ONE
PORFIRIAN MEXICO AND WORLD'S FAIRS

One
France and Her Followers

Paris and its fairs were long the laboratory and the school in which statesmen, scientists, and artists tested and learned about the modern world. The meaning of Mexico's presence in Parisian fairs can be grasped by asking two questions: What did universal expositions mean to France? What did France mean to Mexico's Porfirian elite? This chapter deals with these questions in order to place Mexico's concept of a modern nation in its historical and ideological context and to trace the wellsprings of what Mexico aspired to be during and after the Porfiriato—from the 1870s to the 1910S, in fact the first thirty years of relative political and social stability for independent Mexico.

The Paris 1889 Fair and Its Participants

The first issue of the Bulletin de l'Exposition Universelle de Paris 1889 asserted that "the law of progress is immortal, as progress itself is infinite."^[1] Armed with this faith in progress, the 1889 world's fair celebrated what the modern world considered the triumph of modern democratic, liberal, and republican values. Despite both domestic and foreign resistance, the explicit purpose of the exposition was to honor the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789.^[2] It was a universal as well as an international fair because it proposed to include all of humankind's knowledge and production in natural, hierarchical order.^[3] This intention was expressed in a specific classification of products into groups that corresponded to a particular view of the division of labor and harmony of things.^[4] The exposition was also international because it was meant to be attended by all important nations of the world. The idea of internationalism in the late nineteenth century embraced colonialism, and international expositions were thus attended by both nation-states and their colonies, which were an intrinsic component of national power and pride.

Indeed, the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition was—as several previous fairs had been—an ephemeral and diminutive portrait of what was then considered the modern world. It attempted to be an exact scale model of modern reality. The official commission in charge of the exposition maintained that the exhibition was the outcome of the order and logic of the years. That is, eleven years had been the interval between the 1855 fair and that of 1867, and between this last and that of 1878. Accordingly, the year 1889 was set to have a world exhibition. These cycles seemed to follow what a German thinker later labeled a ritualistic "pilgrimage of the commodity fetish."^[5]

Should the fair be a national event? Should it emphasize the commemoration of the French Revolution as a great national leap forward? Should the revolution be considered a universal patrimony? These and other questions were discussed within the framework of the unstable French Third Republic.^[6] After long debates, in 1884 the French President Jules Ferry issued the decree for the organization of an international fair to be held between 5 May and 31 October 1889.^[7] This was only one of many acts that were designed to secure a place for the revolution in the national consciousness. In fact, French modern nationalism owes to the Third Republic the taming and epic mystification of the French Revolution.^[8] For late-nineteenth-century Parisians, to arrange a universal exposition was almost a habit—after all, Paris's history and urban planning were replete with the remains of previous fairs. But once the world's fair project started to become reality, public and private concordance emerged on one issue: the Paris exhibition of 1889 was to be the greatest fair in the universe, in order to celebrate the most important revolution in modern times, and the principal source of France's universalism.

The 1889 Paris universal exposition was indeed the greatest fair of the nineteenth century, echoed only by the world's fair of 1900, also staged in the French capital. The cost of the fair, about 46 million francs, was covered by an arrangement between the state, the city council, and a group of private investors organized as an Association de Garantie. For France, this figure shows how prized world's fairs had become in the late nineteenth century, largely as a result of belief in their efficacy in promoting industrial development and national pride. In turn, this belief justified the huge expenditures involved. Had the cost of the fair been fully met by the French state alone, it would have consumed 15 percent of all French revenues for the year 1889.

The way in which world's fairs were financed shows the specific conception of the role of the state in the construction of the national image. The financing system of the 1889 Paris fair became characteristic of the French method. The first universal expositions arranged by France were financed totally with public money. However, due to the enormous losses of the Paris fair of 1878, in 1889 the system was divided into three financial components—state, city council, and private. By contrast, the British system relied less on

state intervention. British world's fairs were also controlled by a state agency, but the British Royal Commission was in charge of soliciting the necessary funding from private interests. The U.S. strategy for the economic management of world's fairs was even more dependent on private organization and funding.^[9]

As for Mexico, it was up to the state to finance Mexican participation at world's fairs as part of promoting national industrialization. As historians of Mexico's industrialization have argued, the state—directly formed by private interests—was the fundamental agent of industrialization.^[10] Thus the Mexican exhibit at the Philadelphia fair of 1876 was fully sponsored by the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The Mexican displays in Paris 1889, Paris 1900, and Chicago 1893 were also fully funded by the Mexican government. The same was true of Mexico's presence in the New Orleans exhibition of 1884. Government expenditures to sponsor these exhibitions consumed a significant percentage of the national budget, particularly if we consider that these were only ephemeral events.

The role of the Mexican state included public participation and sponsorship of private exhibitors.^[11] In fact, the French media acknowledged the remarkable industrial patronage of the Díaz regime. In 1891 Tout-d'Union , commenting on Mexico's performance at Paris, argued that expositions were not schools of imitation but modern showcases for new industrial and commercial needs. The sole role of government should be to facilitate private initiative, and Mexico was held up as an example of how this might be accomplished.^[12]

Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair took place within the context of an intricate international environment. After long debates, the Paris world's fair of 1889 finally commemorated the republican values of the French Revolution. Therefore, in addition to the traditional French enemies, several European monarchies were unwilling to celebrate the murderers of kings.^[13] Ultimately, a monarchical boycott of the exposition occurred, and in a show of solidarity, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Spain, England, Italy, the Low Countries, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden decided to have no official participation. However, thanks to French diplomatic efforts, private attendance was allowed by most of these monarchies.^[14]

England, the reigning industrial power, was not willing to sanction with its presence either the French industrial and military displays or the rhetorical republican nationalism of France. French patriotism adjusted quickly to the circumstances. French nationalism ideologically overcame the boycott through references to the modern consensus on universal truths and values. For France, what was important was that private scientific and industrial progress was exhibited in Paris. Although the assumption was that science and industry had no citizenship, their universal presence in Paris effectively reinforced French modern nationalism. The French republic was hence

viewed as the monarchy of science, and the attendance of a scientist such as Thomas Alva Edison was therefore itself a great royal approbation: "If the kings of war have refused to visit the 1889 exposition, who cares? We have the king of science [Edison]."^[15]

Although the French fair did not succeed in attracting the participation of all Europe, it was proclaimed as a great moment for the imperial and colonial pursuits of France. The French colonies had an enormous display on the Esplanade des Invalides. Various pavilions represented Cochin-China, Cambodia, Algeria, and the "villages" of Senegal, Gabon-Congo, New Caledonia, and Tonkin. The products and people from these regions were brought to Paris to round out the material and human circus of the exposition.^[16] Indeed, France's geopolitical concerns were part of the whole event. The official and nonofficial invitations to African, Asian, and Latin American countries were imbued with French imperialist longing that dated back to the two Napoleons.

From the French perspective of the time, the interests of France in Latin America were being seriously threatened by Germany, England, and the United States. In 1886, in La Revue Diplomatique , Auguste Meulemans candidly verbalized France's ambitions in Latin America on the eve of the international fair. For him, Hispanic American attendance at the fair would be rather sympathique (curious and entertaining). Such a presence would also be advantageous for France because, first, it could assure France's supremacy in a market of "forty million men who have our gustos [tastes], traditions, and aptitudes." Second, it could help France promote the collection of needed statistical data and the establishment of French chambers of commerce in Latin America. Both were important considerations in view of the proposed opening of the Panama Canal.^[17]

In truth, in the late nineteenth century all worldwide events took place within the economic and political context established by imperialist expansions and rivalries.^[18] This was especially true for Latin American countries, which had acquired the very concept of Latinness from the imperialist ambitions of Napoleon III and which had been economically, and especially intellectually, tied to France.^[19] French efforts to encourage Latin American participation had particular import in Porfirian Mexico.

Taking advantage of the European boycott to more prominently display their own advantages and promise, Latin American countries undertook costly exhibits at the 1889 Paris fair. After all, for non-European countries such as Mexico, the language of modern culture and politics was largely animated by the French Revolution and its consequent developments. Beyond a doubt, if modernity was the goal, France was the place to be in 1889.^[20] Hence, among the countries that officially accepted the French invitation were Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, El Salvador, Uruguay,

Venezuela, and Mexico. Nevertheless, there were even more distinguished guests from the New World. The United States was among the "noble" guests. French media were less captivated by Latin America's products than by Edison's phonograph, Tiffany's glass, and the "Buffalo Bill Wild West Show."^[21] They were impressed by both the prosperity and the industrialism of Americans, who were, in the words of a French art critic, "enfants prodiges " who "undertake the conquest of science with a constant fever."^[22]

For all countries of the New World, the pragmatic goal in joining international exhibitions was basically the same—to offer raw materials and to publicize a modern image of the nation in order to attract immigrants and investment. However, for the United States—the enfants prodiges —European world's fairs were occasions to certify already achieved strength, advertising, as an American historian candidly argued, "American power and greatness to the world."^[23] In essence, whereas Mexico and other Latin American countries had to produce—industrially, commercially, artistically, and scientifically—the image of a modern nation from zero, countries like the United States had to reproduce and redefine the American image as a military and industrial power and to work hard to gain acknowledgment as a modern nation in culture, the arts, and education. Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina could never equal the success of the United States in international fairs or match its theatrical capacity, of which the best example was Chicago's 1893 Columbian fair, a rough copy of the 1889 Paris exposition.

While the United States was already the promised land, countries such as Mexico and Brazil were at least promising nations. Hence Mexican rhetoric made constant reference to unexploited resources and a benign climate that made Mexico "a country picturesque beyond description and beautiful beyond belief . . . with that indefinable charm which those indolent, lotus-eating lands exercise always over the sterner and colder nature of the northman."^[24] Throughout the Porfirian period this image of an unexploited and rich land was fostered nationally and reproduced internationally. Equally, Brazil was always portrayed as a "promising tropical country."^[25] Bolivia, in turn, aimed to lure European investors with its abundant mineral resources. Therefore, a tunnel of silver, which functioned as the entrance to Bolivia's pavilion, constituted both an exact copy of the entrance to the mine at Pulacayo and a Midas-like experience for visitors. In contrast, Argentina employed French sculptors, designers, and engineers to build the likeness of the "whitest" and richest of the Latin American nations. It constructed a monumental French-style pavilion, inside which Argentina introduced itself as a young woman reclining on a cow, having at her feet three male figures, denoting industry, commerce, and livestock.^[26]

In Mexico, therefore, in an effort to construct a cosmopolitan and modern image of the nation, the Porfirian elite began a portrait of both their country and themselves. This, they believed, would have several useful func-

tions. It would serve as Mexico's passport to modernity's paradise, as their own sense of identity and unity, and as a source of domestic legitimacy.

The Mexican Paradox of Afrancesamiento

Despite the abortive and resented French-supported empire of Maximilian in Mexico (1864-1867), by the 1880s France was the foremost cultural and intellectual model for the Porfirian elite. Whereas Mexican liberals after the 1860s were ambivalent toward Europe as a whole, most shared a nationalistic republicanism which responded sympathetically to the reestablishment of the republic in France. And once positivist ideas—which were unmistakably French—were widely accepted, the concept of scientific politics embraced by Mexican elites could not be dissociated from the French milieu. In fact, cultural and intellectual analyses of the period often have been written as the history of Mexico's afrancesamiento (Francophilia). It is important to bear in mind, however, that Mexican elites were not seeking to be French specifically, merely to be modern. Thus Mexican emulations were an echo of a wider process that included many other nations and, even within France, the Paris-like modernization of rural areas.^[27] France, as arbiter of late-nineteenth-century culture and politics, was a process of colonization and homogenization of which the ostensible center was Paris but which in fact had no center. Ideas, products, and people circulated throughout the world in an uncontrollable fashion. Mexican and French elites, as well as those of other Western nations, were simultaneously colonizers and colonized in this process.

For Mexico, this process of cultural and political colonization was composed of a twofold perspective: on one hand, Mexico's somewhat idealized view of France; and on the other, France's own striving to be the ideal picture of progress and cosmopolitanism, of which the world's fairs, and Mexico's presence in them, were the main expressions.

The events of the French Third Republic were followed closely by the emerging Porfirian elite. The new French republic paralleled the consolidation of a stable political status quo in Mexico.^[28] As historian Charles Hale has shown, the consolidation of the opportunistic French republic was very well received by intellectuals like Justo Sierra, Santiago Sierra, and Francisco Cosmes. Indeed, in achieving a peaceful political balance marked by conservatism, France became again an unparalleled model. According to the newspaper of the Porfirian avant-garde liberal group, La Libertad , the French Third Republic was an example of a liberal party that, in turning into a party, of government, had also somehow become conservative.^[29]

Throughout the 1880s the emerging Porfirian elite—more urban and cosmopolitan than ever before—readily absorbed and idealized French thought. For the elite of Mexico at this time, Hippolyte Taine's scientific

determinism was the model for the construction of scientific politics, even though Taine's ideas were being seriously challenged in France at the same time. These challenges eventually were raised in Mexico as well, especially in the 1910S with the intellectual group of El Ateneo de la Juventud (see chapter 12), but in the 1880s Mexicans still saw France as an unstoppable economic, intellectual, and political wave of progress. Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair, therefore, represented more than the achievement of economic advantages. It also symbolized Mexico's quest to be recognized as a nation that formed part of the cosmopolitan world. It was to be part of Zola's France, from which, as Justo Sierra later argued, Mexicans learned "the brutal and sinister poem of matter."^[30] It was a dream come true, epitomized in a poem composed by Rafael de Zayas Enríquez for the awards ceremony to honor Mexican exhibitors in Paris 1889:

Thanks my God! It came true, 
the dream I conceive in my delirium, 
patriotic and poetic, 
Juárez and Porfirio's Anáhuac 
I have seen honored 
by the France of Thiers and Gambetta.^[31]

However, in honoring and making use of French culture and history, Mexicans had to make them fit the epic structure of their own intellectual landscape. In 1899 Francisco Bulnes observed that France had hypnotized Mexico and the rest of the "Latin" countries.^[32] In the same way, in his poem entitled "Le Mexique, a la France," Auguste Genin, a Franco-Mexican writer and entrepreneur resident in Mexico and a long-time freelance writer for the Mexican government, paid poetic tribute to France on behalf of Mexico in verses that simultaneously and candidly expressed the Mexican idealization of France and Mexico's intellectual self-conformation to that idealization:

O France! It is from thee that books come, 
it is from thy lucid spirit that my spirit becomes intoxicated, 
my voice is the echo of your voice; 
my sons love thy sons; thy festivities are my festivities 
and it is through thy singing that today my poets 
fascinate their lyres in Mexico. 
Their accents touched upon thy heart 
because their genius 
is born under the sun of thy infinite glory 
from a spark inspired by the vision of thee, 
Alarcón and Corneille have walked together, 
Ignacio Ramírez resembles Voltaire, 
as Juárez resembles Gambetta. 
France, I have Juan de Dios Peza, my sweet François Coppée; 
Guillermo Prieto sings my epic poem,

A Béranger close to my national symbols, 
Gorostiza, for me, is Collin d'Harleville; 
Sierra is Saint-Beuve and Casasus, Delille; 
Altamirano, Mirabeau!^[33]

In turn, the French media considered almost all aspects of Mexico's presence in Paris not so much a self-serving Mexican extravaganza as a "great manifestation in honor of France."^[34]

The idealized France emulated by Latin American republics in fact existed in, and only in, the terrain of the world's fair, and indeed the 1889 exhibition helped France persuade itself of its greatness. Beyond the fairgrounds, however, and beyond the apparent political and social consensus they epitomized, France was still recovering from the aftermath of its disastrous defeat at the hands of Prussia: Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. In addition, the consequences of the French commune could still be felt in the Paris of the Third Republic. Nonetheless, for France the 1880s were an era of striking economic growth and resurgent nationalism. Just as the debt to Germany was paid early, "La Marseillaise" was made the French national anthem in 1879, and July 14th was proclaimed the national holiday. It was the era of debates regarding patriotic monuments, especially to honor the French Revolution, an era that combined republicanism with nationalism and both with positivism.^[35] Yet political instability was such that arrangements for the celebration of the centenary of the 1789 revolution were only finalized at the last moment.^[36]

In truth, the year 1889 may be analytically viewed as a small fragment of the rapid process of transformation of late-nineteenth-century French society. In the late 1880s France underwent simultaneous and accelerated changes, including the growth of the working class in both size and importance. Political protests by socialists and anarchists were common and frequently violent, eventually resulting in the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894.^[37]

The perception of contemporaries about the fragility of the social balance of their era was expressed in the Paris exposition of 1889. Great emphasis was placed on the well-being of the working class—a sign of modernism. To be socially and politically enlightened within a modern idealized world meant, hence, to be committed to an intricate combination of sanitary, anthropological, criminological, industrial, Saint-Simonian, and educational concerns about the lower classes, or at least to advertise such concerns. The utopian picture of a world rationally ordered and guided both by the entrepreneurial spirit and by science was not at odds with the frank economic, imperialist, and racist aspects of the French world's fair. Indeed, the socialism of French fairs ought to be understood as a part of the attempt to produce an idealized portrait of the modern world; that is, it furnished the

utopian ingredients indispensable for a worldview that could remain an alluring hope despite all odds.

Through its churches and philanthropism, Saint-Simonian thought generated a sort of socialist education that was the ideological point of reference for numerous middle-class professionals, and not merely in France. They, in turn, started to play an important role in the growing technocratic states of the late nineteenth century. The international fairs were, as historian Pascal Ory argues, the common experience of these professionals.^[38] Economists such as Le Play, a Catholic monarchist who had a great concern for the situation of workers and who institutionalized sociological inquiry to measure the true situation of the lower classes, fulfilled the state's technocratic tasks during the middle of the nineteenth century. Le Play himself organized the imperial French exhibition of 1855, and his follower, Jean-Baptiste Krantz, directed France's first republican fair. Alfred Picard, the force in the organization and architectural works of the 1889 fair, together with George Berger, director-general of operations, was inspired by Le Play's legacy. In 1889 Picard helped include a class in hygiene and public charity in the fair as well as a special exhibit on social economy.^[39]

In addition, the social recruitment of political elites in late-nineteenth-century France was changing. The old military men and politicians began to share power with a bureaucracy of technocrats, and French world's fairs echoed this social change. Civil engineering influenced and in turn gained strength from world's fairs and their industrialist and Saint-Simonian inspirations. Engineers, as well as doctors, architects, and other professionals, obtained a well-defined political place more or less linked to their particular expertise. Thus the growth of technocracy created an illusion of non-ideological politicians—neutral and scientifically objective experts—who reinforced the idea of "scientific politics" as nothing more than management of the state.^[40]

For late-nineteenth-century France (or Mexico) to achieve modern government organization, it was necessary to develop the ideology of scientific politics. To do so, a technocracy was required. However, universal scientific politics proved to be a selective ideological discourse that depended on both the circumstances of each specific country and the interests of its national elite. In fact, Mexico's attendance at Parisian fairs also illustrates the emergence of a Mexican technocratic elite. By the late 1880s the political group known as the Científicos was emerging as the elite that claimed to rule the country scientifically. Economists (including Joaquin Casasus, josé Yves Limantour, and Emiliano Busto), engineers (such as Gilberto Crespo, Antonio de Anza, and Luis Salazar), and doctors (for example, Domingo Orvañanos, Eduardo Liceaga, and José Ramírez) were in attendance at the Mexican exhibit in Paris and very much a part of Mexican politics.

