of American nature, discovered a natural inferiority in native American creation of works of culture, and attacked the religious fanaticism of the Spaniards. Robertson states in The History of America (1777) that the Aztecs had barely reached the state of barbarism without reaching the heights of true civilization. With Protestant severity, he criticized the influence of the Catholic religion in the administration of the Spanish colonies and issued multiple judgments against the obscurantism, superstition, and administrative inefficiency of the Hapsburg dynasty, whose monarchs he blamed for the decadence that struck down Spain beginning in the seventeenth century.

When this critical wave reached New Spain, it raised unanimous indignation in the religious and the educated Creoles, who were the group that had done the most to build a positive image of American nature, to create a new and favorable interpretation of the pro-Hispanic past, and to support the creative virtues of those born in America. To the derogatory statement that New Spain was an "intellectual desert," Juan José Eguiara y Eguren replied with the first monumental Bibliotheca mexicana (1755), a work dedicated to demonstrating the scientific and literary production of the Mexicans from most ancient times to the first decades of the eighteenth century. But the most consistent reply of the Americans to the European criticism was produced from his remote Italian exile by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, who wrote his Storia antica del Messico (1780), without a doubt the most outstanding American contribution to the dispute about the New World and a key work in the affirmation of Creole historical consciousness.

Handling the theses of enlightened thought with confidence and imbued with profound patriotism, Clavijero destroyed the prejudiced statements of the European critics and in their place presented a glowing portrait of Mexico's ancient history, which, by placing this history within the perspective of the development of classical civilizations of Europe, shows it to be an original history deserving of admiration. By proposing the uniformity of human nature as an analytical principle, Clavijero destroyed, on the one hand, the thesis of "natural inferiority", that Enlightenment critics argued and, on the other, disqualified the interpretations about the intervention of the devil that had been made by Spanish friars to denigrate the paganism and idolatry of the indigenous people.

Clavijero's response to the European critics had an immense and definitive effect in his own country, in the first place, because his history came to be the first coherent, systematic, and modem integration of the Mexican past into a single book, the first successful image of a blurred and until then incomprehensible past. In the second place, by taking up the defense of this fragmented and demonized past, Clavijero took the hardest step in the complex process that had perturbed the Creoles for more than two centuries in order to found their identity: he accepted that past as his own, as the root and substantial part of his homeland. Beginning with this conversion of the foreign into his own, Clavijero was able to offer a reconstruction of the indigenous past as a proud inheritance of the Creoles without connecting this illustrious past with the degraded situation of the surviving natives.

In contrast with the Creole elites of the viceroyalties of Peru or New Granada, which for various reasons distanced themselves from the pre-hispanic past and from their indigenous descendants, the Creoles of New Spain had the inspired notion of appropriating the indigenous past to give historical legitimacy to their own claims and separated that past from its true historical descendants. This expropriation of the indigenous past, which was carried out by the Creole intelligentsia, marks the essential difference between the Creoles of New Spain and those of the other viceroyalties of the continent, it explains the basis the Creoles of New Spain used in taking up the political leadership of their own country and demanding from the peninsular Spaniards the right to rule and govern the destiny of their homeland.

The Historia antigua de México culminates the long process that was initiated by the missionaries and the Creoles to recover the pro-Hispanic past and take it up as their own past. From the dedication, Clavijero states that his book is " a history of Mexico written by a Mexican, " which he delivers "as a testimony of my very sincere love for my homeland," and whose principal aim is the "utility of my compatriots". Clavijero is the first historian to present a new and integrated image of the indigenous past and the first writer to reject European ethnocentrism and support the cultural independence of the Mexican Creoles from the Europeans. Another contribution was to open a broad historical horizon to the development of the notion of homeland, which, at that time, by including pre-Columbian historical background, takes on the prestige of the past and projects an extraordinary political dimension to the future.

Clavijero's homeland is the complex of values that the Creoles identify as their own. It is a homeland that is not given, but constructed and declared beginning with the recognition of communal values. First was a homeland identified by the originality of its geography, recognized by its qualities as a prodigious land, exuberant and good until it became the belief of many that Mexico was an earthly paradise, a gift of God. Later, this geographic notion was enriched by the incorporation of intimate cultural values and traditions, by the unity of sentiments, beliefs, and practices that the Catholic religion spread, by the presence of the unrestrained baroque style and the proliferation of various forms of painting, music, handicrafts, foods, customs, and manners of expression, created in the country itself and produced especially to satisfy the tastes of its people. Finally, this community of values and practices was expressed in symbols whose purpose was to denote a shared identity, affirm a unity located beyond the divisions created by race and abysmal economic and social differences. The Virgin of Guadalupe was the most successful unifying symbol of this unevenly divided society. She united Catholics and Indians in one nationally celebrated cult. To this group of integrated values and symbols, the Creoles of the eighteenth century added the idea that that homeland had a remote past, a past that, by being accepted by them, stopped being only Indian to become Creole and Mexican. Thus, by integrating indigenous antiquity into the notion of homeland, the Creoles expropriated their own past from the Indians and made of this past a legitimate and prestigious history of the Creole homeland. The Creole homeland now had a remote and noble past and a present unified by shared cultural values and religious symbols, and it could therefore legitimately demand the right of governing its future. No other group or class created integrated symbols endowed with that force, nor did any other group have the ability to introduce and extend those symbols to the rest of the population.

Clavijero's work, by being so decisive in the creation of a new dimension of the historical consciousness of the Creoles, was one of several that were published between 1750 and 1810 that changed the conception of the past. The deepest root of this past, ancient Mexico, was seen in a new light by the Creoles who were educated under the influence of the modem ideas and the Enlightenment. In the same years during which Clavijero was writing his Historia, Mariano Veytia, a Creole educated in Spain and influenced by Boturini, finished his Historia antigua de México, which was published many years later, in 1836.The proverbial curiosity of José Antonio Alzate, the famous editor of the Gazetas de literatura, got him interested in ancient monuments, for he said that a "building manifests the character and culture of the people." He thought that the buildings were a valuable witness for "finding out" the "origin of the Indians." Driven by those interests, in 1788 he published a text in which for the first time he described the archaeological monuments of Tajín and later came out with a work entitled Antigüedades de Xochicalco (1791), which is the first publication illustrated with prints that provides information about an ancient city.

To another Creole, Antonio de León y Gama, is owed, according to José Femando Ramírez, "the first and only rigorously archaeological research that Mexico can claim." Educated in astronomy and physics, León y Gama published in 1792 his Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras, which he dedicated to the analysis of the Coatlicue and the Sun Stone, two monoliths discovered accidentally in 1790. As a sign of the change that had taken place in the viceroyalty, instead of the monuments' being destroyed, as had been common, the viceroy himself, Revillagigedo, ordered them preserved. Another indication of the changing times was that the study that León y Gama dedicated to the Sun Stone left its mark on archaeological investigations. León y Gama, for the first time, took an archaeological monument as a primary source for explaining an entire system of ideas and he undertook this enterprise with unusual intellectual skills: to his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics he added that of nahuatl and consultation of most of the codices and Indian texts known at that time; against the current of his time, he made it clear that the indigenous calendar was governed by its own concepts and could not be studied using the categories of the European calendar. He demolished the prior errors of interpretation and shed new light on the system of computing time and the indigenous chronology.

Pedro José Márquez, another Jesuit exiled in Italy, published in 1804 Due antichi monumenti di architettura messicana, a popular work based on Alzate's publications on El Tajín and Xochicalco. Along with those new works about ancient Mexico, the exploration of a historical world at that time unknown was started: the exploration of the ancient cities and archaeological monuments. This new look at a very old and until then almost hidden presence can be said to have had its origins in 1790 in Palenque, when Father Antonio de Solís was named pastor of that place. Very soon he and his family began to make known the existence of the archaeological monuments. In 1773, Father Ramón Ordóñez, who as a child had discovered Palenque through the family of Father Solís, organized the first expedition to visit the archaeological ruins. He also informed the governor of Guatemala, José Estachería, of the existence of Palenque, and the governor, in turn, ordered José Antonio Calder6n to prepare a report on the place. The text and the drawings of Palenque that Calderón prepared in 1784 can be considered the first archaeological report about an area of ancient monuments, although Calder6n, impressed by the grandeur of the constructions he saw in the jungle, thought that the authors of these buildings must have been "Romans." One year later, the governor of Guatemala ordered another exploration of the site. The reports of these visits were sent in 1786 to the emperor of Spain himself, Charles III, who approved them and ordered new explorations carried out.

The enlightened mentality of the Spanish rulers of the second half of the eighteenth century, then, canceled the prohibitions of the authorities and the church at the end of the sixteenth century on the study of Indian antiquities. Beginning then, expeditions especially dedicated to examining the archaeological monuments began to spread rich information about them. Juan Bautista Munoz, chief chronicler of the Indies, became acquainted in Madrid with the reports on Palenque and in 1786 recommended a detailed investigation of the site and the necessary excavation to learn about the system of construction and the characteristics of the city and its monuments. Captain Antonio del Río, who was designated to carry out this mission, spent a long time in Palenque, made numerous excavations, drew up plans and drawings of the zone, and much later (1822) published, in English, the results of his expedition.

Charles IV continued this policy and ordered a broader scientific expedition, dedicated to discovering monuments, recovering collections, and preparing the corresponding studies. Guillermo Dupaix, an Austrian military man who had studied in Italy, and the Mexican artist Luciano Castañeda, headed this expedition. Between 1805 and 1807, Dupaix and Castañeda made three visits to the center and southeast of the viceroyalty. Their first tour encompassed part of the states of Puebla, Veracruz, and Morelos. On the second trip, they concentrated on the outskirts of the Valley of Mexico. They visited Oaxaca, where Dupaix was astounded by Monte Albán, and produced the first literary description of this archaeological zone. On the third trip, they covered various parts of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Chiapas and stopped for some time in Palenque. This expedition confirmed the existence of new and grand archaeological zones, permitted the gathering of one of the first collections about monuments, and redoubled the scientific interest in the antiquities.

The work that most successfully spread news of the antiquities and spectacular geography of Mexico was, however, Vue des cordilleres et monuments des peuples indigenes de l'Amérique, by Baron Alexander van Humboldt, published in Paris in 1810. This large album contains sixty-nine plates with corresponding explanations, of which thirty-two refer to Mexico. Five reproduce archaeological monuments (Cholula, El Tajín, Xochicalco, and Mitla), seven others reproduce recently discovered monoliths, including the Coatlicue and the Sun Stone, and the rest illustrate pages or details from pictographic codices. Of these the famous Borgia Codex stands out.

The importance of these reports is that, for the first time, their authors provide surveys, plans, and technical drawings of cities and ancient monuments. They ask about the origin of the peoples who created these works and discuss the degree of cultural development, comparing this with that of the classical civilizations of Europe. It is also common in these authors to submit the American artistic works to a comparison of archetypes of the beauty of classical antiquity. No one followed the path away from mental subordination that Antonio de León y Gama started by rejecting the categories of the European calendar in order to investigate the indigenous chronology and calendar. Nor did anyone follow the path Clavijero opened. On the contrary, the authors of these reports refuse to accept that the ancestors of the Indians, who accompany them as guides and bearers, might have been the builders of these architectural marvels that they are contemplating. This is why they attribute the creation of these fantastic cities to Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians, and even to the inhabitants of Atlantis. Only Humboldt states that in recent years, "a happy revolution has taken place in the manner of examining the civilization of these peoples," and this is why he says of his investigations about America, "they appear in an age in which that is not considered unworthy of attention which is distant in style from that which the Greeks have given us as inimitable models." Nevertheless, although this attitude did not take effect until a century later, what is certain is that these first plans and drawings of strange cities and the reproductions of buildings, sculptures, and magnificent monoliths spread a new image of American antiquity.

