the Reform movement” (Florescano [2002] 2006: 290).8 However, in the twentieth century, shortly before the Mexican Revolution, the story shifted, and rather than integrating indigenous groups as an evolutionary antecedent to the Mexican nation, the nationalist discourse emphasized the mestizaje of national culture. Neither indigenous nor European, Mexican society was conceived of as the blending of two different cultures. Against the prevailing negative views on miscegenation of that period,9 Mexican ideologues resignified mestizaje to convey the blending of proper virtues of indigenous and European societies and cultures (Basave Benítez 1992).
Mestizaje was to become, during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, a dominant issue in the nationalist agenda. Post-revolutionary Mexico required a façade of unity to confront the threat posed by other nations (the US, England, Germany, France, and Spain) who sought to exercise control over Mexican natural resources and trade. The ideology of mestizaje proved to be an efficient instrument in the erasure of difference. Regionalism was seen as an obstacle by some of the most influential central Mexican thinkers involved in the invention of the nation, who identified local and regional fatherlands as a hindrance to the constitution of one single nation. In Los grandes problemas nacionales (Great National Problems), Molina Enríquez ([1909] 1978) pointed to the urgent need to unify the country into a single Mestizo nation. His analysis of the different problems facing the new nation found them to be rooted in existing conservative indigenous and Creole groups, whom he viewed as the enemies of national unity. Consequently, along with his diagnosis, he prescribed that the Mexican state had the duty to intervene and to ensure the unification of the nation by assimilating and/ or erasing the different (stories of) origin, religions, (racial) types, customs, and languages, in their diverse evolutionary stages, in order to bring together the common desires, purposes, and aspirations of the Mexican people (ibid.: 396-424). Once unification was achieved, he suggested, patriotism could be understood as people living “all as brothers in a family, free in their exercise of their faculty for action; but united in the fraternity of a common ideal, and constrained to virtue by that same fraternity, on the one hand, to distribute equally the enjoyment of the common heritage that feeds them and, on the other hand, to the mutual tolerance of the differences that this enjoyment spawns” (ibid.: 425).
Manuel Gamio, one of the first Mexican anthropologists trained abroad (under Franz Boas), shared Molina Enríquez's and other intellectuals' beliefs of his time. In his volume Forjando Patria (Forging the Fatherland), Gamio ([1916] 1992) tells readers about his experience in Mérida, where he visited a bar. When he ordered a beer, the waiter gave him the choice between national and imported. He asked for imported beer and was served a XX, a beer brewed in the city of Orizaba (in the state of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico). He proceeded to question the waiter, who explained matter-of-factly that ‘national' (del país) means from Yucatán. From this anecdote, Gamio moved to argue that Yucatán was the only Mexican state where mestizaje had reached an advanced stage, distinguishing the people of the state, who have a strong sense of cultural unity, from people in other Mexican regions. He concluded that, in order to achieve a national sense of harmony, the Mexican state had the duty to promote mestizaje in the totality of the national territory (ibid.: 12-14).10
The homogenization of the nation has been continuously promoted through different literary means. For example, in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), Octavio Paz ([1950] 2004) presented a powerful and influential argument about the nature and character of the Mexican people.11 Although he stated early in his essay that he was in fact making reference to a small portion of the population—that is, those who recognize themselves as ‘Mexican'—his narrative often transposed what he took from this group of central Mexicans to the totality of the inhabitants of the nation at large. Very often, this piece has been read as an analysis of all of Mexican culture, forgetting that it subsumes the rest of Mexico under the values, culture, and worldviews of central Mexican society and disregards the differences among regional cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes. He argued that modern industrial societies have the task to create (quantitative) uniformity where (qualitative) diversity exists (ibid.: 219).12 The story of cultural conflation and rhetorical homogenization, obviously, did not end in 1950 with Paz's Labyrinth. Other central Mexican intellectuals, for example, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, have continued the tradition of describing Mexican culture in terms that represent it as a single homogeneous unity, based on the views, values, terms, and codes that are prevalent in central Mexican society. For example, Lomnitz (2001: 111-122) describes the term naco, used by upper-class inhabitants of Mexico City to denigrate lower, uncouth classes, as a term that encapsulates Mexican social relations. In his explanation, the term is derived from the word ‘Totonac', the name of a central Mexican indigenous group, and applied metonymically to all indigenous people and to working-class individuals. More recently, Lomnitz (2005) uses central Mexican views on death to describe the national character and culture. Needless to say, in Yucatán, where Totonacs are a distant and alien reference, the term naco does not have the same currency that it does in Mexico City. Comparing the local relationship to death in a society such as central Mexico, where murders are more frequent, to that of Yucatán, where there is a higher frequency of suicide, requires a more nuanced approach.13
While some central Mexican intellectuals have been busy inventing the teleology and seeking the cultural essence of the Mexican nation, others have been active in the invention and dissemination of icons of mexicanidad (Mexican identity). This long process began in the time of colonial New Spain, when Catholic Spaniards imposed foreign military rule; an alien form of secular administration over humans, commodities, and natural resources; and an array of local saints and different Madonnas (virgin saints) in villages, neighborhoods, and cities throughout the territory. Later, the stories of local saints became partially displaced by the story of apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This parochial central Mexican patroness has been turned into the main religious icon of Mexican (and, more recently, of Latin American) society, displacing local saints (Gruzinski 2001). In Yucatán, well into the end of the twentieth century, cities and towns had their own saints who were celebrated on specific dates and whose churches were important sites of regional pilgrimage (Fernández Repetto 1995; Negroe Sierra 2004). For example, Valladolid is the site of residence of the Madonna (virgin saint) of Candelaria (Quintal Avilés 1993); Izamal has its own Madonna, the Virgin Saint of Izamal (Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra 2006); Tizimín hosts the Three Magi (Rugeley 2001); and Mérida has, among different important saints, the Christ of Blisters (Negroe Sierra 2004). During the late twentieth century, under the influence of central Mexican television, the proselytizing of a centrally controlled church hierarchy, printed newspapers, and national television, the Virgin Saint of Guadalupe was elevated in Yucatán from her old role as the patron saint of local taxi drivers to her present role as the most revered Madonna of the Catholic pantheon, receiving the blessing of Pope John XXIII as the “Mother of the Americas,” and the emphatic endorsement of Pope John Paul II after his first visit to Mexico and Yucatán in 1979.
The print media, cinema, radio, and television have also played an important part in the dis-semination of nationalist pedagogy and the subordination of regional and cultural differences. In this homogenizing endeavor, education through broadcast channels controlled by the Ministry of Education, the repetition and routinization of female images of the Patria (fatherland) in almanacs and on the covers of schoolbooks, the rendering of national maps, and the construction of highways contributed to bring Mexicans together into a single national community (Craib 2002, 2004; Florescano 2005; Hayes 2000, 2006; Lewis 2006; Vaughan and Lewis 2006; Waters 2006). Schoolbooks printed for elementary schools and high schools, provided gratuitously by the Ministry of Education, and state-designed broadcasts, such as The National Hour, which radio stations all over the country were required to transmit (all on the same day and at the same hour), promoted the consciousness of belonging to a common nation. Also, with the development of television and cinema, the proliferation of magazines, and the dominance of news agencies at the center of Mexico, selected icons became representative of the national character. Progressively, all Mexicans came to be represented by the macho tequila drinker, wearing a charro hat while singing, laughing, and crying to mariachi and ranchero