The social concerns of Mexican technocrats, however, did not echo those of the France they aspired to imitate in 1889. In fact, in 1888 Manuel Flores, a member of the Mexican exhibition team, was commissioned to evaluate the French plans for an exhibition of social economy. After reviewing the plans, he argued: "As can be seen, the Exposition on Social Economy is . . . a vast statistical work about the present and real conditions of the working class." For Flores, Mexico had no cooperative societies or any sort of workers' organization that could be exhibited in a social economy display, and Mexico especially lacked fabricated hygienic housing for workers. Social economy, understood as an elaborate French combination of Saint-Simonianism, socialism, and social Catholicism, was not a Mexican preoccupation.^[41] Flores's advice was, in the last analysis, to exhibit the benefits that came from having no social concerns at all: "Mexico cannot join the exposition of social economy. . .. The statistical data that Mexico is able to submit in this regard . . . should only appear in the official section of the Mexican exposition, as a way of making the world learn about the conditions of our workers from the point of view of their meager salaries, their austerity, resistance, and working capacity; these are qualities that distinguish them from European workers."^[42]

Porfirio Díaz himself was aware of workers' protests in Europe—he was informed by Mexican diplomats and travelers. He expressed concerns regarding the workers' discontent, but he wished his country to remain exempt from these problems. In 1891 he wrote to Vicente Riva Palacio, "Of course I am aware of labor protests in Europe" and—no matter that Mexicans' daily workload exceeded eleven hours—added, "I believe that European governments ought to give workers the eight-hour day they request." His ambivalence was such that he acknowledged the prudence of workers in their protests but believed it to be the consequence of official repression. Díaz, like the wizards of progress, thought that this type of bourgeois European concern did not apply to Mexican workers. In the last analysis, he said to Riva Palacio, the workers' victory over the bourgeoisie would mean that "they [will] all become bourgeoisie."^[43]

Mexican indifference to French social concerns can also be observed in Mexico's participation in the congresses affiliated with the 1889 exposition. Of the thirteen congresses that dealt with social issues, Mexico attended only five, whereas Mexican representatives were present at nearly all of the artistic and scientific congresses, including those dealing with pigeon breeding and with colonial questions.^[44]

The condition of women was another concern that Mexican Científicos did not seriously consider. French world's fairs gradually included concern with the condition of women in the social economy exhibits, whereas U.S. fairs contained women's pavilions and buildings. At these, in addition to the traditional domain assigned to women, suffrage and social issues were ad-

dressed by women themselves. Mexico's displays at the women's exhibitions in Philadelphia (1876), New Orleans (1884), and Chicago (1893) illustrate the growth of a female Porfirian aristocracy. Whereas in Philadelphia and in Paris 1889, numerous women individually sent samples of their woven or embroidered textiles, in Chicago a Ladies' Board (Junta de Señoras) was created and was headed by no less than Carmen Romero Rubio, Porfirio Díaz's wife. But these Mexican exhibits only reinforced traditional female roles.^[45] The social implications of modernity, then, were at the bottom of the modernization agenda of Porfirian Mexico.

The year 1889 can also be viewed as an especially meaningful time in the political transformation of the French Third Republic. The stable and scientific French republic that was featured in Mexican accounts was at odds with both the perceptions of the French people and the European view of France. By the 1880s republicanism had lost its utopian appeal for some sectors of French society. The republic—reduced to political bargaining among numerous factions—faced economic and military failure. In addition, the republican spirit was seriously threatened by waves of scandals that began in 1887 and continued through the Dreyfus affair in 1894. Illegal traffic in Legions of Honor brought about a government crisis that concluded with the dismissal of President Grevy in 1887. In turn, the Panama Canal Company started to collapse in 1889, exposing a Pandora's box of corruption in the French government.

Political discontent and what might be called revenge nationalism finally threatened to disrupt the political status quo of the 1880s French republic. The traditional opposition between radicals and opportunists was seriously endangered by the emergence of Gen. Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger.^[46] By January 1889 the fragile French republic seemed about to succumb to the peculiar Boulanger, whose party knew how to appeal to popular nationalistic sentiments, to the appetite for revenge against Bismarck's Germany, and to the exposure of republican corruption. Despite Boulanger's political strength, his expected coup d'état never occurred. Instead, after being exiled, he died in the arms of his lover, an ending worthy of the French belle epoque.

Hence it was Sadi Carnot—the obscure president who emerged in 1889 as a compromise among the republican factions and the victor over Boulanger—who inaugurated the 1889 world's fair. Carnot undoubtedly gained public confidence and political strength as a result of the fair's pomp and glitter, a fact that was not lost on William Henry Bishop, a U.S. journalist at the Paris exposition: "If the Exposition can serve as a bond for keeping the peace for even six months, its promoters will have built better than they knew."^[47]

In addition, in the late 1880s French nationalism drew strength from France's expanding colonial empire. The isolationist nationalism of the conservatives was overcome, and colonialism began to be seen as part of the nation's strength. This was especially true after the resignation of Bismarck in

1890 and the signing of the Russo-French pact that established a new European balance of power which permitted France to embark on more colonial adventures.

By 1889 the French economy showed signs of slow recovery, and controversy began regarding the merits of the different projects for national economic development. There were good reasons for this debate: in the early 1880s France had been second only to Britain as an industrial power, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had declined to fourteenth place.^[48] In addition to increasing anxiety about industrial weakness vis-à-vis Germany, England, and the United States, there were also worries about the constant decline in France's birthrate.^[49] Small wonder that a well-established rhetorical faith in the free market came to be challenged by protectionist policies designed to encourage national development.

French precariousness in the 1880s is best demonstrated in the cultural and intellectual realm. In French intellectual circles the 1880s saw the questioning of the belief in science and progress. The positivist consensus, which the world's fair epitomized, started to be attacked by an "antipositivist reaction in science."^[50] By the early 1890s French intellectuals started to talk about the bankruptcy of science.^[51] Nationalism nevertheless remained a strong, though ambiguous, component of French cultural life. It included, on one hand, the universalist tradition rooted in the French Revolution—that is, a belief in rationalistic, democratic, and liberal values—and, on the other hand, a more parochial nationalism based on local interests and on racial arguments. Nonetheless, throughout the Third Republic universalist tendencies seemed to dominate the political and intellectual life of Paris.^[52] Victor Hugo's funeral ceremonies in 1885 were a grandiose extravaganza of French national pride understood as a universal patrimony; they honored a national poet but indeed celebrated a universal man.^[53] However, nationalism started to be influenced by certain social concerns which in turn were saturated by new scientific theories. This was especially noticeable in literature—for instance, in Émile Zola's naturalistic fiction. Yet by the late 1880s naturalism came under attack in French intellectual circles, and the love-hate relationship with naturalism eventually became the important underlying factor of the intellectual life of fin-de-siècle France. Then symbolism—as pioneered by Verlaine and Mallarmé—emerged as the new intellectual vogue, at the same time as Baudelaire was canonized. In art, although impressionists and their existential anguish for the temporariness of modern life had been visible since 1874, high culture was formed by the approved bourgeois taste of the salons' dogmatic style, neoclassical sculpture and architecture, and the imitation of Henry II's decorative style. The 1880s brought the consolidation of a noncanonical culture: in 1889, while the exposition's art gallery exhibited Roman-like marble sculptures, the Moulin Rouge opened its doors, and

the Chat Noir and Le Mirliton cabarets offered a new kind of Bohemia for the bourgeoisie escaping modern life.^[54]

For outsiders, French culture was often understood as a high cultural production which readily became a universal canon, making it difficult to distinguish between what was merely an expression of French nationalism and what were actually universal values. In history, Michelet had solved this distinction by making France equivalent to the universe. In literature, Victor Hugo had resolved this confusion by making France the world in his panegyric to the 1855 Paris exposition: "O France, adieu! You are too great to be merely a country . . .. You are so great that you soon will no longer be. You will cease to be France, you will be Humanity . . .. Resign yourself to your immensity . . . O my country, and, as Athens became Greece, as Rome became Christendom, you, France, become the world."^[55]

The 1889 fair combined both universalist (French)conservative art and progressive industry and science. Technology in 1889 was already more than mere machine making. It included its social appreciation, experience, and suffering.^[56] For France, as for industrialized Europe, technology was a generous, albeit awe-inspiring, promise. This was expressed, for instance, by an ironic prayer directed to the Eiffel Tower by Émile Goudeau: "Oh iron lady, pray for us, you who are in heaven, Turrisferrea, ora pronobis, peccatoribus [iron tower, pray for us sinners]."^[57]

In short, beyond the fairgrounds, beyond the Boulevards Pigalle, Montmarte, and Saint Germain, beyond the cafés, a France of insurmountable economic difficulties, political instability, and cultural uncertainty lay hidden from visitors such as the Latin American elites who went to Paris to learn the majestic lesson represented by the exposition. At the time, France was experimenting with unorthodox doctrines to catch up with industrialization, improvising political alliances to maintain stability, undertaking social reforms in fear of revolution, and questioning the positivist and neoclassical intellectual and cultural canon. Latin American elites did not see this France—it was beyond their view of the modern world picture as learned through the extravagant fairs of Paris. As for instability, poverty, and chaos, Latin Americans must have thought that such weaknesses were exclusively theirs, along with marginality. The world's fair of 1889 was an illusory lesson in progress, but nonetheless a great lesson in comparison with which everything else seemed to be secondary.

Two
The Imperatives of Mexican Progress

Mexico began its great performances at world's fairs in the 1880s. The same decade saw the end of the turbulence that had characterized the country since independence and the beginning of the modern Mexican nation-state.^[1] Progress thereafter was a bizarre amalgamation of the collective hopes of the elite, actual industrial and social changes, rhetorical consensus, and constant accommodation between modern and traditional patterns. To trace the modern connotations of progress in Mexico, I analyze the political and economic centralization of power in the 1880s as an inherent component of the formation of those who created the image of the modern Mexican nation. What characteristics of late-nineteenth-century Mexican political life made possible the conscious and sophisticated attempts to summarize the idea of the nation in Paris 1889, Chicago 1893, or Paris 1900? What economic interests and conditions permitted and benefited from these Mexican displays? Were these exhibits mere facades orchestrated with Machiavellian cleverness to support the economic interests of the elites, or did they indeed constitute the only substance from which nationhood could have been made? To answer these questions it is necessary, first, to abandon the idea of establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the Mexican extravaganzas in Paris and the political and economic condition of the country. Let us instead look for the common ground that simultaneously supported and was promoted by events like Mexico's presence in Paris 1889, Porfirio Díaz's third election, the emergence of the Científicos, and the promotion of foreign investment and immigration as part of an elite plan for economic development. In search of this common ground, we must examine what I term the political, intellectual, and social commonplaces and the dineros (economics) of those times.

Commonplaces

On 1 December 1888 Diaz began his third presidential term, the second in a row after the Manuel Gonzalez interim. Díaz was in power, as Justo Sierra cynically argued, "less by the vote than by the national will."^[2] By this date, the caudillos of the first years of the Porfirian regime had become less caudillo-like. Through military, political, and economic means the revolutionary group had established a relatively homogenous power base. As different political groups, especially those headed by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and José María Iglesias, were reconciled and absorbed into the Liberal Party, shared interests gave rise to a relatively cohesive elite. Furthermore, the old economic oligarchies were gradually becoming as one with the new political and economic groups.^[3] The tone this elite gave to urban life created the impression that Mexico was enjoying a belle epoque.^[4] With political opposition either dissipated or mastered, with increasing international recognition, and—after 1885—with relative economic stability, Porfirian Mexico was indeed embarked on the creation of a modern (that is, nineteenth-century) national economy, society, and image.

By 1889 this elite was so linked by mutual interests as to make any attempt at a quarrel treacherous for them all. They had begun to consolidate their wealth with that of the northern and central mining interests, of the railroad magnates, and of the speculators in central Mexico. Most of them, in addition, played a role as intermediaries with foreign interests. Increasingly, this elite started to look to the world outside. They were, as one German commissioner called them, the cosmopolitans.^[5]

The 1880s were the years in which the Porfiriato started to exhibit itself as the inevitable, necessary, and optimal political solution. Although the Científicos did not become consolidated until the middle of the 1890s, by 1889 technocrats were already replacing the old caudillos, and the battle cry of the decade was more administration, less politics.^[6] Díaz himself, having married Manuel Romero Rubio's aristocratic daughter, resembled a statesman more than a caudillo. Underscoring this transformation, Díaz, a mestizo from Oaxaca, began to be portrayed as whiter and whiter on the countless canvases that were painted of him at this time.^[7]

In addition, a new generation of intellectuals and politicians began to influence the direction of this elite. The early ideas of Mariano Otero and Gabino Barreda were echoed by the group called La Libertad, headed by the brothers Santiago and Justo Sierra.^[8] Justo characterized this period as one of "diplomatic discipline, of order, of peace." These qualities were necessary for the achievement of the "only supreme goals"—freedom and "patria " (country). But colonization, an ample labor force, abundant capital, and efficient means of communication were also needed to achieve those goals in Mexico.^[9] Therefore, the legal equality of all citizens (including Indians),

strong government, and liberalism's harmony of proprietors were considered natural ingredients in the emergence of a scientific management of politics.^[10] For Mexico this era was, as Alan Knight has argued, "the end of ideology."^[11]

The centralization of power and administration achieved during the 1880s, though more comprehensive than before, still could not encompass the diversity and distances of the country. Vast sectors of the population remained cut off. Even so, the 1880s saw unprecedented efforts to achieve a centralized and coherent administration, a more or less consolidated political elite, a unified internal market, and a well-defined and well-promoted national culture.

A rhetorical piece may serve to recapitulate the commonplaces of late 1880s Mexican polity. In May 1889 Alfredo Chavero, a long-time member of the Porfirian exhibition team, addressed a panegyric to ex-president Lerdo de Tejada, Díaz's former enemy, who had died in exile in April:

Lerdo may rest at ease in this land which is his own; Juárez the indomitable, Ocampo the inflexible, Zaragoza who taught the world with how much glory one can be defeated, they all rest within it. This land of Mexico is worthy of the distinguished maestro [Lerdo de Tejada], accustomed as it is to guarding the purest silver and dazzling gold in its entrails. In closing this grave, an altar is erected, watched in silence under the shadows of the night, by science, freedom, and la patria.^[12]

In this sermon, as in countless political speeches, all of the political components of the late-nineteenth-century Porfirian formula for a modern nation were included. First, an official requiem for Lerdo de Tejada, leader of the Lerdista group, adversary of Díaz's group, epitomizes the idea of reconciliation, which was understood as national maturity. The nation had grown up; previous conflicts were part of its unstable adolescence. This belief was constantly repeated regarding not only politics but economic and social issues as well. The truth, especially the new truth in a recently built nation-state, was a matter of repetition.

Reconciliation, in fact, meant the achievement of an internal political balance after the defeat of the Lerdista liberals. Although the Diaz regime did not overcome what some authors have termed political and economic atomization,^[13] it did institute a central authority, a central command based, above all, on solid, common material interests. It was an order founded on mutual elite convenience, and their solidarités , whether modern or traditional, were rooted in the inherent pragmatism, amodern and atraditional, demanded by the exercise of power.^[14]

Second, Chavero's discourse alluded to the crystallization of an Olympus of heroes for a modern nation: Juárez and Ocampo as national idols of pristine liberal justice, Zaragoza as military hero of a nation that, with no victories in war to venerate, had to create the national epic out of losses, an epic

of triumphant capitulations to consummate the greatest victory—peace and stability. This national epic—as we will see in the examination of the Mexican Aztec Palace in Paris 1889—was crucial in the creation of a symbolic horizon where regional and ideological differences could be surmounted. But in fact one of the mandatory roles of the national state—and perhaps its ontological raison d'être—was theatrical: to invent, re-create, and manage the national mythology.

Third, Chavero raised the idea of a nationalism constituted by both the economic potential and the beauty of the Mexican territory. As Francisco Xavier Clavijero or Alexander von Humboldt or Bernardo de Balbuena had in earlier times, by the 1880s the Porfirian elite had come to regard the country as immensely rich, unexploited, and naturally splendorous.^[15] By this date the great economic potential and scenic grandeur of the nation had become even more well known with the development of charts of all sorts, statistics, paintings, photographs, and exhibitions of products. Immigrants would surely come, Mexicans believed, if only they heard about Mexico's beauty and wealth.

Fourth, Chavero incorporated the unifying ideas and myths that had composed the Porfirian liberal consensus of the 1880s—that is, science, patriotism, and freedom. Together, these three safeguarded Lerdo's grave in the same way they protected the nation as a whole. This conception of science included a complex network of collective certainties that explained and enforced educational, political, and daily-life decisions—a view related to the emergence of positivism and of a particular Mexican Darwinism, both of which have been widely studied.^[16] But this conception of science went beyond a mere consumption of foreign ideas; it included attempts to be a part of and to understand the comprehensive and dominant world-view of modern times. No nation was modern if it did not follow the natural—that is, scientific-order of things and possess a scientific organization.

By the late nineteenth century the notion of patria was directly linked to a weighty generational historical experience that included both the old criollo patriotism and the liberal nationalism fortified by two painful wars of intervention.^[17] The Porfirian elite, however, added to the old understanding of patna a more intelligible historical, political, and geographical content: the first comprehensive synthesis of patriotic history, the reorganization of bureaucracy at all levels, and the increasing scientific study of Mexico's territory. Freedom, in contrast, was the most ethereal of the rhetorical resources of the Porfirian elite. They assigned to the Western idea of freedom only a few narrow connotations: political (freedom from violence), international (freedom from the oppression of other nations), and economic (freedom of the market).

Finally, Chavero's oration was expressed in the eloquent style of the period, which, far from being merely an accessory of late-nineteenth-century

culture, was an intrinsic component of the ideals mentioned above—political reconciliation, nationalism, and scientism. For the idea of a modern nation could hardly be conceived without its rhetorical style. In constructing a nationalist ideology, the distinctions between form and content vanished. The so-called imagined communities of the late nineteenth century were, as was cultural modernity itself, a matter of form; that is, a question of style. Thus the Mexican exhibits in world's fairs fought for the form they believed to be the closest synonym of the modern form. And this effort was managed by politicians and technocrats who simultaneously were poets, writers, and his-torians^[18] —at best, truly men of letters; at worst, picos de oro (silver tongues), as historian Luis González characterized them.^[19]

The national project articulated by the Porfirian elite for such fairs as the 1889 Paris exhibition was but a miniature version of the above-mentioned features. When Chavero honored Lerdo, and when the exhibitions team prepared Mexico to join the Paris world's fair of 1889, the country had attained a political and economic stability unknown throughout the nineteenth century. Peace seemed to be the most significant achievement of those years.

Peace meant political and economic reconciliation after decades of political unrest and economic chaos. But once achieved, peace also constituted the first substantial political consensus since independence, and to maintain it and protect it became a collective goal. An Argentine observer of Mexico's display at the 1900 Paris exposition clearly saw this in commenting on Diaz's regime: "The need for repose is a social sensation that precedes the emergence of these arbitrary regimes; when peoples are tired of civil unrest, such a caudillo-like regime is the consequence of the search for peace at all costs."^[20]

For a long time, peace was considered a primary requirement for the consolidation of a governing elite. Oddly enough, once peace was visible it became the reason for this elite's unity and relative cohesion. Yet peace alone was not enough; it had to be transformed into productive and manageable tranquility. Thus, above all peace was the sine qua non for economic progress. Because foreign capital, Northern European immigration, and improved communications were considered economic necessities, domestic peace was viewed as an indispensable component of the economy. Hence the enjoyment of peace became the construction of a modern nation. In essence, peace meant the nation, as shown by the spirit of the 1889 exposition:^[21] only in the aftermath of war, Mexicans believed, could the nation develop its natural attributes.

In sum, in the late 1880s the Porfirian elite achieved a clear awareness of the coherence and unity of its interests and, therefore, a collective expression of its ambitions. It must have seemed as though the past had been overcome and as though, for the first time in independent Mexico, the present and the future had an articulate and palpable affinity.

Dineros

For Mexico, the last two decades of the nineteenth century were a time of unique economic transformation that, despite its failures and problems, can be depicted as a profound process of modernization in the contemporary sense of the term. In fact, twentieth-century Mexican industrial development is inconceivable without its nineteenth-century origins, especially without Porfirian industrial development.^[22] While so-called traditional economic structures merged with modern patterns, the characteristic problems of nineteenth-century world economies started to appear in Mexico. What historian Stephen Haber has called "obstacles to industrialization"—insecure property rights, low per capita income growth, precapitalist agricultural organization, lack of a national market—were recognized and addressed at the end of the 1880s.^[23]

In the 1880s the Mexican economy seemed to have entered a period of sustained growth; the first part of the decade saw substantial investment in railroads and overall economic growth. The economy experienced a severe financial crisis in 1884,^[24] but within the whole Porfirian era—from the 1870s to the 1910s—the period between 1885 and 1891 can be seen as a time of relatively healthy economic growth. In contrast, a combination of factors—among them the decline of international silver prices and a series of bad years for agriculture—led to a profound economic crisis in the 1890s, which, among many other things, prevented Mexico from repeating at the 1893 Chicago exposition the lavish expenditure for the 1889 fair.

