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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia

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They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe

Joshua Lund Version of record first published: 03 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Joshua Lund (2003): They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 12:2, 171-189 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569320305847

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2003

They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe

JOSHUA LUND

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By the word people (populus) we mean a multitude of men assembled within a tract of land, insofar as they comprise a whole. This multitude, or the part of it that recognizes itself as united into a civil whole by its common origin, is called a nation (gens). The part that exempts itself from these laws (the unruly crowd within this people) is called the rabble (vulgus); and when the rabble unites against the law, it forms a mob (agere per turbas)conduct that excludes its members from the status of citizens. (Immanuel Kant, 1797) In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men. (Giorgio Agamben, 1994) It is good for everyone to know how to forget. (Ernest Renan, 1882)

I The past two decades have witnessed the revival, exaltation and increasing banalization of theories of hybridity as the best mode for asserting and analysing the processes of a radical identity formation and cultural production in the Americas. And yet it is also widely known that the cultural, racial and artistic dialectics implied by hybridity theories have long functioned within Latin American state formation, harnessed to the coalescence of national hegemony and institutional sovereignty throughout much of the hemisphere. Certainly, the new hybridity represents a repetition with a difference: whereas past generations were interested in stabilizing frontiers by sublimating an overarching national trait, todays hybridologists emphasize the volatility of and potential liberation from the tyranny of all borders. The rush to nd historical precursors (as opposed to critical interlocutors), however, has led to a host of absurdities, whereby gures like Gilberto Freyre become postmodern, Fernando Ortiz postcolonial, and Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio something like friends of the Indian. In short, an uncritical reinvention of hybridity often obscures, and runs the risk of endorsing, that is, of simply repeating the biopolitical programmes that haunt its basic logic: not only the aesthetics, but also the eugenics that underwrite the politics of hybridity. I doubt that the teleological rescue that demonstrates how the thinkers who helped institutionalize theories of hybridity foresaw a later critical trend is a project of any particular urgency. Rather, I maintain that it might prove more
ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/03/02017119 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1356932032000106757

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worthwhile to challenge our own conventions by confronting them with their history.1 In this essay, I attempt to do so by examining the relationship between the late-nineteenth-century erection of the preferred mode of theorizing hybridity in Mexicooften generalized as mestizajeand its function within the rhetorics surrounding a state-sponsored massacre. The primary vehicle for this comparison is a reading of Heriberto Frass Tomochic (1893; nal revision in 1906) and a comment on its critical reception. Therein I examine the cultural ramications and critical effectivity of a seemingly paradoxical discursive hallmark, and largely uninterrogated legacy, of the Porrio Daz era (18761910): the simultaneous sublimation and erasure of the Indian.2 This gesture of inclusive exclusion inscribes and delimits the structural function of the Indian within the discourse of mestizaje, transcending the historical discontinuities of both. In short: hybridology in America loves the Indian, but especially when she or he is absent. While many American theories of hybridity certainly forge the patria through the formulation of political life, dening the norms of mere citizenship is not their ultimate function. At stake in hybridity is nothing less than what Giorgio Agambenat once building upon and revising the biopolitical horizons of modernity rst intimated by Aristotle and later outlined by Michel Foucault has called bare life (la nuda vita).3 That is, while hybridity has been appropriated as a measure for discerning the national interior from the exterior, its sharpest and most brutal trajectory leads elsewhere: not only to questions of the political (or cultural) integration of specically constructed groups of people, but to the judgement over the very possibility of their continued survival. To gaze upon and circumscribe the indigenous tribes and communities of the Americas through the lter of hybridology is not to reconcile the out with the in, but rather to produce an inner exteriority whose simultaneous construction and destruction founds the articulation of nation and state. The critique of hybridity theory that I will propose is not a denunciation of mixing (racial, cultural, philosophical, etc.), but rather an attempt at producing a meaningful interpretation of the representation of mixing as it settles in under the aegis of the violence that accompanies state formation and national consolidation. I will thus be returning to consider an explicitly racialized theory of hybridity. However, I must emphasize from the outset that such a return is meant as a way of confronting the new hybridology with a history whose reconsideration complicates any project of simply moving beyond ethnicity. II While the atrocity that will be at issue in this essay occurred over one hundred years ago, it is only exemplary in so far as it echoes an ongoing process. Let us begin, then, by framing the following remarks with the memory of two recent incidents, to whose signicance I will return at the end. Incident is an almost offensively inappropriate term here, for what we are dealing with is massacres. The rst occurred last summer in a remote region of Oaxaca at a junction called Agua Fra, and was widely reported in the Mexican and international press. A group of twenty-eight men from the nearby village of Santiago Xochiltepec were returning home on a truck after a weeks worth of lumber harvest. They were subsequently halted and surrounded by a second group of

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men, this one armed with automatic weapons, and promptly executed (two survived the immediate attack). The second massacre was communicated to me through a video installation that I recently viewed at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.4 The installation presents itself as an artistic rendering of a video which, the artist reports, has been circulating informally on Mexico Citys Tepito ea market. The video is a kind of home movie that documents men, in aircraft, wearing safari gear, carrying ries, and who, in the most literal sense, are engaged in hunting other people, and then, after shooting them, disembarking in order to desecrate the bodies. Apparently the images were recorded in the Brazilian Amazon, but the video has re-emerged, with some controversy, on the New York art scene as part of an exhibition on current Mexican art.5 The representations of both instances of this real human slaughtervia the mainstream press and avant-garde artinvite not only sentiments of horror, but also multiple interpretations and speculative implications, which would perhaps necessarily begin with a consideration of the differences between reporting news and creating art (or vice versa). But one thing that I nd that they hold in common, as both event and discourse, is a perceptibly abject representation of the killing of people; and more signicantly for the comments to follow, the killing of people specically constructed, in both cases, as indigenous.6 I will not be arguing that hybridity or any other concept is somehow responsible for the historical fact of these crimes. I do want to argue, however, that responsible reading forces us to consider the entanglement of the biopolitical and the national at the intersecting discourses of race, violence and life common to both statist and counterhegemonic invocations of hybridity. These examples, taken from Mexico on purpose, introduce the problematic in its most extreme and polemical dimensions. An analysis of the history of their representation requires us to begin tracing, without reverence or fear, the vicissitudes of a concept of hybridity that is at the heart of the dominant construction of Mexican (post)national identity. III That concept of hybridity is known as mestizaje. As a long-heralded mode of theorizing and representing hybridity in Mexico, it is both a marker of national identity and a necessary discursive pillar of statist ideology. It is not merely, as often assumed, the product of the Revolutions rediscovery and monumentalization of the Mexican self, but rather the very link that marks the ideological continuity between the nineteenth-century positivists and their post-Revolutionary, idealist opponents.7 In its dynamic mode, mestizaje converts the dread of Mexican backwardness into the new vanguard of the universal metropolis.8 Yet it simultaneously enables a powerful rhetoric of stasis, capable of converting Porrian authoritarianism into amicacion, and the Zapatista critique of coercion into something like consensus.9 A striking example of mestizajes continued discursive force can be found in a contemporary document of nation-building: Enrique Krauzes ambitious recent history of modern Mexico, Mexico: Biography of Power (1997). This force is notably exerted in a chapter called The Triumph of the Mestizo, particularly at the point where Krauze makes an interesting attempt at formulating a structural