The discovery of the monumental richness of ancient Mexico coincided with the appearance of new studies about the recent history of the viceroyalty. Another Jesuit living in Italy, Francisco Javier Alegre, concluded in the decade of 1760 the Historia de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, which became the first general history of the order from its establishment until 1767. Around this time, Father Andrés Cavo, also a Jesuit, wrote in Rome what could be called a general history of the viceroyalty between 1521 and 1766; it later was published with the title Historia de México. In this work, in addition to treating the mandatory theme of the Conquest, Cavo collected, in the form of annals, the principal events that occurred during the viceroyalty. Considered individually or as a group, these works, which recover large portions of an until-then forgotten past and present new methods and interpretations, are a product of the mental change introduced by the ideas of the Enlightenment.

In the mid-eighteenth century, a distinguished group of religious overcame the resistance of scholastic tradition to modem philosophy and the new experimental science. But the great revolution that precipitated the separation between religion and education, between theology and science, and between religious state and profane society had as its backdrop the years 1770 to 1810, when the Spanish monarch himself decided to govern his possessions under the principles of the Enlightenment, and new political projects and new institutions were born that transformed the life of the viceroyalty.

The principal change that the enlightened policies of the Bourbons introduced was the substitution of the project of creating a church-state with a modem lay society no longer directed by the religious and moral values but by the principles of enlightened modernity. The new state that the Bourbons proposed was not only a state distanced from the church but one that pursued earthly ends and whose goals were industrial, technical, scientific, and educational progress, not eternal salvation or religious values. The conviction that these goals should be promoted by the government and by enlightened rulers was the decision that most affected the established order. Starting then, direct state intervention in the economy, society, and cultural institutions wrested powers and privileges from the church, the merchants, the hacendados, and the Creole bureaucracy. This time, the interests and plans of the government were opposed in a radical fashion to the interests of the colonial oligarchy.

The ambitious Bourbon project of modernizing society took shape within these contradictions and had on its side the active participation of the Creoles, who played a major role as transmitters and executors of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Further, by carrying out this project of renewal, the Creoles successively occupied the new intellectual and scientific centers that the Enlightenment created. In a few years, the proposal to establish the ideals of the Enlightenment and to found new institutions changed traditions forged over two centuries. In 1768, the Royal School of Surgery was created, which, contrary to the university tradition, replaced Latin with Spanish for teaching and, instead of the predominance of theory, put an emphasis on medical practice. The founding in 1792 of the Royal Seminary or College of Mining produced even more decisive changes, for it came to be the door through which entered a group of distinguished Spanish mineralogists, technical and scientific teaching applied to mining production, new classes and knowledge, and the most modern physics, mineralogy, and chemistry laboratories. This new institution educated a brilliant generation of technical and scientific Creoles. It became the center of scientific activity of the viceroyalty and was the point of contact with European science.

Another radical change, but in the field of the arts, was introduced by the founding in 1781 of the Royal Academy of the Noble Arts of San Carlos. The opening of this royal institution brought about the transfer to New Spain of an important group of Spanish artists and the sudden introduction of the neoclassical style, which had been established in the Spanish court. From the beginning of its activities, the academy broke the monopoly that until then had been enjoyed by the teaching guilds, production and sale of artistic and artisanal works, and ceded this monopoly to its own teachers and graduates. In addition, it became the institution that granted construction permits for public works and was the only one that granted titles and prizes in fine arts (architecture, painting, sculpture, and engraving). Its members acted as the principal arbiters of public taste. Further, the academy was responsible for the introduction into the viceroyalty of lay and state art, which instantly came into conflict with religious art and with the traditional conception of the beautiful, which was also very marked by the religious spirit of the era.

Thus, with the strength of academic rules and monopoly of action, the teachers and graduates of the academy began to change the baroque face of New Spain; everywhere, formerly praised retablos and baroque porticoes gave way to sober neoclassical models. Public works in the cities as well as new religious construction were completely dominated by the new style. In this manner, the state, not the church, came to be the arbiter of urban design, architectural style, and aesthetic taste and the new Maecenas of artists and artisans. In sum, the seal that during those years distinguishes the new architecture and the "noble arts" is its lay and state character, it being an art that, in addition to having classical antiquity as its model, tams toward public life and celebrates the rulers and their symbols.

Along with these new scientific and cultural institutions, there developed a form of communication that revolutionized the flow and spread of ideas. With an intellectual fervor similar to that which in France drove the appearance of the Encyclopedia or in Spain the extraordinary popular work of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, the Creoles gave themselves to spreading in their country the transformative potential of science and the new economic, social, and educational ideas that they thought would convert New Spain into a modem country equal to the most advanced ones. In 1772, José Ignacio Bartalache began to publish his famous Mercurio Volante, which was the first medical magazine published in the Americas and the medium for popularizing the new scientific methods.

Perhaps the most representative spirit of the enlightened mentality of New Spain was embodied in José Antonio Alzate. A priest, like the majority of the intellectuals of the time, Alzate personified the principal characteristics of the enlightened temperament: a follower of the new philosophy and enthusiastic promoter of experimental science, he was, above all, a believer in the transformative power of reason, an ideologue of mental and social change, and a man of encyclopedic curiosity. In addition to these qualities, he developed another typical of the enlightened spirit: the problems that awakened his curiosity became public topics in his famous Gazetas de literatura, the magazine that, between 1778 and 1795, disseminated and promoted the discussion of these topics in New Spain. In addition, between 1784 and 1817, the Gazeta de México was published, which, along with news of public celebrations,earthquakes, processions, droughts, crimes, and other local events, made known European political events, scientific advances, and the latest news in machines and technical inventions.

Prompted by this propitious, enlightened environment, a group of Creoles connected to the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City promoted the publication of the first Diario de México (1805-1812), which opened its pages to critical reflections on social and political matters that proclaimed the inclinations of the most politicized Creole group. In light of the participation of persons such as Carlos María de Bustamante, Francisco Primo de Verdad, and Jacobo de Villeurrutia (the three implicated in the later independence movement), and the topics on its pages, the Diario de México can be considered the first case in which a social group attempted to use a modem communications medium as an ideological instrument. Triple novelty: in the Diario de México, the establishment of the first newspaper, the training of a group of Creoles in handling a modem communications medium, and a marginalized social group's transformation of this medium into ideological warfare all converge.

Almost everything that is created in New Spain at the end of the eighteenth century reflects the change brought about by the introduction of modem, enlightened ideas. Everywhere we see the presence of a sensitivity preoccupied with the things of this world and of a mentality that questions, classifies, and interprets natural and social reality using new analytical instruments. Mining, for example, was subjected to minute scrutiny by a distinguished group of Creole and Spanish specialists; said scrutiny clarified its history, its legislation, and its systems of production and brought about the creation of a new legal framework, new financial policies, and new institutions dedicated to its development.

This tendency to consider the aspects of the material or social reality using new analytical instruments and arguments supported by rigorous technical expositions is common in the majority of discussions and proposals of this period. The same can be seen in the polemics caused by the introduction of vaccination or the establishment of the intendencia system, as in the discussion of the laws about free trade or in the analysis of agricultural, mining or ecclesiastical problems. What is new is that, instead of having recourse to the argument of authority or presenting dogma as an unquestionable proof, in this era there is an extraordinary development of the inventory and the catalog as elements on which to base arguments, explanations, or judgment. During these years, a veritable rage for investigating measuring cataloging, and inventorying the natural and social world develops. In 1769, beginning with Miguel Costanzó, Juan Crespi, and Junípero Serra, the scientific expeditions dedicated to maritime, geographic, and astronomical exploration and to collecting samples of the flora and fauna of the viceroyalty begin. This was followed by other expeditions, among them the one headed by Alejandro Malaspina and the very famous one that Charles III sent in 1786, which produced the first scientific herbarium in Mexico, the founding of the Botanical Garden, the creation of a chair of botany, and the first natural history laboratory. These and other expeditions traveled over a great part of the territory and contributed to determining latitudes, carrying out astronomical observations, drawing maps and charts, applying new scientific knowledge to these tasks. Thus, in a few years, this curiosity, guided by systematization, produced a new image of the resources and geography of the viceroyalty. To this scientific analysis of the natural environment were added the first population censuses and the reports of the intendentes, bishops, priests, merchants, miners, and farmers about the economic and social situation of each province, and quantified information about the principal economic activities of the viceroyalty. On the basis of this very abundant information, organized under the rational patterns of the Enlightenment, works and observations were drawn up that it would not have been possible to imagine years before. An example of the qualitative leap that occurred then in the organization and management of information is the Historia general de la Real Hacienda (1791), a compilation that, for the first time, organized the chaotic accumulation of data about the income and expenditures of the viceroyalty, explained the origins of each item, and transformed the disorder into a modem accounting system that was in use until late in the nineteenth century.

Another case that shows how the new systematization of information led to qualitative changes in analysis and to the capture of previously unencompassable aggregates is the Memoria de estatuto o idea de la riqueza que daban a la masa circulante de Nueva Espaiía,sus naturales producciones (1877). This work by José María Quirós is the first attempt to do what we would today call a calculation of national income, or, as Quirós himself said, to create "as correct an idea as possible of the territorial and industrial production of this New Spain." Without the accumulation of sectoral, regional, and general information, without the purifying ordering of these complex data, and without the new theoretical instruments brought by the Enlightenment, this high moment in the analysis of economic reality would not have been reached.

The introduction of the reasoned discourse of the Enlightenment and of experimental science methods brought about, then, a quantitative and qualitative change in the systems of collecting information, for these were now able to capture a broader universe and had at their disposal sharper instruments for collecting and refining the information. This important change was followed by a fundamental change in the processes of analyzing, interpreting and explaining accumulated information. The most representative works of this era-the Historia antigua de México by Clavijero, the Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras by León y Gama, many pages of the Gazetas de literatura by Alzate, the Comentarios de las ordenanzas de minas by Francisco Javier Gamboa, the Memoria sobre el influjo de la mineria en la agricultura, industria, población y civilización de la Nueva España by Fausto de Elhúyar, the Historia general de Real Hacienda by Fabián de Fonseca and Charles de Urrutia, or the Memoria de estatuto by José María Quirós-are the systematized sum of known information and an exposition governed by the logical demonstration of the facts, the internal coherence of the arguments, and reasoned and convincing explanation. There is in these works a new language that translates a new way of seeing reality, of analyzing and explaining it.

