For a century Mexico's history was a history of peasant revolts and rebellions framed by two revolutions: the War of Independence in 1810, the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Mexico
institutional Today celebrates the two revolutions and political changes. Forget, hides or obscures the past to the rebellion that gave body and destiny. These, unlike the revolutions and its programs, would not dream of institutions and policies. Just wanted justice.
The two revolutions, a century apart between them, were of course different. The proposed 1810, Mexico's independence from colonial rule, when the Napoleonic wars and invasions had a crisis in Spain and its vast American empire. Of 1910 was proposed at the beginning a democratic transformation of the political regime. In this the oligarchy had consolidated his power and wealth by seizing land and water to communities and agricultural villages and the inclusion of Mexico in the bright world market of the Belle Époque.
two revolutions, each in its time, changed the structure of the state and its political institutions. But both preserved intact split on which was founded Mexico since the Conquest: the racial fault line that the Republic has always refused to recognize in their laws, but he never gave in their practices.
On one side of that line, the one below, are managed and organized the rebellion without which no revolution is possible. On the other hand, the above, the programs were formed and conspiracies that led to ruptures in the political regime that transform the rebellions in revolutions. So
Mexico met in a century, between 1810 and 1910, two revolutions. But after the first, between both happened countless indigenous rebellions, large and small, all for old claims denied by the republican regime, land, justice, rights and freedoms, all carrying at its core an old demand intangible humiliation to the dignity of each and all as the essence of human relationships.
A group of Zapatista Amecameca shows their weapons, state of Mexico, 1911 (Photograph by Hugo Brehme). Mexico photograph taken from the book and revolution. Edited by FundaciónTelevisa
bodily substance at its Independence Revolution of 1810 had been a long rebellion of Indian communities and peoples to defend their communal rights, their way of living and their life worlds, which the Bourbon reforms in the colonial order were snatched from the second half of the eighteenth century.
This was documented as many as have been excavated in the archives of the reasons, motives and modes of peoples insurgents. This is sketched in a foreshortened Octavio Paz, in the middle of the twentieth century, in The Labyrinth of Solitude:
War of Independence was a war of classes and not include his character if they know that, unlike what occurred in South America was an agrarian revolution in the making.
The resulting change in the political organization the country-Independence and Republic-handed power to the new dominant Creole elite, white, educated and owner. But little or no change in the content and forms of domination against which the people had revolted Indians and peasants of Mexico. The domain native customary rights even dismantled the pueblos.1 Little or nothing has changed for the Indians, in the substance of humiliation as a constitutive feature of racial domination of the old and new landlords.
rebellion and revolution here their paths diverged, their contents and their meanings.
The result was that the class war, that revolution land in gestation, continued throughout the nineteenth century or open the underlying struggle of indigenous peoples to defend their land, their worlds and their lives of material deprivation and racial oppression under the republican regime. India was an intermittent war, disperse, without center or periphery, which in the late nineteenth century and intensified in 1910 erupted into a new agricultural revolution, which is known as the Mexican Revolution.
The Revolution of 1910, so diverse in its infancy and in such other purposes, of Independence, lived in the same dichotomy. But now it appeared clear, sharp, and programs embodied in different hosts within the revolution.
One was the revolt of the communities and farmers in the north and south that made people's revolution in the armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Another was the political revolution of the chiefs and Liberal leaders that culminated in the 1917 Constitution and Mexican governments since 1920, after the defeat of the peasants in their rebellion absorbed weapons and radical land reforms and legal democratic.
The proclamations and policy objectives of the ruling elites of the two revolutions were also different, both as it was the nation that each of them imagined. But shares of the items Indian peasants revolted to the call of these claims were strikingly similar change. A century later, the methods of action, the repertoire of comparison, in the language of other historians were repeated.
Eric Van Young, on the other rebellion, 2 describes the behavior pattern of the rebels in the War of Independence when they took a population:
invariably cast the goods on the street or square to the common people is the lead, stole money and kept it for himself, the prisoners released from prison and kidnapped the English and the white officers of the town.
Felipe Avila in between the Porfiriato and revolution, refers to what happened from the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1911, the Zapatista territories: 3
fighting, stock footage, looting, burning of offices and public records, tax loan , release of prisoners and enforcement authorities, traders, employees of farms and factories, and foreign residents.
