Journal o f Historical Sociology Vol. 1 No. 1 March 1988 ISSN 0952-1909

The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community*

ANA MARIA ALONSO

Abstract Social memoiy is integral to the creation o f social meaning: representations of the past are central to the symbolic constitution of social groups and social identities. This paper examines the production of effects of tru th and power in both official and popular historical discourses in Mexico and dem onstrates how representations of the past configure the imagining of community (social memoiy: official/popular historical discourses: nationalism : revolution: hegemony: Mexico).

I. The Positive Sense o f Ideology and H istoriographies’Hidden Herm eneutics: the Production o f Effects o f Truth in Historical D iscourses

How are histories ideologically constituted?^ Whoever h as been part of an historical event in the m aking will be aware th a t a t the time, w hat is m ost salient is the am orphousness and confusion of rapidly shifting action, framed by a welter of im pressions, by a chaos which is itself an index of the extraordinaiy. Those caught up in th is film w ithout a script try to improvise a plot line which will allow them to meaningfully orient their actions. Snatches of in terrupted dialogues hang in the air b u t to the ubiquitous question. W hat is happening?, no clear reply emerges.

Such w as our experience of history-as-action during an event which occured one Saturday in October of 1983, while we were engaged in fieldwork in the ru ra l town of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, Mexico. We were ju s t sitting down to lunch w ith the local doctor and her family when suddenly, the quotidian ceremony was rup tured by sounds which we a t first confused w ith the backfiring of trucks b u t which we soon knew to be gunshots. My colleague and T m anaged to ru n outside before our friends locked their doors and drew their curtains.

A throng of people w as hurtling down the m ain street. F irst came children, ci3âng and screaming, their faces contorted by a rictus of terror. Then came women, dressed in their Sunday best, some clutching babies, m any w ithout shoes yet seemingly impervious to the rocky, ru tted surface which gouged their feet and limited their movement to an uncertain lunging forward. Last came men, several bleeding from the head, barely able to stand, propelled onward by others. One of them , though covered in blood, was clearly tiylng to

organize the exodus and mitigate the panic, bellowing unheeded directions to the crowd which continued to surge ahead, disappearing around the bend of the road w hich led out of town. He heard our shouted question, ‘W hat is happening?’ and yelled back. They are killing people in the plaza!’ ‘Who?’ T he sta te police!’

Running toward the plaza, frora which the m ultitude w as running away, we stopped to help one of the wounded.^ This elderly m an was sitting frighteningly still on the curb, while blood gushed from his head and ran down his body.® His male relatives told us he’d been clubbed by the state police. W hen we finally reached the plaza, all was still. No bodies were to be seen. The state police w as assem bled in front of the m unicipal office buildings. B ut the trucks stopped a t crazy angles in the surrounding streets, the high-heeled shoes scattered throughout the square, and the tear gas which still hung in the air and had u s coughing and choking, bore w itness to the extraordinaiy and to the disorder which distinguishes it from the eveiyday and serves as the sign of one type of ‘historical event’.

Obviously, the preceeding historical description is ideologically constituted in several respects. Here, 1 am using ‘ideology’ in Ricoeur’s positive sense of a symbolic system w hich provides a code of interpretation for social action and relationship (RLcoeuf 1978). To paraphrase T ristan Tzara, in transform ing action into text, I have waved the baton and m ade the categories dance, 1 have classified practice, cu t it into sections, channelized it (cf. Tzara in Motherwell 1951:78).^ All histories, w hether spoken or w ritten, are produced in an encounter between a herm eneutics and a field of social action which is symbolically constituted, even though a t the time of the action, the m eanings em bedded in practice may not be. clearly or fully evident to the consciousness of actors.® M uch of th is encounter takes place ‘after the fact’; histories are retrospectives because the contours of the p a s t are finally delineated and fixed from the-vantage point of the present. Thus, the contingency of histoiy-as-action is alw ays m itigated by th e backw ards gaze of h isto ry -as- representation which orders and explains, which introduces a teleology hardly evident a t the time of the original events.

Yet historiographies tend to conceal the effects of th is gap between past and present, between contingency and necessity, occluding the process of in terpretation and the conditions of its production, and re-presenting historical action as an objective and transparen t ‘given’, as ‘w hat really happened’. Historiographies hide their herm eneutics and create an illusion of unm ediated reality through several strategies which, though unconsciously deployed, are nonetheless effective. In th is project, language, w hether spoken or written, conspires w ith histoiy-m aking. Not only does the fixity of the printed word or the freezing by repetition of the spoken word aid

the work of simplification and reification b u t also, it helps to establish the authority which re-presentations require if they are to be seen as representative. Public language, through its veiy publicity, acquires a m easure of tru th and legitimacy. Here, we will limit the discussion to three of the m ajor discursive strategies deployed by both oral and w ritten histories to create ‘effects of tru th ’ and to transform partiality into totality. Such strategies play with framing, voice and narrative structure.

Re-presentations of the past, w hether professional or popular, printed or spoken, are defined as specific sorts of perform ances or texts through a series of fram ing devices. The way such reconstructions are framed configures their tru th value by bringing into play the ideologically constituted s ta tu s of different forms of knowledge. For example, since Balzac’s studies of French society in the nineteenth centu iy are framed as novels, they have a different tru th value from th a t accorded to scholarly treatises on the sam e subject which are framed as histories. This is because in W estern society, histories are conceived as being about ‘facts’ and novels about ‘fictions’. Thus, Balzac’s account is viewed as being less factual th an th a t of our im aginaiy historian who has ransacked the archives for data and amply footnoted his text. Since my own historical description deploys a ra ther literaiy style, though it is overtly framed as ‘history’, it m ight be viewed as less ‘objective’, less ‘accurate’ th an one which replaced the figurative language with the colorless, im personal and purportedly value-free prose so generalized in the social sciences.

Obviously, the ideological valuation of forms of knowledge varies from society to society and from group to group. An ap t illustration of th is point is provided by a third example of modes of framing. The text in question is a popular counter-history of a peasan t rebellion which took place In Mexico a t the end of the nineteenth century (Chavez Calderon 1964).®The author, son of one of the peasan t rebel leaders, fram es his narrative as a counter-history whose tru th resides in its popular origins. He denies the factuality of official histories of the sam e events because they are w ritten by professionals who lack direct, experiential knowledge of ‘w hat really happened’ and rely instead on w ritten sources which articulate the partial and distorted views of s ta te functionaries. By contrast, the tru th of his counter-history rests on its being framed as a faithful transcription of the spoken narrative of the sole surviving eye­w itness of the totality of events, his mother. And as the au thor asks, ‘would a m other Instruct her sons w ith the tru th or with lying w ords?’

To sum m arize the argum ent th u s far: the epistemological s ta tu s of re-presentations of the p as t is established through a multiplicity

of framing devices ranging from the overt to the covert, from the title of w ritten accounts or the prefatoiy rem arks of oral ones to the type of language used, figurative or scientific, scholarly or popular. Once framed as ‘history’, the events and personages of such narratives in a sense become indexical signs which perpetually point to their s ta tu s as realities constituted independently of the process of re ­presentation itself.