Another outstanding example of the depth that the analysis of reality had reached can be seen in the works of the bishop-elect of Michoacán, Manuel Abad y Queipo. In the Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero . . . (1799), and in other writings about the economic, social, and political situation of the viceroyalty, Abad y Queipo demonstrates extraordinary dominion of the information (he always has at hand the most significant and current data) and masterful managing of the arguments and of reasoned explanation. By devoting himself to the most unjust economic and social aspects of the viceroyalty, he took a step forward in the development of analysis and stowed himself to be a coherent, enlightened man. He discussed the most advanced social reforms of this time. In a letter addressed to the king and signed by Bishop Antonio de San Miguel, he proposed radical measures to overcome the terrible situation the castes and the Indians were in: abolition of tributes; suppression of legislation that degraded the caste groups; division of the lands that belonged to the state among the Indians and the dispossessed castes; an agrarian law that permitted working on uncultivated lands of the large landholders; and the division of community lands as private property among the Indians of the towns.

Abad y Queipo's proposals and the works of his contemporaries confirm that, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new analytical methods and the new forms of recording inventorying, and explaining reality were concentrated in the profane world: in the transformation of the economy, society, and forms of government. This secularization of analytical thought is one of the most notable manifestations of the great change occurring in the mentality of the ruling groups of the viceroyalty.

The secularization of government that the Bourbons began by separating the interests of the state from those of the church was taken to its ultimate consequences by Enlightenment ideology. At the end of the eighteenth century, there is a progressive secularization of the social and political order, of education, sciences, arts, and customs. If in the first half of this century the officials of the Holy Inquisition were exclusively occupied with persecuting heretical philosophical ideas or those contrary to religious orthodoxy, in the last twenty years of the century, they faced a surprising secularization and politicization of the attitudes of the people of New Spain. In these years, the books that the alarmed Inquisition confiscated were the works of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert and of other popularizers of the libertarian principles of the French Revolution.

This change in readings was followed by a change in the readers. These are no longer only ecclesiastics and learned Creoles, but minor and middle-level officials, higher and lower clergy, members of the army, and a growing number of individuals from the middle sector of the urban popfllation. All of them, say the inquisitors in consternation, are permeated by "purportedly strong spirits, which under the name of modern philosophers and with the reality of Atheists, Deists, Materialists, the Impious, [and] Libertines, attack religion and the state in our century" What disturbs the spirit of the inquisitors is the violent propagation of seditious ideas, the unexpected "passion for French books that have precipitated so many into the abyss of corruption," and the un-restrainable spread of a subversive political philosophy that invades the most traditional redoubts. This is why the inquisitors lament "this ill-fated era in which the intemperate echoes of liberty have reached the" most remote provinces. This invasion of revolutionary political ideas ended by destroying the ideological monopoly of the church and heightened the conflict with traditional values.

The secularization of thought and the invasion of the profane in environments previously dominated by religious values was manifested also in the popular sectors of the cities and the country. In these years, an infinite variety of dances, songs, and profane distractions multiplied. What is new about these forms of profane distraction is no longer their growing and multiplying number or lascivious, sensual, scandalous, obscene, or lewd character, but their ever more irreverent, antireligious, and subversive tone. What now worries the inquisitors who pursue these dances and songs is not just their unrestrained impetus but their conversion into instruments that mock traditional values.

A century earlier, what was exceptional and punished was a mixture of the religious with the profane; at the end of the eighteenth century, what alarms the inquisitors is the spread of the profane over the religious, the relaxation of customs and traditions, insolent play with previously untouchable religious symbols, the irreverence toward holy things, and the mocking of the most sacred Christian values. In this process, a new fact is the transformation of the profane spirit into criticism of traditional values. Dance, song, anonymous satire become the weapons of criticism. Little by little, derision and mocking leave by the wayside the individual, the circumstance, or the anecdotal to become mocking of institutions, authorities, and governments. Imperceptibly, from the mocking of priests, it passes to the mocking of the church or religion, from the mocking of an official to the mocking of government, from the mocking of the greedy Spanish carpetbaggers to criticism of Spanish domination. Festive satire becomes political satire, and both become confused and spread by means of anonymous writings that multiply through the effective channels of rumor.

The division that the ideas and practices of the Enlightenment established between the profane and the religious accentuated the criticism of obscurantism, fanaticism, and miracles that predominated in the religious world. This division, previously nonexistent, was what was imposed in the last quarter of the century in painting architecture, sculpture, theater, and the so-called noble arts for, in addition to spreading Enlightenment styles and models, these activities stamped a worldly content on their creations. Music was opened to new European airs, and poetry and literature were peopled by Olympus, Hades, nymphs, heroes, and Greco-Roman myths. This new literature also becomes a critical and contradictory literature, as can be seen in the first and most important novel of the era: El periquillo sarniento by Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. It criticizes the morals, customs, and traditional forms of life. In this way, the artistic and cultural world dominated before by Christian values, religious sentiment, and edifying example, became a medium that created profane objects guided by worldly values and stimulated by non-ecclesiastical sponsors.

There is, then, a correlation between the progressive secularization of social reality and the scientific, artistic, and cultural products and the creation of new spaces that permit the expression of this new mentality without the constraints that the religious medium previously imposed. The new scientific and cultural institutions, the new centers created by the government to spread the ideals and fashions of enlightened thought, the new subject areas, and journalism are secular institutions and spaces, not religious ones. In these environments opened by Bourbon and Enlightenment policy, the Creoles completed their ideological and political training. With the exception of the highest posts of government the Creoles dominated these new seats of knowledge, analysis, criticism, and diffusion. The Creoles were the students, the teachers, the popularizers, and the directors of this new knowledge and the forces and direct beneficiaries of the conversion of analytical thought into a critical instrument of social reality. In the new scientific and cultural institutions, in the new subject areas, and in journalism, which then developed with great force, the Creoles came into contact with philosophy, sciences, and techniques that were introduced by the Enlightenment and became experts in the new areas of knowledge and specialists in the handling of the new medium of diffusion of modern society: journalism and books. It is not by chance that, beginning then, the most advanced ideas are spread through journalism, pamphlets, fliers, anonymous papers, and books.

It was precisely a book that came to integrate the new knowledge created by the Creole intelligence and to reaffirm the historical conscience and images of identity that the Creoles had forged of their homeland: the Ensayo politico sobre el reino de la Nueva España, by Baron Alexonder von Humboldt. Humboldt personified the qualities required to write the first globalizing systematic book on New Spain. His ambition was to join scientific knowledge with humanistic. He had an exceptional encyclopedic education and "an astonishing capacity for work, an immense power of assimilation, and an extraordinary ability to synthesize data and information." With this basis, during his travel through America he conceived the idea of presenting to the European public the most complete portrait of geography, geology, botany, ancient history, and the economic and political situation of the Spanish possessions in America. This encyclopedic ambition was combined with a practical, utilitarian disposition: Humboldt knew that in Europe and the United States there was a lively interest in knowing precisely the real potential, the condition of the military force, and the mineral riches of Spanish possessions in America and particularly of New Spain, the greatest and richest of all. This is why he thought first of preparing Tablas geográficas politicas del reino de Nueva España, which he completed in 1803, and then thought about an Estadistica de México, which kept growing in size and complexity until it took the final form of his famous Ensayo politico, published in Paris between 1808 and 1811.

But if the conception and structure of these works are properly part of Humboldt's genius, the rich information that nourishes them is the result of the accumulation of knowledge that the enlightened spirit promoted in the last decades of the viceroyalty. In the gathering of data that support the Tablas and the Ensayo, Humboldt had in his favor felicitous circumstances that smoothed his path. In the first place, he found already elaborated the quantitative and qualitative information on the physical and natural environment, the population, the treasury, agriculture, industry, mining, and trade that had been gathered by the officials and teamed persons of New Spain. In the second place, he had as principal informants the most illustrious Creoles and the most open and critical minds of the viceroyalty. The best-informed men of New Spain, desiring to display their knowledge, wanting the approval and advice of the German scholar, and deeply interested in showing him the potential of their homeland, generously famished the data he solicited and everything that they could imagine would serve the purpose of making known to the world through such an illustrious agent the grand image that they had formed of their country.

As Ortega y Medina says so well, the generation of enlightened Creoles who, for years, had been constructing a new idea of themselves and of their country, on meeting with "Humboldt, idealize him and see themselves reflected in him. " The ideas that the Creoles had formed of the greatness of their country, the knowledge that they had gathered about its history and its current situation, their criticism of the government and the power that marginalized them, their exulted evaluation of scientific and artistic advances, their resentment, and the boundless optimism that they had conceived concerning the resources of their country, all these Creole ideas and sentiments are present in the Ensayo politico sobre el reino de la Nueva España. In this sense, Humboldt came to sanction the Creole image of a great and vigorous Mexico.

The powerful impact that this work had on the people of New Spain and on the Creoles in particular is explained by the unitary focus that embraces the entity of the viceroyalty and by the sectoral treatment of topics. For the first time, this approach offered those born in New Spain a precise idea of the territory they inhabited, of the number of inhabitants and their distribution in the intendencias or administrative jurisdictions into which the kingdom had been divided, of the agricultural richness and its famous mineral potential; of the increase in manufacturing and trade; of the military defenses and the vast income that this varied production famished the Spanish crown. By uniting in his analysis all these parts, Humboldt composed a global image of an immense country that, until then, had lacked an eloquent portrait that displayed its true dimension. It should be added that this first modem vision of the whole of New Spain appeared precisely at the moment when the independence movement began. Through this sum of intrinsic qualities and historical juncture, the Ensayo became the most read, influential, and quoted bock of many written in the nineteenth century about Mexico. Thus, through one book, one work peopled by scriptural images and the new scientific arguments of the Enlightenment, those born in Mexico stated and confronted the ideas that they had formed of their homeland. Justly, Lucas Alamán was able to say that Humboldt's work "came, to say it in this way, to discover the New World for the second time." And for the Creoles, it can be said that this book was the mirror in which for the first time they saw reflected the opulent image of New Spain that they had dreamed: an extensive geography, a cornucopia of agriculture, cattle, and mining; a vigorous country that to reach the level of the most prosperous nations of the world lacked only the development of its trade and industry and improvement in its government, from which the Creoles were excluded.

It is clear that in the last decades of the viceroyalty the historical consciousness of the Creoles underwent changes that strengthened their own interpretation of historical development and extended their capacity to recognize and absorb other memories of the past. Their specialized education (philosophy, theology, sciences, arts, and letters) led them to create an open relationship with Enlightenment ideas, and their intellectual and political compulsion persuaded them to convert those ideas into their own habits of reflection and to promote their spread in other social sectors. Through these channels, Gianbattista Vito's theories of human development were known in New Spain. Through William Robertson's innovative conception, which considered social development as a succession of progressive stages (savagery, barbarism, civilization), filtered the first enlightened ideas that conceived of historical development as a continuous march for progress. Also arriving with them was a group of new techniques for managing, criticizing, and refining historical information. In this way, for many Creoles, historical development ceased to be a process guided by the Christian teleology of eternal salvation and the fulfillment of God's plans and became an earthly, profane process determined by its own internal causes, which wore susceptible to being clarified through observation and analysis of the historical reality itself. In the countries where the Enlightenment flowered, this descent from heaven to earth expelled Providence from historical discourse, began an earthly search for meaning that could be attributed to historical events, and borrowed from the experimental sciences several methods that allowed the confrontation of hypotheses and theories with empirical research results. In this way, the explanation of the historical facts and the interpretation of historical development became a critical exercise in a persistent search for the credible and confirmable. This was the legacy that the spirit of the Enlightenment left scholars of historical events and that in New Spain became embodied in such works as Historia antigua de México by Clavijero, Descripci6n histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras by León y Gama, or Ensayo politico by Humboldt.