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logic to explain the proliferation of rural uprisings in Mexico. While similar unrest periodically erupts today, it was regular during the nineteenth century, when the state was beset by scores of such actions.10 Krauzes explanation interests me for the rhetorical turns through which it explicitly links hybridity, race, national culture, violence and representation. These turns emerge as he identies two types of rebellions. The rst type he calls social in character. Short in duration, these actions are linked to specic political grievances, are reconciled through diplomatic solutions, and historically (stretching back to the colonial period) represent the majority of rural uprisings. More signicantly, his notion of social seems to emerge negatively as the absence of a racial or ethnic basis for the tensions: they are not articulated around ethnicity, but rather poverty (p. 222). Somewhat paradoxically, however, Krauze falls back upon the language of ethno-cultural typication in order to distinguish these non-ethnic rebellions. This happens at the intersecting rhetorics of race and space. That is, their regional contextshe cites Oaxaca, the eastern sierras and the central plateauall show an important similarity: They had been the scene of intense cultural and ethnic mestizaje. And the process of [religious] conversion had been carried out with particular vigor and success (p. 221). In contrast, a second type of uprisinglong, nasty, brutishalso traversed the nineteenth century, again exhibiting a common regional quality. This rare and exceptional region of intransigent rebellion (p. 222) had two characteristics that ominously distinguished it from the rest of the country. It had only been supercially converted to Christianity; and mestizaje was almost nonexistent (p. 221). Problem spots, then, are pure spots. And they are pure on two counts: they are Indian, and they are fanatic; cauldrons of the explosive mix of religious passion and ethnic grievance (p. 222). Now, let us quickly push Krauzes argument one step forward and demonstrate that it rests upon an empirical impossibility. As some of Krauzes own subsequent descriptions will suggest, the territories to which he here alludes as regions of exceptionChiapas, Yucatan, the northern hinterlands of Sonoraare (and were during the nineteenth century) nothing if not mixed.11 More important than the empirical viability of Krauzes model, however, are the symptomatic dimensions of his argument, that is, the way that it illustrates a meticulous recitation of the discursive operations of mestizaje within the realm of state ideology. For Krauzes argument to stick, it would need to nd support in empirically measurable levels of cultural purity and mixedness. At what point does a region or community become more mixed than another? As the long-standing Mexican debate over when an Indian becomes a mestizo indicates, many have foundered on the reefs of this question, perhaps none more spectacularly than Manuel Gamio and his attempt to measure the indigenousness of communities through his plan of a culturally representative census (1992 [1942], p. 189).12 Taken together, the critique of the scientic utility and validity of race (from Herder to the Human Genome Project) and the critique of the racialization of culture (Hall, 1996b; Gilroy, 1992; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991 [1988], pp. 1728) have long taught us that claims of cultural purity and mixture hold little empirical basis. In short, questions of ethno-cultural purity and mixture are not scientic ones to be resolved through empirical objectivity, but rather political propositions that depend on rhetoric and representation.

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Krauzes challenge, then, is a rhetorical one: not simply to identify communities that are too pure, but to build a convincing case that can make those problematic regions pure; pure Indian, pure fanatic, pure barbarian. Given the rich store of discursive resources which he is tapping into here, this is an easy case to make, and one to which he devotes minimal attention. For those resources are maintained precisely by the power-move at the heart of mestizaje, its dialectical conation of opposites, its productive contradiction in the service of the nationstate. And it is here that we discover that the purity of non-mestizaje is in fact a kind of impurity, a deviation, a heresy: that is, a rejection of Mexican state sovereignty which is at the same time the same thing as rejecting the pure mestizaje that ideologically underwrites projects of hegemonic, national identity formation.13 I am not simply being convenient when I implicate the basic logic of mestizaje with projects of state. Krauzes troping of mestizaje, in fact, operates within a long discursive trajectory of national consolidation whose modern theorization in Mexico begins not, as I noted above, with the post-Revolutionary intelligentsia, but with the liberals, positivists and Cientcos that dominate the late-nineteenth-century lettered city.14 While this genealogy is far too heavy to unpack here, let me register that Andres Molina Enrquez, probably the most innovative of the late positivists, would nd the ultimate expression of the ideological effectivity of mestizaje by equating the ascension of Mexicos longstanding sovereign, Porrio Daz, with the very embodiment of mestizo Mexico, that is, Mexico as a racially marked mestizo state (pp. 132147).15 If Daz repre sented the mestizo state incarnatewhich of course is a racialized metaphor for the conuence of Amerindian and European cultureswhat function did the Indian half of this social contract serve? What was the space of the Indian within the Porriato? In short, it was an ancient space, a traditional space, a foundational space, even a sacred space; all of this is another way of saying that it was a space of erasure, abstractly included, concretely excluded.16 It is not accidental that the necessary conuence of mestizaje and indigenismo is rst deployed systematically in the name of nation-state consolidation under Daz.17 It was also the Porriato that signicantly raised the bar in meeting indigenous resistance with nalizing, modern military solutions.18 I trot out this quick (and admittedly simplied) sketch of the Porrian Indian policy not only to contextualize Tomochic, but also to draw out an essential link between practices of theorizing hybridity and of colonial discourse: the profound ambivalence that governs their common representation of the colonized other.19 The language of colonialism here, despite the fact that Daz was concerned with nation, is not casual, but rather residual: indeed, the association between development and colonization is made explicit in one of the primary organs of Porrian state policy, known as the ministry of fomento, colonizacion, industria y comercio.20 Ultimately, the Porrian Indian policy reveals that the split that Etienne Balibar identies between a nationalism which derives from love (even an excessive love) and the one which derives from hate (p. 47) is really the constitutive ambivalence of a single, expansive nationalism. It is a nationalism enabled by a gesture that appropriates while vanquishing, sacralizes while destroying: simultaneously a rescue and an erasure. It is within the context of this intensication of the inclusive exclusion of competing modernities that Heriberto Fras launches one of the sharpest cri