This plebeian violence, as called Avila, was described by the press of the time as violence in India. Although this use of the term Indian was loaded racist, in fact they spoke the truth: the Zapatista revolution of 1911 in its agrarian roots, in the composition of his troops and their leaders and their actions was essentially a revolt of the Indians, even when the claims and agendas of their national leaders the revolution started in 1910 was a democratic political revolution.
If a century after proclamations, programs and goals of the leaders of the revolutions of 1810 and 1910 were so different, where does the uncanny repetition of gestures and actions of the protagonists of the two rebellions, the people Indians of Mexico?
is that the imaginations of those leaders were responding to a renewed policy with the times and circumstances, a policy which often identified with the word progress. In contrast to these other modes, the plebeian violence, came from a genealogy transmitted by successive generations as a legacy experience and intangible feelings, ways of being together, imaginations, custom, life-worlds.
programs revolutionary elites pointed to a society and polity in the future. Gestures, actions, methods of struggle of indigenous peoples responded to the grievances, humiliation, offal suffered by them and their ancestors in the past and thrived on these inherited and repeated experiences to date of their lives.
Rise of the past emerges and he takes his reasons, his motives and methods. It is a heritage and genealogy. The revolution that is it breaks down the old institutions and establish new ones. It is program and policy. Can the reasons for the rebellion to be antagonistic to the political objectives of the revolution. They are certainly different. This difference took material form in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the peasant armies of Zapata and Villa ended up facing weapons in hand with the Constitutionalist Army.
When a revolution broke out, the time of the rebellion is one that completely covers, full of meanings, confused with it. The historian then do not ask only what happened but what was the meaning of that which had been happening. Moments that EP Thompson described in a classic passage on the questions of the historian to those old commoners no records: 4
These issues, when we examine a culture of manners, often have less to do with the processes and logic of change with the recovery of previous states of consciousness and textures of social and domestic relations. They have less to do with evolution than with being. As some of the major players in the history of our attention away, politicians, thinkers, entrepreneurs, general- a huge supporting cast, which we thought were just extras in the process, moving to fill the entire proscenium. If we are only concerned about the future, then there is full periods of history in which an entire sex has been neglected by historians, because women are rarely seen as prime actors in the political, military or economic. If we care about being, the exclusion of women from history then reduced to futility.
Seen from this viewpoint, the uprising is an eruption of being dominated in the political events of domination, in its development. To approach it the historian needs to look and see what your doing before bodies express terms that convey your words. No claims of the two revolutions said opening the prisons, to distribute the food, burning the files of justice and property, and execute to the hated. They did, however, in both cases the rebels. The historian does not touch judge whether it was right or was wrong, but to register that that was how it was. Unveiling
those moments in history has to do not only record the ideas of knowing own time and place, but also to investigate and recover the ways of doing and being.
Those ideas are certainly needed to organize the goals of a revolution. But the forms, the human bonds and imaginations through which this organization takes shape coming from behind. In memory of the rebels, in their life stories and legacy in this net in the workplace and life is transmitted from one generation to another. This is a story of places and regions and human beings who live, work, enjoy and give meaning to their lives.
That sense is what EP Thompson suggests we investigate when we are told that those dark and protagonists of these stories are concerned about being rather than for the future. It's the fine line that, even when parts of a historical process, distinguishes the rebellion of the revolution.
Soldiers and their families engage in Sonora to meet Villa's forces in Torreon, Coahuila, c. 1913 (photographer unknown). Mexico photograph taken from the book and revolution. Published by Fundación Televisa The revolt is a cut in the homogeneous time of history, says Walter Benjamin. It feeds the image of oppressed ancestors, not the vision of the descendants released. The political agenda for a future that will be opened by the evolution of the revolution. But the strength of the revolt without which there is no revolution comes from the accumulation of debris, accumulated grievances and humiliation by successive generations. Forse a rabbia antica, generazioni senza nome, gli urlarono vendetta [perhaps an ancient rage, nameless generations, clamored for revenge], said a song by Italian Francesco Guccini to explain the meaning of the meaningless gesture of a railway engineer in the early XX, back in Bologna, threw his locomotive crazy against a luxury train that ran in the opposite direction. Theaters and stadiums filled with young people chanted these verses in Italy in the seventies of last century.
