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This essay offers a new reading of Alfonso Reyes's canonical imagining of Mexican national identity, published in 1917 during the Mexican Revolution. Reyes and his contemporaries of the Ateneo de la Juventud were self-proclaimed "vitalists" inspired by James, Boutroux and Bergson. Despite this, there has been minimal examination of the impact of this philosophy on Reyes's writings. Robert Conn's recent monograph on Reyes denies genuine engagement with vitalism on the part of the Ateneo and he, alongside Ignacio Sánchez Prado, draws on Hegel for an interpretation of the text. Beginning with a close examination of this last essay, I argue that, despite the historical frame of Part I, Reyes's essay does not set out to provide a historical idealist depiction of Mexico. Instead, working closely with three of Bergson's major texts, I argue that Reyes's "vision" can be understood as an aesthetic of metamorphosis echoing the philosophy of creative evolution. Deriving his thesis on Mexican identity from a textually visual aesthetic, I conclude that the essay equates to a Bergsonian, virtual image of nation, evoking a communal, ahistorical consciousness. In this way, my reading shows that, although Visión de Anáhuac connects to Romantic ideas of perception and subjectivity, Bergson's influence separates the essay from mainstream 19 th century currents.

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In 2007, the Museo Soumaya in the Claustro de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in México City held the exhibition 'La muerte niña' in which there were displayed numerous affecting paintings and photographs recording the Mexican tradition of the artistic representation of dead children. The exhibition's curator explained that the practice of dressing up children as angelitos and immortalising their image was a way of affirming that they would bypass purgatory and go directly to heaven. The tradition was popular from the New Spain of the 16 th century through to 19 th century Mexico and continued to be observed in some villages to that day. As well as the overtly Christian associations with the passage to the afterlife, the practice recalled the Mesoamerican tradition of offering up dead children to the gods and, in this way, the exhibition underlined the syncretic dimension of the images (EFE, 2007). The images are extraordinarily powerful and, to a modern eye, the later photographs are particularly arresting because they seem not so much to record the child's death as to perpetuate life in death. In many cases, the 19 th century images show the children, sometimes brothers and sisters together, dressed in their Sunday best apparently laid out in peaceful sleep or even posed as if still alive. It is clear that these children are dead. The viewer knows this from the context of the exhibition and the quality of unsettling perfection found in the inanimate. Yet, at the same time, meticulously composed in order to appear alive, we are overcome by the sense that, indeed, they might be. What the viewer experiences is a profound unconscious recognition of one's own mortality. The images give a perfect demonstration of Freud's notion of the unheimlich or the uncanny; not (as Freud explains) because of their ambiguity but because, as doubles, they rehearse within us the atavistic