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tiques of the Porriato during Dazs reign, set forth in his serial originally called iTomochic! Episodios de campana. Remembered today simply as Tomochic, it novelizes an actual federal crackdown against a popular rebellion in the northern state of Chihuahua. It provides an excellent case study for the increasingly biopolitical stakes of the Porrian state, and its appropriation of the transforming discourses of mestizaje, the Indian and nation, through which the formation of citizens and patriots cedes to, or becomes entangled with, the decision over life itself.21 As a narrative wherein the ideological and the critical consistently hold sway over the aesthetic,22 Tomochic lends itself to the kind of allegorical reading proposed by Doris Sommer in her study of the nineteenth-century Latin American novel, Foundational Fictions (1991). But there is an important difference. The basic structure of the national romances that Sommer has called foundational ctions is premised upon forgetting: the desire for national bourgeois hegemony is allegorized through reconciliatory (and usually consummated) love stories, whereby racial and social-class tensions are forgotten in favour of the national formation embodied by the protagonists (1991, pp. 6, 19). Fras pro duces a different kind of foundational narrative, one that emphasizes national disarticulation over reconciliation, and one that is ultimately more faithful to Ernest Renans maxim: Fras will ask us to remember the national crime that has been forgotten, and then at once assert its necessity for the process of nationbuilding.23 This kind of foundational disarticulation, then, allegorizes the nation as profoundly fractured. The healing (or forgetting) agent of that fracture will not be the seduction of romance, but rather the brute force of armed intervention. The project of national consolidation is thus represented as a reconciliation that can only come as a result of the material effacement of challengers to state sovereignty. While the foundational ction responds to the ideal by representing a nation made whole through raceclass reconciliation (Sommer, 1991, p. 14), the foundational disarticulation is governed by the real, representing the grim vision of a nation made whole through state-sponsored terror. In the case of the Mexico of Frass Tomochic, it is the tragedy of Ignacio Altamiranos Clemenciaa frustrated mestizajeon a massive scale. The basic polemic that arises from Frass novel is that the foundational moment of the Porrian state is not the realization, but rather the utter failureeven the abandonmentof an idealized mestizaje. This position is insightful, and is what I think endows the novel with the kind of power that Mariano Azuela notes, when he calls Tomochic (along with Inclans bandit classic, Astucia) one of only two authentically national Mexican novels (1960 [1947], p. 659).24 Beyond the novel itself, a common misreading of its treatment of the discourses of mestizaje and the Indian make it exemplary in a double sense: as a narrative memory of the violence of national consolidation; and as a testament to the referential forgetting established by the ideological triumph of that same process of consolidation. IV Tomochic is the account of a state-sponsored massacre. Told in gruesome, naturalist tones, it follows the federal soldier Miguel Mercado as he participates in the government campaign against the village of Tomochic. In a urry of popular religious enthusiasm that coalesces around a set of federal abuses,

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Tomochic has taken up arms and declared itself sovereign, responsible only to God.25 Most of the story focuses on the military campaign against the wellfortied town, and is an extended commentary on both the technical and moral bankruptcy of the Porrian projects of state expansion, modernization and centralization. There is also a love story that runs through the novel. While typically discarded as irrelevant, distracting and unconvincing in the commentary on Tomochic,26 Sommers exposition on foundational ctionsthat is, narratives that she proposes as foundational to the bourgeois project of national hegemony asks us to pay closer attention to love interests. And indeed, in Tomochic, the love story is one of the places where the critique of Daz becomes frankly ad hominem, and the foundational disarticulation most symbolically realized. Miguel and Juliaa bewitching native of Tomochicnd their mutual affections stymied by Mexicos fragmentation. Julias repeated declaration of iSoy de Tomochic! suggests the irreparable disarticulation between the local rebellion and national project of consolidation in which Miguel participates. The disjuncture is exacerbated by an allusion to Dazs double, in the gure of Julias uncle Bernardo, her senior by decades, and an ogre that keeps his niece in incestuous domestic bondage (pp. 1922, 28). The allegorical afnity is clear, especially when we remember that Daz was not only married to a woman thirty-three years younger than himself (Carmen Romero Rubio, daughter of a former political enemyamicacion indeed!) but was also previously married to his niece (Delna).27 What should be an interregional reconciliation and allegory of national consolidation is instead forcibly sundered, as the civilized capital (Miguel) ends up participating in the murder of the barbarous region (Julia) due to the greed and perversion of a tyrant (Bernardo), who lords over and manipulates Julia the way that Daz tightens his iron grip around the nations peripheries (e.g. pp. 1316, 143).28 As the narrative of a campaign ofcially framed as civilizations modernist advance against the backwardness of barbarism, Frass critique hinges upon its ability to convincingly reverse the referential targets of those binary signiers, and, in effect, display the states project as fundamentally barbaric. This is the critical and thematic thread that ties the narrative together, with Miguel concluding, over and again, that the reality of war, of this war, has nothing of the solemn poetry of war grand, noble, heroic, epic! (p. 79; see also p. 143). It is neither a shadow, nor even a parody of the epic classics. Even the recent internecine, Mexican civil skirmishes, with serious ideological stakes in the balancethe War of Reform that pitted liberals against conservativeswere noble in comparison: Miguel recognized the tragic barbarism of the catastrophe! The horror of the killing had been as atrocious as defeat ! (ibid.). The entire campaign is shown to be fundamentally misguided, sacricing young workingclass men, conscripts and petty ofcers poorly trained by the national academy at Chapultepec, to the guns of the Tomoche veterans, who have grown up ghting off bandits and rivals, and whose repeating Winchesters are said to never miss their target (p. 2). Indeed, the federal tactics are displayed as so crude and outdated that their technologically advanced heavy artillery (e.g. a modern canon, p. 147) is effectively neutralized, even mocked, as it is noted to have levelled minimal material damage, and no psychological effect whatsoever (p. 138). It is the savage Tomoches, in fact, who display a marvelous intuition

