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

They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe

JOSHUA LUND

By the word people (populus) we mean a multitude of men assembledwithin 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 itscommon origin, is called a nation (gens). The part that exempts itselffrom these laws (the unruly crowd within this people) is called therabble (vulgus); and when the rabble unites against the law, it forms amob (agere per turbas)—conduct that excludes its members from thestatus of citizens. (Immanuel Kant, 1797)

In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being thatwhose 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 increasingbanalization of theories of ‘hybridity’ as the best mode for asserting andanalysing the processes of a radical identity formation and cultural productionin the Americas. And yet it is also widely known that the cultural, racial andartistic dialectics implied by hybridity theories have long functioned withinLatin American state formation, harnessed to the coalescence of national hege-mony and institutional sovereignty throughout much of the hemisphere. Cer-tainly, the new hybridity represents a repetition with a difference: whereas pastgenerations were interested in stabilizing frontiers by sublimating an overarch-ing national trait, today’s hybridologists emphasize the volatility of and poten-tial liberation from the tyranny of all borders. The rush to find historicalprecursors (as opposed to critical interlocutors), however, has led to a host ofabsurdities, whereby figures like Gilberto Freyre become ‘postmodern’, Fer-nando Ortiz ‘postcolonial’, and Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio somethinglike ‘friends of the Indian’. In short, an uncritical reinvention of ‘hybridity’ oftenobscures, and runs the risk of endorsing, that is, of simply repeating the biopolit-ical programmes that haunt its basic logic: not only the aesthetics, but also theeugenics that underwrite the politics of hybridity.

I doubt that the teleological rescue that demonstrates how the thinkers whohelped institutionalize theories of hybridity foresaw a later critical trend is aproject of any particular urgency. Rather, I maintain that it might prove more

ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/03/020171–19 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1356932032000106757

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worthwhile to challenge our own conventions by confronting them with theirhistory.1 In this essay, I attempt to do so by examining the relationship betweenthe late-nineteenth-century erection of the preferred mode of theorizing hybrid-ity in Mexico—often generalized as mestizaje—and its function within therhetorics surrounding a state-sponsored massacre. The primary vehicle for thiscomparison is a reading of Heriberto Frıas’s Tomochic (1893; final revision in1906) and a comment on its critical reception. Therein I examine the culturalramifications and critical effectivity of a seemingly paradoxical discursive hall-mark, and largely uninterrogated legacy, of the Porfirio Dıaz era (1876–1910): thesimultaneous sublimation and erasure of ‘the Indian’.2 This gesture of inclusiveexclusion inscribes and delimits the structural function of the Indian within thediscourse of mestizaje, transcending the historical discontinuities of both. Inshort: hybridology in America loves the Indian, but especially when she or he isabsent.

While many American theories of hybridity certainly forge the patria throughthe formulation of political life, defining the norms of mere citizenship is nottheir ultimate function. At stake in hybridity is nothing less than what GiorgioAgamben—at once building upon and revising the biopolitical horizons ofmodernity first intimated by Aristotle and later outlined by Michel Foucault—has called bare life (la nuda vita).3 That is, while hybridity has been appropriatedas a measure for discerning the national interior from the exterior, its sharpestand most brutal trajectory leads elsewhere: not only to questions of the political(or cultural) integration of specifically constructed groups of people, but to thejudgement over the very possibility of their continued survival. To gaze uponand circumscribe the indigenous tribes and communities of the Americasthrough the filter of hybridology is not to reconcile the out with the in, but ratherto produce an inner exteriority whose simultaneous construction and destructionfounds 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 producinga meaningful interpretation of the representation of mixing as it settles in under theaegis of the violence that accompanies state formation and national consolida-tion. I will thus be ‘returning’ to consider an explicitly racialized theory ofhybridity. However, I must emphasize from the outset that such a return ismeant as a way of confronting the new hybridology with a history whosereconsideration complicates any project of simply moving ‘beyond ethnicity’.

II

While the atrocity that will be at issue in this essay occurred over one hundredyears ago, it is only exemplary in so far as it echoes an ongoing process. Let usbegin, then, by framing the following remarks with the memory of two recentincidents, to whose significance I will return at the end. ‘Incident’ is an almostoffensively inappropriate term here, for what we are dealing with is massacres.

The first occurred last summer in a remote region of Oaxaca at a junctioncalled Agua Frıa, and was widely reported in the Mexican and internationalpress. A group of twenty-eight men from the nearby village of SantiagoXochiltepec were returning home on a truck after a week’s worth of lumberharvest. They were subsequently halted and surrounded by a second group of

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They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe 173

men, this one armed with automatic weapons, and promptly executed (twosurvived the immediate attack).

The second massacre was communicated to me through a video installationthat I recently viewed at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.4 Theinstallation presents itself as an artistic rendering of a video which, the artistreports, has been circulating informally on Mexico City’s Tepito flea market. Thevideo is a kind of home movie that documents men, in aircraft, wearing safarigear, carrying rifles, and who, in the most literal sense, are engaged in huntingother people, and then, after shooting them, disembarking in order to desecratethe bodies. Apparently the images were recorded in the Brazilian Amazon, butthe video has re-emerged, with some controversy, on the New York art scene aspart of an exhibition on current Mexican art.5

The representations of both instances of this real human slaughter—via themainstream press and avant-garde art—invite not only sentiments of horror, butalso multiple interpretations and speculative implications, which would perhapsnecessarily begin with a consideration of the differences between reporting newsand creating art (or vice versa). But one thing that I find that they hold incommon, as both event and discourse, is a perceptibly abject representation ofthe killing of people; and more significantly for the comments to follow, thekilling of people specifically constructed, in both cases, as ‘indigenous’.6 I willnot be arguing that ‘hybridity’ or any other concept is somehow ‘responsible’ forthe historical fact of these crimes. I do want to argue, however, that responsiblereading forces us to consider the entanglement of the biopolitical and thenational at the intersecting discourses of race, violence and life common to bothstatist and counterhegemonic invocations of hybridity. These examples, takenfrom Mexico on purpose, introduce the problematic in its most extreme andpolemical dimensions. An analysis of the history of their representation requiresus to begin tracing, without reverence or fear, the vicissitudes of a concept ofhybridity 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 oftheorizing and representing hybridity in Mexico, it is both a marker of nationalidentity and a necessary discursive pillar of statist ideology. It is not merely, asoften assumed, the product of the Revolution’s rediscovery and monumentaliza-tion of the Mexican self, but rather the very link that marks the ideologicalcontinuity between the nineteenth-century positivists and their post-Revolution-ary, idealist opponents.7 In its dynamic mode, mestizaje converts the dread ofMexican ‘backwardness’ into the new vanguard of the universal metropolis.8 Yetit simultaneously enables a powerful rhetoric of stasis, capable of convertingPorfirian authoritarianism into amificacion, and the Zapatista critique of coercioninto something like ‘consensus’.9

A striking example of mestizaje’s continued discursive force can be found in acontemporary document of nation-building: Enrique Krauze’s ambitious recenthistory of modern Mexico, Mexico: Biography of Power (1997). This force is notablyexerted in a chapter called ‘The Triumph of the Mestizo’, particularly at thepoint 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 similarunrest periodically erupts today, it was regular during the nineteenth century,when the state was beset by scores of such actions.10 Krauze’s explanationinterests me for the rhetorical turns through which it explicitly links hybridity,race, national culture, violence and representation. These turns emerge as heidentifies two types of rebellions.