A second strategy for establishing the veracity of historical accounts involves the m anipulation of ‘voice’. In my own description, the voice is th a t of the observer, of the ‘I’ who ‘sees’; the authority of th is voice relies on our society’s conception th a t ‘seeing is believing’, on the privileged access to facts accorded to the ‘eye­w itness’, key to the legitimacy bestowed on ethnographic description or new spaper reportage and indirectly, on historical narrative based on prim ary sources. By contrast, Balzac’s novels deploy a multiplicity of voices whose ‘tru th ’ depends on the w riter’s craft, on the ability to m ake invented speech sound like reported speech, on fiction’s potential to be ‘true to life’ if not to ‘fact’. Our im aginary h istorian’s account might employ the voice of the im personal narrator; the effacement of the writing subject fosters the illusion of a transparen t objectivity. Note th a t by turn ing words into things, by naturalizing the texts which form their sources, such monophonic narratives suppress the polyphony and contingency of historical action and interpretation, endowing one voice with the authority which accrues to the discourse which appears to totalize. Lastly, in our popular counter-history, the voice is split; it is sim ultaneously th a t of the m other who is also the eye-witness, and th a t of the native son. Veracity draw s on a host of cu ltural Ideals to establish its authority, from the purity of motherhood, to the prim acy of direct experience, to the privileged access to tru th of the ‘I’ who sees and articulates the ‘insider’s ’ point of view.

Lastly, a th ird strategy for producing effects of tru th in histories is through the iconism th a t generally obtains between the narrative structu re of re-presentation of the p ast and the unfolding of historical action outside the text or speech.^ The chronological ordering of historical narratives is a diagram of the sequence of actions and events in p ast time. The use of such iconism is critical to conveying the illusion of unm ediated reality in all sorts of genres of writing and speaking as well as in the visual arts, where it has played a m ajor role in concealing the complex techniques and conventions which underpin ‘realism ’ and cause such a rt to be subjectively apprehended as an exact copy of the actual (cf. Gombrich 1969).

Though the point of departure for the preceeding discussion of hlstory-maM ng w as a positive concept of ideology, some of the

language used, including the verbs ‘conceal’, ‘naturalize’, and ‘occlude’. Indicates th a t a negative notion w as smuggled in. Re­presentations of the p as t are concerned w ith ‘tru th ’ in different ways and to different degrees. The verification procedures of professional historiography clearly indicate th a t the goal is to recover the tru th of the past, insofar as th is is possible. B ut the paradox is th a t by hiding its own herm eneutics, by passing interpretive description off as unm ediated factuality, histo iy does a violence to th is tru th and becomes ideologically constituted in a negative sense.

Why does h isto iy hide its herm eneutics? The answ er lies in the ideological constitution and valuation of different forms of knowledge in society. In W estern society, the hegemony of ‘value- free’ science h as led to the over-valuing of purportedly objective forms of knowledge; thus, the conditions of knowledge in the social sciences, in which m an is both the knowing subject and the object of analysis, are often occluded or m is-represented. In ru ra l Mexico, subjectivity is equated w ith personal in terest and w ith emotion, both conceived as barriers to tru th ; ergo, in our popular counter- histoiy, the object of knowledge is disingenuously configured as being Independent of the ‘seeing’ subject whose ‘eye’ does not transform it in any way b u t instead, reproduces and transm its it to posterity as a copy whose exactitude is as unquestionable as the purity of motherhood.®

The paradox is th a t historical discourses hide their herm eneutics so as to construct their ‘credibility’ and ‘authoritativeness’ vis-à-vis their audiences. H istoiy is rhetorical in th a t it aims to convince and in order to do so, it is draw n into m isrepresenting its project. Like realist art, historical haixative pretends to be a copy of an actuality which is ‘naturalized’, presented as ‘raw data’, as ‘hard facts’. This is particularly evident in the fetishism of docum ents which are Avidely assum ed to be transparen t sources. Yet such artefacts are social products which are symbolically and politically constituted, which are integral to the project of the state. So too, the memories of the peasan t m other are conditioned by the broader project of rebellion in which she was as m uch a participant as an observer. Project and m em oiy form an organic unity; in th is sense, there is nothing ‘raw’ about any source. Historical description, ‘w hat really happened’, is no t the resu lt of self-evidences which we gather and string together b u t instead, the product of a complex interpretive process which, like any practice, is inflected by broader social projects, by relations of dom ination which seep into the private sphere of even the m ost ‘civil’ of societies. It is to th is intersection of power and knowledge th a t we now tu rn .

II. ‘What Really Happened’: the Intersection o f Power and H istorical Knowledge

W hat happened in the plaza of Namiquipa, C hihuahua, on th a t October Saturday in 1983? In the following days, two contradictory interpretations of Saturday’s events emerged and began to vie for hegemony. These interpretations were ciystallized through a multiplicity of guarded, exploratory, intim ate dialogues which largely took place ‘off stage’, th a t is, in w hat are categorized as ‘non ­public’ spaces and contexts.® As an implicit consensus w as reached within the two factions. Interpretations were simplified, sedim ented, and fixed through repetition and they began to be aired in increasingly ‘on stage’ contexts.

‘The two factions’ is the key phrase in the preceeding paragraph. The events of Saturday were the culm ination of a long battle for political office between two loosely constituted, shifting factions within the m unicipality and their allies outside it.*° The majority of the inhab itan ts of the town of Namiquipa proper, who are largely agricultural petty-commodity producers, supported the candidates of the PRI, Mexico’s official ‘party of the institutionalized revolution’.^’ Thousands of poorer agricultural producers and ru ra l workers favored the candidates of the PST, a nom inal opposition party.

The opposition claimed electoral victory, and though the consensus was th a t they had won in votes, they had effectively lost in deed, since official recognition went, as it generally does, to the PRI candidates.’3 On th a t S aturday in October, the opposition planned to symbolically affirm its claim to victory by literally carrying its candidate into the office of the m unicipal presidency and ‘seating’ him in the presidential ‘chair’, the emblem of political office in ru ra l Mexico.’ Both interpretations were in agreem ent on the lineam ents of th is broad context. Where they differed was precisely on ‘w hat really happened’ w hen PST supporters tried to translate their plan, which had been announced days before, into action.

PST leaders and supporters claimed th a t w hen they began their advance toward the m unicipal buildings, the state police fired into the crowd, killing several persons. By contrast, PRI supporters argued th a t the state police had only shot b lanks and th a t the casualties resulted w hen some PST supporters who m eant to fire a t state policemen, m istakenly shot their own, gripped by the general panic which took hold of the crowd as the state police let off tear gas and began to beat people with clubs.

Two things were especially striking about th is process of Interpretation. First, events were consciously defined as ‘historical’; th a t Saturday in October has been m ade salient in the history of the

com munity of Namiquipa proper by giving it a nam e, T he Day of the Clubs’ (‘El Dia de los G arrotes’). Notice th a t it w as no t called T he Day of the Clubbings’, for to do so would focus attention on people’s having been hurt. And of course, it w as not baptized T he Day of the Shootings’. T hat deaths occurred is som ething those who supported the PRI, th a t is, m ost of the inhab itan ts of Namiquipa proper, prefer to forget. The nam e is a mnemonic sign which condenses an in terpretation of events and gives the day a historical saliency, b u t a saliency which is selective, which highlights some aspects and obscures others.