The rebellion does not speak of the future, speaks of abolition of past wrongs. His exasperated violence seemingly meaningless and sometimes even contrary to its purposes, comes from another source than the imaginations of the future. It comes from a long chain of humiliations and offal, and humiliation own parents and grandparents. The revolution may lead to the Declaration of Human Rights and extended it in the proclamation of Olympe de Gouges, but the rebellion that triggered it was organizing in those minds of which arose from Doléances Cahiers, the memorials of grievances of the Revolution French.
want to stop the revolt, or at least interrupt, the time of humiliation and contempt. In his Theses on history, Walter Benjamin draws this break in a curious anecdote about the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris: 5
Once the first day of fighting, it happened that at nightfall the crowd, the darkness fell, in different neighborhoods the city and at the same time, began to attack the clocks. A witness, whose perception is perhaps due to random rhymes, wrote:
Who could believe it! It is said that in anger with the time, / a new Joshua, at the foot of each tower / shoot up to stop the day quadrants.
That cut in time recognized uniform domination and obedience can be accepted, or -not a revolution, a change in laws, institutions, property, forms and contents of domination itself. This has happened in all victorious revolutions: French, Haitian, Russian, Chinese, Algerian, Vietnamese, Cuban, Bolivian, the two Mexican revolutions.
These changes come prepared earlier by other companies and programs are announced, criticism and activities of political elites. But not these elites, even radical, which give body to break the old order and give way to new. Are different, the humiliated and offended, the protagonists of the material and physical act of revolt, without which no revolution but, at best, change in the established political control. Are those for whom life has become intolerable to them and to whom the rupture between the elites "of the Old Regime and the revolutionary-open space to break into the foreground of the scene. Perhaps
spatial dichotomy between actors and extras is contained the secret of what Benjamin, also in his thesis, called a fundamental aporia: 6
The history of the oppressed is a discontinuum. The task of history is to take over the tradition of the oppressed. [...] The continuum of history is that of the oppressors. While the representation of the continuum leads to the leveling of the discontinuum is the basis of all authentic tradition. Awareness of historical discontinuity is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the time of his action.
One of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, exiled since 1929, could write his History of the Russian Revolution, the work of writer, actor, historian and chronicler of events. In the preface to this work presented its own views on the preservation of past traditions in the genesis of the revolutionary rupture and the relationship between the rebellion of the people and the politics of their leaders: 7
The masses go into a revolution with a preconceived plan new society, but with a clear sense of not endure the old society. Only the guiding of his class has a political agenda, which, however, still needs to be tested by the events and the approval of the masses. [...] Only by studying the political processes of the masses themselves, can understand the role of parties and leaders, which in no way want to deny. They are an item, if not independent, but very important in this process. Without a guiding organization energy of the masses would dissipate like steam dissipates not contained in a boiler. But nevertheless, what moves things Not the boiler and the piston, but the steam.
His proposal to explain the process, then, is guided first by the make of the insurgents, and only after the words of their leaders. The dividing line between those that do, and this is what also separates rebellion and revolution.
Although in reality appear confused, there is no revolution without rebellion, he said, in the historian's task is essential to recognize that line. Quite a few stories of the Mexican revolutions are stories of political leaders, including the most radical, rather than the deep reasons of the oppressed to rise up and what were the feelings and processes in their consciences that they decided to run the risk of a rebellion.
former is now the dominant trend in the official celebrations of the two Mexican revolutions. Talk to them the voice and the memory of state institutions, ie the voice of order emerged from the revolution and not the many voices of breaking the previous order that was the essence of each of these rebellions. They are tales of the "continuum of history", Benjamin would say, not historical discontinuity embodied in revolutions. Thus the state commemoration of the Mexican revolution becomes a discourse of power and its institutions, as if the task and mission of the rebellions had been to found this power and not to destroy the powers formerly dominant. In those speeches
ranks continuity of discontinuity and the continued move to impermanence is the essence of every rebellion.
triumphal entry to Villa's Zapatistas and Mexico City on 6 December 1914, only time of the Revolution in the heads of the two sides agreed on a common. (Photo by Antonio Garduño). Mexico photograph taken from the book and revolution. Published by Fundación Televisa No one can ignore the changes in the economy, changes in the rules and forms of domination or crises and splits in the ruling elites who may be at the origin of every rebellion. But a task is the study of its causes and investigating other forms it takes, of what happens in the very heart of the rebellion, those modes of making and revolt that are repeated and renewed through time.