The first type he calls ‘social’ in character. Short in duration, these actions arelinked to specific political grievances, are reconciled through diplomatic solu-tions, and historically (stretching back to the colonial period) represent themajority of rural uprisings. More significantly, his notion of ‘social’ seems toemerge negatively as the absence of a racial or ethnic basis for the tensions: theyare not articulated around ‘ethnicity’, but rather ‘poverty’ (p. 222). Somewhatparadoxically, however, Krauze falls back upon the language of ethno-culturaltypification in order to distinguish these non-ethnic rebellions. This happens atthe intersecting rhetorics of race and space. That is, their regional contexts—hecites Oaxaca, the eastern sierras and the central plateau—all show an importantsimilarity: ‘They had been the scene of intense cultural and ethnic mestizaje. Andthe process of [religious] conversion had been carried out with particular vigorand success’ (p. 221). In contrast, a second type of uprising—long, nasty,brutish—also traversed the nineteenth century, again exhibiting a commonregional quality. This rare and exceptional region of intransigent rebellion(p. 222) ‘had two characteristics that ominously distinguished it from the rest ofthe country. It had only been superficially converted to Christianity; andmestizaje 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 Krauze’s argument one step forward and demon-strate that it rests upon an empirical impossibility. As some of Krauze’s ownsubsequent descriptions will suggest, the territories to which he here alludes asregions of exception—Chiapas, Yucatan, the northern hinterlands of Sonora—are(and were during the nineteenth century) nothing if not ‘mixed’.11 More import-ant than the empirical viability of Krauze’s model, however, are the symp-tomatic dimensions of his argument, that is, the way that it illustrates ameticulous recitation of the discursive operations of mestizaje within the realm ofstate ideology. For Krauze’s argument to stick, it would need to find support inempirically measurable levels of cultural purity and mixedness. At what pointdoes a region or community become ‘more mixed’ than another? As thelong-standing Mexican debate over ‘when’ an Indian becomes a mestizo indi-cates, many have foundered on the reefs of this question, perhaps none morespectacularly than Manuel Gamio and his attempt to measure the indigenous-ness of communities through his plan of a ‘culturally representative census’(1992 [1942], p. 189).12 Taken together, the critique of the scientific utility andvalidity of ‘race’ (from Herder to the Human Genome Project) and the critiqueof the racialization of culture (Hall, 1996b; Gilroy, 1992; Balibar and Wallerstein,1991 [1988], pp. 17–28) have long taught us that claims of cultural purity andmixture hold little empirical basis. In short, questions of ethno-cultural purityand mixture are not scientific ones to be resolved through empirical objectivity,but rather political propositions that depend on rhetoric and representation.

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Krauze’s challenge, then, is a rhetorical one: not simply to identify communi-ties that are ‘too pure’, but to build a convincing case that can make thoseproblematic regions pure; pure Indian, pure fanatic, pure barbarian. Given the richstore of discursive resources which he is tapping into here, this is an easy caseto make, and one to which he devotes minimal attention. For those resources aremaintained precisely by the power-move at the heart of mestizaje, its dialecticalconflation of opposites, its productive contradiction in the service of the nation-state. And it is here that we discover that the purity of non-mestizaje is in fact akind of impurity, a deviation, a heresy: that is, a rejection of Mexican statesovereignty which is at the same time the same thing as rejecting the puremestizaje that ideologically underwrites projects of hegemonic, national identityformation.13

I am not simply being convenient when I implicate the basic logic of mestizajewith projects of state. Krauze’s troping of mestizaje, in fact, operates within along discursive trajectory of national consolidation whose modern theorizationin Mexico begins not, as I noted above, with the post-Revolutionary intelli-gentsia, but with the liberals, positivists and Cientıficos that dominate thelate-nineteenth-century lettered city.14 While this genealogy is far too heavy tounpack here, let me register that Andres Molina Enrıquez, probably the mostinnovative of the late positivists, would find the ultimate expression of theideological effectivity of mestizaje by equating the ascension of Mexico’s long-standing sovereign, Porfirio Dıaz, with the very embodiment of mestizo Mexico,that is, Mexico as a racially marked mestizo state (pp. 132–147).15 If Dıaz repre-sented the mestizo state incarnate—which of course is a racialized metaphor forthe confluence of Amerindian and European cultures—what function did theIndian half of this social contract serve? What was the space of the Indian withinthe Porfiriato? In short, it was an ancient space, a traditional space, a founda-tional space, even a sacred space; all of this is another way of saying that it wasa space of erasure, abstractly included, concretely excluded.16 It is not accidentalthat the necessary confluence of mestizaje and indigenismo is first deployedsystematically in the name of nation-state consolidation under Dıaz.17 It was alsothe Porfiriato that significantly raised the bar in meeting indigenous resistancewith finalizing, modern military ‘solutions’.18 I trot out this quick (and admit-tedly simplified) sketch of the Porfirian Indian policy not only to contextualizeTomochic, but also to draw out an essential link between practices of theorizinghybridity and of colonial discourse: the profound ambivalence that governs theircommon representation of the colonized other.19 The language of ‘colonialism’here, despite the fact that Dıaz was concerned with ‘nation’, is not casual, butrather residual: indeed, the association between ‘development’ and ‘coloniza-tion’ is made explicit in one of the primary organs of Porfirian state policy,known as the ministry of fomento, colonizacion, industria y comercio.20

Ultimately, the Porfirian Indian policy reveals that the split that EtienneBalibar identifies between a nationalism ‘which derives from love (even anexcessive love) and the one which derives from hate’ (p. 47) is really theconstitutive ambivalence of a single, expansive nationalism. It is a nationalismenabled by a gesture that appropriates while vanquishing, sacralizes whiledestroying: simultaneously a rescue and an erasure.