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for the modern art of war (p. 70). They deliver the federal army several stinging defeats, forcing the state to rely on sheer, overwhelming force. By the end, the federales outnumber the Tomoches ten to one (p. 147). Cowardly federal ofcers who avoid the fray of battle are juxtaposed against the heroic, if fanatic, Cruz Chavez, leader of the Tomoches who never hesitates to put himself in harms way. And even the Tomoches religious hyperbole is mitigated by the soldiers decidedly more hollow, if no less fanatical, deference toward the state. While the Tomoches surge into battle with pledges to el Gran Poder de Dios, Mara Santsima, the Santsima Trinidad, and promise death to the sons of Lucifer, the soldiers less convincingly respond with ivivas! to the Supreme Government, to the Mexican Republic, to the Ninth Battalion, to General Daz (e.g. pp. 5659), and, ultimately, to the united Nation (p. 114). Drawing an even more damning distinction, we learn that it is the supposedly professional, federal army that consistently violates the normative rules of just war handed down from Biblical law and secular scholarly tradition. The Tomoches, meanwhile, exhibit a model respect for the conventional injunctions that govern a just war: restrictions against the abuse of prisoners, the killing of non-combatants, the harming of women and children, and the excessive destruction of other forms of property.29 So, on the one hand, the federal soldiers, stymied in their attacks, take up positions in the surrounding hills and re upon any living thing in the town that dares move, busy themselves with reducing the church to rubble, and steal the cattle and other food supply of the Tomoches (pp. 8586). The Tomoches, on the other hand, never harm the soldaderas who bring food and water to the federal troops: not once did their marvelous sharpshooters re upon the soldaderas . The honorable sons of the sierra would not kill women! (p. 86). In marked contrast, the federal army, incompetent in battle, defers to a double strategy. First, a policy of scorched earth, burning the church where the better part of the women of Tomochic had sought refuge, and from whose spire an old woman hurls herself to avoid the ames (p. 115); later, a long siege which yields a nal victory over half-dead and starving non-combatants (pp. 117122). While the Tomoches exhibit model treatment of their prisoners (pp. 70, 91), returning them, including ofcers, unharmed, any captured Tomoches are summarily executed by federal ring squad (pp. 72, 132, 146147). In one particularly gripping scene, a group of soldiers heroically pursue a brave Tomoche through daunting terrain, nally bring him down, and cautiously approach the cadaver to nd a dead thirteen-year-old boy with a tranquil expression on his dark, beardless face that seems to laugh at the suddenly less enthusiastic soldiers (p. 97). And in a devastating parody of militarism, an ironic victory reveille is repeatedly trumpeted throughout the narrative, a kind of leitmotif of unjust war: And its bellicose, joyful notes suddenly became gloomy in the midst of that eld of sadness, of ashes and of ruin, in that putrid valley of smoking tombs and unburied corpses (p. 129). This game of reversals that organizes the critical logic of Tomochic rests on a discourse of race, revealing the stakes of the narratives biopolitical context. It shows the barbarism of a white state that sends its darker young men to die in battles not of national defence, but of conquest. The Tomoches perceive the racialized element of the project, and incorporate it explicitly into their strategy of resistance: [Cruz Chavez] understood the transcendental importance of

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eliminating the ofcers, and he taught his men to recognize them by their white faces and their commanding attitudes (p. 70).30 In short, this vilication of the state, whose military here demolishes an indigenous village (Monsivais, 2000, p. 967), is then juxtaposed with a counter vailing ennoblement of those admirable Indians defend[ing] their religion and their lands (Azuela, 1960, p. 665), of the Yaqui Indians assaulted by the Porriato (Magana, 1964, p. 53), of the Indians of Tomochic [part of] the Yaqui nation whose tribes refus[ed] to be governed by the central authority and to participate in the process of modernization (Bentez-Rojo, 1996, p. 479). How ever, while there certainly is a racialized logic that propels the critical force of Tomochic, reading it as a defence of the Indian raises a problem. That problem is the fact that Frass Tomoches of Tomochic are not Indians: What did they want, concretely, those serranos ? They knew nothing of the Patria, nor its governors, nor Religion, nor its priests. And the strangest aspect of all was that they were not a barbarous tribe. They were not Indians, but Creoles [criollos]. Spanish blood, Arab blood, blood of cruel fanaticism and noble bravery, coursed through that marvelous Tarahumara and Andalucian race . Tomochic gave the Mexican Republic the rare spectacle of a village that had gone crazy (p. 26). V What can we make of this disconnect, where Fras says not Indian, but mestizo, and yet is widely understoodby accomplished and perceptive readers like Monsivais, Azuela, Magana and Bentez-Rojo, no lessas saying precisely the opposite?31 I maintain that it speaks loudly to the ideological status of articulating mestizaje with Mexican state formation and national consolidation, and moreover to the biopolitical function of the Indian in Mexican discourse and society. While Frass critique, as anti-Porrian propaganda, is enabled by a racialized discourse, it is more complex than a simple inversion of the value codes ascribed to a civilized state and a barbaric tribe of Indians. We have just seen how Fras indulges in the classic rhetorical move of reframing his opponenthere, the Porrian stateas the real barbarian. But at the same time, the recodication of the rebels of Tomochic will have greater discursive impact if it can be more nuanced than a simple sublimation, or even civilization, of the noble Indian. Consider the real fears of the metropolitan and largely bourgeois reading public of Porrian Mexico, the target audience of Tomochic, that is, their fears of widespread indigenous revolt.32 This reading public would have no reason to be enthusiastic about local uprisings that, if contagious, could present a real threat to their material interests.33 In fact, the Porrian media machine openly touted its incursions into outlying areas such as Sonora, Chihuahua, Chiapas and Yucatan as precisely a war against intransigent Indians who insist on frustrating the civilization and modernization of Mexico.34 A romantic Indian, then, would simply repeat the Porrian, indigenista rhetoric, at best sparking an academic debate over the good or bad character of the old Indian that, either way, hinders the emergence of a modern Mexico. A romantic Indian, while perhaps yielding a nostalgic pathos, would probably incite little outrage against the Porriato. Hence a sharper critique of the Porriato, one that can strike a

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rhetorical blow, will need to go beyond a romanticization of the Indian. This is precisely the route that Fras takes, as Tomochic works not to bring the Indian into the national fold but rather to de-Indianize Tomochic. In other words, Frass strategy is to show that the Porrian mission is launched not against Indians, as it purports, but rather against mestizos. The assault on Tomochic, then, must be represented as an assault upon an honorable mestizo community, indeed, against Mexico itself. The action against Tomochic must be a kind of anti-mestizaje, deferring to hate over love, destruction over reconciliation. If, as Balibar argues, the nations articulation to the racial community has a tendency to represent itself as one big family (p. 100), then the racialized mark of that national family identity in late nineteenth-century Mexico is the mark of mestizaje.35 The crime that Fras must ascribe to the Porriato is not the killing of an internal national other, but rather the massacre of a patriotic brother: Dazs war must be exposed as a perverse excess, a kind of cannibalism, waged against heroic Mexicans, good and loyal (p. 104).36 Historical context shows that these were in fact the actual terms in play. In a recent study of the historical (as opposed to literary) uprising and massacre at Tomochic, Paul Vanderwood draws on newspaper editorials and government documents to show the Porrian states concerted effort dedicated to Indianizing Tomochic (1998, pp. 135140, 250251).37 The implications of Vanderwoods work also shows that Fras had objective accuracy on his side: Tomochic was in fact a largely mestizo, though multi-ethnic, community (pp. 5153, 135). Contrary to the readings of Monsivais, Azuela, Magana and Bentez-Rojo, the critical edge of Tomochic is not a sublimation of the Indians of Tomochic. Rather, Frass critique operates within the discursive parameters of mestizaje. In other words, it operates within the same system of representation upon which the ideological triumph of the Porrian state rests. With mestizaje thus serving as the discursive formation within which the sayable can be said, the common biopolitical premises, where Porrian Mexico and Frass anti-Porrismo meet, clearly emerge. Both recognize the nation embodied in the mestizo. And both assume the material killing and symbolic sublimation of Indians as constitutive of mestizajes dialectical progress. This is how mestizaje exhibits the ambivalence of a colonial discourse. Thus Daz can at once sublimate old Indian heroes to the status of national icons and construct a discourse of contemporary, Indian savagery as a justication for wars of conquest. At the same time, Fras, too, can speak to the natural sense of honour that Indians exhibit in battle (e.g. pp. 73, 124126), while presenting the effacement of their communities as a necessary erasure in the march of progress. This is precisely what happens in Tomochic: at one point, as if to underscore the difference of the federal incursion against Tomochic, Fras interpolates a short chapter on the campaign against the Apaches, in which an old soldier recounts to Miguel the costly, even tragic, but clearly necessary, war against an invasive indigenous savagery (pp. 4951). Later, drunk and swept up in the blind enthusiasm of the Tomochic massacre, Miguel imagines himself in heroic victory, not over the mestizo Tomoches, but over the barbaric Apaches (p. 133). To emphasize: clearly, the polemic of Tomochic is not levelled at the Porriatos genocidal campaign against the Indian, which is tacitly endorsed in the novel. It is levelled at the expansion of that genocide against the Tomoches, a strong race, deserving to live and to become the root of a robust Mexican people (p. 136).