Second, w hereas the proponents of one or the other view were veiy quick to affirm th a t their re-presentation of ‘w hat really happened’ corresponded absolutely to the reality of events, they were very slow to verify their ‘facts’ and indeed, they were indifferent to details th a t contradicted w hat they so energetically proclaimed to be ‘tru e’.’® T ru th ’ entered in, b u t m ainly as an ad hoc justification, as a claim to legitimacy. Its effects were secured - through the discursive strategies of framing, voice and narrative structu re we have already examined. ‘Lie’ w as the appellation reserved for the enemy’s words which were as ‘interested’ as one’s own side’s were ‘disinterested’. W hat was over-determining these accounts was not an abstract preoccupation with ‘tru th ’ b u t instead, a concrete concern with the power which also produces the effects of ‘tru th ’.

The intersection of relations of power and historical knowledge is a highly variable one. In the dom ain of professional historiography, ‘the Interweaving of effects of power and knowledge’ may be extremely subtle and highly m ediated (Foucault in Rabinow 1984:52). In the context of political struggles such as th a t of T he Day of the Clubs’, power and knowledge are more intim ately embraced. In Spanish, the word ‘poder’ has two senses; one approxim ates the m eaning of the English noun ‘power’ and the other is aptly translated as th e verb ‘to be able to’. The play on words is possible in Spanish and impossible In English b u t its sense can be stated, albeit less elegantly. The ability to know rests on th e power to know; the ‘tru th s ’ and effects of knowledge are also the ‘tru th s ’ and effects of power (Foucault 1980b).’® Nowhere is th is more evident th an in national histories.

III. R e-presentations o f the Past and the ‘Imagining of Com munity’.

The Centrality o f History in the Imagining o f ‘the Nation’

That ‘the nation’ is ‘an Imagined political community’, a sociocultural construct, is a point which has been eloquently

developed by Benedict Anderson (Anderson 1983). Anderson notes an affinity between the national and the religious imagination: though one vision is sacred and the other secular, both mitigate death and suffering by transform ing fatality into continuity, by linking the dead w ith the yet to be bom (1983:18). Nations, he adds, loom ou t of an im memorial p a s t and . . . glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to tu rn chance into destiny’ (1983; 19). One of the paradoxes of nationalism s is precisely ‘the objective modernity of nations . . . vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists’ (1983:14). Though Anderson recognizes the centrality of histories to national imaginings, th is Insight rem ains a t the edges of his argum ent. Here, we will m ake it our central concern as we examine how the imagining of com munity is configured by official and popular re-presentations of the past.

Social m em oiy is integral to the creation of social meaning. Social groups form Images of themselves in relation to a set of founding events and re-enact th is shared link to a collective p ast in public ceremony as well as in eveiyday life (Ricoeur 1978:45). Conjoining p resen t projects and p as t memories, ideologies of h isto iy are central to the symbolic constitution of social groups and to the creation of social solidarities (Ricoeur 1978:46).

National re-presentations of the p ast create felt fraternities both w ithin the limits of a national territoiy and across the bounds of a national time, reckoned in term s of m etaphorical genealogy and historical chronology. The links of nationality are Imagined through an idiom of kinship which is more m etaphorical th an literal, though the perennial possibility of a fall into literality h as been amply dem onstrated by the national racism s of th is century, which have resulted in the deaths of millions whose m isfortune it was to have the wrong sort of ‘blood’.A c r o s s space, th is ‘shared substance’, th is ‘national blood’; m akes all m en brothers, and through time, it makes, them sons of the sam e founding fathers; the nation is indeed one family, one eternal body.i® D eath may be ‘a clot of em ptiness’, the soundless pop of ‘an empty can’ being opened, b u t w ithin the national im agination, we are rendered immortal, forever reproduced through th e tim elessness of m etaphorical genealogy.^® And the irony is th a t precisely th is transcendence of m ortality through the sharing of substance between the dead and the yet to be bom , has produced social sentim ents so strong th a t millions have m arched to the grave in the defense of ‘nation’, feeling th a t ‘to die for one’s country’ is a ‘sacrifice’ both ‘sweet and decorous’.

Historical chronologies solder a multiplicity of personal, local and - regional historicities and transform them into a unitary, national time. They link the experiences of day to day life to events which are categorized as ‘national’ and in so doing, they reinforce the

solidarities of nationality. For example, in Mexico people will often date occurences in their own purportedly private lives in relation to the political term s o f national presidents.^®

Such national chronologies establish both a historical right to a specific territoiy and a territorial right to a particular hlstoiy. The m odem Mexican nation is conceived as being as rooted in the p ast of the great pre-colum blan civülzations as in the history of conquest and colony. The nation appropriates the totality of the history enacted in its territory. And as the conflict between Argentina and England over the M alvlnas/Falklands dem onstrates, the totality of the territory dom inated during th is history is also claimed for the nation. Territory and history are the privileged political spaces w ithin which nations are imagined and through which ‘sovereignty’ is constructed.

T hat nations are configured in relation to the axes of time and space on which the imagined coordinates of com munity are plotted is everywhere evident in the social landscape of Mexico. ‘Sufragio Efectivo’, ’20 de Noviembre’, ‘No Reelección’, ‘Madero’, ‘V enustiano C arranza’, ‘Emiliano Zapata’: the patronym s of dead heroes and the slogans of past struggles provide a unitary set of nam es for streets, institutions, and com m unities w hich links the m ost rem ote ru ra l villages to the greatest of metrópoli. This vast iconic structuring of ‘public’ social space transform s w hat w as once the terra in of local and regional autonom ies into a homogenized and nationalized domain, where an objectified official history m akes the presence of the state palpable in everyday life.

The hegernony of m odem nation-states, and the legitimacy which accm es to the groups and classes th a t control their apparatuses, are critically constituted by re-presentations of a national past. As B em ard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks have recently argued, m odem state form ation is a social and ideological project in which relations of power are constituted and legitimated through forms of knowledge which the national sta te creates and organizes ‘to m ark and m easure the health , w ealth and welfare of its citizens’ and to reproduce itself as the ‘na tu ra l em bodim ent of history, territory and society’ (Cohn & Dirks 1986: l,2).2i Above all, national history is the official history of the state, and the ‘determ ination, codification, control and representation of the p as t’ h as been central to the reproduction of state hegemony (Cohn and Dirks 1986:2). The em brace of power and history becom es even more intim ate. And as Ricoeur points out, the negative aspects of ideology become prom inent as codes of Interpretation are mobilized to legitimate relations of domination, resulting in a phenom enon of political ‘over value’ th rough which the excess of the claim s of the m lers over the response of the ruled is dissim ulated (Ricoeur 1978:48-49).