Thus when Mexican politicians, scientists, and writers arrived in Paris 1889, they had left in Mexico what seemed to be a promising economic situation. For them, railroads, mining output, certain industries (textiles, cigarettes, and alcoholic beverages), and export crops (henequen, coffee, and cacao) were leading economic sectors. Railroad construction went from 640 kilometers in 1876 to 12,172 kilometers in 1898. Foreign investment was expanding within the framework of an increasingly interrelated world economy whose main actors were Great Britain and the United States.^[25] The textile industry, cigarette manufacturing, and beer production all enjoyed high rates of growth.^[26] Overall, from 1884 to 1900 the average annual rate of economic growth approached 8 percent.

The 1880s were also a period of transition for the economic-administrative concerns and approaches of the Porfirian elite. The circle led by Romero Rubio had acquired expertise and sophistication, and it attempted to diversify Mexico's foreign investment. New laws were passed to favor foreign ownership of land and mining, as well as possibilities for incorporation. A technocratic class was growing in size and complexity.^[27]

In this sense, for Mexico the world's fairs were laboratories in which to test at an international level the national administrative achievements as well

as to learn of new worldwide trends and methods for managing the economy and the government. Thus advertisements heralding the country's progress not only included material advancement but also stressed social, administrative, and political progress. Mexico's publicists often spoke of the accomplishment of scientific politics. For example, Rafael de Zayas Enríquez, in his book especially written in French for Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris world's fair, argued that administration through the study of sociology and economics was helping Mexico solve all of its problems with "tact, honesty, and good faith, with a clear direction, with no political factions, only one national, scientifically ruled party."^[28]

As has been the case throughout the history of independent Mexico, a main goal of the Diaz administration was to attract foreign investment, not only for its economic and "civilizing" benefits but also because such sums indirectly represented Mexico's main source of income, through customs duties on the goods that were imported and taxes on the precious metals that were exported. Mexico's presence at world's fairs like that of Paris 1889 was, in this sense, part of a commercial attempt to diversify Mexico's international links. The growing importance of U.S. capital challenged European interests in Mexico. English and French yearly economic almanacs reported with concern the growing superiority of the United States as a source of imports and capital for Mexico, as well as a customer for Mexican exports.^[29] British investment, more indirect than its American and French counterparts, found ways to coexist with American investment, but English entrepreneurs were nevertheless concerned with their loss of influence in Mexico.^[30] In 1890 a British observer believed that Mexico was rich and stable and "only need [ed] English capital and English energy to reap one of the richest harvests which history can show."^[31]

French interests—in the amount of some 165 million francs^[32] —also felt seriously challenged by American and German investments. The French community in Mexico, composed of large-scale industrialists and others who were an important part of the commercial sector, was prosperous and influential.^[33] Cautiously, the French invested largely in wholly owned types of businesses. Their investment in state funds, concentrated in banks, railroads, and, in the 1880s, mining, was relatively low compared to that of other countries.^[34]

After 1890 this investment started to expand, in part due to the publicity efforts by the Porfirian elite at events such as the international fairs. In a book distributed in Mexico's pavilion in Paris 1889, F. Bianconi discussed the growing commercial weakness of France in Mexico. He believed this weakness was the result of a "stupid colonial policy" that was "a very serious mistake" in a country like France. The French government, he argued, ought to oppose the colonial ventures of competing countries and should not undertake more colonial ventures itself. What France needed instead, he claimed, was a commercial policy; in it, Mexico deserved special attention.^[35]

Mexico's presence in world's fairs was also part of a Porfirian import-substitution policy under which emerging Mexican industry received tariff protection and government subsidies.^[36] Ricardo de Maria y Campos, in charge of the Mexican commerce commission in Paris 1889 and Paris 1900, distributed many Renseignements commerciaux about Mexico. De Maria y Campos's commercial books were devoted mainly to an explanation of import tariffs and the costs of transportation, manufactures, and raw materials in Mexico. High tariffs were imposed on cigarettes, paper, cotton and woolen textiles, some live animals, manufactures of precious metals, diamonds, emeralds, and certain chemicals, while technological apparatus were exempted.^[37]

The other main socioeconomic goal of the Diaz regime—especially stressed in world's fairs—was the inducement of Northern European immigration. Although Mexico's population increased from 9.3 million in 1877 to 15.1 million in 1919, the figure masks the ups and downs of an endemic demographic stagnation. Mexican physicians and journalists complained of the high level of infant mortality, unsanitary conditions, and poor medical services.^[38] Foreign immigration never was significant enough to have an important impact on the entire economy and culture of the country.

This was not through lack of trying. Beginning in the 1880s, the Mexican government made an intense effort to attract foreign immigrants, offering land and tax exemptions as the main incentives. Toward that end, vast stretches of public land were surveyed by private companies to be sold to foreign colonizers. ^[39] But fiscal and military exemptions were not enough to attract foreigners, or at least not sufficient to lure the type of foreigners desired by the Porfirian elite.

By and large, the relatively few immigrants attracted to Mexico came from Spain, Italy, the United States, and China.^[40] American immigrants, albeit "racially correct" by the racist standards of the Porfirian elite, were nevertheless feared as part of U.S. expansionism. Historical memory played a role in this phobia. Spanish colonists were all too common for the comfort of some Mexicans and, though officially welcomed, were not numerous enough or culturally capable of Europeanizing Mexico. Chinese and black immigrants have long been neglected in Mexico's bizarre melting pot. Overall, not even American, Spaniard, and Chinese immigrants were numerous, and the long-desired massive wave of Northern European colonists never arrived.^[41]

Mexican presence in world's fairs pointed up the strenuous effort made during this period to attract immigrants. Special books and pamphlets were written to explain Mexican immigration facilities and procedures. Those books aimed to overcome Mexico's long-standing reputation as an inhospitable, savage nation.^[42] In a book produced especially for distribution at the Paris fair of 1889, Antonio Garcia Cubas, the well-known Mexican geographer, argued that Mexico offered colonists franchises and land for sale at a

"very low price." Immigrants were also "exonerated from military service and from the payment of all taxes for ten years."^[43]

Countless propaganda books that explained Mexico's advantages for immigrants were printed or sponsored by the Mexican government. For example, in 1886 a French journalist traveling in Mexico remarked that Diaz wanted him to say that the economic crisis of González's time was over. He stated that Diaz was especially committed to French immigration.^[44] Other books, such as Archibald Dunn's, which was dedicated to President Diaz for his "honesty of purpose," argued that Mexico wanted immigrants with capital to invest, small farmers who were willing to work, and agricultural workers who were willing to be guided by capitalists.^[45] Other books contained information about prevailing land prices and detailed explanations of the tax policies of the Mexican government.^[46]

As the Porfirian elite saw it, Mexico's failure to attract immigration stemmed in part from the nation's bad reputation as an unstable and unsanitary region, a legacy of previous political and economic chaos. According to the perception of Mexican authorities, immigrants did not come simply because they were unaware of the advantages Mexico offered in terms of vast lands, cheap labor, and plentiful natural resources. Mexico's presence at world's fairs was a unique way of overcoming its bad reputation.^[47]

By 1889, however, a new generation of politicians and intellectuals was articulating other ideas about immigration. LaLibertad pointed out that much of Mexico's unsettled territory, far from being an immensely rich land, was in fact inhospitable. Immigration, according to this group, was of course needed, but in order to procure it several issues had to be addressed—land tenure, religious freedom, sanitation, allocation of the labor force, and, especially, the so-called Indian problem.^[48]

The Porfirian elite thus discussed unused lands, campaigns against vagrancy, methods for recruiting workers, and ways of civilizing Indians. There was a consensus about the scarcity and low productivity of mestizo and Indian workers and about the cultural and physical superiority of white immigrants. These last, it was believed, would eventually produce the economic, cultural, and racial modernization of the country.

With white immigrants slow to arrive, however, throughout the second part of the nineteenth century Chinese and black immigration was considered by the Mexican government. Nonetheless, it was abandoned as a project in the first part of the Porfirian period. In 1879 the prolific philologist and writer Francisco Pimentel responded to a request of the Mexican minister of foreign affairs regarding the convenience of black immigration: "The presence of Blacks in Mexico would increase all the problems we already face due to the heterogeneity of races. . .. Because our country needs industrialists rather than farmers, Blacks are not useful because they do not belong to the class of industrialists."^[49] In 1889 the possibility of bringing in

black workers was again rumored, but opposition, headed by Justo Sierra and E. M. de los Ríos, was promptly voiced.^[50] Nevertheless, Chinese immigrants did begin to arrive in the late nineteenth century. They became part of a cheap labor force that, in addition to exploitation, had to face constant discrimination.^[51]

At the 1889 Paris world's fair, Mexican officials witnessed one of the main causes of Mexico's failure to attract foreign immigrants, namely, competition from democratic countries. Because of Mexico's low wage structure, throughout the 1880s and 1890s Argentina and the United States were better destinations for would-be immigrants. Mexican officials were aware of this, but instead of marketing an attractive image of a country of good salaries for low-income European workers, the Mexican elite emphasized the advantages of a country of vast land and low wages, aiming to captivate middle- and high-range investors (who very rarely migrate). Unlike Mexico's, Argentina's propaganda at the 1889 exposition emphasized good salaries, democratic rights, and the overall coexistence of various European nationalities. Argentina estimated that nearly 200,000 immigrants would arrive in 1889, and these immigrants, it was argued, would obtain, in addition to goods and property, all the guarantees of a liberal democratic nation as granted by the Argentine constitution.^[52]

In Mexico, therefore, foreign investment did indeed arrive, but not the rush of immigrants that would have translated into population growth and cultural learning. If only for this blindness about the reasons why people migrate, which reflected a lack of democratic discussion of national and international realities and options, the Porfirian elite was to be blamed, as José Vasconcelos noted in the 1930s.^[53]

The imperatives of progress were as much a part of Mexico's displays at world's fairs as was their nationalistic symbolism. The pragmatic goal of attracting foreign investment and immigrants was not at all at odds with the allegorical role played by world's fairs for Mexican nationalism. In fact, they were complementary: the economic goals would have been inconceivable without the unifying myths of the nation and its nationality, while the theatrical duties of the state could not have been understood without its economic imperatives.

Three
Mexico and the World at Large

Mexicans believed that "in the world at large, a community yet exists for us."^[1] By 1889 Mexico had acquired some experience as a participant in world expositions, especially during the Porfirian peace. In fact, Mexico's involvement in world's fairs paralleled the process of political and economic consolidation of the Porfirian elite. The accumulated experience, common interests, and international links of this elite made possible the emergence of a group of professional world's fair experts who were able to construct the image of the modern nation at all levels (see Appendix 1). These wizards of progress staged their first major performance at the New Orleans exposition of 1884. Nonetheless, their long history of trial and error included not only Mexico's participation in American and European expositions but also the idea of a Mexico City world's fair.

Mexico at the Philadelphia and New Orleans Fairs

Many Mexicans viewed participation in world's fairs as one of the best ways of changing the widespread perception that Mexico was violent and uncivilized. During the first years of the Porfiriato the Ministry of Economic Development maintained that "[Mexico has been] splendidly endorsed by nature. . . . To show such riches and thereby open a wide road for the development of industry and commerce is a patriotic deed that we can achieve only by means of world's fairs."^[2]

Although the belief that progress would be encouraged by participation in fairs appeared in the 1850s, not until the Philadelphia world's fair of 1876 did Mexico begin its official participation in international exhibitions. And not until the New Orleans world's fair of 1884 did Mexico undertake a major effort to postulate the ideal type of a modern Mexican nation.^[3]

In 1875 Gabriel Mancera, special commissioner of the Mexican Board of Expositions in the United States, wrote two long letters in which he analyzed the possibilities and potential advantages of Mexico's participation in Philadelphia 1876 and thus convinced the Mexican government to participate. According to Mancera, economic and social problems in the United States would eventually result in migration to Mexico. In particular, he believed that workers' discontent in American cities was producing more repression than social reform and that some of the more disaffected laborers would eventually opt for migration to Mexico.^[4]

Mexico occupied a small area of the 11,644-square-foot building prepared to hold products from various countries in the 256 acres of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park.^[5] Mexico's stand was formed by a structure of arches with showcases. A New York newspaper described it as a stand "almost exclusively built with plaster casts which show all the notable features of Aztec architecture during Moctezuma's rule."^[6] In fact, the style of the stand was not pure Aztec but, rather, neoclassical with some Aztec adornments. But Western eyes saw what they expected to see. To a British newspaper the Mexican stand was semi-Gothic.^[7] In addition to this display, Mexico was represented in an annex of the Art Gallery, together with artwork from Chile and Argentina.^[8] A Mexican newspaper announced that altogether, 300,000 pesos had been allocated from the national budget for Mexico's display in Philadelphia (see Appendix 2).^[9]

In agreeing to participate in Philadelphia's exposition, despite Mexico's political and economic problems, President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada aimed to acquire international recognition for his regime. The Mexican government argued that "to have declined the invitation would have amounted to being defeated. A defeat all the more appalling since it would have meant deserting the struggle, confessing impotence, recognizing Mexico as unworthy of participating among the learned peoples."^[10] The government had good reason to be concerned by its lack of international credibility. In the United States a general anti-Mexican feeling arose as a result of the Mexican-American War, and the belief that Mexico was unstable and barbaric was widespread. For instance, the New York Times , commenting on the arrival of boxes containing the Mexican exhibit for the Philadelphia fair, observed: "It is universally understood that the staple production of these republics is their frequent and regular political revolutions. To box up a revolution and send it to Philadelphia is impossible."^[11]

The image of Mexico created for the Philadelphia exposition, and the individuals involved, formed the bedrock for many future exhibitions. In 1876, however, the group of organizers still lacked cohesion and experience. Moreover, the group had been formed before the Tuxtepec rebellion that brought Porfirio Díaz to power, so several political readjustments, conciliations, and conflicts were yet to occur. In addition, the unstable economic situation of

Lerdo's regime limited the actions of the group at Philadelphia; the more ample budget of the Porfiriato gave wizards of progress greater range and ambition.

After Philadelphia, Mexico did not resume its attendance at international expositions until the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition that was held in New Orleans between 1884 and 1885.^[12] This fair commemorated the first shipment of cotton from America to England, as well as the emergence of the post-civil-war American New South. It included a women's building and "the Exhibit of the Colored Races."^[13] It was at this world's fair that the wizards of progress acquired a more or less clear configuration. In tracing back Mexico's presence in international fairs, Sebastián B. de Mier, the Mexican commissioner for the 1900 Paris world's fair, argued that Mexico's progress began to be internationally appreciated at the 1884 New Orleans fair.^[14]

Gen. Díaz himself, at the time "on leave" from the presidency during Manuel González's tenure, briefly headed the Mexican Commission for the New Orleans world's fair. The commission included many of the wizards of progress and ranged from politicians like Mariano Bárcena to famous publicists like José Francisco Godoy, who was to become a diplomat and a polyglot freelance writer often hired by the Mexican government in its publicity enterprises (see Appendix 1).^[15] In addition, the engineer Santiago Ramirez was asked to write a "special report on the occasion of the New Orleans Industrial and Cotton Exhibition" on Mexico's mining resources.^[16]

Like its French counterparts, the New Orleans fair was a showcase for U.S. imperial aspirations, and Mexico, of course, was within the scope of those ambitions. Again like the French, the American fair organizers encouraged Latin American countries to participate and thereby lend credence to a U.S. commercial "protectorate," an unofficial support for the Monroe Doctrine. In 1884 Isaac W. Avery, who was responsible for encouraging Latin American countries to take part in the New Orleans fair, traveled around Latin America for nine months, publicizing not only the fair but also the Nicaraguan Canal project—which aimed to supplant the Panama Canal project of the French.^[17]

Certainly Mexico's presence at New Orleans reflected both its domestic hopes and its international ambitions to find an outlet for its raw materials in the modern world economy. Thus, in New Orleans Mexico occupied a display of nearly 50,000 square feet within the main building of the fair, in addition to 200,000 square feet inside the gardens near the horticulture building. Without question, Mexico's attendance at New Orleans constituted the first major effort to portray itself as a modern nation on the world stage.

The Mexican presence in New Orleans was an expensive enterprise, though the U.S.$200,000 spent by the Mexican government would eventually pale before outlays at later world's fairs.^[18] Díaz was informed of all financial procedures, and following the Lerdo regime's lead, the government

paid the total expense, although numerous private interests, from railroad companies to a Freemason lodge in Mexico City, which gave 400 pesos, made generous donations.

In this patronage, the Mexican state approximated the French model: the state ought to manage the economy and, through expositions, seek international prestige for the ultimate economic benefit of the nation. This pattern eventually led to total governmental sponsorship, including the cost of products exhibited and both local and international transportation expenses, as in the case of Mexico's attendance at Paris in 1900.^[19]

In the exhibits, the wizards of progress chose not to exploit the Indian exoticism of Mexico but, rather, to emphasize an exoticism more familiar to European eyes: Moorish architecture. Ramón Ibarrola, in charge of the architectural and engineering works for the exposition, designed the Mexican pavilion (see Fig. 1). Known as the Mexican Alhambra, it was a multicolored steel-and-iron Moorish-style construction that housed Mexican minerals, including half a ton of silver displayed as a mountain.^[20] The pavilion was in fact inspired not so much by Mexico's Moorish-Spanish legacy as by the popular Moorish horticulture hall of Philadelphia 1876, in which exotic and tropical products had been exhibited.^[21] Ibarrola's pavilion of 1884 was built by the Keystone Bridge Company of Pittsburgh as a structure that could be assembled and dismantled.^[22] In addition to the Mexican Alhambra, a wooden building was constructed to house both a Mexican martial band and a cavalry squadron. Indeed, according to those who commented on the fair, Mexico and Japan staged the two most impressive foreign exhibits at New Orleans.^[23]

The Mexican exhibit was notable for its impressive displays of minerals and agricultural products, especially tropical fruits and vegetable fibers such as henequen. For balance, a Mexican steamship, built in English dockyards, was also exhibited to exemplify Mexican progressivism.^[24] In the middle of the exhibition's main corridor was a model of the "ship railroad planned by Captain Eads for the Tehuantepec Isthmus."^[25]

Mexican art was an important part of the nation's international image on display at New Orleans, as it had been in Philadelphia. In the arts section, Mexico's School of Fine Arts displayed paintings by such artists as José Obregón, Santiago Rebull, Gonzalo Carrasco, and José María Velasco. As I will later show, these artists were important contributors to Mexico's modern national image. In addition, the New Orleans fair, in common with that in Philadelphia, included a women's pavilion, in which the presidential canopy made by the girls of the National Secondary School and other works by Mexican women were on display.^[26]

The New Orleans fair was followed by many less important international fairs held in the southern United States. But even New Orleans eventually paled in comparison with the greatest American world's fair: the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, which crowned the inclusion of the American

Image not available.

1.
The Mexican Alhambra, as Mexico's pavilion at the 1884 New Orleans world's
 fair was dubbed. The structure is now on the Alameda in Santa Maria la Ribera, 
Mexico City. (Photograph by the author)

West into the great industrial development of the United States. In the meantime, those who constructed Mexico's national image moved their equipment and interests to the great European fairs—that is, to Paris.

Mexico at Early London and Paris Fairs

Mexico's participation in European world expositions began in the 1860s, but its presence became significant only at the Paris fair of 1889. In fact, Paris 1889 was to be the largest and most expensive of Mexico's international performances. Even Mexico's presence at the 1900 Paris fair, though less costly than that of 1889, was impressively expensive in relation to the national budget for that year.

Few traces remain of Mexico's participation in London's Crystal Palace fair of 1851. Though some products and private exhibitors came from Mexico, apparently no official Mexican commission attended.^[27] Mexican antiquities, natural products, and exotic peoples had been exhibited especially in London, where the naturalist and entrepreneur William Bullock organized an inclusive Mexican display in 1824.^[28]

In the 1855 imperial exposition of Paris some Mexican products were exhibited, although Mexico's economic and political chaos did not permit a significant undertaking. The Mexican government did, however, appoint a commission to represent the nation in the 1855 exposition.^[29] Pedro de Escandón, head of the commission, claimed that Mexico's greatness ought to be admired, not only for the "tropical nature" which was one of its "most powerful industrial agents" but also for the potential the country would develop if it "were able to calmly devote itself to progress and development."^[30]

Mexico had 107 exhibitors in 1855, in contrast with the 130 from the United States, 7 from Guatemala, 6 from Argentina, and 4 from the Brazilian Empire. The Mexican displays were largely samples of mineral and agricultural products. In addition, five cigarette-manufacturing machines were displayed, as were plans for "a musical machine that simultaneously [produced] sound and [transcribed] musical notes," a device that, Escandón claimed, could not be finished in time.^[31] All of the machines were inventions by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, a peculiar Mexican inventor who kept submitting all sorts of inventions to Mexican authorities throughout the 1860s and 1870s—from armament, accounting devices, and hydraulic plans for Mexico City, to a "kaleidoscopic machine" to avoid falsification of official documents.^[32] Mexico also exhibited the saddle that had been given to Prince Albert of England by Mariano Arista.^[33] All in all, Mexico's presence in Paris 1855, though somewhat weak and insignificant, launched the symbolic and propagandistic display of what were to become the main aspects of Mexico's presence in later international fairs: mining, agriculture, and native peoples and products.