It is within the context of this intensification of the inclusive exclusion ofcompeting modernities that Heriberto Frıas launches one of the sharpest cri-

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tiques of the Porfiriato during Dıaz’s reign, set forth in his serial originally called

iTomochic! Episodios de campana. Remembered today simply as Tomochic, it novel-izes an actual federal crackdown against a popular rebellion in the northern stateof Chihuahua. It provides an excellent case study for the increasingly biopoliticalstakes of the Porfirian state, and its appropriation of the transforming discoursesof mestizaje, the Indian and nation, through which the formation of citizens andpatriots cedes to, or becomes entangled with, the decision over life itself.21

As a narrative wherein the ideological and the critical consistently hold swayover the aesthetic,22 Tomochic lends itself to the kind of allegorical readingproposed by Doris Sommer in her study of the nineteenth-century Latin Amer-ican novel, Foundational Fictions (1991). But there is an important difference. Thebasic structure of the national romances that Sommer has called ‘foundationalfictions’ is premised upon forgetting: the desire for national bourgeois hege-mony is allegorized through reconciliatory (and usually consummated) lovestories, whereby racial and social-class tensions are forgotten in favour of thenational formation embodied by the protagonists (1991, pp. 6, 19). Frıas pro-duces a different kind of foundational narrative, one that emphasizes nationaldisarticulation over reconciliation, and one that is ultimately more faithful toErnest Renan’s maxim: Frıas will ask us to remember the national crime that hasbeen forgotten, and then at once assert its necessity for the process of nation-building.23

This kind of foundational disarticulation, then, allegorizes the nation as pro-foundly fractured. The healing (or forgetting) agent of that fracture will not bethe seduction of romance, but rather the brute force of armed intervention. Theproject of national consolidation is thus represented as a reconciliation that canonly come as a result of the material effacement of challengers to state sover-eignty. While the foundational fiction responds to the ideal by representing anation made whole through race–class reconciliation (Sommer, 1991, p. 14), thefoundational disarticulation is governed by the real, representing the grim visionof a nation made whole through state-sponsored terror. In the case of the Mexicoof Frıas’s Tomochic, it is the tragedy of Ignacio Altamirano’s Clemencia—afrustrated mestizaje—on a massive scale. The basic polemic that arises fromFrıas’s novel is that the foundational moment of the Porfirian state is not therealization, but rather the utter failure—even the abandonment—of an idealizedmestizaje. This position is insightful, and is what I think endows the novel withthe kind of power that Mariano Azuela notes, when he calls Tomochic (alongwith Inclan’s bandit classic, Astucia) one of only two ‘authentically national’Mexican novels (1960 [1947], p. 659).24 Beyond the novel itself, a commonmisreading of its treatment of the discourses of mestizaje and the Indian make itexemplary in a double sense: as a narrative memory of the violence of nationalconsolidation; and as a testament to the referential forgetting established by theideological 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 participatesin the government campaign against the village of Tomochic. In a flurry ofpopular 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 toGod.25 Most of the story focuses on the military campaign against the well-fortified town, and is an extended commentary on both the technical and moralbankruptcy of the Porfirian projects of state expansion, modernization andcentralization.

There is also a love story that runs through the novel. While typicallydiscarded as irrelevant, distracting and unconvincing in the commentary onTomochic,26 Sommer’s exposition on foundational fictions—that is, narratives thatshe proposes as foundational to the bourgeois project of national hegemony—asks us to pay closer attention to love interests. And indeed, in Tomochic, the lovestory is one of the places where the critique of Dıaz becomes frankly ad hominem,and the foundational disarticulation most symbolically realized. Miguel andJulia—a bewitching native of Tomochic—find their mutual affections stymied byMexico’s fragmentation. Julia’s repeated declaration of ‘iSoy de Tomochic!’suggests the irreparable disarticulation between the local rebellion and nationalproject of consolidation in which Miguel participates. The disjuncture is exacer-bated by an allusion to Dıaz’s double, in the figure of Julia’s uncle Bernardo, hersenior by decades, and an ‘ogre’ that keeps his niece in incestuous domesticbondage (pp. 19–22, 28). The allegorical affinity is clear, especially when weremember that Dıaz was not only married to a woman thirty-three yearsyounger than himself (Carmen Romero Rubio, daughter of a former politicalenemy—amificacion indeed!) but was also previously married to his niece(Delfina).27 What should be an interregional reconciliation and allegory ofnational consolidation is instead forcibly sundered, as the civilized capital(Miguel) ends up participating in the murder of the barbarous region (Julia) dueto the greed and perversion of a tyrant (Bernardo), who lords over andmanipulates Julia the way that Dıaz tightens his ‘iron grip’ around the nation’speripheries (e.g. pp. 13–16, 143).28

As the narrative of a campaign officially framed as civilization’s modernistadvance against the backwardness of barbarism, Frıas’s critique hinges upon itsability to convincingly reverse the referential targets of those binary signifiers,and, in effect, display the state’s project as fundamentally barbaric. This is thecritical and thematic thread that ties the narrative together, with Miguel conclud-ing, 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 isneither a ‘shadow, nor even a parody’ of the epic classics. Even the recentinternecine, Mexican civil skirmishes, with serious ideological stakes in thebalance—the War of Reform that pitted liberals against conservatives—werenoble in comparison: Miguel ‘recognized the tragic barbarism of the catastrophe!The horror of the killing had been as atrocious as defeat … !’ (ibid.). The entirecampaign is shown to be fundamentally misguided, sacrificing young working-class men, conscripts and petty officers poorly trained by the national academyat Chapultepec, to the guns of the Tomoche veterans, who have grown upfighting off bandits and rivals, and whose repeating Winchesters are said tonever miss their target (p. 2). Indeed, the federal tactics are displayed as so crudeand outdated that their technologically advanced heavy artillery (e.g. ‘a moderncanon’, p. 147) is effectively neutralized, even mocked, as it is noted to havelevelled 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 stingingdefeats, forcing the state to rely on sheer, overwhelming force. By the end, thefederales outnumber the Tomoches ten to one (p. 147). Cowardly federal officerswho avoid the fray of battle are juxtaposed against the heroic, if ‘fanatic’, CruzChavez, leader of the Tomoches who never hesitates to put himself in harm’sway. And even the Tomoches’ religious hyperbole is mitigated by the soldiers’decidedly more hollow, if no less fanatical, deference toward the state. While theTomoches surge into battle with pledges to ‘el Gran Poder de Dios’, ‘MarıaSantısima’, ‘the Santısima Trinidad’, and promise death to the sons of ‘Lucifer’,the soldiers less convincingly respond with ‘ivivas!’ to the ‘Supreme Govern-ment’, to ‘the Mexican Republic’, to ‘the Ninth Battalion’, to ‘General Dıaz’ (e.g.pp. 56–59), and, ultimately, to the ‘united Nation’ (p. 114).