D issim ulation is m ost evident in the naturalization of the ideologically constituted distinction betweeen ‘the s ta te’ and ‘civil society’, between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. Gramsci a t tim es uses ‘the s ta te’ to designate ‘political society’ and a t other tim es to refer to ‘political society + civil society’ (Gramsci 1971). Though some have found th is double usage confusing, it perfectly captures the duplicity of th a t neat separation between the realm of the state and the dom ain of civil society.^^ Such a distinction renders invisible the manifold technologies of power and forms of docum entation through which the state in trudes into the quotidian round and into our veiy bodies, through our gender and sexuality, through our color, through our age, through a plurality of qualities and sta tuses which are predicates of the subject ‘F. The s ta te ’s project is ‘both totalizing and individualizing.. It participates in the constitution of social categories and identities’ (Cohn & Dirks 1986:2). As Foucault’s later work indicates, the state constitutes its subjects in both a political and a phenomenological sense (1980a & b). In all this, national h isto iy plays a critical role. Folk explanations of social action in term s of national character implicitly recognize the extent to which subjectivity is configured by national imaginings which are critically inflected by re-presentations of the past.

In Mexico, sites of production of a national p ast are monopolized by the state; as Anderson points out, revolutionary nationalism s tend to em anate from the state and serve to consolidate its hegem ony (Anderson 1983:145). Public space, m useum s, educational institutions, advertising, political rhetoric, television and film are among the m any loci of official historical production. Not Ju st prin t b u t also, new technologies of com m unication articulate the historical images and m essages of the state.^^

W hat distinguishes nationalism s, as Anderson notes, are the different styles in which they are imagined (Anderson 1983:15). The dead heroes whose nam es baptize public space in Mexico are overwhelmingly draw n from one of the m any dom ains of the past; m odern Mexican nationalism is above all a revolutionary nationalism . This wiU become evident if we leave our m ain argum ent to take a detour through the M useum of the Revolution, a privileged site in the production of Mexican national histoiy.

The M useum o f the Revolution

Doña Luz Corral, the only legitimate wife of the controversial revolutionary leader Francisco Villa, died in 1982. The house she ■once shared with Villa, located in the capital of the N orthern state of C hihuahua, w as immediately occupied by the Mexican army, appropriated by the Mexican state as part of the ‘national patrim ony’

and transform ed into the M useum of the Revolution.^"^ General Francisco Villa, leader of the Division of the North, Mexico’s greatest popular revolutionary army, had long been banished from center stage in official Mexican historiography and political rh e to r ic .^ ^ In 1915, the com petition for national hegemony among the different revolutionary factions becam e a ‘w ar of m anoeuvre’ to be decided on the battlefield. B ut th is w ar w as waged w ith words as well as guns. As of 1915, Vllllsmo began to be re-presented and de-legitlmlzed as ‘an aimless, m ercenary rowdyism’, as a force of disorder and a th reat to national reconstruction, in the discourse of its enemies, whose political heirs rule Mexico today.^®

However, In 1976, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government rehabilitated and incorporated Villa into the pantheon of official, national revolutionary heroes, through a symbolically pregnant transfer of his headless rem ains from periphery to center (Katz 1 9 8 0 :5 9 ) .Appropriated by the state for the nation, the m eanings of Vllllsmo were cannibalized, re- valued and incorporated into a historical bricolage from which a hegemonic Ideology h as been built.

One site where the national s ta te ’s official ideology of history has been objectified is the M useum of the Revolution.^® Doña Luz had tu rned her home Into a m onum ent to Villa’s memoiy. Into a living m useum where the artefacts of Vllllsmo and the personal effects of Villa were anim ated by her spoken recollections. Widely known as ‘the house of Villa’, (‘la casa de Villa’), th is space objectified a vision of revolutionary history which w as regionallst and above all, Vllllsta, through the m edium of artefacts which are mnemonic signs. In transform ing ‘Villa’s house’ into the M useum of the Revolution In 1982, the Mexican state re-valued the signs of a regional and popular Vllllsta history, bringing them into a new set of meaningful relations more in accord w ith the ‘national in terest’, with the ideological project of state-building.

For anyone familiar with the popular history of Villa and Vllllsmo, the M useum of the Revolution is full of paradoxes and Ironiès. For example, the nam es of C hihuahuan Vlllistas are juxtaposed with those of their enemies and all are inscribed together in a m onum ent to local revolutionary heroes. Not only Villa and his ally Zapata, b u t also their m ost hated enemies and assassins are re-presented in the M uséum. T he Revolutionary’ is produced as a unitary domain in which personal, class and regional enm ities and differences are erased and overcome by a vision of a struggle in which all fought on the side of ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’, whose privileged representatives currently control the apara tu s of the Mexican state. Difference is suffocated and dissolved in the all encom passing embrace of national and revolutionary fraternity.

‘Revisionist’ h isto ries are curren tly de-construc ting ‘the Revolution’ and dem onstrating th a t th is process of social upheaval was not unitary b u t composed of distinct movements w ith divergent social projects and even different chronologies (e.g. Katz 1981; Knight 1980, 1985; Koreck 1985; Alonso 1986a; Nugent 1985). However, official history continues to articulate ‘the Revolution’ as a unitary and integrated phenom enon because such a re ­presentation is critical to the imagining of the nation and to the legitimation project of the m odem Mexican state. In the creation of such an official history, subordinated histories are appropriated and transform ed as they are incorporated into a ‘national’ vision. In m ra l Mexico, the verb ‘comer’, ‘to eat’, is sometimes used as a m etaphor for domination. The Mexican state h as ‘eaten’ Villa and ‘regurgitated’ h is rehabilitated image as a symbolic elem ent in a historical bricolage through w hich a hegemonic ideology h as been constructed, an ideology which constitutes and legitimates relations of domination.

As the example of the M useum of the Revolution evinces, national re-presentations of the p ast feed on local and regional histories; official history gets fat on the pasts it appropriates and subordinates. S tate cannibalism is a transform ative process. Subordinated histories are treated as ‘raw facts’, cooked according to hegemonic recipes and served up as national cuisine. B ut w hat are these recipes and culinary techniques? How are the histories of subordinated groups and classes appropriated, reworked and used to advance the legitimation project of the state?

State Cannibalism.: some Culinary Techniques

Many social scientists have agreed th a t Mexico’s is ‘an inclusionary au thoritarianism ’, unwittingly reproducing the view of power and society ^ ic u la te d by official ideology. For th is inclusion of subordinated groups and classes is above all imagined. As Guillermo O’Ddrmell has observed, ‘the popular’, w hat is ‘of the people’, is one of the ideological m ediations central to the constm ction of hegemony in Latin America (O’Donnell 1979). Hegemonic ideologies appropriate and transform popular histories through a multiplicity^ of techniques. The discussion here will confine itself to three: naturalization, departicularization and idealization.

N aturalization is a form of reification w hereby social actors, discourses and practices are re-presented as na tu ra l essences or things. The M useum of the Revolution is an ap t example since history is literally articulated through artefacts and the exegesis of their m eanings is naturalized as unm ediated description.

N aturaliza tion d isgu ises th e transfo rm atio n s effected on subordinated histories by turn ing re-presentations into ‘raw facts’ which cannot be contested. Framing, voice and narrative structu re are all m anipulated to conceal the work of reinterpretation in which power and knowledge are Intim ately linked. The effects of tru th render invisible the effects of power.