Evidence of Mexican participation in European world's fairs between 1855 and 1867 is scattered, so it is difficult to draw a clear picture of the nature of its involvement.^[34] We do know that a pre-Hispanic Mexican-style building was exhibited at the Paris universal exhibition of 1867. Just as Napoleon the Great had sent an archaeological commission with the army that invaded Egypt, Napoleon III sent a French scientific commission to Mexico during the intervention. This scientific group delineated and copied, among other pre-Hispanic ruins, the temple of Xochicalco.^[35] The resulting model, constructed by French private interests, was exhibited at Paris in 1867 to demonstrate that "there exists thus a social life and an art in Mexico, over which Europeans have put their foot."^[36] Few other traces of Mexico's participation in this world's fair remain.

Eleven years later, Paris hosted another universal exhibition. Despite French efforts to encourage Mexico's participation, Ignacio L. Vallarta, then minister of foreign affairs, strongly opposed attendance because of the continuing strain on Franco-Mexican relations in the wake of the French intervention of the 1860s.^[37] Diplomatic complications made it impossible for France to officially invite Mexico to attend the Paris world's fair of 1878.^[38]

Mexico took some part in various later European and American world's fairs, notably the Hispanic fair of 1883 in Buenos Aires and Berlin's fair of the same year.^[39] Along similar lines, temporary and permanent Mexican exhibitions of this sort in European and American cities became quite common during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.^[40] Mexico's exhibits were often forced to compete with other Latin American exhibits, so much so that Mexican official Mariano Bárcena complained in 1889 that "for Mexico, it is inconvenient to confuse its products with those of other countries, and to establish competition in such a limited ground as the one presently being offered."^[41]

A Mexico City Fair?

The staging of a world's fair in Mexico City was much discussed throughout the Porfirian period, for the project was supported by various political and economic interests. To many people, a fair in Mexico City was a contradiction in itself: Mexico needed to approach the world; the world was not going to come to Mexico. But others, who thought that Mexico needed to organize its own universal exhibition, made their case by voicing a common economic concern of the time: Mexico's economic difficulties derived not from lack of production but mainly from the weak and traditional patterns of consumption. A world's fair in Mexico City, they believed, would be influential in transforming Mexican consumption habits. The project never materialized, however. The high cost of the enterprise, coupled with the main goal assigned to world's fairs—to serve as a backdrop for Mexico's display of

its optimal image, not simply of itself—made the realization of a universal exposition in Mexico City impossible. Creating a picture of Mexico to be exhibited at fairs attended by all the world was one thing; making the world come to an old city full of problems was quite another. Nevertheless, brief mention of these projects will highlight the importance that Mexican elites gave to these events.

During the first years of the Porfirian period, world's fairs were used to demonstrate national stability and progress, both of which were indispensable for international recognition. Therefore, in March 1878, a month before the United States formally recognized the Díaz regime, Manuel Maria de Zamacona came up with the notion of a "Mexican-American" fair.^[42] Because Zamacona was the main architect of American recognition,^[43] a key member of the exhibition team, and an astute political actor, a fair along these lines would have further enhanced his personal prestige. Although Zamacona's idea was initially approved, it was later rejected, much to his disappointment.

In what seems to be a sequel to Zamacona's project, in 1879 the engineer Ramón Rodríguez y Arangoity, together with the American firm Edge Moor Iron Company, conceived the idea of an international exposition in Mexico City for the year 1880 (see Fig. 2). They proposed that the exposition be situated in the area surrounding the monument to Columbus on Mexico City's most elegant avenue, the Paseo de la Reforma.^[44] This fair, however, never amounted to more than another unsuccessful promotional scheme, perhaps linked to real-estate interests in Mexico City.

Another project for a world's fair in Mexico City emerged in 1889, when Antonio A. de Medina y Ormaechea, founder of the Sociedad Mexicana de Consumo (Mexican Society for Consumption), proposed a universal exhibition for the year 1910.^[45] Medina y Ormaechea argued that not only would a Mexican world's fair take advantage of Mexico's national and international experience, but an exposition on native soil would have fruitful educational results. For whereas Mexico's displays in American or European cities demonstrated the progressivism of the Mexican elite to the world, a universal exhibition in Mexico itself would help to educate and modernize Indians who were "satisfied with a shirt and a calzón de manta [cheap cotton trousers] to cover their flesh, with a pair of sandals for their feet . . . with a bowl of chiles, beans, and tortillas and a ration of pulque."^[46]

In the 1890s the growth of companies—often funded by American capital —that specialized in the management and organization of world's fairs, together with Mexican and international private interests in Mexico City's profitable urban development, came together to envision a Mexican fair. René de Cornely interested a group of Mexican politicians and industrialists (including some members of the Porfirian exhibition team) in staging an international exhibition from September 1895 to April 1896 in Mexico City.

Image not available.

2.
Drawing by the Edge Moor Iron Company of a building to house an international
 exhibition in Mexico. Source: EXP, Box 31, Exp. 9; reproduced courtesy of
 the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. (Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)

This exhibition was publicized and, indeed, arranged down to almost the last detail.^[47] The former hacienda of Anzures, near the Paseo de la Reforma and Chapultepec Park and owned by Salvador Malo, was the proposed location of the fair. Malo was a wealthy, well-known aristocrat of Porfirian Mexico. Perhaps the group was using the fair as an opportunity to rapidly urbanize the Anzures area of Mexico City in order to profit from real-estate speculation, but their plans evaporated.

Preparations for the Paris Fair of 1889

From 1884 to 1888 the Mexican embassy in Paris acted as a clearinghouse for information regarding the impending universal exhibition. It seems clear that Mexican bureaucrats were aware of the fact that prominent European nations were planning to boycott the French event, but they were also con-

scious of the major economic interests that supported the idea of a fair in Paris. Despite this realization, Mexico hesitated to officially announce its participation because of the prospect of being compelled to exhibit collectively with the other Hispanic nations, as had been the case for the Latin American countries that had taken part in the Paris exhibition of 1878.^[48] Mexico's dilemma was resolved when, as a result of diplomatic pressure by Ramón Fernández, Mexican minister in Paris, the French minister of commerce assured Mexico of its right to a separate exhibit, together with all requisite facilities.^[49] Thus, in August 1887 the Mexican government appointed Manuel Díaz Mimiaga, the oficial mayor (chief officer) of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former Mexican minister to Guatemala, as its delegate to the French exhibition.^[50]

This diplomatic process can be considered an expression of willingness on both sides to end the long years of tension that had characterized Franco-Mexican relations after the French intervention. Even after Maximilian's death, Mexico could not even attempt to reestablish diplomatic relations with France until Napoleon III died in 1870. Not until the Porfirian regime achieved a certain domestic political balance did the international arena regain importance for the Mexican government and did Emilio Velasco successfully negotiate the reestablishment of Mexican diplomatic relations with France.^[51] Mexico's attendance at the Paris world's fair of 1889 thus appeared to be a way of promoting internationally both Mexico's republicanism and its socioeconomic maturity. It also meant the final symbolic act of reconciliation with the ever-admired French nation.

Díaz put the Ministry of Economic Development in charge of all matters relating to Mexico in Paris 1889.^[52] The ministry was then headed by Gen. Carlos Pacheco, one of the few surviving old friends of Díaz, and thereafter all dispatches, products, and suggestions related to the fair were directed to Pacheco.^[53]

From 1887 to 1891 the Díaz regime made a major effort to produce an image of modern Mexico. Every pamphlet, book, building, statistic, and speech displayed was meant to be part of this image. Diverse metaphors and allegories echoed a rather meager set of shared values (that is, progress, science, a cosmopolitan style, a search for uniqueness); a modern Mexican savoir faire was in the making.

Four
The Wizards of Progress
Paris 1889

Creating a bureaucratic class proved to be anything but natural or harmonious in Mexico. The new class emerged only through continual trial-and-error, which included learning technical processes as well as the art of political bargaining. The development of the Porfirian exhibition team—the wizards of progress—showed how growing technical and administrative expertise could be harmonized with the autocratic, centralized organization of caudillo rule. Technical skills were needed to create and maintain the modern Mexican nation. The wizards were quick to realize that modernity— understood as the maximizing of power advantages—was, on one hand, a diverse and comprehensive set of techniques to be mastered and, on the other, a means of showing that their interests coincided both with those of the nation and those of the modern civilized world.^[1]

The wizards' job included the setting in motion of an intricate set of relationships that extended from the local level to the municipal, state, and national levels. They had to promote private participation from remote parts of Mexico, to collect statistical data, and to gather images of people and places for the graphic construction of an acceptable national past. At times personal relations made this task simple. For instance, it was easy for the minister of economic development to ask for photographs of and data about railroads because he was involved in their construction. However, on other occasions questionnaires were sent to the entire country to acquire necessary demographic, agricultural, educational, and sanitary information.

The Mexican exhibition team was both extremely competent and inefficient. It could produce a complete, comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date image of the modern Mexican nation in a matter of a few months. Yet it was often disorganized and expensive. Recruitment of the wizards was based on familial, personal, and political connections, as well as on particular profes-

sional expertise. As an organization, the team functioned in an extremely centralized and hierarchical fashion, but the various components enjoyed a certain autonomy, again depending on personal and political connections and the field of expertise. Because the team was so small, each individual on it could have direct access to the top without going through many intermediaries. Its effectiveness was based on fidelity to a set of shared interests and to the values of modern cosmopolitan nationalism, as well as on loyalty to the authority of the president.

This chapter analyzes the structure and functioning of the wizards of progress, taking as its focus of analysis the 1889 Paris fair: Information on individual wizards is included in Appendix 1.

The 1889 Wizards of Progress

As preparations for Paris 1889 began in earnest, numerous tasks were distributed among old and new wizards of progress.^[2] A central organizing committee was approved: Alfredo Bablot of the Ministry of Justice; Emiliano Busto of the Treasury; Rodrigo Valdés and Joaquín Beltrám of the War Ministry;^[3] Manuel Zapata Vera of the Foreign Affairs Ministry; José Yves Limantour, first, and later Ramón Rodríguez Rivera of the Ministry of the Interior;^[4] and, finally, Manuel Díaz Mimiaga as delegate of the Mexican government in Paris.^[5] The central committee began to meet in February 1888. During that year and the next, it named numerous individuals to various positions of responsibility, including directors for the nine groups at the Paris exhibition, delegates to congresses, architects, artists, draftsmen, servants, and clerks. Before the exhibition team departed for Paris, this committee discussed and decided all aspects of the Mexican display, in direct consultation with Porfirio Díaz. The Mexican display was governed by a general regulation, by which the second section of the Ministry of Economic Development was in charge of all Mexican affairs at Paris 1889 and of all other Mexican presences at international fairs for the rest of the century.

In February 1888 a provisional budget for Mexico's exhibit in Paris was offered. The projected total of 398,000 pesos^[6] served as the point of reference during the first year of preparations for the Paris display.^[7] But even before the budget was proposed, the Mexican government had authorized the central committee to make monthly expenditures of 10,000 francs (about 3,500 pesos) toward Mexico's participation in the fair. In fact, Mexico's actual expenditures far exceeded the estimates made by the wizards of progress, because the official figures do not reflect numerous expenses that an examination of the available archival material brings to light.^[8] Sebastián B. de Mier, director of Mexico's display at the 1900 Paris fair, estimated that approximately 605,318 pesos had been spent in 1889 (see Appendix 2), but even this sum seems too modest. The official French report of the fair, written by

Alfred Picard, maintained that Mexico agreed to a government subsidy of 5 million francs (almost 1.5 million pesos), the largest sum spent by any foreign country on the 1889 exposition.^[9] Whatever the precise figure, this fair was an extremely expensive event for Mexico, as it was for France.

In addition to submitting the budget, the central committee, following the French classification, appointed the directors of the various groups of displays. Leandro Fernández was put in charge of the arts (Group 1); Fernando Ferrari Pérez, of education (Group 2); Manuel Flores, of furniture (Group 3); Eduardo Zárate, of textiles (Group 4); Gilberto Crespo, of raw and manufactured products (Group 5); José María Velázquez, of general mechanics and electricity (Group 6); Antonio Peñafiel, of food products (Group 7); Pedro Sentíes, of agriculture (Group 8); and Mariano Bárcena, of horticulture (Group 9).^[10] In addition, there was a large and capricious number of honorary members.^[11]

Between 1888 and 1889 three significant changes in the original configuration of the team occurred. In January 1889 Leandro Fernandez resigned as chief of Group 1 (works of art). Fernández argued that, though he had collected the artistic works, an artist should judge their qualities, and José María Velasco was appointed in his stead.^[12] Another significant change occurred when the Mexican consul in Paris, Díaz Covarrubias, died in May of 1889. His place was filled in September by the writer Manuel Payno, then consul in Barcelona and Santander.^[13] A final change occurred when José María Velázquez was replaced by Rodrigo Valdés as chief of Group 6. There is no evidence about the political or technical reasons for this last modification.^[14] Minister of Economic Development Carlos Pacheco and President Díaz frequently asked Díaz Mimiaga to employ Mexican citizens who were living in Paris. In fact, on several occasions Díaz Mimiaga was compelled to accept new members as auxiliaries to the central committee due to the patronage of high-ranking Mexican personalities. For instance, Bernardo Reyes, then governor of the state of Nuevo León, recommended Abraham P. de la Garza, a Mexican engineering graduate from a Paris university, who was included as an honorary member in March 1888.^[15] Similar pressure was exerted on many occasions, especially by President Díaz's wife, Carmen Romero Rubio, and by José Yves Limantour, who in 1889 was living in France, reportedly for reasons of health.^[16] In addition, although not every Mexican state sent a special emissary, virtually every state appointed a member of the exhibition team or a Mexican citizen resident in Paris as its delegate. For instance, Julio Limantour was appointed representative of the Federal District (Mexico City).^[17]

There were also some individuals who, though not officially listed, were nevertheless part of the Mexican team in Paris. Among them was Auguste Genin, the Franco-Mexican writer and entrepreneur mentioned in chapter 1.^[18] He was the prototype of the entrepreneur of propaganda and images

among the wizards of progress.^[19] By September 1889, in addition to the Mexican central committee, numerous Mexican exhibitors and officials were in Paris, including the powerful northern landowners Evaristo and Francisco Madero—of the family that initiated the revolution of 1910—and the influential economist José Yves Limantour (and his wife).^[20]

The central committee included, among other commissions, a press commission, an essential part of the propaganda network of the team. Its members were in charge of "writing or requesting and publishing articles, magazines, studies, etc. about the Mexican exhibition."^[21] Later in this chapter I will address this type of commission.

Almost all of the wizards of progress were distinguished personalities of Porfirian Mexico. For this reason, salaries were high, especially for the directors of groups and for the persons in charge of special commissions. Most group chiefs and commissioners secured more than one income. One salary might be paid for employment in the public administration, another for being part of the exhibition team—and thus as an employee of the Ministry of Economic Development—and still another from service as deputy or in some other official post. To be part of the exhibition team was to enjoy a lucrative position,^[22] in addition to the status and cachet derived from having experienced the Parisian belle epoque firsthand.

Within Mexico, an intricate network for the location and collection of products and data was organized, and all states and districts were asked to encourage local participation. Local fairs took place in the states of Jalisco, Morelos, and Nuevo León in order to preselect the products to be sent to Paris.^[23] In addition, special commissioners traveled around the country looking for specific commodities—minerals, medicinal plants, raw materials, and exotic products and people. To stimulate participants, the Mexican government offered a medal to all those who took part, as well as a grant of 100 pesos.^[24]

During the collection process, each group's chief was in direct contact with Gen. Carlos Pacheco and Manuel Fernández Leal, minister and vice-minister of economic development, who made most of the final decisions, often in consultation with Porfirio Díaz. Through a rather disorganized and complicated bureaucratic process at the Paris end of this chain of location and collection, products were somewhat arbitrarily secured by the directors of the various groups. All exhibitors had to fulfill some requirements, and most of them had to do with the Mexican government's main goal of promoting immigration and foreign investment.^[25] One requirement was for each group to distribute all published materials to the main European libraries and museums, as well as to the other countries' committees at the exhibition.^[26]

Although private participation was strongly encouraged, it was clear to the Mexican government that only the state was able to provide an accurate

and complete view of the modern nation.^[27] The coherent and homogeneous representation of the nation could only be a task for the state to fulfill. But what aspects ought to be emphasized in this representation? How should they be displayed in order to put forward the idea of a nation simultaneously cosmopolitan and unique? In responding to these questions, the Mexican exhibition team frequently adjusted its already pragmatic goals to its cultural and ideological objectives, especially to the changing requisites for entrance into the select club of modern nations.

The Wizards' Goals

Originally, the Mexican government designed a profile of what the Mexican exhibit ought to include. This general plan clearly expressed the Mexican elite's concept of a modern nation as well as their particular interest in world's fairs. In the end, this plan was carried out only in part, and each group, in a rather chaotic fashion, organized its own exhibit.

What the government wanted to emphasize were Mexican crafts and raw materials that would fill European needs or appeal to European tastes. In 1888 Minister Pacheco sent a memorandum to the Porfirian cabinet and to the exhibition team, arguing that "various industries in Mexico, as in all new countries, are still too primitive." However, he continued, "the modest conditions of the product say nothing against its quality." Therefore, Mexican small producers were to follow the example of the sombrero makers at the New Orleans exhibition, where "our modest palm-sombrero manufacturers found . . . a market that was as important as it was unexpected." Toward that end, Pacheco asked the state governments to finance the efforts of small producers who could not themselves afford to join the Mexican exhibit in Paris.^[28] In fact, in 1889, 1893, and 1900 the Ministry of Economic Development received numerous requests for assistance from small producers.^[29]

The orientation and tone of the Mexican exhibit, however, necessarily had to be provided by the various agencies of the Mexican government. Thus, overlapping and crossing the French classification and beyond the private displays of railroad companies, agricultural entrepreneurs, tobacco companies, and textile industrialists, the Mexican government targeted those aspects of the nation that were to be stressed. The idea was to create an image of Mexico that could be easily grasped by both nationals and foreigners. This goal required that the physical, economic, and social diversity of the country be reduced to an analytical reality through the massive production and ordering of maps, photographs, albums, almanacs, artistic canvases, and especially statistics, which included the "inflexible logic of numbers."^[30]

In addition, those who created this image had to rearrange the stubborn national characteristics to fit the criteria of a cosmopolitan modern nation.

Therefore, on one hand, the Indian past was selectively interpreted and utilized to construct a modern secular, liberal, and republican epic for Mexico. The Mexican wizards of progress intended the uniqueness of the country, interpreted in a universal fashion, to be sufficient for admission into the cosmopolitan modern world. On the other hand, the strategic aspects—tropical fertility, good sanitation, and overall civilized development—were emphasized in order to overcome foreign prejudices.

A fundamental part of the official participation of Mexico was thus composed of samples and collections of "the most promising products already being exploited,"^[31] namely, gold, silver, henequen, coffee, cacao, tobacco, cedar, and so forth. Regarding manufacturing, the Porfirian team had a pragmatic approach: first, it acknowledged and protected small-scale industry; second, it recognized the general backwardness of Mexican industry vis-à-vis France, Germany, and the United States, not to mention England. These factors combined to create a sort of official disinterest in Mexican industrial development. Thus, from the beginning the attempt was to show Mexico's "imperfect and expensive industrial products" and the facilities offered by Mexico for improvement and investment in those areas.^[32]

For the Mexican team, however, the most important component of Mexico's image were public works, of which the Porfirian elite was so proud, for railroads, bridges, and factories were clear signs of progress and civilization. Consequently, numerous photographs of railroads and bridges were requested of railroad companies. Textile and other industrial manufacturing plants were also asked to send pictures of their buildings and technology. The Mexican government also aimed to give proof of its consolidation as a national republic by exhibiting pictures of national monuments and buildings, both actual and projected.