Drawing an even more damning distinction, we learn that it is the supposedlyprofessional, federal army that consistently violates the normative rules of justwar handed down from Biblical law and secular scholarly tradition. The To-moches, meanwhile, exhibit a model respect for the conventional injunctions thatgovern a just war: restrictions against the abuse of prisoners, the killing ofnon-combatants, the harming of women and children, and the excessive destruc-tion 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 fire uponany living thing in the town that dares move, busy themselves with reducing thechurch to rubble, and steal the cattle and other food supply of the Tomoches(pp. 85–86). The Tomoches, on the other hand, never harm the soldaderas whobring food and water to the federal troops: ‘not once did their marveloussharpshooters fire upon the soldaderas … . The honorable sons of the sierrawould not kill women!’ (p. 86).

In marked contrast, the federal army, incompetent in battle, defers to a doublestrategy. First, a policy of scorched earth, burning the church where ‘the betterpart of the women of Tomochic had sought refuge’, and from whose spire an oldwoman hurls herself to avoid the flames (p. 115); later, a long siege which yieldsa final victory over half-dead and starving non-combatants (pp. 117–122). Whilethe Tomoches exhibit model treatment of their prisoners (pp. 70, 91), returningthem, including officers, unharmed, any captured Tomoches are summarilyexecuted by federal firing squad (pp. 72, 132, 146–147). In one particularlygripping scene, a group of soldiers heroically pursue a brave Tomoche throughdaunting terrain, finally bring him down, and cautiously approach the cadaverto find 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 isrepeatedly trumpeted throughout the narrative, a kind of leitmotif of unjust war:‘And its bellicose, joyful notes suddenly became gloomy in the midst of that fieldof sadness, of ashes and of ruin, in that putrid valley of smoking tombs andunburied corpses’ (p. 129).

This game of reversals that organizes the critical logic of Tomochic rests on adiscourse of race, revealing the stakes of the narrative’s biopolitical context. Itshows the barbarism of a white state that sends its darker young men to die inbattles not of national defence, but of conquest. The Tomoches perceive theracialized element of the project, and incorporate it explicitly into their strategyof resistance: ‘[Cruz Chavez] understood the transcendental importance of

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eliminating the officers, and he taught his men to recognize them by their whitefaces and their commanding attitudes’ (p. 70).30

In short, this vilification of the state, whose military here ‘demolishes anindigenous village’ (Monsivais, 2000, p. 967), is then juxtaposed with a counter-vailing ennoblement of ‘those admirable Indians defend[ing] … their religionand their lands’ (Azuela, 1960, p. 665), of the ‘Yaqui Indians’ assaulted by thePorfiriato (Magana, 1964, p. 53), of ‘the Indians of Tomochic … [part of] the Yaquination whose tribes refus[ed] to be governed by the central authority and toparticipate in the process of modernization’ (Benıtez-Rojo, 1996, p. 479). How-ever, while there certainly is a racialized logic that propels the critical force ofTomochic, reading it as a defence of the Indian raises a problem. That problemis the fact that Frıas’s Tomoches of Tomochic are not Indians: ‘What did theywant, concretely, those serranos … ? They knew nothing of the Patria, nor itsgovernors, nor Religion, nor its priests. And the strangest aspect of all was thatthey were not a barbarous tribe. They were not Indians, but Creoles [criollos].Spanish blood, Arab blood, blood of cruel fanaticism and noble bravery, coursedthrough that marvelous Tarahumara and Andalucian race … . Tomochic gavethe Mexican Republic the rare spectacle of a village that had gone crazy …’(p. 26).

V

What can we make of this disconnect, where Frıas says ‘not Indian, but mestizo’,and yet is widely understood—by accomplished and perceptive readers likeMonsivais, Azuela, Magana and Benıtez-Rojo, no less—as saying precisely theopposite?31 I maintain that it speaks loudly to the ideological status of articulat-ing mestizaje with Mexican state formation and national consolidation, andmoreover to the biopolitical function of the Indian in Mexican discourse andsociety.

While Frıas’s critique, as anti-Porfirian propaganda, is enabled by a racializeddiscourse, it is more complex than a simple inversion of the value codes ascribedto a civilized state and a barbaric tribe of Indians. We have just seen how Frıasindulges in the classic rhetorical move of reframing his opponent—here, thePorfirian state—as the ‘real barbarian’. But at the same time, the recodificationof the rebels of Tomochic will have greater discursive impact if it can be morenuanced than a simple sublimation, or even civilization, of the noble Indian.Consider the real fears of the metropolitan and largely bourgeois reading publicof Porfirian Mexico, the target audience of Tomochic, that is, their fears ofwidespread indigenous revolt.32 This reading public would have no reason to beenthusiastic about local uprisings that, if contagious, could present a real threatto their material interests.33 In fact, the Porfirian media machine openly toutedits incursions into outlying areas such as Sonora, Chihuahua, Chiapas andYucatan as precisely a war against intransigent Indians who insist on frustratingthe civilization and modernization of Mexico.34 A romantic Indian, then, wouldsimply repeat the Porfirian, indigenista rhetoric, at best sparking an academicdebate over the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character of the old Indian that, either way,hinders the emergence of a modern Mexico. A romantic Indian, while perhapsyielding a nostalgic pathos, would probably incite little outrage against thePorfiriato. Hence a sharper critique of the Porfiriato, one that can strike a

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rhetorical blow, will need to go beyond a romanticization of the Indian. This isprecisely the route that Frıas takes, as Tomochic works not to bring the Indianinto the national fold but rather to de-Indianize Tomochic. In other words, Frıas’sstrategy is to show that the Porfirian mission is launched not against Indians, asit purports, but rather against mestizos. The assault on Tomochic, then, must berepresented as an assault upon an honorable mestizo community, indeed, againstMexico 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 nation’s articulation to the ‘racial community has a tendency to representitself as one big family’ (p. 100), then the racialized mark of that national familyidentity in late nineteenth-century Mexico is the mark of mestizaje.35 The crimethat Frıas must ascribe to the Porfiriato is not the killing of an internal nationalother, but rather the massacre of a patriotic brother: Dıaz’s war must be exposedas 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 arecent study of the historical (as opposed to literary) uprising and massacre atTomochic, Paul Vanderwood draws on newspaper editorials and governmentdocuments to show the Porfirian state’s concerted effort dedicated to IndianizingTomochic (1998, pp. 135–140, 250–251).37 The implications of Vanderwood’swork also shows that Frıas had objective accuracy on his side: Tomochic was infact a largely mestizo, though multi-ethnic, community (pp. 51–53, 135). Contraryto the readings of Monsivais, Azuela, Magana and Benıtez-Rojo, the critical edgeof Tomochic is not a sublimation of the ‘Indians of Tomochic’. Rather, Frıas’scritique operates within the discursive parameters of mestizaje. In other words,it operates within the same system of representation upon which the ideologicaltriumph of the Porfirian state rests. With mestizaje thus serving as the discursiveformation within which the sayable can be said, the common biopoliticalpremises, where Porfirian Mexico and Frıas’s anti-Porfirismo meet, clearlyemerge. Both recognize the nation embodied in the mestizo. And both assume thematerial killing and symbolic sublimation of Indians as constitutive of mestizaje’sdialectical progress. This is how mestizaje exhibits the ambivalence of a colonialdiscourse. Thus Dıaz can at once sublimate old Indian heroes to the status ofnational icons and construct a discourse of contemporary, Indian savagery as ajustification for wars of conquest. At the same time, Frıas, too, can speak to thenatural sense of honour that Indians exhibit in battle (e.g. pp. 73, 124–126), whilepresenting the effacement of their communities as a necessary erasure in themarch of progress. This is precisely what happens in Tomochic: at one point, asif to underscore the difference of the federal incursion against Tomochic, Frıasinterpolates a short chapter on ‘the campaign against the Apaches’, in which anold soldier recounts to Miguel the costly, even tragic, but clearly necessary, waragainst an ‘invasive’ indigenous savagery (pp. 49–51). Later, drunk and sweptup in the blind enthusiasm of the Tomochic massacre, Miguel imagines himselfin 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 thePorfiriato’s genocidal campaign against the Indian, which is tacitly endorsed inthe 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 Mexicanpeople’ (p. 136).