Departicularization is the process whereby historical discourses and practices are emptied of the m eanings which tie them to concrete contexts, to definite localities, to distinct groups, and universalized, m ade the property of all and of no one. For example, through departicularization, distinct and even opposed social movements, struggles and projects have been homogenized, unified and nationalized as ‘the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917’. As the discussion of the M useum of the Revolution dem onstrated, difference is suppressed, the ‘o therness’ of particular histories is dissipated. Contradictoiy social projects are rendered equivalent in a bricolage In which the signs of subordinated and regional histories are appropriated and revalued. Invested w ith new m eanings which reproduce a hegemonic national Ideology and the relations of dom ination it configures and legitimates.

Idealization is the process through which the past is cleaned up, rendered palatable and m ade the em bodim ent of nationalist values. Death and suffering are purged of terror and pain; fratlclde is transform ed into fraternity. It is pertinent to note th a t the car In which Villa w as assassinated had been conserved by his wife w ith Its seats stained by blood, its windows shattered, its tires deflated and its body riddled with bullet holes. For display in the M useum of the Revolution, the car w as refurbished w ith fresh pain t and new seats, windows and tires. From a mnemonic Index which pointed to Villa’s assassination by the founders of the revolutionary Mexican state, from a sign of conflict and difference, of violence and death, the car w as transform ed into a pleasing curiosity, easily integrated into an historical vision which em phasizes fraternity and which m akes V illa’s a s s a s s in s an d th e ir p o litica l d e sc e n d a n ts th e instltutlonallzers of the aspirations of the popular movement he once led.

Pasts which cannot be Incorporated are excluded by national histoiy. Privatization and particularization consign recalcitrant histories to the m argins of the ‘national’, where they are denied a fully ‘public’ voice (Bommes and W right 1982:266-267). W hat is too tough or too ‘ro tten’ to cook Is deemed unsuitable for public consum ption and removed from the national m enu. Relegated to the realm of private tastes, counter histories which resist state cannibalism som etim es survive.

In Mexican towns historical discourses are critical to the

imagining of the local community. The coordinates of th is ‘patria chica’ or ‘small nation’ are also plotted on the axes of time and space, of history and territoiy. In ‘Conflicting Views of S tate and Revolution in the C hihuahuan Sierra’, Daniel Nugent dem onstrates th a t in Namiquipa, the rights to land of thecom m unity are configured and legitimated through a local historical discourse which repudiates the agrarian pretensions of official revolutionary rhetoric and which defends the sovereignty of the patria chica against the claims of the national sta te (Nugent 1986).

Namiquipa was one of the key centers of peasan t revolutionary activity in C hihuahua. The redressal of agrarian grievances w as an im portant focus of arm ed struggle in the North.^® As Nugent observes, the Namiquipenses were among the earliest and m ost privileged beneficiaries of the revolutionaiy s ta te ’s agrarian reform. However, they have been less th an satisfied w ith its consequences because agrarian reform h as allowed the state to penetrate into key aspects of social life in ru ra l areas, trespassing on w hat is thought and felt to be the sovereign domain of the local community.

The historical discourse of the Namiquipenses affirms the prim acy of local sovereignty. Rights to land are no t established and legitimated by reference to ‘the Revolution’ b u t instead, in relation to the founding events of a colonial histoiy which pre-dates the Mexican nation. Not the Mexican state, b u t the Spanish colonial adm inistration is deemed to have conferred on Namiquipa its righ ts to land. In repudiating ‘the Revolution’ as the basis for community rights to land, Namiquipenses are constructing a counter-history which is an implicit critique of the Mexican state which claims to have ‘institutionalized’ ‘the Revolution’ and bestowed upon the peasantry its rights to land.

The Mexican s ta te ’s betrayal of peasan t revolutionary aspirations and agrarian demarrds is also highlighted in a ‘folk song’ popular in central Mexico which constructs a history very different from th a t of official discourse. The song, called ‘J u a n Sin Tierra’ or ‘A Jo h n Doe W ithout Land’, goes like this:

I will sing you the song Of a man who went to war Who was wounded in the rnountains Who just foughf to win sòme land.

Our General told us,‘Fight on with great valor We are going to give you land, ■As soon as we make the Reform.’

Emiliano Zapata said ‘I want Land and Liberty,’

And the government laughed When they went to bury him.

If they come looking for me To make another Revolution I’ll tell them, ‘Sony, I’m busy ‘Planting the fields of the landlord.’®“

W ritten by the people for the people, corridos such as th is one have long been the vehicle of popular counter-histories. In ‘A Jo h n Doe W ithout Land’, the ironic contrast between revolutionary promises and resu lts is a powerful indictm ent of a sta te which re-presents itself as the progressive institutionalizer of the aspirations of popular agrarian struggles. In th is counter-history, symbolic inversion is deployed to subvert official ideology. The term s of dom inant memory are tu rned upside-down: ‘the governm ent’ has given land and liberty not to the revolutionary peasants, as it insistently proclaim s, b u t to the new landlords. T he Revolution’ is re- presented as having gone full circle, as having brought about a re tu rn to old forms of exploitation and dom ination ra ther th an anew, progressive order.^i

Counter-histories such g.s those discussed above are articulated in m any ru ra l com m unities in Mexico, both in the North and elsewhere. B ut it would be a m istake to conclude th a t popular ideology is sui generis and subsists ap art from hegemonic discourses. As the example of T he Day of the Clubs’ dem onstrates, popular re-presentations of the p ast are as capable of reproducing and legitimating the term s of dom inant memory as they are of contesting and demystifying them . Thus, ‘the popular’ cannot be treated as if it were a wholly unified and fully achieved domain, capable of sustain ing memory in pristine isolation from official constructions of the p as t (Bommes and W right 1982:255). Nor can the officializing historical discourses of the state be analyzed apart from popular constructions and responses. Popular and official historical discourses exist in relation to and not apart from each other.

The relationship between popular and dom inant memory is not fixed b u t constantly negotiated. Hegemonic ideologies are not monolithically installed nor everywhere believed in (Bommes and Wright 1982:207). D om inant memory gets fat on 1:he popular pasts it cooks according to hegemonic recipes b u t official cuisine is not always to popular tastes. Thus, the re-presentations of dom inant memory are as open to popular contestation as to affirmation. W hat implications do these reflections have for a concept of ideological hegemony? Several points emerge.

First, history is the site of an ongoing battle in which power is the

stake which competing knowledges dispute. Moreover, as Scott affirms, the histories th a t are produced and contested on th is political terrain are not neutral, value-fi-ee assessm ents b u t constructions whose object is to advance a claim, to levy praise and blame, and to justify or condem n the existing sta te of affairs’ (Scott 1985; 178). The discussion of the competing interpretations of T he Day of the Clubs’ aptly illustrates th is point. Thus, the production and reproduction of ideological hegemony is an ongoing process in which official and popular discourses struggle to advance and to defend social in terests and values. Therefore, ideological hegemony is not monolithic and static, fully achieved and finished b u t constantly negotiated.