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It would take nearly two decades after the initial publication of Tomochic for Daz to fall, for Frass anti-Porrian politics to morph into ofcial rhetoric, and for the book to be praised as an important, if largely forgotten, precursor to the great novelas de la Revolucion.38 In the framing of the historical events around Tomochic, however, it seems that the empirical lies of the Porrian position are in fact a more honest reection of the discursive truth of biopolitical power. In spite of the Revolution and all of its historical revisions, it is Dazs version of the war against Tomochic that is remembered, when it is remembered at all: the expansive state against recalcitrant Indians.39 If today modern Mexico remembers the Indians as heroes, rather than as a terrifying threat, it is in part due to the very success of the Porrian project of pacication.40 For, as Claude Levi Strauss noted long ago in the opening pages of Tristes Tropiques (1997 [1955]), it is only with the removal of that threat that the former enemies of civilization become a source of noble and protable revelations (p. 33). And it is here, at the notion of civilizations enemies, that the Porrian discovery of Indians at Tomochic carries an even stronger sense of discursive integrity. The rebellion at Tomochic was one of several popular religious uprisings against the Porrian state. Its inspiration, a mystic, healer and spiritist known as Santa Teresa de Cabora, had legions of followers across Northern Mexico. These followers were largely drawn from the popular classes, and her support was particularly strong in indigenous communities.41 The mass appeal of gures like Teresa de Cabora, in short, emerged from the social sector that was most explicitly brutalized by the dogmatic positivism and conservative liberalism of the Porriato.42 These largely impoverished masses, while territorially inside, are excluded by the nation-state, an inner-exteriority always in danger of taking its allegiance elsewhere. In that sense, Tomochic and the rebel villages like itin their very declarations of local sovereignty that thus erode national hegemonyperform the discursive function of the Indian. If they are mixed, practising a weird hybrid of popular Catholicisms, it is the wrong kind of mixture, not mestizaje, but a monster.43 Regardless of genealogical race or traditional culture, they are Indian, inauthentic Mexicans, the constitutive erasure in the ambivalent discourse of pure mestizaje. Whether earnest or ironic, Fras confronts us with a chilling vision of the foundational disarticulation that rearticulates national consolidation to colonial expansion. With the end of the campaign, the thuggish (and brutal realist) Castorena sarcastically links the fall of Tomochic to that of Tenochtitlan, as the more sensitive Miguel expresses his admiration for the heroism of the extinct Tomoche race (p. 136) that he has just helped extinguish. While many have noted that the gure of Miguel is a stand-in for the author himself (Azuela, 1960 [1947], p. 667; Magana, 1964, p. 55; Brown, 1989 [1968], p. xvi), the narrative voice that communicates the soldiers thoughts is unstable, often rendered as what Bakhtin would call a double-voiced discourse, at once an afrmation and criticism of the war. It is in these nal chapters, with the articulation of an increasingly rigorous homology between sacrice and the sacred, that the ambivalence of the narrative becomes at once exceedingly intense and ambiguous. Miguel, in a dramatic psychological battle with himself, nally succumbs to state ideology in a way that seems to cast doubt over all of his previous criticisms. In a paroxysm of newfound nationalism, he suddenly recognizes himself as a son of Chapultepec, the site of his military training whose Aztec

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name evokes an epic song, like a joyful reveille, at once linking him to the heroism of the epic death of the ninos heroes of 1847, the triumphant Netza hualcoyotl, the pomp of Moctezuma, and the barbarism of Daz which now takes on explicitly Aztec tones (p. 144). Immediately after Miguels identication with ofcial indigenism and endorsement of the inclusive exclusion of Mexicos living indigenous past, the biopolitical outcome of Tomochic reaches its eugenic limit: with the Tomoches being executed to the last man, it is revealed that this absolute exclusion is to be accompanied by the transfer of the surviving orphans and widows to the leading families of Chihuahua and hence their inclusion as seedbeds [semilleros] for future, robust generations of Mexicans. This is to be carried out for the good of the State [whether this refers to Chihuahua or the nation-state is unclear and unimportant] (p. 146). Finally, just before another unsatisfying reveille accompanies the new days emergence over the ruins of the smouldering town (p. 151), Miguel and his comrades contemplate the heroism of the now sacred, and now dead, Tomoches. All nod in pensive agreement as someone gushes: It couldnt have been any other way, it couldnt have been! (p. 147).

VI But of course it could have been another way, and, in spite of everything, perhaps still can. This would seem to be the lesson from another hybridity, another kind of mestizaje, not simply articulated from below but articulating an explicit rejection of complicitywhose current form is the false choice between national or globalwith something like an afrmation of alliance. This kind of hybridity, after all, is what tenaciously emerges, again and again, as the alternative modernities that mark and remark the history of modern Mexico: the synthesis of European anarchism and local morality, of Nahua and Spanish, of community and property, of orality and literacy that would articulate with such force in Revolutionary Morelos; the conuence of the cosmo-polis and the province, of technology and tradition, in 1990s Chiapas; the small victories, like the one recently witnessed in San Salvador Atenco, as the hybridization of peasant agency and urban activism not only stared down a project of state but also derailed its tired rhetorical turns.44 Alongside these small victories, we still witness the killing of specically constructed groups of people, people placed before the law but not afforded protection under the law: the included exceptions, people like the men of Santiago Xochiltepec, whose recent massacre has been characterized by governmental authorities as an ancient feud in which the state need not (in fact did not) intervene45; people like the victims of human-hunting, now starring in sensationalist and ambivalent video images called art, images so exceptional that perhaps they rebound to mitigate the everyday degradation of similar communities worldwide, whether at the hands of oil companies, global nanciers or anthropologists. For hybridity to be effectively harnessed in the Latin American scene as a mode of theorizing and practising the manufacture of small victories, its role in large defeats must be assessed, rethought and dealt with. Re-reading Tomochic represents a move in that direction.