Mythic Discourse in the Insurgency

At the end of the eighteenth century, the memory of the past and the conception of historical development that the Creoles created dominated the sphere where historical discourse was expressed in the form of books, as a written message. But this was not the only discourse, nor was it the most generalized among the population. Alongside it was manifest the multiple presence of the mythic, indigenous, popular discourse, charged with polyvalent, strange, and disturbing symbols, meanings, and messages. It was a discourse all the more perturbing and difficult to grasp, for only in recent years have researchers become aware of its presence, generally expressed in oral form. In addition, it should be reiterated that this presence comes to us through the distorted record that the repressors made of that discourse. Nevertheless, as in the previous chapter, examples are presented of this multiple, exalted discourse. In this part, room is left for mythic imagination, which before and during the course of the insurgent movement, anticipated new millennia, crownings of kings, divine envoys, and miraculous salvations.

The Deranged Messiah of Durango, 1799-1801

On January 25, 1801, Francisco Antonio de la Bástida y Araziel, principal authority of the village of San Juan Bautista del Río, a town located to the north of Durango, had an interview with an Indian who appeared under the name of "Capitán Cuerno Verde," who later claimed that his name was José Silvestre Sariñana, and finally ended up being José Bemardo Herrada. In his interview with Bástida, Herrada requested permission to remain a few days in San Juan Bautista del Río to participate as "toreador" on foot in the upcoming festivities of the town. Nevertheless, a few days later, the indigenous governor of the town informed Bástida that "Cuemo Verde" was stirring up the population with seditious expressions. Bástida himself received a paper from Herrada in which he noticed messages that could upset the Indians and ordered him jailed. Subsequently, José Bernardo Herrada underwent an intense interrogation that threw same light on his "seditious ideas," but did not get to the bottom of his complex and disturbed mind.

Herrada drew the attention of the indigenous governor of San Juan Bautista del Río when he assured him that he could make it rain fire from the sky during the town's festivities. He told the Indians that in Durango he had been jailed for presenting himself as a mysteriously masked man and stated that he had come to win them over by fire and blood. He told the principal Indians that it was his duty to defend them from the Spanish authorities and announced extraordinary events in the days to come. Subjected to questioning, he caused a disturbance among the Spanish authorities when he confessed to having traveled through dozens of places in the north of the viceroyalty to gather signatures in favor of the crowning of an indigenous king, his own father, who was to be coronated on March 29, 1801, presumably in Tlaxcala. He stated that he had been born in the Analco ward in the city of Tlaxcala, where he had been "captain" of 133 towns in his district. He then gave an imaginative account of his travels through the north of Mexico. According to his testimony, on September 3, 1799, he left Tlaxcala and the following day (?) reached the capital of the viceroyalty, accompanied by several relatives and fourteen Indians from the various towns around Mexico City, his father, the governor of Tlaxcala, had provided to accompany him on his tour. Under the guidance of Herrada, this group traveled together for several days, and when it reached Río Verde, a town near San Luis Potosí, each of its members followed his own itinerary indicated in a royal warrant given to Herrada by the former viceroy, Miguel José de Azanza. According to this document, which was never presented as evidence in the interrogation, Herrada's mission was to collect alms and military deserters for unspecified purposes. Nevertheless, in another part of his statement, Herrada said that his mission was to collect the "signatures" of 40,000 Indians and especially of the authorities of the towns, with the goal of having the signers support his father's government and be present at the coronation, to take place on March 29, 1801. He also said that the collection of signatures was a pretext for finding out the number of Spaniards in each town and rural area. This information was to be gathered because, according to Herrada, the Spaniards "had oppressed and enslaved the Indians, and his father had the crown and power necessary to expel them all [the Spaniardsl as had been done with the Jesuits." In reply to a question from his inquisitors, Herrada said that his father's right to the throne was based on a royal warrant of 1786, issued by King Charles IV of Spain, in which it was recorded that his father "should be crowned with absolute powers to command, perform, and execute." He caused even greater alarm when he assured them that his father's plans were supported by a force of 500 English and 300 French soldiers posted at an unidentified point on the coast and with whom his father was in constant contact. This news, together with the rumors of probable English attacks, reports of indigenous uprisings, and conspiracy rumors, forced the authorities of New Vizcaya to take Herrada's statements seriously and to clarify his link with another indigenous leader who around that time was promoting an uprising in the region of Tepic.

The interrogations that Herrada underwent were unable to establish a definite link between him and Mariano, the indigenous messiah of Tepic, and even less with English forces, but they did demonstrate the fantasy, contradictions, and madness that inhabited Herrada's mind. The supposed father and indigenous governor of Tlaxcala was a product of his disturbed imagination, for Herrada had lost his father as a child. Nor does it appear certain that Herrada had visited the towns he claimed to have toured, for many of them were creations of his fantasies, as were the names of the persons he said had signed the communiqués favoring his father's coronation. Also imaginary were the credentials, the royal warrants, and other official Spanish documents with which Herrada intended to lend credibility to his actions. But what was very certain was the seditious character of his program: among fantasies, deliriums, and contradictions, Herrada clearly preached the advent of a kind of indigenous millennium in which the government would pass from the hands of the Spaniards into those of the Indians through the person of an indigenous king. As soon as the government was in the Indians' hands, the Spaniards were to be expelled from Mexican lands. Nevertheless, this clearness of the principal purpose of Herrada's plan is decreased by the lack of response from his indigenous audiences. Herrada is a frustrated messiah because he does not have followers: he announces a program of liberation but lacks the capacity to mobilize around him the indigenous population he leads. This is perhaps why his message is confused and contradictory. The most contradictory trait of Herrada's plan is his reiterated call to the highest Spanish authorities to legitimize his subversive action, which intended to bring down Spanish power. He says, for example, that the itinerary that he pursued on his trip through the north of New Spain and the mission that he followed were authorized by the viceroy, Miguel José de Azanza. It appears even more absurd that Herrada supported his father's claim to be "crowned with absolute power to command, perform, and execute" by producing a royal warrant from Charles IV!

For several days in February 1801, Herrada replied with these and other statements to the interrogation that the Spanish authorities conducted, until his testimony made up a thick file of 235 folio pages. During the first days of February 1801, he related everything we know of him and his plan. Then he fell silent. He was jailed in Durango in 1801, and in 1805 he was sent under guard to Guadalajara, to be taken to Veracruz and finally to Havana, where he was to serve out a sentence of six years. On the night of December 14,1805, however, he escaped from the Hacienda de Tlacotes near Zacatecas, and nothing more was heard of him.

The Phantom of Mariano in Tepic, 1801

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the consuming war that Spain waged against England and the ever more disturbing fear that the power of the United States awakened increased the susceptibility of the vice-regal authorities to external conspiracy rumors combined with internal rebellions. Within this climate of suspicion and fear, there reached the hands of the authorities of the port of San Blas and of the sub-delegations of Compostela and Aguacatlán in New Galicia copies of seditious papers that called for a general insurrection of the Indians in the region of Tepic. Thus, beginning with rumors whose origin was difficult to verify, the mysterious phantom image of Mariano, the supposed leader inspiring this uprising, was formed. According to imprecise and legendary information, Mariano was the son of the indigenous governor of a town named Tlaxcala in New Galicia.

According to those reports of unknown origin, Mariano had decided to send notices to an undetermined number of Indian communities to hold a general meeting in Tepic. Subsequently, speculation and rumor about Mariano and his seditious strategies increased. There was talk, then, of an indigenous king or of the election of a leader endowed with very broad powers and of the formation of an army of thirty thousand men ready to attack at his command. Rumors also circulated that the Indians had established secret communications between all the towns and with the nation of Tlaxcala. It was said that an unknown person in Mexico City was implicated in the subversive activity of the Indians in Tepic, and the news was spread that an armed horseman had been seen at meetings with different groups of Indians. The culminating act of this conspiracy was to take place in the capital of the viceroyalty on the day of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, precisely when the candles were lighted in the chapel. At that moment, the candles, which were to be connected to explosives, were to blow up the shrine to Guadalupe. The confusion that this terrible act would cause would be used by the insurrectionists to attack the palace of the viceroy, which also would have been mined at its comers.

This fantastic conspiracy was accepted as credible by vice-regal authorities. As soon as this news spread, the general commander of the Audiencia of Guadalajara, José Abascal, and Captain Francisco de Eliza, commander of the naval department of San Blas, mobilized the troops to suppress the insurrection before it could get under way. Abascal ordered the colonel of the Regiment of Dragoons of New Galicia to advance to the insurrectionary zone with two squadrons, leaving the rest of the force mobilized to go into action at any moment. He also ordered the provincial infantry battalion of Guadalajara to be put on alert and notified the coastal militia. Meanwhile, Captain Francisco de Eliza sent Captain Salvador Fidalgo to Tepic with troops and marines to surprise the Indians when they held their meeting. Apparently, the majority of the population of Tepic knew nothing of Mariano, or they had not paid attention to his communiqués. Others, believing that the Indians were gathering to receive an important person, perhaps the king of Spain himself, as someone said, went to the town to find out about the events. What is certain is that Fidalgo found the Indians gathered and ordered them to surrender. The majority obeyed, throwing their machetes to the ground, saying they had come in peace. Others, however, fearing arrest, attempted to escape. At that moment, a scene of panic and confusion was created: the troops opened fire, killing two Indians, injuring many more, and taking seventy-two prisoners. Fidalgo's troops arrested some two hundred Indians who later were taken to Guadalajara, where many died in prison before their cases were brought before the courts.

When the viceroy received the first news about these events, he saw in them the confirmation that he was facing a real menace to the security of the viceroyalty. This is why he ordered Captain Eliza to be prepared to evacuate San Blas and transfer his detachment to Acapulco. The war with England, the recent skirmishes with English and North American corsairs in the Pacific, and Mariano's insurrection led the viceroy to think of the possibility of a foreign plot. Nor did the viceroy put aside the suspicion that the Indians were preparing a general rebellion by means of secret contacts between each town. News coming from Veracruz seemed to confirm his worst fears. According to the authorities in that region, same Indians from Acayucan had spoken of the crowning of an indigenous king in Tlaxcala whom they proposed to visit and recognize as such. A few days later, an Indian named Juan José García was taken prisoner in Potrero Grande, Nuevo León for having stolen a mule. Jailed in San Luis Potosí, Juan José García refused to eat for several days and at the end of his hunger strike declared he was Alexander I. His jailers put him in solitary confinement and in irons and chains for several days. Questioned again so that he would tell the truth, García stated that he had been commissioned to visit the viceroy in Mexico City, who was to name him commander-general of the Provincias Internas. As he was unable to get an interview with the viceroy, he transferred to Tlaxcala and then to the port of Veracruz, where he was proclaimed Mariano I. Questioned about this nomination, he said that a royal warrant had granted him this title.