At the Paris exposition it was necessary to manipulate not only the Indian past but also the reality of a country with a large Indian population. The Mexican exhibit was therefore designed to show Europeans at one and the same time the exoticism, the nobility, and the hygienic characteristics of the Mexican Indian people. The goal was to show the good faith of Indians, which often implied the Indians' willingness to be mastered. Accordingly, the Mexican government thought to display at Paris a study of the way of life of Mexico's inhabitants, especially of the "moral and material conditions of the Mexican proletariat and peasantry." This task was originally assigned to one of the few Indians who had achieved recognition within the Porfirian elite—Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, perhaps the most important literary figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, the Mexican exhibit in Paris had to invent Mexico's cosmopolitanism. Hence, there were plans to offer a "summary of the current stage of modern Mexican culture."^[33]

This very ambitious original plan was only partially fulfilled. What took

place was a rather rapid collection of objects by each ministry. Each ministry had its own special program to assist the general exhibition project, with an individual in charge of the works collected under its auspices. These delegates were invariably already part of the exhibition team and occupied other posts within it.

The Ministry of Finance, represented by Emiliano Busto, was in charge of exhibiting Mexico's advancement in the scientific management of both the government and its finances. Accordingly, in addition to the official bulletin and general publications, this ministry collected photographs of the machines used to print tax stamps, descriptions and designs of the fiscal offices throughout the country, and two general volumes of statistics—Cuadro estadístico , by Bodo von Glümer,^[34] and a compilation of agricultural, mining, and industrial statistics under the direction of Busto himself.

In order to collect these statistics, Busto suggested conducting a commercial and economic census. Toward this end, a questionnaire was to be sent to all commercial agents by way of local fiscal authorities, customs administrators, and post office employees. In addition, as part of the original plan, Busto proposed what eventually became the major display of the Ministry of Finance's in Paris 1889: a comprehensive comparative study of the public administration of France and Mexico (see chapter 8).^[35]

The War Ministry, represented by Rodrigo Valdés, who was also chief of Group 6, exhibited arms, uniforms, and tools. The Museo del Hospital Militar also contributed in a major way to the exhibit on education, science, hygiene, and medicine. Included were several human organs infected by various diseases and, especially striking, the head of the Apache Indian Juan Antonio, a trophy gained by the Porfirian army during its repression of northern Indian tribes.^[36]

In addition to the displays of the ministries, a commercial commission was created by initiative of Ricardo de Maria y Campos. This commission was in charge of making available and displaying a wide range of data of interest to potential immigrants and investors. Data on political organization, economic and social statistics, commercial tariffs, and legal issues in migration were widely distributed.^[37]

Not all of Mexico's elaborate plans were successfully carried out, however, largely because they were too ambitious and because implementation was hampered by time pressure, inefficiency, and bad organization. Indeed, the Mexican exhibit was finished so late in mid-1889 that it could not be included in the general French catalogue of the exposition.^[38] To trace the extent to which the integrity of the original master plan survived we would have to analyze its piecemeal implementation by the various groups—a long and detailed task. A review of the essential content and key personalities of Mexico's exhibit at the 1889 Paris fair will suffice to make my points.

Mexico on Display

The core of Mexico's display in the 1889 Paris fair was found in the exhibits of arts, education, textiles, and extractive arts (Groups 1, 2, 4, and 5). Group 1, works of art, was directed by the well-known artist Jose Maria Velasco, a distinguished landscape painter whose work had been greatly admired at the Philadelphia and New Orleans fairs.^[39] Indeed, Velasco, rivaled only by the sculptor Jesùs Contreras, was the most prominent plastic artist of late-nineteenth-century Mexico.^[40] Because of his expertise as a painter and his links with intellectual circles—which dated from the middle of the nineteenth century—Velasco occupied a high position in the cultural bureaucracy and in the exhibition team, despite his humble origins.^[41]

In March 1888, several well-known personalities were assigned to Velasco's group. Among them were Cayetano Ocampo, a medal engraver; Santiago Rebull, a classical painter who had been Emperor Maximilian's official painter; and Gabriel Guerra, a distinguished sculptor. All were professors at the Academia de San Carlos.^[42] In addition, in September 1889, Antonio Rivas Mercado was nominated as member of this group. He was a French-trained architect and eventually became the official Porfirian architect of many buildings and monuments—among them the Columna de la Independencia, inaugurated in 1910 for the centennial celebration of independence, which still stands on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma. On this occasion, Rivas Mercado was commissioned to study European architectural improvements.^[43] Later, in May 1889, Díaz Mimiaga suggested that Contreras be appointed auxiliary to this group for his valuable services as sculptor in charge of statuary for the Mexican pavilion.^[44]

The French descriptions of the Mexican art exhibit reveal a fascination with the numerous paintings by Velasco and with the canvas entitled El Senado de Tlaxcala . They represented, French critics argued, a real Mexican style. In truth, in the 1889 Paris fair the core of the display of Group 1 was formed by sixty-eight Velasco paintings, five canvases by Cleofas Almanza (Velasco's student), and other works by Alberto Bibriesca, José Obregón, Adolfo Tenorio, Juan Ortega, Alberto Herrera's design of Cuauhtémoc's monument, and Contreras's busts of Porfirio Díaz and Manuel Díaz Mimiaga. In architecture, the project for a legislative palace by Anzorena y Agreda, as well as Luis G. Molina's project for a national theater, were ostentatiously exhibited.^[45]

Group 2, education, was directed by Fernando Ferrari Pérez, a teacher in various Mexico City schools and a distinguished naturalist. The well-known Mexican geographer Antonio Garcia Cubas and the historian, archeologist, and writer Alfredo Chavero were also assigned to this group.^[46] In addition, in April 1888, Justo Sierra, then aged forty and a prominent educator, intellectual, and politician, became an active member,^[47] though there is no evidence that he traveled to Paris in 1889 (he was present at the 1900 Paris fair) .^[48]

The main part of the education exhibit consisted of educational statistics, issues of major Mexican newspapers and journals, and numerous copies of works from countless schools. The exhibit as a whole was designed to portray the image of a free, liberal, well-funded, and positivist national educational system. Indeed, various French newspapers took this image more or less at face value.^[49] The statistics had been prepared through a general questionnaire, supposedly sent to all educational institutions in Mexico, that was designed to elicit information on endowment, government subsidies, expenses, study programs, demographic composition, schedules, sanitary conditions, support for students, and library size. Another part of this group's exhibit dealt with natural history and included paintings of native animals, many of which were by Velasco. But what most amazed visitors was the collection of dissected small Mexican birds.

Mexico exhibited a total of 1,763 articles in this group, according to the French report. Many were grouped in Class 8—organization, methods, and appliances for higher instruction—because of the important role played by professional schools and scientific societies. However, education was of such importance for nineteenth-century Mexican liberals that, in the number of objects exhibited, Mexico was second only to France itself.

Another important exhibit was that of Group 4, textile fabrics. It was directed by Eduardo Zárate, a lawyer and professor at the Escuela de Artesanos, who had been a member of Philadelphia and New Orleans commissions as well. One of the first persons assigned to this group was Emiliano Busto, as representative of the Ministry of Finance.^[50] In Mexico, the textile industry had been well established since the colonial period, and to exhibit its products in Paris was of major significance for the Mexican government. Eduardo Zárate prepared a detailed description of products for eventual exhibition, together with an inventory of textile producers, both of which were compiled by research teams that traveled to the important textile centers of the country. Eventually this research led to the compilation of a general handbook of textile statistics for the Chicago world's fair of 1893.

Zárate believed that three aspects of the textile industry should be stressed by the Mexican exhibit. First, samples of textile production of all kinds and from all regions of the country should be gathered for display. Second, the statistical compilation should be displayed for maximum impact in what Zárate envisioned as "a great statistical table of the textile industry, artistically laced at the center of the display of this branch's products in such a way that the industry's situation in our Republic will be made evident at a glance."^[51] Finally, in his view, the exhibit should highlight popular Mexican clothes and costumes.^[52]

On this last point, Zárate wished to harmonize the industrial and economic interests that spurred the Paris fair with the great cultural and ethnographic concerns of the late nineteenth century, likewise so evident at the

exposition. Thus he proposed that dresses made of Mexican textiles be displayed on mannequins that were faithful representations of the size and physical characteristics of the inhabitants of the different regions of Mexico (that is, tipos populates ).^[53] In all, Mexico exhibited 403 objects in this group—also second only to the great French textile exhibit.

Group 5, extractive arts, was directed by Gilberto Crespo, an engineer and a former member of the New Orleans commission. The most important part of this group's exhibit was formed by various samples of mining products, statistics, photographs of mines, and specimens of all kinds of wood. The mining aspects of this exhibit were highlighted in the French catalogue over all other Mexican products.^[54] This group contained specimens provided by various public figures, including Porfirio Díaz himself, who sent various samples of minerals from mines in which he had some interest, including silver and gold.^[55] Other mineral products on exhibit were copper and onyx.^[56]

The Mexican government was anxious that tobacco be prominently featured in this group's exhibit, because Mexico's tobacco producers, domestically protected, asked for official help to promote their product in Paris for possible use in the European market. Therefore, Ignacio Mariscal visited the Gros Caillou tobacco factory to investigate what type of tobacco the management of the French tobacco monopoly was looking for. He reported that Mexican tobacco, especially that produced by the El Valle Nacional company, was of sufficient quality to compete with Brazilian and U.S. tobacco. Acting on this report, Mexican tobacco producers named Auguste Genin as their commercial representative in Paris.

Obstacles had to be overcome in Paris, however: American, Brazilian, and Cuban competition. Even worse, La Régie (the state-owned French tobacco company) attempted to prohibit trade in tobacco at the fair. Responding to pressure by Mexico, La Régie proposed a solution: all countries would be allowed to sell tobacco in their respective pavilions, but "La Régie will set up a large deposit where all tobacco for the exposition will be placed."^[57]

According to Genin's final report, Mexican tobaccos enjoyed great success in Paris. "Our tobacco has been remarkably welcome by the cosmopolitan public of the Exposition," he claimed, adding that better packages and publicity were needed to surmount Cuban dominance in this realm in the future.^[58] In fact, E. Gabarrot and Cía., proprietor of El Valle Nacional, won two gold medals for its cigars, and M. Rivero and E. Pugibet were awarded silver medals for their cigarettes.

A total of 358 different products in Group 5 were exhibited. The larger part of the Mexican exhibit was concentrated in Classes 41 and 44—products of mining and metallurgy, and agricultural products not used for food. Mexico exhibited many other items at the various displaying groups, for a total of 3,206 different products, according to the French count. After France and its colony Algeria, Mexico's display was the largest, though not the most suc-

cessful one, as the number of prizes received reveals—of its 953 prizes, only 14 were grand prizes.^[59]

Propaganda and the National Image

The functions of the wizards of progress were capped by a large propaganda network. The Porfirian regime realized the importance of propaganda to obtain international recognition and capital.^[60] Porfirian officials were prompt to recognize that in modern European and American cities, everything and everybody had a price. Therefore, they reasoned, Mexico's image could look as modern and attractive as that of any other nation provided the appropriate prices were paid. Toward this end numerous writers and lobbyists, both foreign and national, became freelance writers for the Mexican government, and in the United States and Europe many books, pamphlets, and articles were directly or indirectly subsidized by the Porfirian authorities.^[61]

Although Mexico's total propaganda expenses at the 1889 expositions cannot be calculated with precision, from available evidence we have to assume that the sum was significant. For example, José Francisco Godoy, the Mexican journalist who wrote various propaganda books about Mexico for distribution at international fairs,^[62] received 2,500 pesos to write his México en París .^[63] The Mexican writer Ireneo Paz, editor and director of Mexico City's newspaper La Patria , received 2,500 pesos to write Los hombres prominentes de México , which included texts in Spanish, French, and English.^[64] It supported not only Mexico's international image but also the reelection of Díaz. The book consisted of biographies of Mexican entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, writers, and scientists, among them almost all of the members of the Mexican exhibition team. Those who wished to appear in this propaganda book had to pay 50 pesos. The handsome edition of this book won a silver medal in Paris.^[65]

In addition, to advertise the scientific image of Mexico, the Mexican writer Manuel de Olaguíbel received 2,000 pesos to compile a bibliography of Mexican science in the nineteenth century.^[66] Moreover, to have a better international impact in Paris, it was agreed that a bulletin on scientific activity in Mexico was to be published from 1888 to 1890, with no more than four issues per month.^[67]

In France, F. Bianconi, author of Le Mexique a la portée des industriels, des capitalistes, des négociants importateurs et exportateurs et des travailleurs avec une carte du Mexique commerciale, boutière, minière et agricole , was the principal writer to publicize Mexico. Bianconi received at least 4,000 francs for his work.^[68] In addition, Felipe Cazeneuve was paid 100 pesos a month to write Le Mexique, son passé, son présent, son avenir .^[69] These efforts to exalt Mexico did not match the extravagant standards of the book published in connection with

Mexico's display at the 1900 Paris fair, for which E. Levasseur, a well-known French publicist and economist, edited the expensive two-volume work Le Mexique au début du XXe siècle .^[70] In it, prestigious writers, politicians, and scientists were paid to write wonderful things about Mexico. The general commissioner for the 1900 Paris exposition, Alfred Picard, wrote about Mexico's industry, commerce, and transportation; the greatest of the nineteenth-century French geographers, Elisée Reclus, wrote a geographical description of Mexico; Prince Roland Bonaparte, a distinguished traveler, ethnographer, and collector, dealt with population and colonization; the ideologue of solidarité , Louis Bourgeoisie, wrote about Mexico's institutions; and the French senator and former minister of agriculture, Hippolyte Gomot, wrote on agriculture. This anthology aimed to portray the new Mexico for the new century, and although it is impossible to calculate the total cost, one can assume it was not cheap to collect papers from those personalities, although most of them seem only to have lent their names and signatures to what was otherwise customary propaganda, with the brilliant exception of Reclus, who included a section on Mexico in his geography of the world.^[71]

By far the most important part of the propaganda network had to do with newspapers. In Paris 1889, and again in Paris 1900, the Mexican government hired the French-Polish-Mexican publicist Gustave Gostkowski as a media agent.^[72] In July 1889 Gostkowski signed a contract with Díaz Mimiaga to publish articles in Parisian newspapers. These articles, it was agreed, would not only praise Mexico's exhibit but also provide data of interest to capitalists, industrialists, and businessmen. Gostkowski agreed to pay numerous writers to publish articles in such newspapers as La Liberté, Petite République, Le National, Paris, Justice, Échos de Paris, La Nation, Le XIXe Siècle , and L'Événement Petit National . In return, Gostkowski received 3,500 francs for his services.^[73] Throughout 1889 he sent newspaper clippings from Paris containing very favorable articles about Mexico.^[74]

At American expositions, the wizards of progress preferred the services of José F. Godoy, but in France Gostkowski and, to a certain extent, the Mexican-French entrepreneur Auguste Genin, were the main organizers of Mexican propaganda. In 1900 Gostkowski was again hired, and he produced another propaganda book, one that included a new target: tourism. The book's title suggested the new emphasis: Au Mexique: Études, notes et renseignements utiles au capitalistes, a l'immigrant, e au touriste.^[75] Overall, the propaganda network was expensive and ineffective.^[76]

The wizards of progress complemented this propaganda function with their own lobbying for Mexico in different instances. Nothing illustrates this better than the bargaining for awards at the 1889 Paris exposition. French honors had to be ardently and painfully negotiated. As soon as Díaz Mimiaga obtained the official list of awards to be granted by the French organizers, he began to lobby for many more prizes than those originally announced.^[77]

In the same way he negotiated honors for various wizards of progress, obtaining a total of 94 recognitions and 37 diplomas.^[78] Thus the Legion of Honor and similar awards began to be distributed for Mexicans.^[79]

In sum, judged by the results obtained in immigration and foreign investment, the exhibition team was modestly successful. But judged by the speed, efficiency, and accomplishments in term of propaganda and lobbying, one could argue that Mexico did not assemble a team of similar quality until the 1990s, when the Mexican government undertook a successful and expensive campaign for an international free trade agreement.

The Rhetoric of Conflict and the Conflict of Rhetoric

The wizards of progress, though a well-articulated and organized team, were divided by internal conflicts. Most members had direct personal economic and political reasons for safeguarding the world's fair. Those with interests in mining, agriculture, or manufacturing tried to earn the favor of international capitalists and to promote their own companies. Bureaucrats and scientists were prompt to foster their own political or scientific areas of influence within the Mexican government. All personal interests operated within a small and tightly linked framework of relationships. Conflicts were often incited by personality differences or by the all-too-common attempts to bypass the hierarchical order. Because all of the members were so closely related, it was easy for almost anyone to gain the ear of Minister Pacheco or even President Díaz—a frequent occurrence in the many years during which the group labored for the success of Mexico's presence at world's fairs.

Devotion to Díaz's authority was what ultimately unified the group. Nationalism and professionalism were understood as loyalty to a set of principles and ideas. In the application of their ideas and in their loyalty to authority, they were quite a complex and disciplined team; that is, one could say that, though full of conflicts, they formed a modern team.

The wizards of progress weathered many personal difficulties during the course of their service. Except for the serious economic problems they experienced in preparing for the 1893 Chicago exhibition, the greatest conflicts among the members of the exhibition team had to do with the 1889 world's fair. Most of the problems were caused by the very structure of the team, and the fashion in which those conflicts were expressed is fundamental to understanding the nature of the Porfirian political organization. No conflict was openly discussed until all avenues of reconciliation were exhausted. Once a conflict became public, the first priority of all factions was to express loyalty to Díaz and/or Pacheco, which meant—through bizarre rhetorical twistings and turnings—loyalty to the country they represented. Finally, whenever friction rose, language was both the weapon and the battlefield, and, as with the whole Porfirian political culture, an eloquent style was in-

dispensable because, as argued before, style was far from a mere rhetorical accessory, it was what late-nineteenth-century culture was all about.

Countless frictions emanated from Díaz Mimiaga's difficult personality. He seems to have been pretentious and authoritarian, and, although Porfirio Díaz trusted him, he never achieved a position higher than that of oficial mayor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His status within the Porfirian hierarchy can be judged by the fact that his biography appears in only one of the many biographical dictionaries of the epoch: Ireneo Paz's Hombres prominentes de México , for which, as mentioned above, those who wished to be included had to pay 50 pesos.^[80] Díaz Mimiaga died in Italy in 1891, while serving as Mexican minister to that country.^[81]

Díaz Mimiaga's angular personality impeded the work of the exhibition team on more than one occasion. Quarrels with various team members prompted Alfredo Bablot, general secretary of the Mexican commission in Paris, to write a letter to the minister of economic development in April 1890 in which he blamed Díaz Mimiaga for much of the delay in the inauguration of the Mexican pavilion. Bablot characterized Díaz Mimiaga as "a real disaster."^[82] Another scandal erupted among the wizards of progress when Ramón Fernandez accepted a Bolivian invitation to attend what was billed as a dialogue to foster scientific discussion among the Latin American nations. Fernandez informed the Mexican minister of foreign affairs of his plans in order to guard himself against the wrath of Díaz Mimiaga, who had forbidden his colleagues to attend meetings at which he could not also be present. Díaz Mimiaga tried to censor all memoranda directed to Pacheco and Porfirio Díaz.^[83] He considered Fernández's action an affront to his authority. The subsequent debate among the commission members was resolved only when Fernández, ordered by Pacheco, apologized, even though the wizards of progress present at Paris declared themselves unable to achieve a final verdict.^[84]

In all conflicts the final decision was made after consultation with President Díaz himself. So it was in the case of Jesús Contreras, the famous Mexican sculptor who tried to have a hand in the construction of the Mexican pavilions at both the 1889 and the 1900 Paris world's fairs.^[85] Not until Díaz ordered that Luis Salazar and Antonio de Anza were to be in total control of the construction did Contreras cease all artistic and entrepreneurial efforts, including plans prepared with the assistance of a French engineer.^[86]

One other conflict illustrates both the issue of loyalty and the significance of language. In November 1889, according to the session's minutes, a great debate took place among the members of the commission regarding the feasibility of fulfilling all of the conditions established by the Reglamento económico for the Mexican display in Paris. Zá rate verbalized his interpretation of the Reglamento , making clear that it was impossible to complete what had originally been mandated. He acknowledged Bablot's good intentions in preparing this document and praised him highly. But at the same time he called

Bablot and his Reglamento an "extremely compassionate father of a brutal son,"^[87] and in an eloquent speech he assailed various aspects of the Reglamento as infeasible. Bablot, no less well spoken, said of Zárate's criticism that "it is a pity that so much beauty is not true." He maintained that Zárate and those who agreed with him aimed to "innocently cast me, expiatory victim, into eternal flames." However, in his defense Bablot pointed to his loyalty to President Díaz and Minister Pacheco and said he would go to the "dark Avernus in good company" because both Díaz and Pacheco had approved the Reglamento .