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A number of readers shared with me their critical comments on earlier drafts of this essay. In particular, I would like to thank Peter Hallberg, Ignacio Sanchez Prado and Amy Robinson for their suggestions. 1. But cf. Hall (1996a, p. 259). 2. The discursive formation of the Mexican national subject categorized as the Indian (el indio) is a theme whose extensive bibliography I wont detail here. To be clear, however, let me note that what I mean to indicate by the Indian is the outcome of a historical trajectory of identication: one that dialectically homogenizes (the monolithic Indian) and diversies (distinct indigenous communities) and that depends on a colonial gaze backed up by force. The Indian thus functions rhetorically as both emblem and social relation. This complex history is what I mean to indicate by placing the Indian in quotation marks here at the outset (and which will be implied henceforth); in doing so I attempt to invoke the explicitly referential ambivalence of the Indian, at once indicating real subjects and communities so (self-)dened, and the sociohistorical process by which those subjects and communities enter into discourse and society as particular unities and/or an overarching totality. 3. Agamben draws la nuda vita, or bare life, from what was known in the classical tradition as zoe, apolitical natural life as such, the simple fact of living common to all living beings (1998 [1995], p. 1). It is the politicization of bare life (p. 4) whereby the humanity of living man is decided (p. 8) which, for Agamben, constitutes the decisive event of modernity (p. 4). The incremental merging of the realms of bare life and the political becomes the dening problematic of modern Western politics. That process is governed by a structure of inclusive exclusion, whereby law and sovereignty are founded on the gesture that incorporates bare life (situating it as a condition for the city of men) by banishing it (the city is that space where bare life cedes to bios, or political life): Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion (p. 11). Agambens attention lies elsewhere, but it is a suggestive frame for thinking about the biopolitical contracts that govern the social, legal and symbolic status of the Indian in several modern American states. 4. The installation in question is Ivan Edezas de negocios y placer (2000). It was on display at P.S.1s Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values (30 June September 2002). I owe a debt of gratitude to Klaus Biesenbach (Chief Curator) and Amy Smith (Project Manager) for their generosity of insight in discussing the exhibition with me. 5. The programme notes that the footage was most likely shot in the 1970s somewhere in the Brazilian jungle. It is of course impossible to tell whether the footage is an authentic testimony or a performance, like the gruesome documentaries staged by the journalists in Ruggero Deodatos revolting (and widely banned) Cannibal Holocaust (1979). But the authenticity of the images is not the question at issue here, given that a central point of the installation is to present the images as a record of real murders. 6. The rst reports of the massacre at Agua Fra refer to the victims simply as campesinos and to the region as una zona indgena (La Jornada, 2 June 2002). Subsequent accounts refer to their village as a pueblo zapoteco (the Zapotecs are an indigenous ethnicity native to the state of Oaxaca) and the victims as indgenas zapotecas de Xochiltepec (3 June 2002), and nally to the killing itself as la masacre de un grupo de zapotecas (5 June 2002). The programme accompanying Edezas video installation identies the eeing tribe below as indigenous people in a Brazilian jungle and Brazilian natives of the rain forest. 7. Others have noted an ideological continuity between pre- and post-Revolutionary intellectuals, typically dening it through what Hale calls their common commitment to the heroic liberal tradition of mid-nineteenth-century Mexico (Hale, 1989, p. 12; see also p. 18). 8. This is equally the case in thinkers as seemingly disparate as Gabino Barreda (1979 [1867], pp. 915) and Jose Vasconcelos (1979 [1925], 1926, esp. pp. 65108). 9. Amicacion (derived from the am- common to amigo, amor and amo) is Andres Molina Enrquezs theory of the Porrian political genius, which he links directly to Dazs embodiment of mestizaje (see below) (1978 [1909], pp. 136139). The most effectively critical comment on the post-Revolutionary, statist co-opting of indigenous identity and Zapatista resistance that I am aware of is to be found in Elena Garros Los recuerdos del porvenir (2001 [1963]) (see especially Part 1, Chapter 7). 10. See Reina (1988 [1980]) and Garca Cantu (1969, pp. 5592). 11. Myriad examples could be brought forth that run precisely counter to Krauzes claims of the

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non-mestizaje of Mexicos historical regions of unrest. Limiting the scope to the bibliography that I am handling here, see Hu-Dehart (1988) and Reina (1988 [1980], pp. 4557). For examples of the varied mestizaje at play in regions whose unrest was neither short-lived nor politically resolved, see Reina (pp. 6482) and the reports of the Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos Bartolome Carrasco Briseno, cited in La Jornada (3 June 2002). All translations from the Spanish, unless otherwise noted in the list of works cited, are mine. Gamios culturally representative census wanted to measure levels of indigenousness by taking as its standard the everyday use of a range of cultural artifacts denominated indigenous, European or mixed. Thus a subjects or communitys use of huaraches would increase indigenousness, while use of marihuana would decrease it. Ultimately, if it so happens that la cifra de objetos de cultura indgena presente un alto porcentaje respecto al total de objetos, then pueden considerarse como indgenas a las familias clasicadas (p. 187) regardless of genealog ical race. The recognized opacity of race is thus confronted with the transparent purity of culture in the form of racially designated cultural objects. Gamio speaks of the pristina pureza of the tipo mestizo that serves as his historical protagonist of Mexican national identity formation (1992 [1916], p. 66). Perhaps it is predictable to nd Krauze, a writer in the same liberal tradition as Gamio, here similarly repeating an uncritical exaltation of the mestizo, at the expense of indigenous communities (on Krauzes commitment to monumentalist historiography, see Lomintz, 1998). And yet even Gloria Anzaldua, while her critical motives lie elsewhere, makes the same move with all of the biopolitical implications intact (1987, p. 5). See, among others, Barreda (1979 [1867, p. 9]); Altamirano (2001 [1880]); Sierra (1960 [1885], p. 7; 1977 [1940], p. 291); Riva Palacio (1889, pp. viii; 471, 478, 481); Molina Enrquez (1978 [1909]). The post-Revolutionary intelligentsia will only strengthen this cultural link between metaphors of (racial, cultural and philosophical) mestizaje and Mexico. Some notable examples include Reyes (1992 [1915], pp. 1617); Gamio (1992 [1916]); Vasconcelos (1979 [1925], 1926); Brenner (1970 [1929]) (whose perspective was from the North, but still); and Lombardo Toledano (1988 [1930], pp. 4547). Ramos, Paz, Villoro, Zea and a host of others carry on the tradition, sometimes articulated melancholically, but largely unproblematized. Molina: El senor general Daz, que vea en [los mestizos] a los suyos, a su raza, a la nacionalidad, al porvenir, tomo a su cargo al empeno de saciarlos (p. 138, my emphasis). I here paraphrase Jesus Martn-Barberos description of the Enlightment-era, liberal concept of popular sovereignty as one of abstract inclusion with concrete exclusion (1993 [1987], p. 7). The classic study of this history is Villoro (1950), whose paradox nicely sums up the necessary conuence of indigenismo and mestizaje at the site of the nation-state: ahora el indio ya no es solo alteridad; lo vemos alejado, pero al propio tiempo, forma parte de nuestro espritu (1950, p. 192). Villoros existentialist problematic is already thematized in a more historico-materialist register in Lopez y Fuentess El indio (1972 [1935]: see esp. the chapters Sumision, La tradicion perdida and El lder). See also Hale (p. 9) and Knight (1990, p. 79). OConnell offers a particularly efcient review of the historical conditions of both indigenousness and indigenismo (1995, pp. 4757); for more extensive treatment, see Bonl (1996 [1987]). I invoke indigenismo here as a long historical trajectory of the Occidentalist appropriation of indigenous cultural practices, and do not, for the purposes of this essay, abide by the traditional distinction between indigenismo and Romantic Indianism. These included the large-scale invasion of indigenous territories with modernized federal forces, bombardment with heavy artillery, and mass, race- or ethnicity-based imprisonment and deportation. While these were not always Dazs rst resort, they were rigorously applied as the last. On the ambivalence of colonial discourse, see Bhabha (1994, pp. 85122). The nineteenth-century policy of colonizacion referred to the occupation of so-called terrenos baldos by small landholders, preferably immigrants from Europe. While its goals differ from traditional colonialism, it shares the structural similarity of expanding sovereignty through primitive accumulation; in this case, the alienation of communally held (often indigenous) lands by appropriating them as private property and fomenting the liberal ideal of creating a rural bourgeoisie through colonization (Hale, p. 237). The history of its emergence as state policy, with ample references to the need to improve the blood of the Mexican citizenry, exemplies the tightly woven discourses of race and space in Porrian Mexico. See Hale (pp. 234238) for a brief review, and Gonzalez Navarro (1960) for a book-length study of this history.