In mid-June 1801, reports of supposed Indian insurrections, fears of foreign plots, and rumors of fantastic coronations were reduced to their true dimension. When Viceroy Marquina received sure information, he teamed that Mariano's insurrection in Tepic had been a great hoax thought up by a single person: an Indian named Juan Hilano had been the author of the notices and communiqués attributed to the volatile phantom Mariano. The Indians of Acayucan, who supposedly had gone to subjugate themselves before the recently crowned indigenous king of Tlaxcala, turned out to be beggars who, passing through Tlaxcala, requested meager alms from the indigenous local governor. In turn, Alexander I, or Mariano I, was recognized by the doctors in San Luis Potosí as a man attacked by a "true melancholy dementia." Finally, the feared attack of the English never took place.

Rumors of uprisings, rebellions, and Indian revolts had been common throughout the tense social history of the viceroyalty. What was new at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century was the insecurity, the growing anxiety of the vice-regal authorities before these menacing manifestations of social discontent. The wars with England and other European powers added to the concern for internal security a fear of possible foreign attacks. Thus, in contrast to earlier times, the most fantastic news took on the appearance of reality. This new psychological situation of the vice-regal authorities perhaps explains so disproportionate a reply to Mariano's supposed insurrection in Tepic, or the unusual credibility they gave to the rumors of imaginary coronations of indigenous kings. What is certain is that at this time the indigenous myths and signs through which the deepest pulses rose to the surface already moved on their own: they were living phantoms that efficiently transported the accumulated load of indigenous claims; they had a specific weight in both the Indian mentality and that of their dominators.

The King of Spain in the Insurgent Ranks

Just as the religious symbols (the miraculous appearances of the Virgin), the symbols of indigenous resistance (memory of uprisings, insurrections, and crowned indigenous kings), and the indigenous messiahs began to be presences endowed with their own lives that gave messages of different meanings to the indigenous and the Spaniards, so also among the popular classes the figure of the king of Spain became an insurgent symbol and a protective shield of the oppressed social groups' aspirations for liberty. This phenomenon is foreign to developed political societies, where it is clearly absurd and illogical. But it is common in the traditional ones, where mythic and sacred thought is dominant and where there is nothing that could be called modern political thought. In New Spain and in the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia), this phenomenon is well documented.

Starting in 1801, in the supposed insurrection at Tepic, the presence of the king of Spain is mentioned as supporting the assembly that the Indians had held to plan the insurrection. During that same year, José Bemardo Herrada, the deranged messiah of Durango, bases his rights to the crowning of his indigenous king on a royal warrant granted by the emperor Charles IV. Later, when the French invade Spain, the popular allusions to the messianic figure of the king of Spain appear one after the other. In October 1808, at a ceremony held in Epazoyuca to proclaim the ascension of Ferdinand VII, an Indian named Pablo Hilario, who bore a standard with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe similar to that carried by the indigenous governor but with the image of Ferdinand VII, yelled: "Long live Ferdinand VII, and death to all the gachupines." One year later, the vice-regal authorities feared that the diabolical French included in their plans the visit to New Spain of deposed king Charles IV. In preparation for this event, they alerted the population to send him back respectfully if he came alone or to treat him like any enemy if he came accompanied by the French army. That is, at that time, the vice-regal authorities themselves were conscious of the charismatic power that the image of the king of Spain had among the indigenous people and the possible use of that image for subversive purposes.

This intuition was fully confirmed during the insurrectionary movement headed by Miguel Hidalgo. According to tradition, the war cry that Hidalgo started in the parish of Dolores was "Long live Ferdinand VII, long live religion, long Iive the Virgin of Guadalupe, and death to the gachupines!" Essentially, it is the same cry that had resounded previously in the main plaza in Mexico City and had taken the vice-regal palace in 1624 and 1692. In 1624, the disputes between the viceroy, the archbishop, the Real Audiencia, and the Creoles caused a riot that unleashed the fury of the popular classes in the city. On that occasion, the rioting people shouted: "Long live the church, long live the faith, long live the king, death to bad government!" In 1692, a terrible drought and manipulation of grain by the authorities and the landowners caused a popular riot that set fire to the vice regal palace and brought cries for death to the gachupines. Among the expressions most repeated by the inflamed multitude were death to the viceroy and the authorities who had commandeered the maize and voices of "Long live the king, death to the Spaniards and the gachupines!" That is, just as in the popular revolution in the New Kingdom of Granada (1781), in New Spain, the protest of the up-risers separates the acclamation of the figure of the king and condemns bad government: "Long live the king, death to poor government!"

During the war for independence, the king of Spain is not only the sole Spanish personality proclaimed and respected by the insurgents, but clearly appears as a figure who protects the rebels. In November 1810, a few days after the battle of Monte de Las Cruces, some Indians who had participated in it said to their Spanish captors that the king of Spain himself commanded Hidalgo's troops and rewarded the people who joined the rebel armies. According to their version, with the protection of the king of Spain, the rebel army would kill the viceroy and all the gachupines, whose properties would be divided up among the poor. The hated tribute, which weighed on the Indians, would be abolished by an edict issued by the king of Spain himself. The deposed king, Ferdinand VII, said other Indians, visited the rural areas of New Spain, and, hidden by a silver mask that covered his face, had been seen traveling with Father Hidalgo.

Here, then, is how the king of Spain, the highest representative of the power that was being fought, appears in the indigenous and popular mentality, invested with the attributes of a messiah. The Spanish monarch takes on, in the popular mind, the rank of the supreme commander of the insurgent army and is seen as a messianic agent whose intercession will bring about the defeat of the royalist forces, the death of all Spaniards, the division of all their property among the poor, and the disappearance of tribute. That is, he embodies the program to liberate the popular classes from the oppression they suffer and, precisely through this transfiguration, preserves the strength, dignity, and prestige of royalty, which in this fashion, with all his power intact, is maintained as an ally and protector of the popular came. In contrast with political movements, whose end is to unite all their powers to bring down those who have power, the mythic mentality makes the monarch of the oppressor nation sacred: instead of asking for his head, it proclaims him and converts him into a protector power of the insurgent action, into a defender of popular aspirations. In this case, the mythic mentality not only does not distinguish, in the person of the monarch, the representation of the highest political power that oppresses the indigenous people, but sees in him what had traditionally been the monarch in the history of the relationship between the king and the indigenous communities: a paternal power, a patriarchal figure, a source of divine justice, a sacred authority, a mythic entity.

The Battling Virgin

During the war for independence, the Virgin of Guadalupe added new roles to the many that she already had: she consolidated her position as queen and mother of those born in Mexico; she became the protective symbol of the insurgents; she was the charismatic magnet that called the indigenous and popular masses to follow the insurgent armies; and she headed a sort of holy war against the gachupín heretics. Early on, the Virgin defined her character as protective symbol of those dissatisfied with Spanish government. In the so-called Conspiracy of the Machetes, put down in 1799, the artisans, laborers, and humble people who participated in it chose her as a propitious symbol to call the people together to kill the gachupines, take possession of their wealth, free the prisoners from the jails, and proclaim independence from Spain. Later, her presence is constant in all the phases of the insurgent struggle. Her charismatic name is invoked in the parish of Dolores at the moment at which Hidalgo decides to take up arms against the Spanish government. Afterward, as Hidalgo passes through the parish of Atotonilco, he takes up the image of Guadalupe that was venerated there and converts it into the rebel flag. From that point, the image of Guadalupe travels the battlefields, and with this sacred and patriotic presence, the cry: "Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe and death to the gachupines!" the rebel army adds new supporters to its cause from the ranches, haciendas, and towns through which it passes:

Everywhere soldiers, clergy, hacendados, miners, people large and small, joined up; in some, all citizens with very few exceptions . . . as well as the greatest part of the clergy and other people who know how to read and write and have influence on the multitude, they are Creoles, they not only did not contain the multitude but incited it to disorder and uprising, and all it took was four poor souls in a group of one thousand yelling: Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe and death to the gachupines! For the entire [town] to rebel.

Later, these first reactions that spontaneously took up the Virgin of Guadalupe as the symbol of the insurrection were transformed by the rebel leaders into a premeditated strategy. On March 11, 1813, a proclamation from Morelos obliged the men in his army to wear the national colors (blue and white) on their hats and a "device of ribbon, tape, linen, or paper on which he declared his devotion to the holy image of Guadalupe, soldier and defender of her cult". That same year, in the Sentimientos de la nación, Morelos proposed establishing, through a constitutional law, "the celebration of December 12 in all towns dedicated to the patron of our liberty, most holy Mary of Guadalupe." Later, he ordered the official seal of the Chilpancingo Congress to contain the Guadalupan anagram.

In the unleashing of ethnic hatreds, wrongs, resentments, injustices, and vengeance that mark with bloodshed the war against the royalist armies and against Spanish persons and property, the insurgency becomes a holy war and the soldiers, soldiers of the Virgin, armed defenders of the religion. In his excellent study on independence, Luis Villoro observes that the ignored mass that creates history in the Revolution sees in the war against the Spaniards "something deeper than a claim of their rights. Suspicion in a dark sense that is embarked on in a decisive struggle between the forces of good and those of evil that will end up in the establishment of the kingdom of religion and equality; an eschatological duel in which the faithful defend the religion of Christ from the impious and blasphemous. " It is a holy war because the Indians and the popular masses that fought in the insurgency acted as if they were possessed by a religious furor, convinced that they wore the "defenders of the religion", threatened by the gachupin heretics. It is a religious war because, from one band to the other, insults were traded that qualified the other as a heretic, sacrilegious, or a partisan of Satan. The royalist clergy and the excommunicators of Hidalgo accused him of being the "new Antichrist," "little Mohammed," impious, an atheist, heretic, apostate, schismatic, perjurer, seditious, and an opposer of God, and affirmed that "God is with Ferdinand [VII] and with the Spaniards, because heaven has fought for us. " And in turn, the insurgents reply, "All gachupines are Jews," and they call them "gachupin dogs, heretics!" In the pulpits and confessionals, the "priests of the-low clergy incite [the people] to join the insurgent defenders of religion," while the proclamations, the banns, and the edicts of the vice-regal authorities denounce the insurgents as atheists, heretics, and Freemasons.

It is a religious war because the very leaders of the insurgent band were religious men, priests who appeared before the people with the bearing of messiahs announcing eternal salvation for those who took up their cause, condemning with terrible anathemas the enemy and handling themselves as warriors illuminated by divine protection. The priests who headed the insurgency embodied the qualities of the traditional charismatic leaders: they were popular leaders, military chiefs, and messiahs concentrated on carrying out a sacred mission-to defend religion and to bring justice to the forsaken. And so were they recognized by the ragged masses who followed them. In the places through which they passed, Father Hidalgo's troops spread this image of their chief: "The priest is a saint; . . . the holy Virgin speaks to him several times a day . . . the gachupines are Jews; and . . . those who are killed by them in the war or executed as criminals are martyrs."

Ignacio Allende himself fell into this religious vertigo that seduced the masses, for in September 1810 he stated: "The cause we defend is that of religion and for it we must shed our last drop of blood." Later, he declared to the fighting masses: "Those who die in defense of the just cause will earn a distinguished place among the heroes, in the annals of history, and we will go to heaven as victims of our sacred religion."