Bablot then argued that labeling his Reglamento a monstrum horrendum had been unfair, and in rebuttal he reviewed the Reglamento item by item. For instance, regarding article 16, which mandated that group chiefs keep themselves up-to-date concerning the different aspects of the production of their particular products, Bablot responded to Zárate's criticism by arguing that indeed group chiefs were constantly comparing Mexican products with their foreign counterparts. Thus, he ironically asserted, "not even remotely could it be assumed that Mr. Zárate thinks that his colleagues are so unconscious as to comply with Article 16 the same way Mr. Jourdain in Molière's drama spoke in prose without being aware of that fact." To Zárate's complaint regarding the impossibility of having each chief write a report on the development of his disciplines, Bablot replied that the travel impressions of each were sufficient. Sarcastically, Bablot commented: 'And surely we needed Mr. Zárate to tell us his story to know that today it is an insufferable sacrifice to travel through Europe in a sleeping car, with toilet, shower, dining room, boudoir, salon, smoking room, and all those unbearable discomforts invented by that cannibal Pullman." Bablot concluded the defense of his Reglamento by accusing Zárate of stigmatizing, "through the annihilating rays of his eloquence," the Reglamento with "touches of rhetorical flowers called exaggeration."

In fact, Bablot was, as poet Manuel Gutiérrez Najera characterized him, the prototype of the orator who "distracts the enemy with fast moves, zigzagging, making the enemy feel drowsy, and, at precisely the right moment, opens the joints of the armor and calculates and nails the rapier from there."^[88] The rhetoric with which this conflict was expressed caricatured the role of style in a courtlike bureaucratic structure. Zárate's speech and Bablot's response not only made references to but also created the common reality over whose details the two men quarreled. Thus both proclaimed their loyalty to Pacheco, to Díaz, and to the idea of progress. Moreover, this conflict demonstrated how, in an openly eloquent era, the human pecking order worked through rites of intimidation expressed with pure and penetrating selection of words.

By 1889 Mexico's exhibition team was more or less consolidated. The wizards of progress constituted a group that eventually included a large portion

of the elite: from Porfirio Díaz to such literary and artistic heroes as José Maria Velasco or Amado Nervo; from prominent economists and financiers like José Yves Limantour to official historians and archaeologists like Antonio Peñafiel. Most of Mexico's regional and national elites were at some point involved with Mexico's presence at world's fairs—from Francisco Madero (the father), who was a distinguished personality at Paris in 1889, to Justo Sierra in Atlanta's exhibition of 1895 and Paris 1900.^[89] By the end of the Porfirian era this team was so specialized and so capable of producing a complete image of the nation in a very short period of time that—as I will show in chapter 11—even the first revolutionary government requested its help when attempting to join San Francisco's Pan-American world's fair of 1915.

Five
The Aztec Palace and the History of Mexico

The French diplomas awarded at the 1889 world's fair pictured the chariot of peace and progress, pulled by two lions that were, in turn, led by two short human figures carrying giant drums. Just as the diplomas represented an attempt to allegorize what was considered modern, the 1889 Aztec Palace allegorized the entire world's fair. The palace was meant to highlight the great, though atypical, lineage of the nation it represented: a national entity with a glorious past but ready to adjust to the dictates of cosmopolitan nationalism and eager to be linked to the international economy. As the Cuban poet José Martí explained to Latin American children: "This steel Aztec temple was erected at the foot of the Eiffel Tower by Mexicans, so that their history, which is like the mother of their country, would not be touched by those who do not see themselves as sons of Mexico—such is the way one ought to love the land in which one is born! with such fearlessness, with such tenderness." ^[1]

The exoticism of the Aztec Palace, as well as its combination of archaeology, history, architecture, and technology, was seen by Mexicans and Europeans alike as no more than an essay, an attempt. If all material things were ephemeral in world's fairs, then the ideas they symbolized were expressed as an essay. They formed a coherent, incomplete, and experimental proposal that sought to persuade spectators of the reality of its propositions. The Aztec Palace thus constituted a trial in several ways. It was an attempt to recapitulate and incorporate diverse interpretations of the domestic past; it was an experimental synthesis of Mexican perceptions of the European commercial, industrial, and exotic appetite for the non-European; it was an effort to achieve the proper combination of particularism and universalism; and it was an overall essay on the modernity of the Mexican nation.

In another respect, the Mexican pavilion in the 1889 Paris world's fair was not an essay but a conclusive statement. The Aztec Palace ratified the value, importance, and truth not only of the modern creed itself but also, and especially, of the very import of continuing the attempt to follow the creed, to reproduce it, to copy it. Consequently, the Aztec Palace faithfully re-created the Panglossian sense of the end of history that the whole fair epitomized. It was a categorical petition to enter the modern world.

From the historian's point of view, the Aztec Palace can be seen as a frozen portion of time and space that fossilized an emblematic moment—of conclusiveness and experimentation—in the attempt by the Mexican elite to formulate a vision of its past, present, and future. This chapter and the next two are devoted to understanding this frozen evidence. But because the historian's practice is inescapably a sequential task—that is, one must retain the chronological order of events—the principal themes in the history of the Aztec Palace must be explored concurrently. Especially relevant for the Aztec Palace is the unfolding of two stories: the record of the various ways in which the nation's history was conceived, which I tell in the remainder of this chapter; and the chronicle of the scientific (that is, archaeological and anthropological) ideas about Mexico and Mexicans that were articulated both domestically and internationally, covered in chapter 6. A third historical track converged with and included these two histories: the history of the material (more or less artistic) depictions of the nation, the subject of chapter 7. Although these chapters focus on the Aztec Palace, in fact they take the palace as the pivot for the examination of a larger cultural contour that encompasses the period between the 1870s and the 1910s.

The Aztec Palace was ostensibly nothing more than the Mexican pavilion at the 1889 Paris fair, but it also represented a moment in the writing of the history of Mexico. Tracing the evolution of the conception of the palace involves the appraisal of what it synthesized in the late 1880s: the long political and intellectual dispute over the Indian past; the historiographical infrastructure developed throughout the nineteenth century (both by Mexicans and foreigners); and the latest theoretical, rhetorical, and graphic tools for developing a comprehensive national identity that could be taught and enacted.

When the Mexican authorities announced the construction of a Mexican pavilion for the 1889 Paris world's fair, they declared that it ought to be "a building which at its sides and angles would characterize the architecture of the most civilized races of Mexico, but which would distance itself from the dimensions of ancient monuments that opposed modern necessities and taste."^[2] The effort to be authentically Mexican was combined with that of

being modern. To be genuinely Mexican implied a particular view of the Mexican past, especially of the Indian past that had been, throughout Mexican history, vital for the definition of a self-assured national identity.

As a specific view of Mexican history, the Aztec Palace responded both to domestic and to international political and cultural impulses. Nationally, it was as eloquent as, and even more vivid than, the first great general and comprehensive compendium of Mexican history, México a través de los siglos , which was also completed in 1889. In a sense the whole nation was crystallized in a book at the same time as it was being exemplified in a building, overriding internal political, racial, and regional disparities. Internationally, as following chapters will illustrate, it constituted an ad hoc complement for late-nineteenth-century Western orientalism.^[3] The concurrences between the Aztec Palace and México a través de los siglos best characterize the boundaries within which those elements of Mexican history that were national, homogeneous, logical, and learnable were discussed during the Porfiriato. Previous nineteenth-century historical reconstructions of the nation's past had not reconciled themselves into a single comprehensive history in chronological, geographical, or ideological terms. Porfirian intellectuals finally achieved the desired synthesis, which put special emphasis on two central issues: on one hand, the creation of a civic religion with a well-delineated chronology and hierarchy of events and a demarcated set of heroes; on the other, the reconstitution of the Indian past as an inherent component of Mexican nationhood. The latter issue was in turn the late-nineteenth-century solution to the long-standing dilemma of Mexico's criollo identity—that is, the conflict between the Spanish heritage and the Indian present and past.

The process of designing the Aztec Palace was the physical resolution of the intricate debate over how to make a modern country in the late nineteenth century. The resolution came after long bureaucratic and intellectual negotiation. Two commissions were assigned to submit proposals for the Mexican pavilion in Paris. The engineer Luis Salazar and the architects Vicente Reyes and José María Alva formed the first team; the second comprised the historian and statistician Antonio Peñafiel and the engineer Antonio de Anza. Both proposals were only syntheses of the national history in visual, monumental form, and both sought architectural inspiration in histories that had preceded them while reinforcing a new patriotic history.^[4]

In the early 1880s the beatification of the Indian president, Benito Juárez, and of the last Indian emperor, Cuauhtémoc, were emblematic of the attempts to create a civic religion around well-established—and graphically perceivable—deities. By the early twentieth century it was commonplace for Mexicans to praise three great national heroes and their individual contributions to the nation's evolution: Hidalgo for independence, Juárez for liberty, and Díaz for peace.

In reviving the Indian past, late-nineteenth-century historians, writers, and

politicians were not working in a vacuum. From Bernardino de Sahagún to Francisco Xavier Clavijero, from Carlos Maria de Bustamante to Manuel Orozco y Berra, the Indian past had gained a more or less distinct form and content. Foreign observers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Guillerme Dupaix, Edward King (Viscount Kingsborough), William H. Prescott, and De-siré de Charnay, among many others, were also influential in the historical reconstruction of Mexico's Indian past.

For Mexican criollo patriots since colonial times, the Indian past was an invaluable source of pride and legitimation, a means of seeking equality with and recognition from Europeans. Attachment to the beauty and resources of Mexico, as well as fidelity to religious values and figures, also played a part in the criollo patriotism, which, it can be argued, had never actually disappeared from the debates over Mexican historiography and nationalism.^[5] By the late nineteenth century, the long-standing appreciation of the Indian past was incorporated into modern liberal conceptions.

Thus criollo patriotism and liberal nationalism contained an indigenist element. However, this indigenism was not accompanied by a substantial general and total reinterpretation of the Mexican past or by a general idea of the nation's future shape. The early criollo indigenism—of, for instance, Carlos Maria de Bustamante or Fray Servando Teresa de Mier—was too radical to serve as a guideline for writing the general history of an Indian nation ruled by a white minority.^[6]

The conservative Lucas Alamán, on the other hand, composed the first extensive historical account of Mexico's past and, with it, a more or less articulate program for the modern nation. In Historia de Méjico he attempted an unbiased analysis of the Indian past, acknowledging the technological advancements of the natives but stressing their barbaric religion.^[7] But for him the origins of the Mexican nation were in the Spanish Conquest, which had made a tabula rasa of all prior histories. However comprehensive and well constructed, Alamán's history became prey for the tumultuous political life of Mexico during the nineteenth century. Alamán's links with conservative and monarchist circles in contentious times and the final ruin of the conservative cause brought about by the French intervention made his type of national project politically suspect and difficult to propose. Yet Alamán condensed a historical view of Mexico that remained in the background of Mexico's nationalistic discourses as late as the 1920s.^[8]

The liberals of the first half of the nineteenth century simply did not count on a Lucas Alamán to assemble a comprehensive liberal history of Mexico. But factionalism and endemic wars did not help the liberals compose a comprehensive liberal account of the nation's history, and their creolism and tamed indigenism (if indigenism at all) prevented them from following the example of reformist groups like the young Ottomans who, in the 1860s, used Islamic ideas to legitimize the need to modernize (Westernize) the Ottoman

Empire along European lines. The Ottoman reformers came to equate progress with "a return to the true spirit of Islam."^[9] Mexican liberals, in contrast, were too Europeanized to even conceive of a modern milieu that would be Indian or to use the concept of Indianness in the cause of modernity (not, at least, until the 1910s).

After the overthrow of Maximilian's empire and the definitive establishment of the Reform laws in the 1860s, liberal factions began to rewrite Mexico's past and map out its future. This was a process of ideological and historiographical negotiation, for liberals did not have a golden age—as Alamán had found in the Hispanic colonial era—to look back on, at least until the crystallization of the Reform as an epic moment. In the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal romantics—such as Manuel Payno, a great synthesizer whose history textbook became quite influential in the 1870s—could not look to the colonial period as their paradise lost, especially because the independence movement was too close to them, both chronologically and emotionally. Instead, they turned to the Spanish Conquest and portrayed Indians as brave and noble warriors.^[10]

By the 1880s, once various regional and political factions had established a relative status quo, Porfirian liberals realized that a comprehensive nationalistic history was a sine qua non both for the consolidation of the nation and as a proof of stability and civilization.^[11] They were especially aware that such a history had to be taught and disseminated if a national consciousness was to form.^[12] For them, if history was not a lesson—in both an exemplary and an educational sense—it was not history. The nation, it was claimed by the Porfirian government, would be consolidated in the classrooms. However, the liberals soon learned to be unfaithful to their goal, restricting themselves to making the nation not by teaching it to a dispersed and illiterate population but, rather, by exhibiting it both domestically and internationally. In any event, not until the 1880s did concise liberal histories of the nation start to materialize.^[13] Then came the first general and comprehensive synthesis of Mexico's past: México a través de los siglos , a collective, reconciliatory, and conclusive enterprise that included authors from different liberal factions.

The Aztec Palace in Paris was the steel version of México a través de los siglos . In its walls, as well as in the displays they sheltered, the story told by the new history text was echoed. The book was a five-volume compendium written by the victorious liberals, headed by Vicente Riva Palacio and including Alfredo Chavero, Julio Zárate, Juan de Dios Arias, Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari, and José María Vigil. It was published by Santiago Ballesca, then a well-known Catalan publisher who lived in Mexico and published many important books in the late nineteenth century.^[14] Although it is not clear how the book was originally conceived, it seems to have been fostered by a conscious will to reorder and put together the whole Mexican history in one

book according to the views of the liberals in power.^[15] But Riva Palacio's historiographical endeavor especially echoed the goals of the Aztec Palace in the sense that, from its original conception, the book was meant to introduce Mexico to the civilized world as a modern nation: "a first class book. . . to be known throughout the enlightened world."^[16]

Riva Palacio wrote the second volume—El virreinato —of México a través de los siglos . Above all, he was a writer, truly a man of letters,^[17] and his treatment of the colonial period can be viewed as that of a liberal who had come to terms with the Spanish past, a period that had long been the patrimony of conservative historians. Accordingly, the conquest was the painful and inevitable defeat of a great nation at the hands of a still more advanced civilization. The encounter was, in Riva Palacio's view, the first step in the emergence of the new nation. Hence, following the then-in-vogue French writer Ernest Renan and his question, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? , he maintained that the nation needed a unified territory, language, culture, and that "all attempts at independence will be in vain until the crossbreeding of race produces a new people, exclusively Mexican."^[18]

In effect, what Riva Palacio argued was that, beginning with the Spanish Conquest, a mestizo nation had emerged as a natural fusion, and this fact gave new value to both of its inherent components: Indians and Spaniards. Riva Palacio fashioned a cunning argument through an intricate amalgamation of Renan's type of nationalist thought, Darwin's transformism, and classical criollo patriotism. That is, cultural (linguistic and racial) nationalism and social Darwinism combined with the old patriotism of Mexican criollos that went back to the 1780s and these liberals' common nationalist education during foreign interventions (1840s and 1860s).^[19] Therefore, Riva Palacio could justify the very task of writing a national history as something beyond the mere recounting of the past for its own sake. For Riva Palacio, and unlike Lucas Alamán fifty years earlier, the consolidation of nationhood was beyond the capacity of mere antiquarians and above narrow considerations of objectivity. And thus his literary capacities gained importance, because in writing about the nation, the form became the essence. Riva Palacio thought that empirical historical facts made sense only as expressions of something more essential (divine). The nation therefore seemed to occupy the place of God in Riva Palacio's writing.

Ironically, Riva Palacio combined this romantic nationalism with a description of the racial characteristics of Indians that followed Darwinian parameters filtered through French translations.^[20] In common with the criollo patriots of the independence period, he even praised, albeit in Darwinian terms, the superiority of the Indian race vis-á-vis the European races, because Indians "[have] lost beard and bodily hair, lost the wisdom teeth, and acquired a new molar, substituting the canines which in Europe's most advanced races still exist in a rudimentary state." Nonetheless, as I have men-

tioned, Riva Palacio thought that mestizos would eventually become a new race that incorporated the best features of its two constituents and formed the real Mexico.^[21] In fact, Riva Palacio's transformation of traditional criollo patriotism advanced what would eventually become, without the heavy racial component, the official twentieth-century mestizo definition of Mexican nationhood.^[22]

The Aztec Palace echoed México a través de los siglos most noticeably when it came to the liberal reconstruction of the pre-Hispanic past. The volume that Alfredo Chavero wrote for México a través de los siglos dealt with pre-Hispanic times.^[23] Like Riva Palacio, Chavero was a man of letters: an archaeologist and historian of pre-Hispanic Mexico as well as a writer of dramas that—by the 1870s—often had Aztec motifs.^[24] He was the prototype of the late-nineteenth-century Mexican indigenist.^[25]

Chavero's prose, like that of Riva Palacio, was especially well suited to the construction of a liberal past for Mexico. His writings, as Riva Palacio himself argued, were motivated by a patriotic spirit, "striving to bring to the stage characters such as queen Xochitl and Meconetzin, but with these characters nobody can make a name for himself in Mexico, because it multiplies insurmountable problems."^[26] In fact, Chavero's and Riva Palacio's rhetorical abilities included the intersection of old and new means of expression: the neoclassical liberal rhetoric—a legacy of late colonial times and liberal republicanism—and the emerging professional languages fostered by various sciences.^[27] Thus while the engineers of the Aztec Palace debated whether to use steel and marble in neoclassical or purely Aztec fashion, the writers of Mexican liberal history experimented with baroque Greco-Roman metaphors versus organicist, biological, and technical ones.

In México a través de los siglos Chavero emphasized the strength and significance of the Nahua culture over other cultures, as well as his conviction about the degeneration of races: "It would be a mistake to judge the greatness of the ancient Mexican empire by our present-day Indians."^[28] He concluded with an evolutionist view of the growth of Aztec preeminence: "Thus started gestating the three [Otomi, Nahua, and Maya] civilizations that would develop in the course of several centuries, until the Nahua, the most perfect and powerful of the three, would expand and dominate the entire territory."^[29] This epitomized the late-nineteenth-century liberal appropriation of the Aztecs as the only past of the modern nation.

Together, all the authors of M éxico a través de los siglos achieved what the country had never before had: a comprehensive and articulated picture of its entire history. But it was not a purely Mexican perspective. The work was a synthesis directed at domestic readers, but it also served as a point of reference for readers from abroad. On one hand, the book was paid for in part by private subscribers who received it in periodical deliveries. According to Ballesca, the number of subscribers reached 7,000 in 1882 but declined to

3,000 by 1889.^[30] On the other hand, the book was meant to be, like the Aztec Palace, a modern monument, as Riva Palacio put it, "a monument worthy of the advancement that typography has achieved in our century."^[31] The picture of the country the book presented sought to resolve internal disparities and to foster nationalism, but it also aimed to fit together the parameters of the political, social, and economic ideas, many of them foreign, that inspired the multivolume book. And it did so in a beautiful and colorful Catalan edition, subsidized by the Mexican government, that made use of all of the representational resources then available to the printing arts. Lithographs and pictures were as much part of the late-nineteenth-century literature as were romantic novels and travel descriptions, and the lithographs by F. Fuste and R. Canto in México a través de los siglos produced a vivid, animated, and pedagogic impression.^[32] In addition, photographs and lithographs from national and international expeditions, as well as descriptions and reproductions from foreign historians and archaeologists, were included and so became part of the national symbolism.^[33]México a través de los siglos was thus an object lesson on the importance of books to the modern world (see Figs. 3a and 3b).^[34]

The nationalism that México a través de los siglos synthesized and that the Aztec Palace expressed was simultaneously paralleled by international political and cultural trends that in some way fostered this reargumentation of the Mexican past. Oddly enough, this growing radical nationalism coincided with the growth of cultural cosmopolitanism, because an international common model of values and fashions had emerged among the middle classes. On one hand, cosmopolitanism was considered an attribute of the adventurous and tolerant, the conquest and appreciation of the exotic. In this sense, cosmopolitanism meant open-minded European acknowledgment of other values, things, and peoples. As Baudelaire himself claimed when he commented on the 1855 Paris world's fair, "That divine grace of cosmopolitanism" meant that "beauty is always bizarre."^[35] On the other hand, cosmopolitanism was a set of European values, things, and attitudes that had to be adopted if one was to be modern.