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It would take nearly two decades after the initial publication of Tomochic forDıaz to fall, for Frıas’s anti-Porfirian politics to morph into official rhetoric, andfor the book to be praised as an important, if largely forgotten, precursor to thegreat novelas de la Revolucion.38 In the framing of the historical events aroundTomochic, however, it seems that the empirical lies of the Porfirian position arein fact a more honest reflection of the discursive truth of biopolitical power. Inspite of the Revolution and all of its historical revisions, it is Dıaz’s version ofthe war against Tomochic that is remembered, when it is remembered at all: theexpansive state against recalcitrant Indians.39 If today modern Mexico remem-bers ‘the Indians’ as heroes, rather than as a terrifying threat, it is in part due tothe very success of the Porfirian project of pacification.40 For, as Claude Levi-Strauss noted long ago in the opening pages of Tristes Tropiques (1997 [1955]), itis only with the removal of that threat that the former ‘enemies’ of civilizationbecome a source of ‘noble and profitable revelations’ (p. 33). And it is here, at thenotion of civilization’s enemies, that the Porfirian ‘discovery’ of ‘Indians’ atTomochic carries an even stronger sense of discursive integrity. The rebellion atTomochic was one of several popular religious uprisings against the Porfirianstate. Its inspiration, a mystic, healer and spiritist known as Santa Teresa deCabora, had legions of followers across Northern Mexico. These followers werelargely drawn from the popular classes, and her support was particularly strongin indigenous communities.41 The mass appeal of figures like Teresa de Cabora,in short, emerged from the social sector that was most explicitly brutalized bythe dogmatic positivism and ‘conservative liberalism’ of the Porfiriato.42 Theselargely impoverished masses, while territorially ‘inside’, are excluded by thenation-state, an inner-exteriority always in danger of taking its allegiance else-where. In that sense, Tomochic and the rebel villages like it—in their verydeclarations of local sovereignty that thus erode national hegemony—performthe discursive function of the Indian. If they are ‘mixed’, practising a weirdhybrid 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 dis-course of pure mestizaje.

Whether earnest or ironic, Frıas confronts us with a chilling vision of thefoundational disarticulation that rearticulates national consolidation to colonialexpansion. With the end of the campaign, the thuggish (and brutal realist)Castorena sarcastically links the fall of Tomochic to that of Tenochtitlan, as themore sensitive Miguel expresses his ‘admiration for the heroism of the extinctTomoche race’ (p. 136) that he has just helped extinguish. While many havenoted that the figure 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 narrativevoice that communicates the soldier’s thoughts is unstable, often rendered aswhat Bakhtin would call a double-voiced discourse, at once an affirmation andcriticism of the war. It is in these final chapters, with the articulation of anincreasingly rigorous homology between sacrifice and the sacred, that theambivalence of the narrative becomes at once exceedingly intense and ambigu-ous. Miguel, in a dramatic psychological battle with himself, finally succumbs tostate ideology in a way that seems to cast doubt over all of his previouscriticisms. In a paroxysm of newfound nationalism, he suddenly recognizeshimself 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 Dıaz which nowtakes on explicitly ‘Aztec’ tones (p. 144). Immediately after Miguel’sidentification with official indigenism and endorsement of the inclusive ex-clusion of Mexico’s living indigenous past, the biopolitical outcome of Tomochicreaches its eugenic limit: with the Tomoches being executed to the last man, it isrevealed that this absolute exclusion is to be accompanied by the transfer of thesurviving ‘orphans and widows’ to the ‘leading families of Chihuahua’ andhence their inclusion as ‘seedbeds [semilleros]’ for future, robust generations ofMexicans. This is to be carried out ‘for the good of the State [whether this refersto Chihuahua or the nation-state is unclear and unimportant]’ (p. 146). Finally,just before another unsatisfying reveille accompanies the new day’s emergenceover the ruins of the smouldering town (p. 151), Miguel and his comradescontemplate the heroism of the now sacred, and now dead, Tomoches. All nodin pensive agreement as someone gushes: ‘It couldn’t have been any other way,it couldn’t 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 anexplicit rejection of complicity—whose current form is the false choice between‘national or global’—with something like an affirmation of alliance. This kind ofhybridity, after all, is what tenaciously emerges, again and again, as thealternative modernities that mark and remark the history of modern Mexico: thesynthesis of European anarchism and local morality, of Nahua and Spanish,of community and property, of orality and literacy that would articulate withsuch force in Revolutionary Morelos; the confluence of the cosmo-polis andthe province, of technology and tradition, in 1990s Chiapas; the small victories,like the one recently witnessed in San Salvador Atenco, as the hybridizationof peasant agency and urban activism not only stared down a project of statebut also derailed its tired rhetorical turns.44 Alongside these small victories, westill witness the killing of specifically constructed groups of people, peopleplaced before the law but not afforded protection under the law: the includedexceptions, people like the men of Santiago Xochiltepec, whose recent massacrehas been characterized by governmental authorities as an ‘ancient feud’ in whichthe state need not (in fact did not) intervene45; people like the victims ofhuman-hunting, now starring in sensationalist and ambivalent video imagescalled ‘art’, images so exceptional that perhaps they rebound to mitigate theeveryday degradation of similar communities worldwide, whether at the handsof oil companies, global financiers or anthropologists. For hybridity to beeffectively harnessed in the Latin American scene as a mode of theorizing andpractising the manufacture of small victories, its role in large defeats must beassessed, rethought and dealt with. Re-reading Tomochic represents a move inthat direction.