It was a religious war, finally, because, for the insurgent masses, the holy religion they defended, the Virgin who protected them, and the warrior priests in whom they placed their earthly life and hopes of salvation in the beyond were forces that were submerged in the mythic, eschatological, and sacred world that nourished their deepest personal experiences and aspirations. As in the holy wars years earlier, taken up by Indians who believed in the Virgin of Cancuc or in the messianic prophecies of Jacinto Canek or Antonio Pérez, in 1810 the followers of the Virgin, of Hidalgo, and of Morelos were masses mobilized by eschatological beliefs, organized by religious men, and directed by traditional goals. They defended the Catholic religion and the holy Virgin of Guadalupe. They wished to establish a new kingdom, but in the religious sense, and they wanted to continue to be Indians, men integrated into the egalitarian traditions and solidarity of their communities.

The Virgin of Guadalupe attracted to the ranks of the insurgency the indigenous masses-thousands of workers and unemployed from the fields and the mines, priests, scholars, military, lawyers, and individuals belonging to the middle and popular sectors in the cities. All of them identified with the insurgency as they were Catholics and adherents of Guadalupe, but the latter did not share the mythic beliefs of the former. They were men educated in the ideals of the Enlightenment and Creole patriotism and they had a modern and secular political plan. Nevertheless, the majority of them, following the tradition of making Guadalupe into a symbol in which the particular aspirations of their devotees fit, also transformed the Virgin of Guadalupe into a battling Virgin. Between 1810 and 1814, a group of lawyers, religious, and individuals of the high and middle groups of the cities founded a secret society baptized with the name "Los Guadalupes." During those crucial years, Los Guadalapes helped develop an insurgent press, trafficked and supplied arms to the army, established an extensive information network that transmitted precious news to the various groups of insurgents, and created forms of protection and safeguards for the families of the combatants.

Sought after by these interests, the Virgin of Guadalupe came to be the principal emblem of the insurgency, the center of a fervent patriotic cult, and the flag of those who fought for independence. In the confusion between traditional religious beliefs and modem political aspirations that is characteristic of this era, the Virgin of Guadalupe was the symbol that gathered both the mythic and the eschatological burden of the indigenous and popular masses as well as the libertarian aspirations of the more developed political groups of the viceroyalty. By gathering these plural claims during the years of the insurgent war and at the moment of political separation from Spain, the Virgin of Guadalupe reached her maximum status as a religious and political symbol of Mexicans. Her old meanings neither decreased nor were lost; to the contrary, during the convulsed years of the war, her ancestral, mythic content was enriched as the pulsations of the various indigenous groups -which transferred into the religious process their myths, their traditional conceptions of the past, their proceedings of cohesion to the community through the announcement of miracles and marvels, and their yearning to see the lost golden age brought about on earth or the egalitarian kingdom of God-were brought into her. For the partisans of the insurgency, the Virgin of Guadalupe proved in these years that the manifestation of the Mother of God in Mexican lands had converted Mexico into a privileged country and its inhabitants into a chosen people.

It is not strange, then, that on September 16, 1823, when the independent nation prepared to celebrate the glorious date when liberty had been declared, the shrine of Guadalupe was the place chosen to honor the remains of the heroes, once again melding religious sentiment with libertarian political symbols. That day, the chronicler of the insurgency, Carlos Maria de Bustamante, narrates: "the venerable remains of Morelos reached Guadalupe . It must have around 12:30 when they came into the villa and were presented to the collegiate church. Three Indian musicians from different towns accompanied them and, instead of somber chants and music, they played waltzes and cheerful airs."

This mixture of religious fervor and patriotic cult to the heroes was prolonged after the war, particularly on the dates when the freedom cry of Dolores was celebrated. The tone of this religious nationalist cult is described very well by Jacques Lafaye on referring to the honors given to the heroes of independence in the metropolitan cathedral: "The day following that September 16 (1823), since then a national holiday, army formations accompanied the remains of the founding fathers from the convent of Santo Domingo to the cathedral. In a symbolic amalgam of the new national order, the procession in which military and clergy were mixed escorted by a squadron of grenadiers and by the national militia, accompanied the dead heroes to the cathedral. Around the remains of Hidalgo, Morelos, and their early companions, the Mexican national choir . . . sang, perhaps for once in unison." This form of religious nationalism reached its highest symbolic expression in the first president of the republic, who changed his original name (Félix Femández) to Guadalupe Victoria.

The Enlightened Priests

In this war, so contaminated by religiosity, it seems natural that the popular masses would see their leaders as warriors and enlightened prophets, as beings endowed with special powers and protected by sacred forces that led them to perform extraordinary feats. Such is the image of Father Hidalgo that many of his followers spread. The priest, say his people, "is a saint, " he has direct contact with the Holy Virgin, to whom "he speaks several times a day." Many partisans of the insurgent cause were convinced that it would end with the establishment of a new kingdom, the setting up of a kind of theocracy, and this is why they declared that their most fervent desire was to "go to Mexico City to put the lord priest on his throne." "Before his own men, Hidalgo appears with a strange seal. The people follow him as a saint or as enlightened, before him priests kneel, a gard d'corps preceded him as a sovereign, and his partisans found no better name to give him than that of his most Serene Highness; not your lordship, not excellency, not general, which was his rank, but Highness, a name fitting for those who are glorified above other men."

"Like Hidalgo, Morelos appears closed in a charismatic character, which in the eyes of his troops makes him more of an enlightened prophet than a simple guerrilla chief. They follow him like a father; they call his son Juan 'seer', and one of his Indians, taken prisoner before Cuautla, insists stubbornly that his cadaver be taken inside the besieged plaza so that Morelos can resuscitate him."

The very incandescence of the war, the intense, multiple, unrestrained explosions of frustrations and contained yearnings, the emotional and contaminating force of the mass movements, the cohabitation of individual and collective deliriums, everything favored the manifestation of mythic beliefs and eschatological images in the popular masses, the appearance of new messiahs and enlightened leaders, and the crossing and inventing of the most delirious images. The movement that Hidalgo and Morelos head gathers those manifestations of popular mentality and offers them a conduit through which to express themselves. But in addition, the enlightened leaders of the insurgency owe a great part of their charismatic image to a very conscious sensitivity to the sentiments and demands of their followers. Hidalgo and Morelos are leaders who, in addition to identifying with the popular masses who make up their armies, take on the responsibility of acting on their behalf and representing them. They set themselves up as executors of popular aspirations and demands. If the Revolution at the moment when it is unleashed effectively transfers sovereignty to the people, to the popular armed insurgency that, as of that moment, acts for itself and transforms reality, the decisions that Hidalgo makes in the war are consequences of that new reality. As Luis Villoro says, "Hidalgo's decrees do nothing more than express the effective sovereignty of the people. " The majority of his measures have the character of abrogation, manifesting thus the negative character of popular liberty. Starting with his speech of September 16, the abolition of tribute symbolizes the destruction of existing right: "For us-he says-neither the king nor tributes exist any longer. That shameful burden that is only fitting for slaves, we have borne it for three centuries as a sign of tyranny and serfdom; a terrible blotch that we will wash away with our own efforts.''

The abrogation of tribute is the sign that announces a deeper modification of reality: the destruction of the old order. This is the sense of the other decisions that Hidalgo makes as representative of the masses that carry out the Revolution. "Invested with the authority that he exercises by acclamation of the nation, Hidalgo abolishes the caste distinctions and slavery, signs of the infamy and oppression that the other classes exercised over the blacks and mestizas."

In Morelos the identification with the aspirations of the popular movement is even more genuine. "Morelos begins his military career as one of many caudillos from the ranks of the low clergy. He is no "letrado"; he belongs, to the contrary, to the most humble classes . . . Rising from the people, living always with them, he is the most authentic representative of the popular conscience. His ideas and political positions will be the clear expression of the political movement of liberty. In them the people try to create from its origin a social structure that can replace the old one."

Pressured by the lawyers and literate Creoles that surround him and demand that he define the political plans of the insurgent movement, Morelos states with emotional and simple words the political program centered on popular sovereignty and the disappearance of inequalities that divided the population. He puts into words the ancestral aspiration of the indigenous communities and the oppressed groups to live in equality and converts into a political program the social demands of the most abandoned popular sectors of the vice royalty:

I want [the nation] to have a government issuing from the people

. . . I want us to make a declaration that there is no nobility other
than that of virtue, of knowledge, of patriotism, and of charity; that
we are all equal, for we come from the same origin; that there be
no privileges or lineages; that it is not rational or human or fitting
that there be slavery, for the color of the face does not change that
of the heart or that of thought; that the children of the peasant and
the ditch digger be educated like those of the rich hacendados; that
everyone who files a justified complaint has a court to hear it, to
help them, and to defend them from the strong and the arbitrary.

In this new era that Morelos preaches, the egalitarian nation governed by virtue, charity, and patriotism will have Catholicism as its sole religion, and it will be a nation by and for those born in it. In his Sentimientos de la nación, Morelos establishes that "the Catholic religion will be the only one, without tolerance of others; that the Americans will be those who have jobs; that the laws will moderate opulence and indigence; that [the laws] will include everyone without exception of privileged bodies; and that slavery will be forbidden forever, as will caste distinctions, leaving everyone equal, and the only thing that will distinguish one American from another is vice and virtue."

Thus, by defining this egalitarian project that gathered the social demands of the popular classes and the political aspirations of the marginalized Creoles, Morelos blended the most advanced political and social proposals of the insurgent movement with the deep pulsations of traditional society that formed part of its armies and that he himself represented. This sensitivity that Morelos shows for gathering the hopes and feelings of the popular masses or for declaring the Catholic religion the exclusive faith of the new state or for incorporating it into the official celebrations of the cult to the religious symbol that was most extended and venerated by the population, is manifested also in the effort that he makes to endow the nation with a pantheon of heroes of its own. Morelos is the first rebel chief to elevate the Indian leaders that defended their peoples from Hemán Cortés' troops to the high position of heroes of the country and he was the first to attempt to blend the cult of heroes of indigenous antiquity with the cult of the heroes of the insurgent movement. In his opening speech at the Chilpancingo Congress (1813), after referring to the country by its old name, Anáhuac, he invokes the "genius of Moctezuma, Cacama, Quautimazin, Xicoténcatl, and Caltzantzin" to celebrate with them the "happy moment in which your illustrious sons have gathered to avenge your outrages and loss of privileges and to free themselves from the claws of Freemasonry's tyranny, which was going to swallow them forever." To this same end, he calls to participation in his congress the "ancestral spirits of the dead, of Las Cruces, Aculco, Guanajuato, and Calderón, Zitácuaro, and Cuautla, united to those of Hidalgo and Allende! " In this way, Morelos associates the indigenous victims of the Spanish Conquest with the leaders and insurgent martyrs killed by the Spaniards and establishes a necessary relation between the ancient conquered nation and the liberating present in which the Mexicans decided to declare their independence from Spain. This is why he says, in the same opening speech to the Chilpancingo Congress, that "August 12, 1521, was followed by September 14, 1813. In the former, the chains of our slavery were put on in México-Tenochtitlan, and in the latter, they are broken forever in the fortunate town of Chilpancingo."

The mythic and religious tradition of the indigenous movements, the social demands of the most abandoned groups, and the Creoles ideals of autonomy, patriotism, and Guadalupan fervor were expressed with all their force in the popular movement that Hidalgo and Morelos headed. This movement, plural and powerful, which for the first time joined the pulsations of the indigenous and popular masses with the political aspirations of the Creole group, found in Hidalgo, and especially in Morelos, its highest expression and its highest capacity for realization. In the subsequent political movements, this intimate relationship between the yearnings and claims of the masses and the actions and programs of the political leaders disappears.