12.

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

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21. The centrality of biopolitics as the conation of citizenship with the states selective preservation and elimination of bare life is what distinguishes the national narrative of Fras from the neo-classical narrative of, for example, Altamirano, where citizenship hinges upon the voluntaristic patriotism of the individual. 22. My thanks to Ignacio Sanchez Prado (personal communication) for formulating the structure of Tomochic in this way. 23. This is precisely the structure of Renans famous What is a nation? (1990 [1882]) speech, where the polemical role that forgetting plays at the beginning of the speech is slyly replaced by terms like consent and sacrice at the end (1990 [1882], pp. 11, 1920). 24. I consider Azuelas own thematization of a failed mestizaje in the forthcoming article, Hybridology and Post-Revolutionary Malaise. 25. In the 1906 edition (Porrua, 1989) that I am handling, Chapter VIII reviews the historical conditions of the uprising at Tomochic. These include: abandonment of services, but not of tax collection, by the federal government and the Church (p. 23); the inuence of a messianic movement centred around the mystic Teresa Urrea, the Santa de Cabora (ibid.); an attempt by the governor of Chihuahua to transfer the religious paintings of Tomochics church to the state capital (p. 24); the rape and impregnation of a village girl by a judicial authority from Guerrero (ibid.); the chastisement by a priest for the towns recognition of the villager Jose Carranzas status as the reincarnation of San Jose (ibid.); the rise of Cruz Chavez to rebuke the priest, and lead the crowd to evict him from the town (ibid.); the attempt by the mayor to ne Cruz for his actions, which Cruz refuses to pay (ibid.); and nally, the arrival of a military battalion, which is promptly routed by the Tomoches under Cruzs leadership (p. 25); things escalate from there. In his introduction to the Porrua edition, Brown implies that these are a reasonably accurate summary of the historical facts surrounding the uprising (p. xx). Most are conrmed in Vanderwoods (1998) recent study of the uprising. 26. See Azuela (1960 [1947], pp. 666667), Brown (1989 [1968], pp. xvixvii), and Bentez-Rojo (1996, pp. 478479). 27. A special thanks to Pat McNamara for historical verication (personal communication) is in order here. 28. The love story is a clear point of distinction from Sommers foundational ctions, in which the romances are invariably about desire in young chaste heroes for equally young and chaste heroines, the nations hope for productive unions (p. 24). Frass allegory of national (dis)articulation precisely reverses this model. The young heroes, the embodiment of a fragmented nation, are not chaste (pure), but soiled. At every turn, Julia is at once a nina santa (p. 29) and a victim of la monstruosa violacion (p. 28) of a despotismo de pirata musulman (p. 21), violada ya, pero sana y rme todava (p. 21). Miguel is an alcoholic, a slave to his vicios (p. 6). Moreover, there is nothing chaste in the consummation of their affections. The love scene is at once graphic (pp. 4142), yet ambiguous in its reciprocity, and Miguel spends much of the remaining narrative convincing himself that it was not, in fact, a rape (pp. 4344, 83). Julias death at the hands of the federal siege symbolizes the effective impossibility of non-violent, productive national union. It is signicant, too, that Bernardo is alone among the Tomoches in his ignobility, and even his death is a study in treason, as he guns down a national hero who is about to grant him mercy (pp. 98101). 29. For a critical review of the doctrine of just war, see Helen Kinsellas The Order of War (2002, manuscript under review). 30. Knight: Quasi-colonial attitudes and methods became hallmarks of the Porriato: the army resembled a colonial force (pale ofcers, dark troops) and resorted to the usual counterinsurgency excesses (p. 80). 31. While it is certainly likely that some of the rebel combatants at Tomochic were ethnically Indians, the important point here is that Fras never suggests this within his work. In fact, the construction of a criollo and/or mestizothat is, non-IndianTomochic by Fras is much more than a passing reference, indeed, is quite methodical. Later in the narrative Fras contrasts the Sonoran Indians (aquellos recios indios [los pimas]) with the Tomoches, whom he describes criollos serranos chihuahenses (p. 124). This differentiation is made increasingly explicit in the later editions, with the 1906 edition considered denitive (Brown, p. xix). For example, neither reference just cited (pp. 26 or 124), nor the mention of the white faces of the ofcers (p. 70), appears in the 1899 version. However, even there we nd a pretty clear distinction made between the Tomoches and their Indian enemies, such as the Apaches, the Pimas, the Tarahu-