Second, an analysis of hegemony m ust examine the social conditions of ideological production. The articulation of the dom inant and the subordinated is not only effected thirough d iscou rses b u t also th ro u g h p ractices, th ro u g h specific technologies and forms of organization of power, produced in concrete sites located both w ithin the state appara tu s and in the domain of civil society. For example, in Mexico, thearticulation of local com m unities w ith wider politico-economic and ideological s tructu res has been fraught with contention. Resistance has enabled subordinated classes and groups to defend a terrain which, if no longer fully autonom ous, nevertheless allows local com m unities to keep a m easure of control over the total process of production and reproduction of social life and over the m eanings and values which orient it.® in Mexican ru ral com munities, this process is not yet fully dictated by the state or by capitalism. By contrast, in England, the degree of autonom y enjoyed by local com m unities increasingly dim inished after World W ar II. Lxjcally bounded patterns of social and cu ltural reproduction were significantly dis-articulated both by a massive restructuring in education, social services, housing, transport and com m unication spearheaded by the state, and by a concentration and centralization of capital which fostered labor mobility (Bommes and Wright 1982:297-298).

Evidently, the sites of production of ideological hegemony are m uch thicker on the ground in England th an in Mexico. As a result, in England, popular re-presentations of the p ast have been more . effectively penetrated by official ones, and local histories are increasingly becoming particularized versions of national ideologies ra ther th a n alternative discourses which challenge the term s of dom inant memoiy (cf. Bommes and W right 1982; Popular Memory Group 1982). Thus, the problem of the articulation between official and popular ideology is no t simply one of S3rmbolic b u t also of social analysis.

Third, as Scott comments, ‘a hegemonic ideology m ust, by definition, represent an Idealization which . . . creates the contradictions th a t perm it it to be criticized in its own term s. The ideological source of m ass radicalism is, in th is sense, to be sought as m uch w ithin a prevailing Ideological order as outside it’ (Scott 1 9 8 5 :3 1 7 ).33 T hus, con test is still possible even w here the penetration of oflficlal ideology Is extensive.

Fourth, a potential disjunction between the representations of official rhetoric and the m eanings embedded in lived experience defines a possible space for the emergence of popular counter­histories. Such a disjunction between the m eanings of official discourse and those of practical experience Is highlighted by the popular song, ‘J u a n Sin Tlerra’: in a society where the state loudly and continuously proclaim s th a t agrarian reform h as been successfu lly concluded, revolu tionary p easan ts and th e ir descendants continue to work the fields of the landlords.®^ Such counter-histories de-naturallze the re- presentations of dom inant discourses; official Ideology Is construed as an inversion of the m eanings em bedded in day to day life.

This disjunction between the re-presentations of official ideology and popular practical experience cannot be viewed as one between sjncnbollc forms and a pre-symbolic ‘real life’. As Ricoeur stresses, ‘the so-called ‘real’ process already has a symbolic dim ension’ (1978:51). The gap between hegemonic rhetoric and lived experience emerges w hen official Ideology becomes w hat Ricoeur calls ‘a secondary distortion of [the] symbolic constitution of social reality’ (1978:51).

To summarize: the production and reproduction of hegemony is an ongoing process which is subject to negotiation and contest as social groups struggle to advance and defend competing claims, values and interests. History is a central focus of social contest because the m eanings of the p as t define the stakes of the present. Popular and official memory exist in relation to each other; this relation is no t fixed b u t is constantly shifting as the contours of the social terra in on which it is negotiated are redefined.

In analyzing the construction of social memory, it Is im portant to pay attention to the sites where it is produced and dissem inated, to the circuits of power and knowledge. The monopoly o f‘public’ spaces and ‘on stage’ contexts is critical to the reproduction of a dom inant memory which ‘privatizes’ w hat it carm ot incorporate and transform . Subordinated counter-histories are by and large marginalized, relegated to a molecular, ‘off stage’ existence, and Identified with particu lar groups ra ther th an with society as a whole. Only hegemonic discourses can claim to speak in the voice of ‘the nation’. Counter-histories articulate the voices of peasants, women.

workers, ethnic groups, b u t never the voice of an all encom passing imagined community.

IV. Conclusions

One of the points I have tried to dem onstrate and com m ent on in th is paper is Ricoeur’s observation th a t m eaningfulness is neither fully linked to the present agent nor totally contained in the present time b u t inextricably interwoven w ith social m em oiy (Ricoeur 1978:46). The relation between m eaning and memoiy is an internal one. As signs become im bued with the memories of social groups’ lived experiences, they become revalued. Such mnemonic signs are constantly deployed in day to day life and one’s ability to use and to in terpret them is indexical of one’s m em bership in a social group. The use of a m ultitude of signs which condense and telegraph memories particu lar to specific social groups is p art of w hat gives the living discourse of such groups its character as a distinct socio- ideological language m B akhtin’s sense (Bakhtin 1981).

A second point 1 have tried to establish is th a t histories are ideologically constituted. Re-presentations of the past are organized by interpretive schem es and by discursive strategies which produce effects of tru th . In order to be credible, histories have to be authoritative; effects of tru th are also effects of power. The naturalization of historical discourses is critical to their authority; the work of in terpretation effaces itself and disguises the traces of its social production as histo iy becomes ‘w hat really happened’. Yet the past is neither transparen t nor given; ‘w hat really happened’ is a focus of conflicting interpretations.

Though knowledge is never ‘value-free’, the relation between historical discourses and effects of power is m ediated and variable. Power and m em oiy are m ost intim ately em braced in the representations of .official histories which are central to the production and reproduction of hegemony. The negative aspects of ideology become prom inent in the constitution of a dom inant memory which is concerned w ith ‘tru th ’ only insofar as its effects advance the legitimation project of the state.

The imagining o f‘the nation’ is central to th is legitimation project. Here, histo iy plays a prom inent role as the coordinates of commimity are plotted along the axes of time and space. National ■ histories transform fatality into continuity, contingency into destiny. By linking the dead to the yet to be bom , national histories mitigate mortality. Moreover, by making histo iy the locus of the unfolding of national destiny, such discourses introduce a teleology which overcomes contingency and which gives significance to the past which prefigures the present. National histories are key to the imagining of com munity and to the constitution of social identity.

The stakes in the struggle to define the p ast are indeed great; thus, social memoiy is a central site of political contest.

My conclusions support those of the Popular Memoiy Group: ‘Political dom ination involves historical definition. H istoiy - in particu lar popular m em oiy - is a stake in the constant struggle for hegemony. The relation between histo iy and politics, like the relation between p as t and present, is, therefore, an internal one: it is about the politics of histoiy and the historical dim ensions of politics’ (1982:213). Thus, histories are not about a past which is dead, which is finished and behind us, b u t instead, about a past which lives in and has significance and consequences for the present. As Raymond Aron rem arks: T he p ast is never definitively fixed except w hen it has no fu ture’ (in Stoianovich 1976:35). Social remembering is a profoundly complex, active and ongoing process in which different interpretations of the p ast engage each other and struggle for dominance.