Nevertheless, even when this project did not have continuity in its immediate future, its polyvalent mythic and ideological charge will be present in all later political and social movements. Like the traumatic episode of the Conquest, Hidalgo and Morelos's Revolution will be established in the historical memory as a parting of the waters, an act denying colonial submission, and founding the independent Mexican nation. Beginning then, even when the social and egalitarian programs that replied to the demands of the popular masses are set aside, the presence of myths and symbols of popular rebellion and the mythic images of Hidalgo and Morelos will continue to act in the construction of Mexican nationalism, along with the heroic figures of the other leaders of independence and alongside the inseparable Virgin of Guadalupe. In this strange combination, through which the myth [the Virgin of Guadalupel] becomes historical reality and historical fact is transmuted into myth, the revolution of independence created the myth of the preexisting but enslaved nation (ancient Anáhuac), freed by the cry of Dolores and the declaration of independence. It created also a pantheon of national heroes and, above all, created the project of building a nation based on an ancient history endowed with founding fathers, protected by the divinity, owner of an extensive and rich territory, and destined to live a promising future. The Creoles had already encouraged this project, but Hidalgo and Morelos converted it into a real historical possibility and, above all, gave it the human presence and the emotional charge of the popular masses. They did not imagine a nation for one class or a restricted group; they fought and died for a national project that involved and liberated the majority of Mexicans.

Origin and Founding of a National History

During the viceroyalty, there was no precise idea or conception of the Mexican nation, nor a national history or nationalist historiography, for the simple reason that the country was a viceroyalty, a colony of Spain. This link of political submission impeded the appearance of the idea of nation, that is, a political concept that in most cases manifests itself in situations of autonomy or repulsion of aggression or political subjugation. For almost three centuries in New Spain, the political and ideological conditions to support the idea of an autonomous nation did not exist. On the other hand, as has been seen, the notion of country developed and an exalted patriotic sentiment was manifest, although reduced to the identity with the earth where it had been born, seated on a group of shared religious values (the unity around the Catholic faith and the Virgin of Guadalupe), supported by a progress the recovery of the ancient history of the original inhabitants and directed by the interests and ideological claims of the Creole group. It was, then, a concept of limited homeland that was not shared by the other groups that made up the country and that did not spare the very deep ethnic, social, economic, and cultural divisions that fragmented and opposed the population.

The situation of the viceroyalty changed radically when its political relationship with Spain was modified. Beginning in 1808, the appearance of a political thought centered on the ideas of autonomy and sovereignty of the nation and the formation of a new political reality produced by the insurgent movement created the conditions that allowed the modern idea of nation and the conception of a historical national project to unfold vigorously.

In 1808, Spain was invaded by the armies of Napoleon and Charles IV and his heir to the throne fell prisoner to the French. Thus, for the first time, the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Spain and the Indies contemplated with alarm the disappearance of the royal tie that united them. In New Spain, while the authorities of the viceroyalty declared that the imprisonment of the monarch did not change in any way "the powers established legitimately and they should continue as they have thus far," the Creoles stated that there was a new political situation and that situation forced raising the problem concerning whom sovereignty resided in and who should assume it in the circumstances of the moment. The Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, which at the time was a redoubt of the Creole group, and Jacobo de Villaurrutia, the only Creole oidor of the Real Audiencia, initiated this debate. The Ayuntamiento surprised the highest authorities of the viceroyalty when it argued that the abdications of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII were null, as they were "contrary to the rights of the nation to which no one can give a king if it is not itself by the universal consent of its people."

Thus, for the first time, the political debate held that the king did not exercise sovereignty by divine right, but that it had been granted him by the express will of the nation. It was also stated, then, that there was an original pact between the king and the governed that the monarch could not alter by himself. The Creoles' doctrine of the social pact came from Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez, two great Spanish writers of political treatises, whose thought had been collected in the eighteenth century by Francisco Martínez Marina and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. These principles of Spanish political thought became mixed with "some ideas of rationalist naturalism [Grocio, Puffendorf, Heinecio] that had quite a bit of influence in all the Hispanic kingdoms during the eighteenth century." Francisco Javier Alegre, an enlightened Jesuit, gathered these two currents in his Institutorum teologicarum (1789). In this work he held that " the proximate origin of authority was in the 'consent of the community ' and its foundation in the right of the peoples; the sovereignty of the king-he stated-is only mediate: it is obtained by delegation, by common consent." Citing Puffendorf, he explained a doctrine that coincided also with the Suarist line of thought: "Every empire . . . of whatever type it may be had its origin in a convention or pact between men".

These ideas on sovereignty and the social pact between the king and the governed were the principal sources of inspiration of the first theoreticians of independence. Francisco Primo de Verdad y Ramos, a lawyer who was a trustee of the Mexico City town council, held in 1808 that "authority comes to the king from God, but not in an immediate fashion, rather, through the people." For his part, Juan Francisco Azcárate, also a lawyer and member of the same city council, proposed that this body present the viceroy with a document requesting non-acceptance of the nominations of new authorities in the viceroyalty or of any government decision proceeding from Spain because, in the absence of the king, sovereignty resided in the kingdom of New Spain, in the courts that formed it, and in the bodies that "carry the public's voice," which for Azcárate was, in this case, the town council of Mexico City.

Azcárate explained that there existed a pact between the nation and its sovereign that could not be broken unilaterally; therefore, in the absence of the king, sovereignty returned to its original source, the nation, or to its constituted bodies, that is, principally the town council of Mexico City. Thus, what the Creoles argued was that the basis of this society no longer rested on the king, but on the nation.

Fray Melchor de Talamantes, who was tied to Judge Jacobo de Villaurrutia and to the Creoles who had influence on the town council and in the Diario de México, took a further step in this debate: he broadened the concepts on which national representation was based and listed the causes for which a colony exercising its national representation could become independent of its homeland. For Talamantes, national representation was society's right to be considered free and independent of any other nation. This right depended on three principles: nature, strength, and politics. According to Talamantes, Nature has divided nations by means of oceans, rivers, mountains, diversity of climate, variety of tongues, etc., and under this aspect, the Americas have national representation, as they are naturally separated from other nations, much more so than the kingdoms of Europe are. By Strength, nations put themselves in the condition of resisting their enemies . . . Considering the Americas in light of this principle, no one can doubt that they have national representation, having resisted, in fact, on many occasions the attacks of foreign powers. The national representation that politics gives rests only on the civil right (direct or indirect suffrage), or what is the same, the quality of citizen that the laws concede to certain individuals of the state.

Talamantes thought that the sovereignty of a nation did not reside in the people, but in the congress that represented them. He held that national representation was inherently the faculty of "organizing oneself," and, based on these considerations, he stated that, as "national representation . . . liberty and independence" were "almost identical things"; Has long as colonies can legitimately make themselves independent, separating themselves from their homelands, they will also be capable of taking on national representation." And in what cases can the independence of colonies be legitimate? Talamantes lists twelve reasons:

1. when the colonies are self-sufficient;
2. when they are equal or more powerful than their homelands;
3. when the latter have difficulty governing them;
4. when the government of the homeland is incompatible with the general good of the colony;
5. when the former oppresses the latter;
6. when the homeland has adopted another political institution;
7. when the first provinces that form the principal body of the homeland subject themselves voluntarily to foreign dominance;
8. when the homeland voluntarily submits to foreign domination;
9. when the homeland is subjugated by another nation;
10. when it changes religion;
11. when the homeland threatens to change the religious system; and
12. when separation is demanded by "the general clamor of the inhabitants of the colony."

This search by the Creoles, to find the political bases to legitimize their aspirations for autonomy, was abbreviated by Servando Teresa de Mier, who discovered an un-objectionable basis in the very Carla Magna de Castilla, written by Alfonso el Sabio. There, argued Mier, it stated explicitly that when there was no king, the nobles and sages of the kingdom and representatives of the towns should gather and constitute a congress to elect a new form of government and its representation. For Mier it was clear that, in the absence of the king of Spain, the American provinces were empowered to call their own meetings or congresses to determine their destiny and to adopt the form of government they elected.

This was the idea that predominated among the members of the Creole party, with two variations. One group (Francisco Primo de Verdad, Juan Francisco Azcárate, and, especially, Fray Melchor de Talamantes) proposed that the gathering or congress be constituted of representatives of the town councils and the "deputies of all the secular and ecclesiastical councils," who should delegate to the congress the exercise of sovereignty. The other current (headed by Jacobo de Villaurrutia) proposed a congress represented by the civil, ecclesiastical, and military corporations and suggested the constitution of a government in which the power of same agencies was counterbalanced by that of the others: a system of division of powers.

The development of this political debate was suddenly interrupted by the coup d'état that in 1808 was headed by merchants and groups most addicted to the traditional state of things. Nevertheless, two years later the ideas and political projects that were then the center of the debates were reborn in Hidalgo's insurrection and took on a new dimension under the influence of popular participation. By means of the transformative action of the Revolution, Hidalgo and Morelos proclaimed the independence of the nation, recognized in the people the original and only source of sovereignty, repudiated the government of the old regime and its laws, and established the basic principles for organizing the freed nation politically and constitutionally. First in the decrees that Hidalgo and Morelos issued during the insurrection, then in the Acta de Independencia and in the documents before the Chilpancingo Congress (Manifiesto of the Congress, Reglamento y discurso de apertura of same). Finally, in the Sentimientos de la Nación and in the Constitución de Apatzingán, these constitutional principles of the nation came to form part of the collective memory of the Mexicans.

The principle of the nationalities or of the liberty of people to govern themselves was the insurgents' point of departure for claiming independence: "No people has the right to subjugate another without just cause for aggression." This principle, invoked in similar conditions by other nations, had in Mexico a particular connotation. Mexico proclaimed itself a free and sovereign nation but defined itself as an old nation, prior to the Spanish Conquest, that had been subjugated. It was not, then, a new nation, but a nation that was freeing itself of domination. This is why it said in the Acta de Independencia that North America had "recovered the exercise of its usurped sovereignty." This is why it was stated in the Constitución de Apatzingán that "no nation has the right to prevent another the use of its sovereignty. The title of conquest cannot legitimize acts of force: the people who attempt to do so should be obligated by arms to respect the conventional right of nations."

The principle of popular sovereignty was another great pillar on which the insurgents' political project rested. Gathering the spirit that inspired the popular insurrection in the Sentimientos de la Nación, Morelos stated that "sovereignty originates immediately from the people"; and in the Constitución de Apatzingán, it was asserted that "sovereignty resides originally in the people and its exercise in national representation composed of deputies elected by the citizens." In this last document, it was said that sovereignty by nature is "imprescriptible, inalienable, and indivisible," and its powers were defined: "Three are the powers of sovereignty: the right to make laws, the right to execute them, and the right to apply them to particular cases."

To the founding principles of the insurgent nation were joined others from popular exploits, the enlightened thought of the Creoles, and modern political thought. These affirmed the equality of all Mexicans before the law, ratified the unity of the people around the Catholic religion, and declared that the fundamental objective of the state was the pursuit of a common good and the definition of the new political organization of the nation.