Mexico's elite was linked to the transformation of nationalism as well as to both notions of cosmopolitanism. Accordingly, they racially—scientifically— redefined Mexican nationhood by supplying Mexico with an acceptable national uniqueness and a degree of exoticism.

The two proposals for a 1889 Mexican pavilion that were submitted sought to represent the Indian past faithfully and to make it coincide with modern progress, and both were historically supported and inspired by the historical synthesis introduced by México a través de los siglos . Both proposals attempted to satisfy the cosmopolitan and exotic appetites of the modern

Images not available.

3.
Covers of  México a través de los siglos , vols. 1 (top) and 4 (bottom).
 Sources: Vicente Riva Palacio, ed., México a través de los siglos, vols. 1, 4 (Barcelona, 1887-1889).

world; both shared the conviction of having arrived at the final stage of progress and the idea of reconciliation. Yet they varied in the extent and weight they gave to the different components of the nationhood they sought to mirror.

The building design submitted by Luis Salazar, Vicente Reyes, and José Maria Alva was a bizarre architectural synthesis of pre-Hispanic architectural styles based on a collection of antiquities assembled by Lord Kingsborough, Antiquities of México .^[36] Jean Fréderic Waldeck's lithographs of the pre-Hispanic architecture of the Maya region were also used by Salazar.^[37] In addition, Salazar was influenced by the pioneering work of Capt. Guillerme M. Dupaix, who had been commissioned by the king of Spain to study the Maya ruins during the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as that of the photographer and archaeologist Desiré de Charnay, who was part of the 1857 French scientific commission that photographed and studied pre-Hispanic ruins in Mexico.^[38] In fact, Salazar above all used Chavero's synthesis of all the above-mentioned works that had been included in México a través de los siglos .^[39]

Salazar Reyes and Alva conceived a pavilion that merged features of ancient Indian buildings with those of modern architecture, especially with steel and wood construction (see Figs. 4a and 4b). The structure was meant to be dismantled and later reassembled to serve as a government building in Mexico. Salazar thus imagined a complex combination of Indian architectural styles with ornamentation inspired by pre-Hispanic mythology. As historian Fausto Ramírez observed, the combination was in tune with the fusionist policies of the Díaz regime.^[40] In the Salazar palace, all pre-Hispanic styles and histories were synthesized into one single architectural past, which in turn was the stylistic antecedent of the modern nation. The building was 70 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 17.20 meters tall. The shape of the base was a copy of Xochicalco's temple, combined with motifs taken from Mitla's ruins. The monolith of Tenango was used as a model for the columns, and the lateral windows were copied from Palenque's forms as described by Dupaix and Charnay and reinterpreted by Chavero.^[41]

The second proposal for a Mexican pavilion, that of Peñafiel and de Anza, was the project finally accepted. According to Peñafiel, their building epitomized the essential features of the Mexican pre-Hispanic monuments and the Mexican national history. Unlike Salazar, Peñafiel aimed not to develop a national architectonic style but to be faithful to the real pre-Hispanic past of the Mexican nation and to the natural organic evolution of Mexico. Thus his project was a reproduction of a teocalli (an Aztec temple), because in his view Aztecs conformed to the authentic past of Mexico. He guaranteed that in his project "there is no detail, symbol, or allegorical figure that has not been drawn from the true Mexican archaeology and with the only intent of bringing back to life a genuine national civilization."^[42]

Images not available.

4.
Plans for facades of the Mexican palace at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition,
 by Luis Salazar (top) and J. M. de Alva (bottom). Source: México,
 Secretaría de Fomento, Proyectos de edificio para la Exposición 
International de París 1889 (Mexico City, 1888).

In formulating his proposal, Peñafiel followed the official historiography, especially Chavero's account in México a través de lo siglos , and his own research. In addition, he incorporated into his project the investigations of the Prussian scholar Edward Seler in European archives.^[43] In the end, Peñariel considered only the Aztec people as being worthy of pride and celebration, the true antecedent of the Mexican modern nation.^[44] In the official pamphlet that explained the Mexican pavilion, Peñafiel contended that the building was constructed in the "purest Aztec style," as described in his own book, Monumentos del arte mexicano antiguo .^[45] He maintained that it was to be constructed in steel for easy disassembly and reconstruction in Mexico, "should the government deem it appropriate,"^[46] for an archaeological museum. This pavilion was 70 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 14.50 meters tall, with a glass ceiling and no internal walls except the steel skeleton and the glass showcases.

Peñafiel's goal was to allegorically depict the vigor of the Aztec religion, agriculture, and arts, all understood within an evolutionary line from the beginning of the Aztec civilization to its end, the starting point of Mexican nationhood. Therefore, the building comprised three sections: "The building's central part stands for the capital ideas of religion; the sides stand for agriculture and the arts, principal elements of its progress, and in the middle figures representing the beginning and the end of the ancient Mexican civilization" (see Fig. 5). ^[47]

What Peñafiel did was to select, from what he knew of Aztec architecture, the elements that would meet the requirements of modern nineteenth-century allegorical architecture. Therefore, he looked for Mexican-style columns to substitute for the Greco-Roman columns so common in the neoclassical constructions of his own day. In the portico of the building were "two caryatids, whose shape I took from an archaeological study I did recently in Tula, state of Hidalgo, with the purpose of finding columns that could be used in [modern] Mexican architecture."^[48]

The official guide to the building, unlike Salazar's description, did not explain the aesthetic origins of each section of the building; rather, it was a narrative of the heroics of the Aztec people. In the guide, Peñafiel explained that his design was a "mythological representation akin to the exposition's ends."^[49] By the goals of the exposition he meant the French exhortation to the builders of foreign pavilions to show their native styles. However, in picturing Aztec gods and heroes Peñafiel was doing something more than satisfying the French requirements. He was continuing a long ideological and cultural Mexican tendency to selectively reevaluate the Indian past as part of the national identity.

Following this rendering of a national epic, the Aztec heroes were cautiously depicted and arranged in a symbolic order, so as to clearly present the epic of the Mexican nation. Therefore, the facade of the Aztec Palace was divided

Image not available.

5.
Entrance to the Aztec Palace at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition.
 Source: William Walton, Chefs-d'oeuvre de l'Exposition Universelie de Paris, 
1889 (Philadelphia and Paris, 1889).

into two sets of bronze sculptures, all designed by the Mexican sculptor Jesús Contreras, who was then studying in Paris. One set was located at each side of the facade; the other decorated its central part. In the first set, on the right side of the palace, were Centeotl (goddess protector of agriculture), Tlaloc (god of rain), and Chalchiutlicue (goddess of water). On the left side were Xochiquetzal (god of arts), Camaxtli (god of hunting), and Yacatecuhtli (god of commerce). In the central facade were six representations of Aztec heroes: on the right, Itzcoatl, Nezahualcoyotl, and Totoquihuatzin; on the left, Cacama, Cuitlahuac, and Cuauhtémoc. I will examine these representations later.

Although Peñafiel was considered both an archaeologist and a statistician, his language was even more rhetorically neoclassical than was that of Riva Palacio or Chavero. Peñafiel's official description of the building was a romantic narrative, full of classical references that highlighted the heroism and high degree of civilization of the Aztec world. The Aztecs, he maintained, were superior to the Greeks in their arts "because they managed to do with the straight line, the most ingrate of the lines, what the Greeks did with the curve, which has always easily brought with it beauty at its best."^[50] His classicism was also expressed in his metaphors of the heroes Cacama, Cuitlahuac, and Cuauhtémoc, who stood for what he called "the end of the Mexican monarchy" and whose lives, he claimed, were like a "chant by Homer. . . . Plutarch would have painted those three towering heroic figures of Mexico with the colors of Scipio and Graco."^[51]

Although Peñafiel emphasized the greatness of the Indian past and thus talked about the brutality of the Spanish Conquest, his stance was far from rigidly anti-Spanish. Like Chavero and Riva Palacio, Peñariel depended heavily on Orozco y Berra's description of the conquest, and he established a distinction between sixteenth-century Spain and modern, progressive Spain.^[52]

In the end, both Peñariel's and Salazar's proposals were submitted to the Mexican Central Committee for the 1889 Paris fair and to Porfirio Díaz himself, and in May 1888 the central committee discussed both projects. Chavero favored the Salazar-Reyes-Alva project, arguing that it was "the perfect creation of a new and splendid style taken from the ancient monuments of Mexican art";^[53] that is, a reconciliation both of the various Indian pasts and of these pasts and the present. However, frictions were obvious among committee members regarding the proper degree of indigenism to incorporate into the building. To minimize these, Zárate and Flores proposed that the committee's choice be considered only a recommendation and that the final decision be left to Porfirio Díaz and Carlos Pacheco. They also proposed that a plaster scale model of the losing design be constructed and shown as part of the Mexican exhibit in Paris. A special session of the commission was set for 2 June in Pacheco's residence. The committee voted nine to rive in

favor of Peñafiel's project.^[54] As a partial consolation, both de Anza and Salazar were put in charge of constructing the Mexican pavilion.

Salazar's eclectic, Maya-oriented building did not materialize, though it was reproduced in miniature—also by Jesús Contreras. As we will see, however, Salazar's experiment acquired new life forty years later in the 1929 Seville world's fair, ironically to celebrate the remnants of Spanish imperialism (see part 2). In that year an eclectic Maya building depicted a different regime and nation.

Once the project for the Mexican pavilion was approved, its construction became a constant process of negotiation between and within the Mexican and French governments over economic interests and varied strategies of representation. The main compromises concerned the size and location of the area assigned to the Mexican Aztec Palace, the cost of the building and its decoration, the timing of construction, and the appropriateness of the building's style.^[55] The first problem the commission faced was the size and characteristics of the site assigned to the pavilion. Mexico's request for a larger location had more to do with the impact of its exhibition than with the size of the area assigned to it. As Díaz Mimiaga noted, the small area assigned to the Hispanic American countries would have to be shared with the exhibits of some European countries, and perhaps the Hispanic Americans would come off second best in comparison.^[56] Indeed, for Mexico, careful placement of the exhibition area became very important. In the end, as a result of a long negotiation, Mexico gained what it requested: a rectangular area 70 meters long and 30 meters wide. It was 15 meters away from Argentina's exhibit but far from the great European displays.^[57]

Once the design of the pavilion had been chosen, the committee began to consider construction details. After considering various proposals, in November 1888 Díaz Mimiaga signed a contract with the Société Cail, which did not include the artistic works.^[58] The artistic tasks were assigned, as mentioned above, to the Mexican sculptor Jesús Contreras, who had been given a grant in 1887 to study bronze working in France. In 1889, still in Paris, he had to work arduously on (and was poorly paid for) all of the artistic needs of the building. Yet, as we will see, he eventually became the master and manufacturer of Mexico's late-nineteenth-century craze for statuary, with great fame and profit.^[59] The estimate of total cost submitted by the Cail firm was 385,000 francs, or about 40,600 pesos.^[60]

The interior designs were let to the French designer E. Rousseau at a cost of 280,000 francs. According to Díaz Mimiaga, Rousseau spent two months researching samples of indigenous Mexican adornments in the ethnographic collections of the Trocadero Museum.^[61] Although little graphic evidence of

Image not available.

6.
Design for the interior of the Aztec Palace. Source: José Francisco Godoy, 
México en París (Mexico City, 1891).

the interior of the building has survived,^[62] it seems that the resulting interior decoration was all too French (see Fig. 6). Rousseau apparently designed curtains and internal ornamentation with pre-Hispanic motifs, but the total effect was as modern and cosmopolitan as was that of all of the other palaces in Paris 1889, with curtains and shades recalling haremlike scenarios of oriental exoticism rather than Aztec decor.

Although the Aztec Palace was scheduled to open in March 1889, it was actually inaugurated on 22 June 1889. At 9:00 A.M. "La Marseillaise" and the Mexican national anthem were played by the Mexican 101st battalion orchestra while French President Sadi Carnot, joined by the directors of the exhibition and by Ramón Fernández and Gustavo Baz, climbed the steps of the Aztec Palace. "At that very moment, the Eiffel Tower began to be lit up by fireworks, and the light fountains began to function."^[63]

The inauguration was covered in various French newspapers. For some of them the Aztec Palace was "one of the most original [pavilions] of the Exposition."^[64] For others it was "the exact reproduction of the Aztec temple known as the "Fire Temple"; a temple in which were performed "torture and human sacrifice." The stairs were bizarre, "straight like an arrow, virtually insurmountable. . . . They are called the stairs of torture [supplice ], being one

of the notable variety of tortures that the Mexicans of long ago had invented."^[65] For still others the Aztec Palace was a bizarre pastiche that was at odds with the general cosmopolitanism of the fair.^[66]

Put in a larger perspective, the Aztec Palace was only a brief episode in a long story. It was complete, in common with the entire fair, and yet as such it was also ephemeral, as was the image of the homeland itself. Mexican liberals were keenly aware of this. Although the nation in 1889 was in an Aztec mood and had attained a conclusive general liberal history, some Mexican intellectuals knew that the situation was only temporary. The Aztec Palace was eventually disassembled, and México a través de los siglos was surpassed by yet another liberal, though more positivist, general history, M éxico: Su evolución social . In fact, the great synthesizer of Mexican history, Riva Palacio, wrote from prison of his ambivalence about the winterlike nature of his patria :

When I was young, your rumor spoke
of phrases my thought had guessed;
and later, while crossing the campsite,
patria , your bass voice said.
Today I feel you striking
the strong bars of my cell
amidst my dark nights;
but my misfortunes have taught me
that you are but wind, and no more, when you moan,
you are wind if you roar or if you murmur,
wind if you come, wind if you leave.^[67]

Six
Mexican Anthropology and Ethnography at the Paris Exposition

The Aztec Palace was, above all, a statement about Mexico's Indian legacy in an era of science and nationalism. In this chapter I explain how the issue of exoticism, race, and nationalism came to be part of the image of a modern nation and thus of world's fairs and how this fact marked Mexico's efforts to display itself in Paris. Next I describe the anthropological, archaeological, and exoticist exhibits, both of Mexico and of the fair in general, as being mutually supportive. Third, I deal with the particular way in which Mexicans viewed race in the second part of the nineteenth century. This excursion is indispensable to an understanding of the way in which Mexico was presented as a modern and universal nation by its elite, despite its mixed-race configuration. Hence, fourth, making use of what the fair displayed, I review Western theories on race and nationalism in order to show where Mexicans found the arguments with which to fit their country into the concepts.

The Historical Crisis of an Ecumenical World

"The exotic Exposition makes us reflect on the new duties that we assume in the world," observed Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, commenting on the ethnological exhibits at the 1889 Paris world's fair. He added that in the "ecumenical city of Invalides . . . everything proclaims the rupture of the ancient equilibrium," because of "the reciprocal penetration of [peoples]." This, he added, constituted "the fusion of men . . ., a crisis of history."^[1] Because the alien was at last in the familiar, such a shock, as de Vogüé's anguish exemplifies, both was inevitable and would have unknown future consequences. History was in a quandary because for the first time the exotic needed the cosmopolitan as much as the reverse. For "exotic" Latin American intellectuals, like the Cuban poet José Martí, the fair represented the beginning of

a harmonious, all-inclusive world.^[2] But what was civilized and what was not? What was primitive and what was modern? The fair tried to answer these questions conclusively, but in doing so it made them all the more sonorous and unsolved.

In 1889 the Aztec Palace was only one of the many exotic aspects of the fair. For example, various peoples were brought to Paris and used as subjects of anthropometrical research. Racial hypernationalism required this sort of show, composed not only of the exoticism of others but also of the European nations' own folk peoples.^[3] In this sense modern nationalism constituted— regardless of each country's particularities—a twofold mandate: to create one's own self by reviewing geographical, cultural, and temporal others; and to make one's self at home in modern nationalism by recounting and inventing one's own traditions. The nationalism of the late-nineteenth-century industrialized nations was also embraced by the modernizing elites of so-called exotic and backward countries. That is, the mandate was followed by both the modern observers of the "precipices of time" that were world's fairs and the observed exotic Others.^[4] If what was modern was the mandate, then both the fair and the Mexican pavilion were countenances of modernity.

The French organizers suggested that Mexico and other exotic countries display their national styles in the architecture of their pavilions. For France an Aztec Palace was a complement, albeit minor, to its fin-de-siècle orientalism—a combination of anthropological, archaeological, aesthetic, and nationalistic concerns that conformed to a graphical ethnology.^[5] In Paris 1889 the "Rue du Caire" and the exhibit on the "History of Habitation" were the foremost examples of this orientalism. Visitors walked through a replica of an historical street in Cairo that was so perfect it caused Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé to exclaim: "Here are our slaves."^[6] In contrast, Gypsy and Javanese dances and music were performed all around the fair.

All of that was just a facade, however, a scenario that displayed European architectural, ethnological, and artistic concerns and done in a way that could easily become daily fare for late-nineteenth-century Parisians.^[7] Behind the facade rested the belief in, and the will to try, another expression—harmonious progress. In effect, late-nineteenth-century world's fairs displayed not only modern nationalism but also modernity's unavoidable component: the self-defeating awareness of its stylistic experimental nature. This irony permeated the entire fair.

The facade of the Aztec Palace simultaneously satisfied French oriental-ism and reconstructed Mexican national history. In contrast, its interior was more a statement about the present and the future than it was an assertion about the past. If one overlooked the overall French style in decoration, the interior of the Mexican pavilion contained an impressive anthropological, archaeological, and natural history display (see Fig. 7). In effect, in the interior of the Aztec Palace the issue of race was treated in the same fashion

Image not available.

7.
Interior of the Aztec Palace. Source: Jos(é Francisco Godoy,
 México en Paris (Mexico City, 1891).

as in the whole fair: within a scientific paradigm, with a nationalistic concern, and with a pragmatic (that is, a commercial and quasi-touristic) approach.

The Aztec Palace also shows how modern Western understanding of nationalism and progress was created both from the outside and from the inside. The understanding was constructed by the elite of a country that was incompletely Western. The elite had created its own conception of modern nationalism and progress in accordance with what they believed to be a universal outside, even though they were, in fact, secretly contributing to the construction of that universal.^[8]

Parallel Exhibits

At the 1889 exhibition, "the New World [appeared] rich in exotic realities," C. de Varigny observed. But "in the interior everything is made of steel, everything is modern, and has been classified according to methodic and wise skills. There, everything talks about a young, active, and vigorous race. . . . For the first time, the New World affirms itself in its cosmopolitan diversity and in its individual originality."^[9] That is, the nations of the New World had achieved the perfect combination of particularism and universalism. There-

fore, for Varigny, the Aztec Palace was a great example of the superiority of modern times that could reconcile the architectural exoticism of other civilizations with modern cosmopolitanism—all the more remarkable since the palace was the creation of a country largely populated by Indians.

