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Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. Through economic concerns, elites created a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination, and independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that would nationalize a rich and productive economic apparatus.

Mexico, Interrupted investigates these economic hopes during the difficult decades between 1821, the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain, and 1852, a period of political polarization after the US-Mexico War that led the country to the brink of another armed conflict. Drawing on political and popular media, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsession with labor and idleness in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation.

Focusing on figures of work and its opposites, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs these decades’ “economic imaginaries of independence”: the political and cultural discourses that structured understandings, beliefs, and fantasies of the relationship between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. By bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, Gutiérrez Negrón offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates the history of the “spirit of capitalism” in the Americas.

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Latin America

Mexico

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Publié par	Vanderbilt University Press
Date de parution	15 juin 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780826505552
Langue	English

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Mexico, Interrupted
CRITICAL MEXICAN STUDIES
Series editor: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Critical Mexican Studies is the first English-language, humanities-based, theoretically focused academic series devoted to the study of Mexico. The series is a space for innovative works in the humanities that focus on theoretical analysis, transdisciplinary interventions, and original conceptual framing.
Other titles in the series:
The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation , by Cristina Rivera Garza
History and Modern Media: A Personal Journey , by John Mraz
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance , by Irmgard Emmelhainz
Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production , by Rebecca Janzen
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture , by Oswaldo Zavala
Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City , by Ben Gerlofs
Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias , by David Dalton
The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance , by Ignacio López-Calvo
Mexico, Interrupted
Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence
Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gutiérrez Negrón, Sergio, author.
Title: Mexico, interrupted : labor, idleness, and the economic imaginary of independence, 1821–1867 / Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Series: Critical Mexican studies ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022034837 | ISBN 9780826505538 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505545 (hardback) | ISBN 9780826505552 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505569 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Mexico—Economic conditions—19th century. | Mexico—Economic policy—19th century. | Mexico—History—1821–1861.
Classification: LCC HC135 .G85 2023 | DDC 338.972—dc23/eng/20220808
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034837
Para Ana María y Tomás
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1. The Colono: The Territory, the Future of Labor, and the Subject of Production
2. The Artisan: Industrialization, Labor, and the Modernization of Customs
3. The Vagrant: Vagrancy, Police, and the Opacity of the Social
CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book could have been many other, lesser books were it not for the direct or indirect influence of a lot of good people. It has already had multiple lives. It began as an introduction to a dissertation that was meant to be something else, led by Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, may he rest in peace. It then served as research for what ended up being a novel on contemporary labor, Los días hábiles , which is this book’s shadow. Upon meeting Zachary Gresham, Vanderbilt University Press’s acquisitions editor, it took its current and best form, in many ways because of his encouragement. I am indebted to him, and also to Ignacio Sánchez Prado for offering a model of a rigorous and curious scholarly life, and for curating the Critical Mexican Studies series, of which I am happy to be part. I am also beholden to my colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, Ana Cara, Sebastiaan Faber, Kim Faber, Claire Solomon, Patrick O’Connor, Patty Tovar, Yorki Encalada, and Blanche Villar, for their overall generosity.
Many of the ideas that underlie this project were explored while in conversation with the Conservative Sensibilities research group, led by Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik and Andrea Castro, and I feel lucky to collaborate with all its wonderful members. During Summer of 2018, two Oberlin College-funded research assistants, Zoe Kaplan and Sonia Bloom, helped me go through decades-worth of nineteenth-century newspapers, and their laborious notes and smart insights proved to be tremendously helpful as I found myself writing in the middle of a pandemic in 2020 and 2021. During the day-to-day wordsmithing and paragraph-crafting, I was virtually accompanied by my comadre Naomi Campa and Curtis Dozier, the two coolest classicists with whom to share a writing accountability group. Thank you, friends.