In this manner, the revolution of independence and the political thought that sprang from it affirmed the "subjective characteristics" that, according to theoreticians, explain the formation of a nation: the population's aspiration to constitute an autonomous nation; the loyalty to the nation over any other interest; and the will to maintain the nation united and independent. At the same time, the revolution of independence consolidated and gave a modern political dimension to the "objective characteristics" that define (although they do not explain) the nation: a political organization legitimized by popular consensus; a territorial identity; a shared history; and a common language. For the first time in the history of Mexico, traditional nationalist sentiments (a shared territory, religion, past, and language) were integrated into the modern political project of constituting an independent, autonomous nation dedicated to the pursuit of the common good of its inhabitants. Thus resting on the armed mobilization of the population and on modern nationalist political thought, the nation elevated itself as free, independent, and in possession of its destiny, and created a future in which to carry out its own historical project, centered on the national state and the autonomous nation. This radical transformation of the present and creation of a horizon open to the future substantially modified the conception of the history of the country, the rescue of its past, and the formation of national historical memory.

Political independence from Spain and the decision to carry out the national political project created a single subject of historical narration: the Mexican nation, the national state. For the first time, instead of an internally fragmented viceroyalty governed by foreign powers, the Mexicans thought of their country, their territory, the different parts that composed it, its population, and its past as a unitary, distinctive entity. From then on, independently of internal visions and contradictions, the nation was thought of as a territorial, social, and political entity that had a common origin, development in time, and a future. The appearance of a political entity that contained in itself all the parts of the nation was the new subject of history that unified the social and cultural diversity of the population in a joint search for national identity.

In turn, the appearance of a conception of historical development centered on the nation gave birth to a history for itself, the development of a writing of history done for the nation and composed by Mexicans. Suddenly, with the dazzling clarity of liberty, the country became aware, at the very point it began to exercise its independence, that the greatest part of its historical memory was created by the conqueror, that it lacked its own interpretation of its historical development, and that the very sources for writing its history wore outside its frontiers or had been compiled by its ancient dominators. This discovery explains that the elaboration of a history of their own by Mexicans would inextricably be united with the carrying out of the political project of the national state. Thus, one of the first decisions of the independent governments was to establish archives and museums where the testimony of national history was preserved. With the creation of those institutions, the memory of the past, until then fragmented, expropriated, and alien, began to be a memory recovered and classified by national institutions and under the direction of the historical interests of the nation. Similar to what occurred after the Spanish Conquest, beginning with independence practically the entire past of the country was revised, rethought, and rewritten, but now, under the compulsion of creating an image and a historical memory founded on values recognized as characteristic by the independent nation.

Conclusion.
As the title reveals, this book is dedicated to recovering the diverse images of Mexico's past created by the successive generations that have reconstructed, mythicized, hidden, deformed, invented, ideologized, or explained that past. To enumerate these diverse means of recovering the past is equivalent to saying that this is not an orthodox book. It does not propose, as is customary among historians, to explain only the so-called scientific reconstructions of the past, which are, naturally, those elaborated by historians themselves. In addition to studying the images of the past constructed by historians, this book collects the legends, myths, and symbols of the past created by groups that lacked writing and transmitted their traditions in oral form from one generation to the next. It also collects images of the past crystallized in ceremonies, feasts, and popular celebrations that periodically recorded events, foundings, and origins, the memory of which is important for affirming the collective identity.

This book, then, focuses special attention on images of the past created by indigenous and folk groups. It proposes to rescue the collective imagination that, by means of a different temporal dimension from that of the western categories of measuring time and reconstructing the past, composes its own memory of the occurrences, creates a hierarchy of the importance of these events for the collectivity, brings them up to date, and proposes them as social paradigms for living the present and facing the challenges of the future.

It can be said that, since the birth of the profession of historian, the popular representations of the past have been qualified as mythic, legendary, or false, principally because they do not conform to the conceptions that historians accept as scientifically trustworthy. Nevertheless, my decision to consider them as valid testimony in an exercise of reconstruction of historical memory rests on the following argument. Independently of whether they are deformed versions or false interpretations of the past, they were considered true by those who spread them, and were accepted as true by those who heard them and transmitted them to the following generations.

The most powerful argument in favor of myth or the collective image as valid testimony of the representation of the past is that, in spite of the passage of a long period of time since they were first stated, and in spite of the disqualification of these testimonies by those who practiced written history, nowadays these expressions of the collective memory continue to live, and for many people are the most trustworthy instrument for recalling the past and maintaining its identity in the present.

In the case of Mexico, these testimonies are particularly important because, from the most ancient times to date, they have been the principal instrument for preserving, reconstructing, and spreading the memory of past events among the indigenous peoples, the rural population, and urban popular groups. That is, they have been the privileged vehicle for re-creating the historical memory of the majority of the population.

I could add that this book is part of the current of thought initiated by anthropologists and ethno-historians that makes an effort to open new forms of comprehension for understanding peoples and cultural traditions that are expressed in strange languages, different and sometimes opposed to ours. In this sense, it is a proposal to amplify our comprehension of the multiple forms of reconstructing and spreading the memory of past events.

If today we recognize that, along with the reconstruction of the past carried out under westem historiographical methods, there are other equally valid forms of collecting the past, the principal problem in capturing this memory is rooted in the fact that this field does not contain the same richness of already-proven methods that distinguishes traditional historiography. The methods for collecting and explaining the images of the past created by peoples with an oral tradition, or by marginal social groups, are mostly experimental. They arise from the work of anthropologists and ethno-historians and utilize techniques developed by structuralism, collective psychology, content analysis, history of mentalities, and so on.

Furthermore, with regard to the results that are derived from this investigation, I would mention the following. In the first place, by studying the forms of reconstructing and preserving the memory of the past in ancient Mexico, I discovered that the founding myth of the origins and the cyclical conception of time were the articulating axes of historical memory in antiquity. According to this conception, the cosmos, nature, and human creations had a moment of maximum plenitude. This complete time was the time of original creation, when things were established for the first time and were imbued with the harmony, vigor, and plenitude of primordial creation. Nevertheless, this original creation was later threatened with destruction by temporal happenings, the corrosive passage of time. This is why the actions of the gods and of human beings concentrate on cyclical revitalizing through ritual, religious ceremony, and collective memory, the full moment of original creation. That is, for the peoples of ancient Mexico, the strongest, most significant historical time was the time past, the time in which for the first time were established the foundations of the cosmos and of human life. Contrary to the western conception of history, the indigenous conception of historical events is turned toward the past, it proposes for the present to preserve and revitalize what was created in the origin, and it insists that the future, instead of being the bearer of disruptive changes, is the bearer of permanence.

By examining the conceptions of history and the past that were manifested in the Conquest and throughout the viceroyalty, I discovered that in this era there was no dominant interpretation of history; rather multiple interpretations of the past coexisted, produced by diverse sectors of the population, and each one of them was nourished by different concepts of time and the past. There is the imperialist, providential interpretation of history produced by the official chroniclers of the Spanish crown, who present the discovery and conquest of the new lands as a special enterprise expressly indicated by God for the Spanish nation. The fresh and marveled narrations of the soldier-conquerors stand out. These transmit the epic of the Conquest and the encounter with strange civilizations in a direct fashion. Next to these interpretations we find the mystic, Christian conception of history written by the evangelizing friars, who saw in the discovery of indigenous humanity the fulfillment of the prophecies contained in the Book of the Apocalypse and the opportunity to establish in the new lands a celestial city, governed by the ideals of apostolic poverty, love for one's neighbor, and praise of God. Beside these diverse interpretations of history appear the chronicles of the religious orders, which exalt the evangelizing labor of their members, and, much later, the chronicles of the cities of the viceroyalty, which contain a worshipful remembrance of the local and regional environment.

Even when none of these new discourses manage to predominate, what is certain is that as a whole, they propose a new protagonist for history and a new meaning for the writing of history. From that point on, the new protagonist of history is the conquistador, and the purpose of historical narration is to describe the action that this new protagonist unfolds on the American stage. The past and future of indigenous peoples are subordinated to the history that this new agent of historical transformation writes.

Nevertheless, in spite of the destruction of the testimonies of indigenous memory, and in spite of the prohibitions that the Spanish crown dictated concerning the recovery of the past of the vanquished peoples the indigenous peoples, now without the resource of writing that was lost with the disappearance of their rulers, continued to evoke their past through myth and oral tradition. One of the chapters of this book that is most unusual shows that the conservation and revitalization of ancestral memory was the most powerful resource in the struggle to continue being Indians in a situation of dominance. This was their most effective weapon for resisting the transformation that the conqueror imposed, and the instrument to which they always returned when outside aggression became unbearable and they decided to rebel for the purpose of returning to a lost age in which indigenous values and traditions predominated.

Besides these diverse and internally conflicting memories, there appeared a representation of the past that aspired to fuse these multiple memories into a single one and to represent that as the collective memory of those born in Mexico. This was the memory constructed by the Creoles, by the descendants of Spaniards but born in Mexico. As did the Creoles in other places, those in Mexico experienced an identity crisis between their Spanish ancestry and their loyalty to the land where they had been born. But unlike the continents other Creoles, those in Mexico resolved this conflict by continually establishing more distance from Spain and creating stronger identification with their native land. According to the interpretation of the Creoles, a religious symbol the Virgin of Guadalupe, converted Mexican land into sacred land especially privileged by God. Later, a history book, La historia antigua de México by Francisco Javier Clavijero, culminated the process that for more than two centuries had troubled Creoles who were trying to find their identity in American roots. Clavijero assumed as proper the until-then foreign and repudiated indigenous past and proposed it as the root for the Creole homeland.

Thus, by integrating indigenous antiquity into the notion of country, the Creoles expropriated the past of the indigenous peoples and made of that past a legitimate and prestigious antecedent of the Creole country. The Creoles' country then had a remote and noble past and a present unified by religious symbols shared by Indians and Creoles.

What is astonishing about this reconstruction is that the idea of a Creole country is founded on two myths: that of the existence of an Indian nation prior to the Spanish Conquest, and that of the miraculous appearance of the mother of God in Mexican territory. Even more astonishing is to observe-during the first decade of the nineteenth century and the ten years of the war for independence, when European political doctrines concerning liberty and the sovereignty of nations and modern forms of organizing the state erupted in the viceroyalty-the presence of multiple folk myths and symbols of the construction of an independent nation.

During these years crucial to the political lives of Mexicans, the populist masses, drawn by the Virgin of Guadalupe, joined the insurgent armies. Like their ancestors, they made a talisman of the image of the Virgin, a weapon that they brandished before the enemy. Father Hidalgo and Morelos, the caudillos of the insurgency, were not simply military leaders to the multitudes that followed them; they were providential men, endowed with supernatural powers, Messiah-like, whose presence alone would produce the triumph of the just cause and the defeat of the perverse Spaniards.

When political independence from Spain was finally achieved in 1821, the feast that celebrated this great event became a populist feast in which were condensed and exploded the collective images of the liberation of the ancient conquered nation, the resentment of the ethnic oppressor, the supremacy of the Virgin of Guadalupe over other cults in the Christian pantheon, and the affirmation of the messianic, providential idea that proclaims a great future for the liberated nation.

In summary, if these reconstructions of Mexican memory are correct the most important conclusion that can be drawn from this book is the following. During the long period when the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica developed and during almost all of the viceroyalty, mythical and religious conceptions, of both indigenous and European origin, were dominant in the interpretation of time, of human events, and of historical development.