If the present configures the m eanings of the p ast and the past those of the present, then the shared object of both h isto iy and anthropology is th is relation between p ast and present (cf. Popular Memoiy Group 1982:240). The interpenetration of m eaning and memoiy implies th a t histoiy and anthropology have a common ground. However, the ideological constitution of histories and the historical constitution of ideologies can only become a shared concern if positivist and empiricist orientations are deconstructed by a critical herm eneutics of the conditions of the production of social scientific knowledge. However, as Ricoeur stresses, our reflection can only be partial since we are sim ultaneously the subjects, in both a political and a phenomenological sense, and the objects of our own understanding; the critique of ideology is a ta sk which we m ust always begin b u t can never conclude (Ricoeur 1978:59).

N otes

■ A short version of this paper was presented at the 1987 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, in the session on The Ideological Constitution of Histories organized by Martha Lampland and Catherine Verdeiy. The ethnographic and historical research on which this paper is based was carried out during 1983-1985 and was supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Inter-American Foundation. In producing a final draft, I have benefitted enormously from the comments of Daniel Nugent.

This paper focuses on history as historiography, as re-presentation of the past rather than as social action. The discussion of the ideological constitution of histories will be limited to the role of ideology in the creation of retroactive reconstructions of social practice. The modus operandl of this paper Is greatly indebted to Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of ‘ideology’ and

parallels his discussion in that the point of departure is a positive concept of ideology (Ricoeur 1978). Following Ricoeur, negative modifications of the concept are gradually introduced. This paper is also indebted to David Schneider’s A Critique of the Study o f Kinship, an example of a new genre of anthropological writing which de-naturalizes ‘ethnographic authority’ and renders it problematical by de-constructing the author’s own ethnographic descriptions and making them an object of analysis (Schneider 1984). Finally, and as the title makes evident, the reflections presented in this paper have also been influenced by Michel Foucault’s later work (e.g. Foucault 1980a & b).

The radically ‘other’ orientation of our running is one index of our peculiar status in this community and of our singular perspective on social action as ‘participant observers’ from another society.

® This man later died as a result of his head wound. As the extent of this transformation makes evident, the analogy of

‘action-as-text’ reifies social action and endows it with a fixity, with a closure and coherence which practice often lacks.

For instance, in our historical description, the observed order of exodus, (iconic to the order of re-presentation), was not the product of contingency but of a norm which prescribes that children should be the first to run to safety and men the last.

® This is a history of the famous rebellion of the town of Tomochi, Chihuahua, whose inhabitants managed to repel several of the federal army expeditions successively sent to repress them before they were finally defeated at the end of 1892. One of these federal army expeditions returned to base without even giving battle, since the commander was so drunk he mistook com plants for rebels and after ordering his soldiers to attack a cornfield, triumphantly declared his victory over the ‘disturbers of the public peace’ who had dared to defy the federal and state governments. My colleague, Daniel Nugent, and I located a grandson of Cruz Chavez, the best known of these rebel leaders,and we had several long conversations with him in which he articulated his own grandmother’s version of the history of Tomochi.

‘Iconism’ is a term drawn from C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory. For those not familiar with Peircean terminology, an icon is a sign which represents its object by virtue of some resemblance to it. An index is a sign which ‘points’ to its object, that is, which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of some real cormection to it (a weather vane; a pointing finger). For an excellent discussion of Peircean semiotics and its relevance to an anthropology of meaning, see Singer 1984.

® Note, however, that the units of historical description and observation in this text are not presented as ‘facts’ but as ‘deeds’ (‘hechos’; pp of the verb hacer, ‘to do’, ‘to make’); thus, even though the re-presentation of these ‘deeds’ is construed as transparent, the events of history are still conceived as the product of social action and relationship and are not fetishized as , ‘things’. As a result, the author is able to deliver a trenchant critique of the fetishism of written sources as ‘raw facts’.

® The use of the concept ‘off stage’ is taken from Scott 1985. Such a concept of what is ‘private’, ‘off-the-record’, ‘between you and me’, is quite useful in understanding processes of interpretation formation in societies in which the spoken word is central, in which histories are created in speech instead of print. ‘Gossip’ is framed as this sort of intimate, non-public discourse which can later be disowned. What is crucial in the generation of hegemonic interpretations is the transition from ‘private’ to ‘public’ forms

of discourse, a transition which can be effected molecularly and informally In ‘private’ and semi- ‘public’ spaces, such as the home and the street, or more directly and formally in fully ‘public’ sites such as town squares, dance halls and auditoriums, or through ‘public’ technologies of communication such as radio. Obviously, what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ varies from society to society and is ideologically constituted. Insufficient attention has been paid by anthropologists to this process of negotiation of meaning, carried out through dialogue, in which historical subjects play an active role. Monolithic, static, notions of culture have often led us to attribute consensus where there is argument, and to ignore the active role of social agents in producing and reproducing the meaningful contours of the world they live in.

The stakes, of course, were much greater than political office which was seen as the means for implementing broader social projects. For the opposition rank-and-file, the project included the realization of an equitable and equal land re- distribution and the regaining of popular, local control of municipal administration, which for decades has been the puppet of national and state government and the official party. Opposition leaders had far less radical aims; the PST has been ‘coopted’ by the PRI for years and is little more than a ‘loyal’ ‘left’ opposition. Those who supported the official party candidates in Namiquipa proper did so because a ‘native son’ (hijo del pueblo) was on the slate as the stand-in (suplente) forthe president and they hoped to use him as a sort of ‘hidden hand’ within the system to advance the interests of their community over those of others. The support of many of the farmers who effectively controlled their parcels of land for the official slate was also defensive; the agrarian demands of the opposition were seen as a threat to their own rights to land.

“ Somewhat confusingly, ‘Namiquipa’ is simultaneously the name of the municipality, of the nominal town formed by a series of nominal neighborhoods strung out along 10km. of river, and of the ‘head neighborhood’, which I call ‘Namiquipa proper’, which has a population of aproximately 2,000. This form of baptizing ever larger and more inclusive territorial, administrative and social spaces with the same name as the center is generalized in Mexico. It makes these increasingly broader domains icons of a center which claims sovereignly over all the spaces which share its name and thus, are imagined as part of the same community. Conflicts of sovereignty between ‘neighborhoods’ and the center, Namiquipa proper, often focus on naming; thus, the members of the ‘neighborhood’ of El Terrero indexed their separatist ambitions by dropping ‘Namiquipa’ from the name of their community. Note that state capitals share the name of their states, and the national capital shares the name of the nation. The implications of this ‘equation of the seat of rule with the dominion of rule’ are many (the phrase is from Geertz 1980:13).

Economic class is by no means the only factor in the formation of these factions. Locality, personal ües oL Loyalty to friends and to kin, and ideologically significant distinctions such as ‘insiders’ (originarios) vs. ‘outsiders’ (foráneos), figure prominently here.

In ‘private’, even low-level PRI functionaries recognized that the PST had won the greatest number of votes and that the PRI had ‘stolen the elections’ (robarse las elecciones). Elections in Mexico are not a means of recruiting candidates for political office. Their main function since the revolution of 1910-1920 has been to reproduce the hegemony of the official party through the staging of a spectacle for the national and international audiences, a spectacle which dramatizes a normative vision of the system

and permits the PRI/govemment - self-styled heir of ‘the Revolution’ and its demands for ‘effective suffrage’ - to renew its legitimacy by seeming to secure the active consent of Mexican citizens through ‘democratic’ means. For more on this and on the emergence of a disloyal electoral opposition in Mexico in recent years see Alonso, 1986b.