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maras and the Navajos, of which the latter three ght as mercenaries on the side of the federal army (1899, pp. 13, 41, 133, 157, 165, 221). In one passage of the 1899 version, the heroic ght against the cattle-rustling, feroces indios (1899, p. 41) is noted as the source of the famous Tomoche valor. Finally, in the two illustrations of Tomoches (Bernardo and Julia, see 1899, pp. 1, 51), are both depicted with stereotypically mestizo or criollo features (full beard, modern dress, etc.). In short, nothing in the 1899 version suggests that the Tomoches should be understood as Indians. I have not been able to consult the two original editions, which are rare (both were published anonymously, the 1893 serial printed in El Democrata, and the 1894 augmentation printed in Texas). It is unlikely that any of the critics I mentioned would have been handling an edition earlier than the 1906 (where the mestizo and criollo identication of the Tomoches becomes explicit), which has served as the basis of subsequent publications. Brown notes that Azuelas citations pertain to the 1906 edition (p. xix). Hale cites one inuential metropolitan newspaper (Justo Sierras La Libertad), commenting on a rural uprising a decade prior to Tomochic, as warning that although the Indians were ghting today for a few hundred square yards (varas) of ground, tomorrow they would want the destruction of the white race (p. 224). He goes on to argue that this was the longstanding response of an intellectual and governing elite to attacks upon property and the established social order (p. 224). Fras notes the federal rationale for the crackdown on Tomochic: En efecto, el histerismo belico religioso de los tomochitecos poda ser un foco de contagio para los demas pueblos de la sierra que sufran un malestar sombro pronto a resolverse en rebelion (p. 26; see also 143). Moreover, the material interests of the elite classes is slyly suggested by Fras as the ulterior motive for the military action at various moments in the text. At the very outset, a functionary at a Londonbased mining company threatens the Tomoches with meterlos de soldados (p. 24) and a railway engineer with the same company decides to avoid the region and inform the government of la actitud belicosa del pueblo. By the time that the Tomoches can assure him that they are not bandidos vulgares, it is too late: Mas el grito de alarma se propagaba, se multiplicaba (p. 26). The durable Yaqui resistance, like the uprising at Tomochic, took place in Northwestern Mexico, although centred one state to the west, in Sonora. Dazs attempted resolution of that resistance, however, did not begin in earnest until 1897 (ve years after the siege of Tomochic), with the massacre and deportation of the Yaqui at the hands of 8000 federal troops occurring in 1902 (see Hu-DeHart, 1988, pp. 162165). While I have heard the thesis that Yaqui ghters could have been present at Tomochic, I have not been able to nd verication. Historically, Tomochic was a centre of Tarahumara culture, peripheral to the Jesuit-Yaqui missions to the west (see Vanderwood, pp. 5153); and Frass Tomoches are constantly beset by Apaches (pp. 5, 23; 1899, pp. 13, 41) who were not traditional rivals of the Yaqui (Hu-DeHart, p. 155). The one reference in Tomochic to the Yaqui precisely opposes that resistance to the rebellion at Tomochic (p. 137). In a prelude to his famous works on the evolution of Mexican society and politics, Sierra refers to the familia mestiza, thus conating national singularity with mestizaje (la mestiza constituye la familia mexicana) (1960 [1885]: p. 7). Krauze secures the trope for future generations in his discussion of Mexican origins under the heading The Mestizo Family (1997, pp. 5159). Cannibalism emerges, specically in a passage where Fras implies that the troops have been eating the meat of cerdos voraces que se cebaban en la humana carnaza and hence that have been nutrida con carne humana (p. 139). The historic weight of this accusation could not be heavier, especially as it is launched against an army under a tyrants command. Beyond the local references to Aztec blood sacrice, Agamben reminds us that it is precisely cannibalism that mediates the transition from leader to tyrant, at least since Plato: [W]hoever tastes one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into a wolf Thus, when a leader of the mob seeing the multitude devoted to his orders, does not know how to abstain from the blood of his tribe will it not then be necessary that he either be killed by his enemies or become a tyrant and be transformed from a man into a wolf? (cited in Agamben, p. 108). More precisely, the governments strategy relied on constructing the Tomoche rebels as outside the nation on three counts: Indianness, banditry and fanaticism (Vanderwood, p. 137). A similar process can be seen in a peasant uprising in Reformist Mexico documented by Reina, wherein the military communiques report una gavilla, ladrones, bandidos, rebeldes, sublevados,

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44.

45.

and nally indios (pp. 6770). Today this discourse has come full circle, in Chiapas, where attempts to delegitimize the neo-Zapatistas (the EZLN) often rest upon exposing them as inauthentic Indians, i.e. as urban mestizos. Whereas the statist logic in Tomochic was that the Indians were always already anti-national in their non-mestizaje, the logic in contemporary Chiapas is that the rebels, as urban mestizos, have never been the victims of colonialism and hence must be national traitors. See Azuela (pp. 663664) and Magana (p. 60). Katz goes as far as to suggest that the historical uprising at Tomochic became an enabling memory for the outbreak of the Revolution itself (1986, p. 20). This I could conrm by citing almost any conversation I have had with scholars familiar with Tomochic, which is universally remembered as the story of an Indian uprising. Vanderwood reports that the Daz version of the massacre was so effective that even in the immediate, local aftermath, imagination ran amok as anxious settlers in the Sierra spotted here, there, and everywhere dangerous and vengeful Tomochic Indians as opposed to hard-working mestizos like themselves (p. 318). The distinction he seems to be accepting here is dicey, and his treatment of imagination a bit too self-evident, but his point is important. Thus it is not surprising that, as the anti-Yaqui propaganda of the government increases, so do the increasingly sophisticated versions of Tomochic construct an increasingly explicit mestizo and criollo Tomochic. See Browns note in Fras (p. 137). For more elaborate treatment of teresismo, which reached international proportions, nding receptive audiences in New York and California, see Vanderwood (1998). Gill (1957) offers a thorough, if excessively anti-Porrian, account of the life of Teresa. On the concept of conservative liberalism, see Hale (p. 34 passim). Fras: Cruz convocaba a los principales vecinos a rezar el rosario, un rosario fantastico, donde aquella gente intercalaba oraciones extranas, letanas estupendas, gritos de odio y belicas proclamas, imprecando al gran poder de Dios (p. 27). Mexican intellectuals have long distinguished between a good and bad hybridity, with the former falling under terms like mestizaje and integral (associated with the organicism of autochthonous national development) and the latter historically (at least until Garca Canclini salvaged the term [1992 (1989)]) denominated as some derivation of hibridismo (associated with the imposition of colonialism and cultural imperialism). Gamio (1992 [1916]) is an especially lucid example of this tendency. San Salvador Atenco was the site of a successful popular effort to thwart last summers attempted land-grab by the state for the purpose of building a new airport to service Mexico City. The project would have displaced thousands, permanently fracturing at least a dozen communities. The resistance consisted of a local network of ejiditarios and small landholders in alliance with student, environmental and anti-globalization activists. The state and mainstream press, after attempting to raise the worn-out conspiracy of outsiders perniciously manipulating Mexicos misguided masses (the Basque separatist group ETA and the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso were cited), backed down and terminated the project in the face of widespread popular support for the would-be displaced inhabitants of the community. La Jornada offers excellent coverage of the events 1120 July 2002 at http://www.jornada.unam.mx; for a critical review of the media coverage of the protest, see Borja Villas report at http:// www.rebelion.org/medios/borjavilla250702.htm. Numerous reports have commented generally on the repetitive nature of the violence in the Sola de Vega region of Oaxaca, and specically on the multiple petitions for state intervention that went unheeded in the weeks leading up to the massacre at Agua Fra. See La Jornada, 2 and 3 June 2002.

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