I am, of course, lucky to have had Ana María Díaz Burgos, my colleague and wife, at my side from the very beginning, and I am forever grateful for her love and support. Ana kept me on track whenever a new idea or unrelated primary sources promised the excitement of the new. Tomás, born during the writing of this book, also taught me to focus and be more intentional, and made my language and life all the richer, and I am thankful for him, too. This book is for them.
Introduction
Mexican independence was an economic event. From the earliest days of the insurgency, images of Spanish economic and fiscal exploitation were used to legitimize the uprising and its demands. The first insurgent periodical, El Despertador Americano (The American Awakener, 1810–11), consistently accused the Spanish of having “plundered, devastated and annihilated America” and of keeping the territory “always exhausted, always weak, in the most deplorable scarcity, the most absolute misery.” 1 For its editor, priest Francisco Severo Maldonado, the Spanish had not only taken control of the richest mines and the most productive soils, they had also, among other things, imposed monopolies that made it impossible for the honest individual to work so as to “provide himself at least an average subsistence.” 2 To add insult to injury, imperial functionaries had heavily taxed the population for decades, to the point that the poorest of the poor “finds himself forced to invoke death, as the only available end of his misery.” 3 In the face of such dire exploitation—the “yoke of this hardest and most horrible condition of all”—true liberty could only be, as Severo Maldonado had written in an earlier issue, “the freedom to break all obstacles to industry, to give occupation to our own so that they do not fester as they now fester in a forced idleness, so that we supply ourselves with all we need and free them from the obligation of buying everything from a seventh or eighth hand.” 4
The army general who would be Emperor, Agustín de Iturbide, insisted on this, too. More than ten years after El Despertador Americano , on October 13, 1821, the Gaceta Imperial , the recently rebranded official mouthpiece of Iturbide’s Army of the Three Guarantees, published and publicized two broadsheets that promised such release. These had originally been issued strategically and arbitrarily by Iturbide during his campaign months earlier, on June 30 of that year. One of the broadsheets argued that the previous “fatal administration” had, for the last decade, exacted disastrous duties on the populace just to enrich foreign coffers, in turn driving the locals to misery. “It is high time,” it read, “for [the newly independent nation’s] meritorious inhabitants to begin to experiment the difference that exists between the state of a people that enjoys its political liberty, and that of one that is subject to a foreign yoke.” 5 As a testament to the new regime’s commitment to fiscal liberation, the document went on to call for, and soon after to implement, the radical reduction and elimination of the fiscal and commercial burdens that had driven “all classes of men” to penury. The industry of a free population, the providential wealth of the land, and the workings of the free market would take care to yield the aggrandizement that was inevitable.
After a decade-long war, the economic promises of independence built a common ground between different sectors of the population. 6 Most, if not all, imagined separation from Spain, before and during its first decades, as a feat that nationalized, or that could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus. 7 A new, independent era of territorial sovereignty and autonomy was supposed to guarantee that the providential wealth of the land, its plentiful resources, and the labor of its peoples sustain the existence, survival and improvement of a just state and polity. 8 Freed from restraints, it was only a matter of time until the new Mexican nation would “shine its bright beacon of liberty” over Europe, the United States, and all other nations of the globe. 9
These expectations did not materialize, of course. The next half century would be marked by economic crises, political instability, foreign interventions, and a bloody civil war. Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain and the aftermath of the US-Mexico War. Drawing on pamphlets, legislation, congressional debates, reports, and newspapers of the period, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on three key and interrelated figures of work and their opposites in the period, Mexico, Interrupted attempts to piece together elements of the period’s economic imaginaries, the repertoire of political and cultural discourses, images, and stories that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between the economic futures of the nation and the life of an independent polity.
In its first months of existence, the new Mexican state fulfilled some of the promises it had made. It dissolved many of the viceregal fiscal instruments that survived the war, cut taxes and duties, paid the armies, and nationalized all of the standing debts the Viceroyalty owed to the remaining monied interests, whether local or international. The unspoken expectation behind such moves was that, soon en