From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico

Abstract

In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed 'the Mexican nation is forever free and independent'. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire.

Reconfigurations of Time: Reflections on the Exhibition, Arts of Resistance: Politics and the Past in Latin America, UBC Museum of Anthropology

“…They focus on magnificent and tidily historicized pre-Columbian societies (Shelton 2018: 125), rarely engaging in contemporary Indigenous politics. The decisions to exclude this aspect of cultural heritage are problematic and pertinent to Indigenous activism, which struggles against the image -built by early national and often racist projects -that indigeneity is a historicized state of being, un-evolving and apolitical (McEnroe 2012;Berger 2016). In the case of Mexico, to take an example, this process has its inception in colonial misunderstandings of contact era cultures (Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2017).…”

De monarquía de vecinos a nación de ciudadanos: la definición de la ciudadanía en el México borbónico e independiente, 1780-1825

“…La formación de milicias provinciales durante el siglo XVIII permitieron difundir los nuevos valores individuales de la ciudadanía -las nociones de méritos y servicios a la nación-entre la amplia diversidad étnica y cultural de la población. 27 En un principio, las milicias provinciales, que pretendieron organizar la defensa de la América española ante una eventual invasión extranjera, permitieron a comerciantes y artesanos obtener honores y privilegios. 28 No obstante, ante la crisis de la Monarquía en 1808 y la invasión francesa en la península, así como el estallido del movimiento insurgente en la Nueva España, los cuerpos militares adquirieron mayor importancia y un carácter "nacional".…”