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Notes

A number of readers shared with me their critical comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Inparticular, I would like to thank Peter Hallberg, Ignacio Sanchez Prado and Amy Robinson for theirsuggestions.

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 won’t detail here. To be clear, however, let me note thatwhat I mean to indicate by ‘the Indian’ is the outcome of a historical trajectory of identification:one that dialectically homogenizes (the monolithic Indian) and diversifies (distinct indigenouscommunities) and that depends on a colonial gaze backed up by force. The Indian thus functionsrhetorically as both emblem and social relation. This complex history is what I mean to indicateby placing the Indian in quotation marks here at the outset (and which will be impliedhenceforth); in doing so I attempt to invoke the explicitly referential ambivalence of the Indian,at once indicating real subjects and communities so (self-)defined, and the sociohistorical processby which those subjects and communities enter into discourse and society as particular unitiesand/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 incrementalmerging of the ‘realms’ of bare life and the political becomes the defining problematic of modernWestern politics. That process is governed by a structure of inclusive exclusion, whereby lawand sovereignty are founded on the gesture that incorporates bare life (situating it as a conditionfor the ‘city of men’) by banishing it (the city is that space where bare life cedes to bios, orpolitical life): ‘Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, assomething that is included solely through an exclusion’ (p. 11). Agamben’s attention lieselsewhere, but it is a suggestive frame for thinking about the biopolitical contracts that governthe social, legal and symbolic status of the Indian in several modern American states.

4. The installation in question is Ivan Edeza’s ‘ … de negocios y placer’ (2000). It was on displayat P.S.1’s 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 theBrazilian jungle’. It is of course impossible to tell whether the footage is an authentic testimonyor a performance, like the gruesome documentaries staged by the journalists in RuggeroDeodato’s revolting (and widely banned) Cannibal Holocaust (1979). But the authenticity of theimages is not the question at issue here, given that a central point of the installation is to presentthe images as a record of real murders.

6. The first reports of the massacre at Agua Frıa refer to the victims simply as ‘campesinos’ andto the region as ‘una zona indıgena’ (La Jornada, 2 June 2002). Subsequent accounts refer to theirvillage as a ‘pueblo zapoteco’ (the Zapotecs are an indigenous ethnicity native to the state ofOaxaca) and the victims as ‘indıgenas zapotecas de Xochiltepec’ (3 June 2002), and finally to thekilling itself as ‘la masacre de un grupo de zapotecas’ (5 June 2002). The programme accompa-nying Edeza’s video installation identifies the ‘fleeing tribe below’ as ‘indigenous people in aBrazilian jungle’ and ‘Brazilian natives of the rain forest’.

7. Others have noted an ideological continuity between pre- and post-Revolutionary intellectuals,typically defining it through what Hale calls their common commitment to the ‘heroic liberaltradition’ 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. 9–15) and Jose Vasconcelos (1979 [1925], 1926, esp. pp. 65–108).

9. ‘Amificacion’ (derived from the ‘am-’ common to ‘amigo’, ‘amor’ and ‘amo’) is Andres MolinaEnrıquez’s theory of the Porfirian political genius, which he links directly to Dıaz’s embodimentof mestizaje (see below) (1978 [1909], pp. 136–139). The most effectively critical comment on thepost-Revolutionary, statist co-opting of indigenous identity and Zapatista resistance that I amaware of is to be found in Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir (2001 [1963]) (see especiallyPart 1, Chapter 7).

10. See Reina (1988 [1980]) and Garcıa Cantu (1969, pp. 55–92).11. Myriad examples could be brought forth that run precisely counter to Krauze’s claims of the

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non-mestizaje of Mexico’s historical regions of unrest. Limiting the scope to the bibliography thatI am handling here, see Hu-Dehart (1988) and Reina (1988 [1980], pp. 45–57). For examples ofthe varied mestizaje at play in regions whose unrest was neither short-lived nor ‘politically’resolved, see Reina (pp. 64–82) and the reports of the Centro Regional de Derechos HumanosBartolome Carrasco Briseno, cited in La Jornada (3 June 2002).

12. All translations from the Spanish, unless otherwise noted in the list of works cited, are mine.Gamio’s ‘culturally representative census’ wanted to measure levels of indigenousness by takingas its standard the everyday use of a range of cultural artifacts denominated ‘indigenous’,‘European’ or ‘mixed’. Thus a subject’s or community’s use of ‘huaraches’ would increaseindigenousness, while use of ‘marihuana’ would decrease it. Ultimately, if it so happens that ‘lacifra de objetos de cultura indıgena presente un alto porcentaje respecto al total de objetos’, then‘pueden considerarse como indıgenas a las familias clasificadas’ (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’.

13. Gamio speaks of the ‘pristina pureza’ of the ‘tipo mestizo’ that serves as his historicalprotagonist of Mexican national identity formation (1992 [1916], p. 66). Perhaps it is predictableto find Krauze, a writer in the same liberal tradition as Gamio, here similarly repeating anuncritical exaltation of the mestizo, at the expense of indigenous communities (on Krauze’scommitment to monumentalist historiography, see Lomintz, 1998). And yet even Gloria Anzal-dua, while her critical motives lie elsewhere, makes the same move with all of the biopoliticalimplications intact (1987, p. 5).

14. 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 Enrıquez (1978 [1909]).The post-Revolutionary intelligentsia will only strengthen this cultural link between metaphorsof (racial, cultural and philosophical) mestizaje and Mexico. Some notable examples includeReyes (1992 [1915], pp. 16–17); Gamio (1992 [1916]); Vasconcelos (1979 [1925], 1926); Brenner(1970 [1929]) (whose perspective was from the North, but still); and Lombardo Toledano (1988[1930], pp. 45–47). Ramos, Paz, Villoro, Zea and a host of others carry on the tradition,sometimes articulated melancholically, but largely unproblematized.

15. Molina: ‘El senor general Dıaz, que veıa 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).

16. I here paraphrase Jesus Martın-Barbero’s description of the Enlightment-era, liberal concept ofpopular sovereignty as one of ‘abstract inclusion with concrete exclusion’ (1993 [1987], p. 7).

17. The classic study of this history is Villoro (1950), whose paradox nicely sums up the necessaryconfluence of indigenismo and mestizaje at the site of the nation-state: ‘ahora el indio ya no es soloalteridad; lo vemos alejado, pero al propio tiempo, forma parte de nuestro espıritu’ (1950,p. 192). Villoro’s existentialist problematic is already thematized in a more historico-materialistregister in Lopez y Fuentes’s El indio (1972 [1935]: see esp. the chapters ‘Sumision’, ‘La tradicionperdida’ and ‘El lıder’). See also Hale (p. 9) and Knight (1990, p. 79). O’Connell offers aparticularly efficient review of the historical conditions of both indigenousness and indigenismo(1995, pp. 47–57); for more extensive treatment, see Bonfil (1996 [1987]). I invoke indigenismo hereas 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 betweenindigenismo and Romantic ‘Indianism’.