In popular parlance in rural Mexico, to take political office is to ‘sit oneself in the chair’ (sentarse en la silla). Notice that this language evokes images of the monarchic throne and indexes that access to office is not secured through elections or other ‘democratic’ procedures but through those strategies effective in ‘authoritarian’ systems.

The extent of this indifference is particularly evident in the following example. A couple who upheld the view that the state police had only used blanks, themselves pointed out to us a hole in the plaster by the door of the wife’s parents home, from which they had extracted a dum-dum buUet. State policemen had fired at their son and nephew, who were watching the events in theplaza from the vantage point of the house’s roof, inistaking them for members of the opposition. Despite this detail, the couple continued to affirm the same interpretation, asserting that the buUet must have got there in some other fashion, that it did not come out of the barrel of a state policeman’s gun. They were not consciously aware of any duplicity or disingenuousness on their part in refusing to interpret the bullet as an index signifying that the state police did use real ammunition.

Were the title of Foucault’s Power/Knowledge to be translated into French, it would contain the same play on words as the Spanish, poder/ saber.

That the use of kinship terms is more metaphorical than literal is evident in nations’ provisions for the ‘naturalization’ of the foreign bom, who are welcomed into the embrace of the great fraternity despite differences in ‘blood’.

For the concept of ‘shared substance’ see David Schneider, American Kinship, 1980. Schneider’s concepts of ‘shared substance’ and ‘code for conduct’ might productively be used to analyze subjectively apprehended differences between nationals and the naturalized.

The morbid images are from a poem. The Death of Bobo’, by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Richard Wilbur.

This points to the saliency of ‘the Executive’ in the Mexican state aparatus and recalls the dating by reference to kings characteristic of dynastic states and the ‘official nationalisms’ they later formed.

On this point see Corrigan and Sayer 1985; this is an excellent, theoretically grounded - discussion of state formation as a social and cultural process. For the importance of myth and ritual in the 19th century dynastic ‘theater’ state in Bali, see Geertz 1980. A comparison of the imagining of community in such dynastic theater states and in modem national states would be quite interesting; whereas myth and epic are of central importance in dynastic theater states, histoiy is key in modern national states.

Institutional analyses of the state are partial and superficial because they take this distinction as a point of departure; the state aparatus is by no means the only site of .state power, even if it is its most visible manifestation.

Moreover, in Mexico, the cormection between historians and the state is highly visible and immediate; most intellectual producers work directly for the PRI government in some capacity. The role of intellectuals in producing and reproducting hegemony is evident.

Those surviving Villistas who had shared Dona Luz’s home were ‘relocated’ by the PRI government.

I use ‘popular’ to mean ‘of the people’. The Division of the North was the most militarily powerful vehicle of the popular revolutionary current to develop between 1910 and 1920. In 1915, when the struggle for hegemony among the different revolutionary factions and movements became acute, Villismo represented the only serious threat, on a national scale, to the conservative and reformist bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies which banded together under the Constitutionalist umbrella. The hegemony of the Jacobin wing of Constitutionalism only became possible afterVillismo had been militarily defeated and ideologically neutralized. Villa was allowed to surrender and retire to ‘private life’ in 1920. In 1923, when he threatened to disturb the orderly succession of ‘the Sonoran dynasty’. Villa was assassinated; his murder was planned by Obregon and Calles, founding fathers of Mexico’s current ‘revolutionary family’. For the best discussion of Villismo, consult the works of Friedrich Katz listed in the bibliography. For anthropological and historical analyses of peasant participation in the popular, revolutionary Northern movement see Alonso 1986a; Koreck 1985; Nugent 1985.

The phrase ‘aimless, mercenary rowdyism’ is Alan Knight’s; Knight correctly observes that Villismo has been caricatured by the writers of official history (Knight 1980:19).

The mausoleum in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua, Mexico, which Villa had built for himself during the revolution, and in which he wished to be but was never buried, is empty and neglected, desecrated by vandals and used by gardeners, who groom the park where it is located, to store their tools. The well kept park grounds present a significant contrast to the decaying mausoleum. Also note the contrast between the decay of the mausoleum and the refurbishing of Villa’s house once it had been transformed into the Museum of the Revolution. Because the mausoleum continues to be a symbol of Villa and Villismo, it is consigned to decrepitude and oblivion: since it has not yet been appropriated by the state, it remains ‘privatized’, well off the paths of national and foreign tourists. Were the state to cannibalize it, the mausoleum would probably be transformed into the tomb of the ‘unknown revolutionary’, the most perfect paradigm of the national hero since his very anonymily makes him the apt symbolic vehicle for national imaginings.

The transfer of Villa’s body from ‘the North’ to ‘the Center’ as well as the objectification of official histoiy in Villa’s Northern home is also a continuation of the state’s strategy of incorporating the recalcitrant North into ‘the nation’. Even after it was transformed from a frontier into a border, the North continued to imagine itself as a distinct, regional community; its membership in ‘the nation’ has always been contradictory and ambiguous. While Northeners consider themselves ‘Mexicans’ they also highlight their own unique identity through statements such as ‘the North is another country’ (‘el Norte es otro pais’). For a perceptive discussion of Northern resentment of the Center and the role of this ideological horizon in the current political conjuncture see Krauze 1986.

However, the agrarian basis of the Northern popular movement is widely denied. For studies which document the importance of agrarian conflict in the Northern popular movement see the works of Katz, Koreck, Nugent and Alonso cited in the bibliography. For a contrary view, see Knight 1980.

This corrido is quoted in translation in HeUman 1983:238; the

translation of the title is my own. For an interesting collection of revolutionary corridos and a perceptive and informative commentary on such popular songs, see Simmons 1957,

On the importance of symbolic inversion in the constitution of popular counter-ideologies and in the demystification of officialdiscourses, see Alonso 1987.

See the excellent discussion of the politics and meaning of ‘cultural survival’ in Turner 1986 for this usage of the concept of control over the total process of production and reproduction.

Though I have cited Scott on a number of points here, my overall view of hegemony differs from his in important ways; cf. ‘Hegemony and Consciousness’, Scott 1985.

This disjunction between rhetoric and practice is becoming more visible and pronounced as the politico-economic crisis in Mexico worsens. Actually, this divorce is so extreme that Daniel Nugent, Fernando Estrada and myself have labelled it the phenomenon of the ‘two Mexicos’. Popular counter-discourses are now so at variance with official ideology that Nugent has concluded that there is an ideological disjunction between the state and popular levels (1987). The ideological hegemony of Mexico’s PRI government is being undermined more and more and the legitimacy of authority is seriously questioned by diverse social groups and classes.

BibliographyAlonso, Ana Maria 1986a The Hermeneutics of Histoiy: Class Struggle

and Revolution in the Chihuahuan Sierra. Paper delivered in the Department of History, University of Chicago, seminar of Professor Friedrich Katz, February,

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