A rebellion, strikes, occupation of the physical or symbolic is a way of being together and peer, free from foreign control and to establish the bond of solidarity beyond blood ties and family ties commercial exchanges, including the salary link.
ties of a rebellion from the past and have settled in areas of joint work (planting, ship, mining, finance, industry, study) or living together (village, town, neighborhood, city). They carry a certain pride in our places, such as we, that now we rebel, we did our work and our lives. These are the places where it was created in the past the sense of community belongs to every rebellion. From them came the slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World: "An injury to one is an injury to all" - An injury to one is an injury to all. That
sense of community, history itself subordinate, has its sacred sites and places symbolic. This pride of our sites is usually transmitted between generations, although not registered in the stories. Go through stories, songs, stories from ancient to modern, from old to young, modern and young but then adapt them to new uses. But in a factory, a work area, a village, an indigenous community in the transmission time stories remain timeless as organizers and renewed feelings.
of these stories and their auras will build the future rebellions or protests, or challenges, although their motives and reasons are as different as the times. These narratives, however, have something in common. Remember, repeat, batch recreate that moment it broke the continuity of the humiliation imposed by the power of their rulers, even more when that power is stated in the line of racial distinction.
why the stories and myths of past transgressions, rather than register first economic changes featured in many stories, remembered and celebrated at all times and places of the rupture of the humiliation and the world since the reverse. Not that those do not matter. Is that these are the legendary moments of revolt.
The triumph of the Revolution aims to perpetuate. But they tend to dissolve, even if not disappear altogether in the new order that establishes the need for successful revolution. If that order is frozen in a pure authoritarian or despotic control, as has been recurrent in the revolutions of the last century, those stories and those myths back to their subordinates and recreate places in new and unusual ways.
This distinction between revolution and rebellion, even though both events are confused, is central to the task of the historian. For a revolution is not only what the books say or what they propose programs of their leaders, but above all makes the people rebel.
The genealogy of this done is a subject of priority for the research study of revolutions and rebellions, political agendas, actions and their imaginations.
In his manuscript on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin noted this thesis: 8
The class struggle, which never fails to be present for the historian trained in the thinking of Marx, is a clash around coarse and material things without which things can not survive high fine. However, it would be a mistake to think that in the struggle between classes, the latter only appear as loot for the winner. For nothing is so, because they say at the very heart of this confrontation. There appear and are mixed together taking the forms of faith, courage, cunning, perseverance and determination. And the irradiation of these forces, far from being absorbed by the struggle itself, extends into the depths of the human past. Every victory that has ever been conquered by the powerful, those have never ceased to dispute it. As these flowers that move toward the sun, the former things, driven by a mysterious heliotropism are turning to the other sun is rising in the horizon of history. Nothing is less visible than the change. Nothing is more important, either.
Revolt and Revolution, the eagle and the sun. It will be a revolution historian who knows in his heart to see the revolt, without confusing in one and not separate the two.
By Adolfo Gilly, Lecture at the centennial of the Mexican Revolution - Université du Québec à Montréal, October 12, 2010, and University of California, Berkeley, October 23, 2010.
NOTES 1. And indigenous Indians acted in conflict from 1808 to 1821, in various ways contribute to the creation of the Mexican nation. But his interests seldom joined a search of Indian rights and the promotion of the nation. The right indigenous, the Republic of India, Indian courts had been invented by colonial policies of the English monarchy. The nation and liberalism that soon came to lead the nation were born in opposition to indigenous law. No wonder that for decades many Indians negotiated to limit the nation and liberalism, fighting at key moments against national power and the liberal programs. (John Tutino, Indian and indigenous people in the wars of Independence and the Zapatista revolution, paper presented at the conference Perspectives on history, FCPS-Colmex, November 2009).
2. Eric Van Young, The other rebellion - the struggle for independence Mexico, 1810-1821, FCE, Mexico, 2006, p. 260.
3. Felipe Arturo Avila Espinosa, between him Porfiriato y la revolution - He interim government of Francisco León de la Barra, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico, 2005, p. 21.
4. Edward P. Thompson, History and Anthropology, in Making History - Writing on History and Culture, The New Press, New York, 1995, pp. 204-205.
5. Walter Benjamin, Ecrits français, Gallimard, Paris, 1991, p. 346.
6. Ibid., P. 352.
7. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Juan Pablos Editor, México, 1972, vol. I, p. 15.
8. Walter Benjamin, cit., P. 341.
By: Adolfo Gilly
From: enlacesocialista.org.mx