18. These included the large-scale invasion of indigenous territories with modernized federal forces,bombardment with heavy artillery, and mass, race- or ethnicity-based imprisonment anddeportation. While these were not always Dıaz’s first resort, they were rigorously applied as thelast.

19. On the ambivalence of colonial discourse, see Bhabha (1994, pp. 85–122).20. The nineteenth-century policy of ‘colonizacion’ referred to the occupation of so-called ‘terrenos

baldıos’ by small landholders, preferably immigrants from Europe. While its goals differ fromtraditional ‘colonialism’, it shares the structural similarity of expanding sovereignty throughprimitive accumulation; in this case, the alienation of communally held (often indigenous) landsby appropriating them as private property and fomenting the ‘liberal ideal of creating a ruralbourgeoisie 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, exemplifiesthe tightly woven discourses of race and space in Porfirian Mexico. See Hale (pp. 234–238) fora brief review, and Gonzalez Navarro (1960) for a book-length study of this history.

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21. The centrality of biopolitics as the conflation of citizenship with the state’s selective preservationand elimination of bare life is what distinguishes the national narrative of Frıas from theneo-classical narrative of, for example, Altamirano, where citizenship hinges upon the volun-taristic patriotism of the individual.

22. My thanks to Ignacio Sanchez Prado (personal communication) for formulating the structure ofTomochic in this way.

23. This is precisely the structure of Renan’s famous ‘What is a nation?’ (1990 [1882]) speech, wherethe polemical role that ‘forgetting’ plays at the beginning of the speech is slyly replaced by termslike ‘consent’ and ‘sacrifice’ at the end (1990 [1882], pp. 11, 19–20).

24. I consider Azuela’s own thematization of a failed mestizaje in the forthcoming article, ‘Hybridol-ogy and Post-Revolutionary Malaise’.

25. In the 1906 edition (Porrua, 1989) that I am handling, Chapter VIII reviews the historicalconditions of the uprising at Tomochic. These include: abandonment of services, but not of taxcollection, by the federal government and the Church (p. 23); the influence of a messianicmovement centred around the mystic Teresa Urrea, the Santa de Cabora (ibid.); an attempt bythe governor of Chihuahua to transfer the religious paintings of Tomochic’s church to the statecapital (p. 24); the rape and impregnation of a village girl by a judicial authority from Guerrero(ibid.); the chastisement by a priest for the town’s recognition of the villager Jose Carranza’sstatus as the reincarnation of San Jose (ibid.); the rise of Cruz Chavez to rebuke the priest, andlead the crowd to evict him from the town (ibid.); the attempt by the mayor to fine Cruz for hisactions, which Cruz refuses to pay (ibid.); and finally, the arrival of a military battalion, whichis promptly routed by the Tomoches under Cruz’s leadership (p. 25); things escalate from there.In his introduction to the Porrua edition, Brown implies that these are a reasonably accuratesummary of the historical facts surrounding the uprising (p. xx). Most are confirmed inVanderwood’s (1998) recent study of the uprising.

26. See Azuela (1960 [1947], pp. 666–667), Brown (1989 [1968], pp. xvi—xvii), and Benıtez-Rojo (1996,pp. 478–479).

27. A special thanks to Pat McNamara for historical verification (personal communication) is inorder here.

28. The love story is a clear point of distinction from Sommer’s foundational fictions, in which ‘theromances are invariably about desire in young chaste heroes for equally young and chasteheroines, the nations’ hope for productive unions’ (p. 24). Frıas’s allegory of national(dis)articulation precisely reverses this model. The young heroes, the embodiment of a frag-mented 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 firme todavıa’ (p. 21). Miguel is an alcoholic, a slave to his‘vicios’ (p. 6). Moreover, there is nothing chaste in the consummation of their affections. Thelove scene is at once graphic (pp. 41–42), yet ambiguous in its reciprocity, and Miguel spendsmuch of the remaining narrative convincing himself that it was not, in fact, a rape (pp. 43–44,83). Julia’s death at the hands of the federal siege symbolizes the effective impossibility ofnon-violent, productive national union. It is significant, too, that Bernardo is alone among theTomoches in his ignobility, and even his death is a study in treason, as he guns down a nationalhero who is about to grant him mercy (pp. 98–101).

29. For a critical review of the doctrine of just war, see Helen Kinsella’s ‘The Order of War’ (2002,manuscript under review).

30. Knight: ‘Quasi-colonial attitudes and methods became hallmarks of the Porfiriato: the armyresembled a colonial force (pale officers, dark troops) and resorted to the usual counterinsur-gency excesses’ (p. 80).

31. While it is certainly likely that some of the rebel combatants at Tomochic were ethnicallyIndians, the important point here is that Frıas never suggests this within his work. In fact, theconstruction of a ‘criollo’ and/or ‘mestizo’–that is, ‘non-Indian’–Tomochic by Frıas is muchmore than a passing reference, indeed, is quite methodical. Later in the narrative Frıas contraststhe 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 thelater editions, with the 1906 edition considered definitive (Brown, p. xix). For example, neitherreference just cited (pp. 26 or 124), nor the mention of the ‘white faces’ of the officers (p. 70),appears in the 1899 version. However, even there we find a pretty clear distinction madebetween 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 fight as mercenaries on the side of the federalarmy (1899, pp. 13, 41, 133, 157, 165, 221). In one passage of the 1899 version, the heroic fightagainst the cattle-rustling, ‘feroces indios’ (1899, p. 41) is noted as the source of the famousTomoche 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 werepublished anonymously, the 1893 serial printed in El Democrata, and the 1894 augmentationprinted in Texas). It is unlikely that any of the critics I mentioned would have been handlingan edition earlier than the 1906 (where the mestizo and criollo identification of the Tomochesbecomes explicit), which has served as the basis of subsequent publications. Brown notes thatAzuela’s citations pertain to the 1906 edition (p. xix).

32. Hale cites one influential metropolitan newspaper (Justo Sierra’s La Libertad), commenting on arural uprising a decade prior to Tomochic, as ‘warning that although the Indians were fightingtoday for ‘a few hundred square yards (varas) of ground,’ tomorrow they would want ‘thedestruction 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 establishedsocial order’ (p. 224).

33. Frıas notes the federal rationale for the crackdown on Tomochic: ‘En efecto, el histerismo belicoreligioso de los tomochitecos podıa ser un foco de contagio para los demas pueblos de la sierraque sufrıan un malestar sombrıo pronto a resolverse en rebelion’ (p. 26; see also 143). Moreover,the material interests of the elite classes is slyly suggested by Frıas as the ulterior motive for themilitary action at various moments in the text. At the very outset, a functionary at a London-based mining company threatens the Tomoches with ‘meterlos de soldados’ (p. 24) and arailway engineer with the same company decides to avoid the region and inform the govern-ment of ‘la actitud belicosa del pueblo’. By the time that the Tomoches can assure him that theyare not ‘bandidos vulgares’, it is too late: ‘Mas el grito de alarma se propagaba, se multiplicaba’(p. 26).

34. The durable Yaqui resistance, like the uprising at Tomochic, took place in Northwestern Mexico,although centred one state to the west, in Sonora. Dıaz’s attempted ‘resolution’ of thatresistance, however, did not begin in earnest until 1897 (five years after the siege of Tomochic),with the massacre and deportation of the Yaqui at the hands of 8000 federal troops occurringin 1902 (see Hu-DeHart, 1988, pp. 162–165). While I have heard the thesis that Yaqui fighterscould have been present at Tomochic, I have not been able to find verification. Historically,Tomochic was a centre of Tarahumara culture, peripheral to the Jesuit-Yaqui missions to thewest (see Vanderwood, pp. 51–53); and Frıas’s 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 onereference in Tomochic to the Yaqui precisely opposes that resistance to the rebellion at Tomochic(p. 137).

35. In a prelude to his famous works on the evolution of Mexican society and politics, Sierra refersto the ‘familia mestiza’, thus conflating national singularity with mestizaje (‘la mestiza constituyela familia mexicana’) (1960 [1885]: p. 7). Krauze secures the trope for future generations in hisdiscussion of Mexican origins under the heading ‘The Mestizo Family’ (1997, pp. 51–59).

36. Cannibalism emerges, specifically in a passage where Frıas implies that the troops have beeneating the meat of ‘cerdos voraces que se cebaban en la humana carnaza’ and hence that havebeen ‘nutrida con carne humana’ (p. 139). The historic weight of this accusation could not beheavier, especially as it is launched against an army under a tyrant’s command. Beyond the localreferences to Aztec blood sacrifice, Agamben reminds us that it is precisely cannibalism thatmediates the transition from leader to tyrant, at least since Plato: ‘[W]hoever tastes one bit ofhuman entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into awolf… Thus, when a leader of the mob … seeing the multitude devoted to his orders, does notknow how to abstain from the blood of his tribe … will it not then be necessary that he eitherbe killed by his enemies or become a tyrant and be transformed from a man into a wolf?’ (citedin Agamben, p. 108).

37. More precisely, the government’s strategy relied on constructing the Tomoche rebels as outsidethe nation on three counts: Indianness, banditry and fanaticism (Vanderwood, p. 137). A similarprocess can be seen in a peasant uprising in Reformist Mexico documented by Reina, whereinthe military communiques report ‘una gavilla’, ‘ladrones’, ‘bandidos’, ‘rebeldes’, ‘sublevados’,

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and finally ‘indios’ (pp. 67–70). Today this discourse has come full circle, in Chiapas, whereattempts to delegitimize the neo-Zapatistas (the EZLN) often rest upon ‘exposing’ them asinauthentic Indians, i.e. as urban mestizos. Whereas the statist logic in Tomochic was that theIndians were always already anti-national in their non-mestizaje, the logic in contemporaryChiapas is that the rebels, as urban mestizos, have never been the victims of colonialism andhence must be national traitors.

38. See Azuela (pp. 663–664) and Magana (p. 60). Katz goes as far as to suggest that the historicaluprising at Tomochic became an enabling memory for the outbreak of the Revolution itself(1986, p. 20).

39. This I could confirm by citing almost any conversation I have had with scholars familiar withTomochic, which is universally remembered as the story of an Indian uprising. Vanderwoodreports that the Dıaz version of the massacre was so effective that even in the immediate, localaftermath, ‘imagination ran amok as anxious settlers in the Sierra spotted here, there, andeverywhere dangerous and vengeful Tomochic “Indians”’ as opposed to ‘hard-working mestizoslike themselves’ (p. 318). The distinction he seems to be accepting here is dicey, and histreatment of ‘imagination’ a bit too self-evident, but his point is important.

40. Thus it is not surprising that, as the anti-Yaqui propaganda of the government increases, so dothe increasingly sophisticated versions of Tomochic construct an increasingly explicit mestizo andcriollo Tomochic.

41. See Brown’s note in Frıas (p. 137). For more elaborate treatment of ‘teresismo’, which reachedinternational proportions, finding receptive audiences in New York and California, see Vander-wood (1998). Gill (1957) offers a thorough, if excessively anti-Porfirian, account of the life ofTeresa.

42. On the concept of ‘conservative liberalism’, see Hale (p. 34 passim).43. Frıas: ‘Cruz convocaba a los principales vecinos a rezar el rosario, un rosario fantastico, donde

aquella gente intercalaba oraciones extranas, letanıas estupendas, gritos de odio y belicasproclamas, imprecando “al gran poder de Dios”’ (p. 27). Mexican intellectuals have longdistinguished between a good and bad hybridity, with the former falling under terms likemestizaje and integral (associated with the organicism of autochthonous national development)and the latter historically (at least until Garcıa Canclini salvaged the term [1992 (1989)])denominated as some derivation of hibridismo (associated with the imposition of colonialism andcultural imperialism). Gamio (1992 [1916]) is an especially lucid example of this tendency.

44. San Salvador Atenco was the site of a successful popular effort to thwart last summer’sattempted land-grab by the state for the purpose of building a new airport to service MexicoCity. The project would have displaced thousands, permanently fracturing at least a dozencommunities. The resistance consisted of a local network of ejiditarios and small landholders inalliance with student, environmental and anti-globalization activists. The state and mainstreampress, after attempting to raise the worn-out conspiracy of ‘outsiders’ perniciously manipulatingMexico’s misguided masses (the Basque separatist group ETA and the Peruvian SenderoLuminoso were cited), backed down and terminated the project in the face of widespreadpopular support for the would-be displaced inhabitants of the community. La Jornada offersexcellent coverage of the events 11–20 July 2002 at http://www.jornada.unam.mx; for a criticalreview of the media coverage of the protest, see Borja Villa’s report at http://www.rebelion.org/medios/borjavilla250702.htm.

45. Numerous reports have commented generally on the repetitive nature of the violence in the Solade Vega region of Oaxaca, and specifically on the multiple petitions for state intervention thatwent unheeded in the weeks leading up to the massacre at Agua Frıa. See La Jornada, 2 and 3June 2002.

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