Another visitor, Charles Possonnier—in a pamphlet that was part of the propaganda package distributed by the Mexican exhibition—argued that Mexico was marching under the guidance of modern progress and liberty.^[10] A reporter was especially impressed by the painting El Senado de Tlaxcala , which portrayed Indians conferring in a Roman-style parliament, while dining-room furniture in Aztec style also caught his eye. He reported, with emotion but without surprise, seeing "the head of an Apache chief admirably conserved."^[11]

In addition to the Aztec Palace itself, Mexico's exhibit included books on antiques, studies of Indian customs, and scientific treatises. Leopoldo Batres, chief of the office of Inspección y Conservación de Monumentos Arqueológicos de la República (whose very foundation in 1885 exemplifies the era's archaeo-anthropological concerns) exhibited his book Monografías de arquelogía mexicana: Teotihuacán; o, la ciudad sagrada de los Toltecas , published in English and Spanish.^[12] In it, Batres developed an anthropological theory on the degeneration of the Mexican races. Alfredo Chavero, in addition to the handsome edition of his volume on Mexico's pre-Hispanic history, México a través de los siglos , exhibited novels and dramas with indigenous themes. Antonio Peñariel displayed the attractive edition of his Monumentos del arte mexicano antiguo , published in Berlin, and countless copies of his Explication de l'edifice mexicaine .^[13]

Mexico was also represented at the "History of Habitation" display, though with a structure not made by Mexicans. "The architectural representation of cultures at the world's fairs," architecture historian Z. Çelik observes, "was double-sided, making a claim to scientific authority and accuracy while nourishing fantasy and illusion."^[14] The architect of the Paris Opera, Charles Garnier, conceived the idea of displaying a history of human habitation at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The exhibit included forty-four different buildings illustrating the "march of humanity through the ages." It was a main attraction, popular for the contrast with the Eiffel Tower that it offered. The dwellings exhibited claimed to be "truer than the truth."^[15] For some, the display was scientific proof of the evolution of humanity from barbarism to civilization; for others, like José Martí, what was remarkable about the exhibit was not the progressive evolution, which demonstrated innovation in materials and styles, but the fact that modernity meant that "in each city there are Moorish, Greek, Gothic, Byzantine, and Japanese dwellings, marking the beginning of the happy times in which men treat each other as friends."^[16]

In November 1888 Mexico had been requested both to design a dwelling in Aztec style and to send a group of people distinctively Mexican in look

and dress to inhabit the so-called Aztec dwelling. Mexico's government asked the distinguished historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso to evaluate the French proposal.^[17] He advised against joining the habitation exhibit, arguing that it would be impossible to reproduce genuine Aztec interior decoration and furniture. The truth was that, in terms of exoticism, for Mexico one Aztec Palace was enough, and the government was reluctant to disperse its theatrical effect in various palaces. Nevertheless, Garnier constructed an Aztec dwelling following the descriptions of the French ethnographer and traveler Desiré de Charnay and of the architect and philosopher Viollet-le-Duc.^[18] With the help of archaeology, the Aztec dwelling was depicted as belonging to a civilization that, according to Garnier's classification, remained outside the development of modern architecture, though with some Egyptian influences (see Fig. 8).^[19]

A world's fair was not only an architectural circus but also a human one. Native peoples from Africa, America, and Asia were brought and exhibited with the same principles, techniques, and interests as those of a zoo.^[20] In fact, if Mexico fulfilled in Paris the standards of the plastic orientalism of the West, then in Buffalo's 1901 Pan American Exhibition, the "Rue du Caire" exhibit of 188₉ was replaced by a "Streets of Mexico," a supposedly realistic reproduction of the architecture of a Mexican village, with entertainment provided by live Mexicans dressed in traditional costumes and performing the routines of daily life in Mexico. Porfirio Diaz himself agreed to send Mexican Indians for this display on the condition that they were not to be ridiculed.^[21]

It should be noted that precedent existed for the Buffalo display. At the Atlanta (1895) and Nashville (1896) fairs, Mexicans (along with Asians and Afro-Americans) were put "on view in villages on the entertainment avenues of the fairs that were also the areas of the exposition set aside for cheap thrills and monkey houses."^[22] Even earlier, in the 1850s, in the aftermath of the London Crystal Palace exhibition, an exhibit of Aztec Lilliputians was applauded not only by thousands of visitors but also by the English Ethnological Society and by the royal family itself.^[23] Along similar lines, if in 1889 people and products were brought from the French colonies to reproduce villages of exoticism in Paris, in 1895 the Atlanta Cotton States International Exhibition displayed a "Mexican Village." This village was formed with people from Tehuantepec, brought to Atlanta by the Mexican Village Company.^[24] Once again, at the 1904 Saint Louis exposition an exhibit of "Aztecs and Their Industries" was staged (see Fig. 9 and chapter 11).

The Aztec Palace and all of Mexico's ethnographic and anthropological displays ought not to be considered apart from the anthropological focus of world's fairs. For instance, the 188₉ fair featured a retrospective exposition of anthropological research and science.^[25] The entrance gallery of this exhibit demonstrated the progress and orientation of anthropology (which at the time included ethnography and archaeology) as a field of knowledge.

Image not available.

8.
The Aztec-Inca dwelling in the "History of Habitation" exhibit in Paris, 
1889. Source: William Walton, Chefs-d'oeuvre de l'Exposition Universelle 
de Paris, 1889 (Philadelphia and Paris, 1889).

Image not available.

9.
"Aztecs and Their Industries" at the 1904 Saint Louis world's fair.
 Source: David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904, vol. 2 (Saint Louis, 1913), 119.

To the left of the entrance there stood an image of a naked woman of huge physical proportions—a sort of Amazon—while on the right, there was a representation of a half-naked Indian man. Crowning the entrance was a frieze containing the great names in the history of anthropology: Buffon, Blaumenbach, Lamarck, Cuvier, Hilaire, Retzius, Broca, and Darwin.^[26] This set of heroes was established by a disciplinary infrastructure that included research institutions, journals, congresses, and government agencies. But the exhibition consisted of more than thought: a hundred masks and full-sized models of individuals of various races, "77 pieces or molds . . . of the brain, fifteen of the hand, 234 molds of human skulls, of which 48 are prehistorical or ancient."^[27]

Anthropology was then considered at the root of human labor, a discipline concerned with the historicization of labor itself, while ethnography was considered the history of progress in material things.^[28] The focus of anthropology was in the essence of human labor: the brain. Therefore, all sorts of an thropometric instruments were displayed at world's fairs, as was the case with the arrays of the British biologist Francis Galton.^[29] Thus Mexico also exhibited Indian skulls, measurements, and statistics. This was a Mexico anthropologized by itself, demonstrating the existence of a common set of references between Mexico's exhibits and world's fairs: science, progress, race, skulls, primitive, civilized oriental, Aztec. . . .

Mexican Understanding of Race

Before explaining the interaction between Mexico and the universal exhibitions as a whole, let us briefly examine the apparently conclusive view held by Mexican intellectuals concerning the Indian component of Mexican nationhood, a view that was epitomized by the 1889 Mexican exhibit. By 1889 this view constituted an intellectual, pragmatic, but, above all, ambivalent perspective. The Aztec Palace reflected this pragmatism and ambivalence. Whereas the facade of the Aztec Palace praised Mexico's pre-Hispanic past, the interior hinted at the inferiority of the majority of Mexico's population (that is, the Indians and the hybrid races). On one hand, this view pointed out the "scientific" inferiority of both Indian and mixed-blood people; on the other, it explained how such an inferiority was in fact an advantage for the development of a modern nation.

The ambivalence led to different ways of dealing with the issue of race. First, Porfirians presented a racist social hierarchy as a modern class structure. Second, they consolidated an anthropological scientific perspective. And finally, they introduced education, combined with biological natural selection, as the final solution for their own ambivalence toward the so-called Indian problem.

By 1889 it was unfashionable to accuse American-born Europeans of intrinsic inferiority by virtue of the climatic or geographical imperatives of their development—as Buffon and Gobineau had at the end of the eighteenth century. However, Mexican criollos felt the necessity to prove, through the scientific language furnished by Europe, the particular advantages of a good racial mixture. To do so, Mexican anthropologists, physicians, and philosophers had to carefully read their European lessons in search of the in-betweens to make their own country square with white cosmopolitanism. In 1889, therefore, the most prominent Mexican archaeologists, anthropologists, naturalists, and publicists of race found themselves at the Paris fair— Alfredo Chavero, Antonio Peñafiel, José Ramírez, Auguste Genin, Rafael de Zayas Enríques, and Leopoldo Batres.

As the 1889 fair illustrated, a cosmopolitan modern nation inevitably included a racial core. The superiority of the white European race was so force-fully promoted by the late-nineteenth-century scientific perspective that no nation seeking to be considered modern and cosmopolitan would even attempt to propose the superiority or equality of other races. For Mexico it was a lost cause to try to prove the pure and unmixed white nature of the modern Mexican population. But all of the Mexican propaganda in Paris emphasized that the Mexican upper classes were unmistakably white and, hence, that Mexico fit modernity according to one criterion established by modern societies—namely, through a well-defined class structure.

Consequently, in a Mexican study prepared for and displayed in Paris, the

distinguished Mexican geographer Antonio Garcia Cubas included an ethnographic section in which he argued that 19 percent of the Mexican population was European, 43 percent mestizo, and 38 percent Indian. Nonetheless, he argued, Europeans commanded the country. He stated that Europeans and significant numbers of mestizos were the most noteworthy and dynamic factor in Mexico's progressive development. García Cubas explained that despite the large Indian population, Spanish was the official language and that French, English, and Italian were spoken by the high society. The European population, he stated, resided in Mexico City and directed agriculture, mining, and industry. Mestizos were distributed throughout the country and made up the entire working class. Not only did mestizos represent a good and reliable labor force, they were also, contrary to common prejudice, very capable imitators—thus the excellent quality of their products. On the other hand, García Cubas described Indians as leading a quasi-bucolic, healthy existence in the countryside and mountains, but as becoming a degenerate race when transplanted to the cities. All were brave and resistant workers, save the northern tribes of Comanches, who were "perfidious, traitorous, and cruel."^[30]

In order to equip this modern class structure with a scientific corpus, Mexicans had to construct a native anthropological, archaeological, and ethnographic tradition. This they began to do in the 1860s.^[31] According to the eminent physician Nicolás León, however, anthropology and archaeology attained a definitive impulse in 1887, with the creation of an archaeological section in the National Museum. Two years earlier, the office of Inspection and Conservation of Monuments had been created with Leopoldo Batres as permanent chief. By 1889 this agency of the government was consolidated and publicized abroad.^[32] Nonetheless, it was not easy to establish the necessary infrastructure for anthropological research in a poor country.^[33]

A Mexican anthropological, ethnographic, and archaeological perspective was fairly well established by 1889.^[34] In fact, since 1884 the Mexican scientific journal La Naturaleza had echoed the anthropological focus of world's fairs by arguing that whereas "old anthropology took charge of moral man," modern anthropology dealt with "the anatomical man" and thus was "the accessory part of comparative osteology that is concerned with the state of variations of the skull in diverse human races."^[35] Indeed, though neither Indians nor the concept of race were novel for Mexicans, the way these problems were discussed in the late nineteenth century meant a radical change from the previous three centuries.

The most visible aspect of ambivalent domestic views of indigenous traditions was the belief in the educability of Indians. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, education became a fundamental topic of discussion when it came to what Mexican liberals considered the Indian problem. This, to a certain extent, was a direct consequence of the liberal belief

in equal citizenship as the formula for national development. But it also represented an ad hoc adaptation of liberal and scientific ideas to the Mexican context. A consensus prevailed about the educability of Indians that extended to an acceptance of the eventual fusion of the two races.^[36] However naive this position might seem, it represented a determined and skillful, if somehow tricky, intellectual withdrawal from the mainstream racial theories of the 1880s, which had endorsed the idea of the degeneration of races and the degenerative consequences of miscegenation.^[37]

In sharp contrast to the belief in the educability of Indians, the consideration of live Indians included an important anthropological theory on the inferiority of Indians. This consideration had to be constantly transformed and rephrased according to the increasingly "scientific" parameters set by European and American ideas. The scientific foundation of the understanding of Indians was made not through simple imitation of European theories but through a laborious process of continual modern learning in which Western thought was included both as master and as apprentice. To fully understand this, it is necessary to briefly consider the way in which race was debated in the West during the last part of the nineteenth century.

Debating Race

In the 1880s anthropology had three main concerns that were relevant to understanding race in Mexico. One was the reactivation of the old debate between those who believed that humankind had multiple origins and those who supported the idea of a unified origin (that is, polygenism versus monogenism). The debate seemed to have been solved by the 1840s in favor of polygenism, but it was reactivated by the emergence of Darwinian evolutionism, which linked all human races to a single line of evolution, and by the reinforcement of anthropometrical and anatomical studies of races (especially in France). This last phenomenon gave new strength to polygenism and to the rigidity of racial definitions. Therefore, throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century what best characterized anthropology was the conflict between ethnographers and hard-core physical anthropologists.^[38]

As a result, anthropology developed an emphasis on the temporal dimension of human races. That is, instead of the study of geographical places, the focus was on the position of races in the evolutionary chain. As an historian of anthropology observed, because the archaeological and biological discoveries of the 1860s, "anthropological inquiry, which for decades had focused on the problem of human unity, was now refocused on the problem of the origin of human civilization."^[39]

Finally, by the 1880s modern anthropology and archaeology reinforced their links with the strong nationalistic tendencies of the late nineteenth cen-

tury. They furnished a professional language for talking about race. Race, in turn, was the key to the fundamental change from the romantic nationalism of the earlier nineteenth century to the state-oriented nationalism of the late decades. Race became a fixed characteristic of a permanent ethnic matrix in which degeneration followed from miscegenation. Once nations became so attached to the idea of race, there was no way to talk about race without making nationalistic statements. Thus the scientists' goal was to dehistoricize the issue of the nation and make it a terrain of anthropology. Only anthropology could provide genuine scientific generalities about peoples, so the historian must become an anatomist and a linguist.^[40] This is not to say that the identification of nation with race was a smooth and easily accepted process. Indeed, ideas about race had to be constantly adjusted to fit new criteria and knowledge about both race itself and nationalism, which in turn were shaped by political and economic circumstances.

These concerns of Western anthropology had been applied to—and in— Mexico throughout the nineteenth century. European ethnographical, anthropometrical, and archaeological studies of Mexico were abundant sources of scientific discussion for both Mexicans and Europeans. By the 1880s a well-established French anthropological interest existed in Mexico. As E. T. Hamy argued, in the 1860s "Mexico gained . . . its range within the history of humanity's past."^[41] J. M. A. Aubin, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Desiré de Char-nay, G. d'Eichtal,^[42] and, later, the Scientific Commission of Mexico^[43] provided European minds with a clear ethnographic, anthropological, and archaeological picture of Mexico, which often was adapted by Mexican scholars to study their own country.

In fact, as a part of European orientalism, French and European Americanism emerged simultaneously. Within the well-established field of Americanism, and by virtue of its archaeological and anthropological abundance, Mexico sought to be recognized. Therefore, in 1895 an Americanists congress —the eleventh—for the first time took place on the American continent, in Mexico City, the "Egypt of America."^[44] In common with the orientalism of the period, Americanism reinforced European nationalism by identifying a racial and cultural Other to contrast with the attributes of civilization.

But what was especially relevant for the relationship between race, civilization, and nation was the debate between hard-core physical anthropology and the ethnographic approaches that included race, but not such purely physical aspects as skull measurements. This was especially true in the French context of the 1880s, in which the anatomical trend of anthropology was particularly strong and in which radical nationalism was flourishing.^[45] On one hand, for physical anthropologists, to educate a race was a chimera because racial characteristics were fixed and unchanging. Thus colonialism and/or genocide could be justified by using the idea of racial superiority. On the other hand, within the ethnographic terrain—where French orien-

talists and Americanists found themselves—the role of political, social, and moral factors in reshaping racial characteristics was acknowledged. Of course, it would be difficult to argue that ethnologists were outside the racist paradigm of the period, but they also believed that political and moral factors were influential in the configuration of human characters. However, anthropology (that is, physical anthropology) was the dominant school in France until the beginning of the twentieth century.^[46]

French interest in ethnology went back to the late eighteenth century and was directly linked to natural history. Ethnography sought to study the particular histories of races, their intellectual and moral development, their language and behavior, and their role in civilization. In contrast, since the late eighteenth century, anatomy had developed various studies of the human body, while geology advanced in the study of the evolution of the earth. A. de Quatrefages, following Cuvier and the German scholar Blumenbach, believed in the unified origin of humankind through the physiological definition of the species. With the appearance of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the emphasis was on the study of humankind as a natural inhabitant of earth and on the superiority of humans over other species. Darwinian evolutionism was used and abused by both ethnographers who aimed to emphasize a common origin of humankind and by physical anthropologists who sought to study human beings as part of their analysis of the animal world, thus focusing on what made humans different from other animals; that is, the brain and its surroundings. Accordingly, in 1859 the physician Paul Broca founded the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. With it, French anthropology clearly defined its object of study and method, for the rest of the century subsuming ethnology and all other studies to it.

Race, language, and natural conditions were all important factors in the creation of a modern cosmopolitan world culture of so-called superior nations. And late-nineteenth-century anthropology (that is, anthropometrics) furnished much of the scientific authority for each of these factors.

Mexico Searches for an Entrance Into the Modern Debate

Mexicans who followed these debates became very proficient in anthropometric techniques and very cognizant of the terms of discussion. After all, they were searching for an interstice where the idea of a modern but explicitly hybrid country might fit. Throughout the Porfirian period, Mexican anthropologists moved within European tendencies. Not until the final triumph of culturalism within Western anthropology and archaeology did Mexican thinkers find a spacious intellectual framework for their ideas. Within this context Mexico's prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary support of the cul-

turalism of Franz Boas must be understood.^[47] Porfirio Díaz's official support of the International School of Anthropology—established in Mexico City in 1910, with Boas as first president—and later of Manuel Gamio's (Boas's student) official postrevolutionary indigenism, exemplified the fruitful and useful ground Mexicans found in international cultural anthropology.^[48]

But in the 1880s the ways in which Mexican intellectuals located themselves in the intersection of the pure ethnographic and physiological explanations constituted intricate attempts to achieve an acceptable modern national image. One example of this was Riva Palacio's account of the physical evolution of the Indian, designed to support the idea that Indians were physically more advanced than were some European races (see chapter 5). Riva Palacio relied on Darwin's ideas, as historians Moreno and Hale have demonstrated. Nonetheless, in making his assertion Riva Palacio did not step outside the French milieu, for he read Darwin in French and placed Darwinian thought within the logic of French debates. In the same way as the Aztec Palace, Riva Palacio's understanding of race appeared nonconflictive. But unlike Riva Palacio, the Mexican scientists who were seriously dealing with mainstream anthropological sciences were aware of complexities and contradictions in the discussion of race. These scientists were acquiring the cosmopolitan expertise and language to speak about race.

Riva Palacio, thus, personally consulted such Mexican experts as the physician Nicolás León and the biologist Alfonso Herrera. León, as he himself explained, was searching for the "Indian of pure race," just as Broca, in France, looked for the pure French type. Riva Palacio asked León whether, in Tarascan Indians, "the canine tooth is replaced by a molar in both jawbones," and whether "Indians of pure race lack down or hair in the meeting of the limbs at the trunk, armpit and pubis?" León had argued that among Tarascan Indians there was a "replacement of the canines by small molars" and no "wisdom tooth." These observations were used by Riva Palacio to prove the superior place of the Indians in the evolutionary chain. Later, however, León pursued his research and discovered that dental mutilation, a practice common among pre-Columbian and nineteenth-century Indians, and not evolution accounted for his earlier findings about teeth.^[49] Nonetheless, Riva Palacio trickily utilized the expertise of Mexican anthropologists and presented Mexican Indians in the terms of physical anthropology, concluding the fitness of Mexican Indians for modern civilization.

In the same way, the famous Mexican archaeologist and anthropologist Leopoldo Batres tried to prove (in Paris and in front of Hamy and Quatrefages) that Mexican Indians did not belong to an inferior race: "On the contrary, [the indigenous race] is endowed with conditions superior to many European races." He bolstered his argument with skull measurements and with ethnographic knowledge he acquired while studying in Paris with Hamy in 1887, observing that "despite the wretchedness in which it [the in-

digenous race] lived for so many years, it is the true producer of the republic. . .. One could argue that how is it that being the most vigorous race of the republic, [the Indian race] has endured the Iberian yoke for three centuries. It is because it is not one, but many varied races, each one of them with different types." Thus, though the Mexican Indian race was well fitted for evolution, the promiscuity of various racial types brought about the weakness of the Mexican race as a whole. In such a way, Batres affirmed the validity of phrenology and of the degenerationist antimiscegenation thesis, while supporting the idea of a strong and superior Mexican race that was able to match European races.^[50]

In an 1889 article, Batres gave another example of how Mexicans were locating themselves in the in-betweens of the European scientific discussion. Following the classificatory obsession of European anthropology, Batres developed a method for identifying "the physiognomic type of the principal inhabiting tribes of Mexico." He was on risky scientific ground: "I will not enter into the difficult question of polygenesis and monogenesis because, in dealing with America, it would be very hazardous to give an opinion in whichever of the two senses." Batres then measured the skulls of Indians from various regions of the country in order to "compare the type of living Indian with that of the sculptures of his predecessors, and in this way to establish the type from that which can be called ancient tribes." He combined ethnography, phrenology, and archaeology, as well as the well-accepted Indian past with the difficult issue of the Indian present. And in this way the Indian past acquired greater veneration, and the live Indians a clear classificatory structure; that is, a scientific definition that directly linked live Indians both to the great Indian past—overlooking but not neglecting degeneration—and to a modern anthropological specificity that provided Mexican Indians with a secure spot in modern ethnography.^[51]

In the same way, Peñafiel's historico-ethnographic design for the facade of the Aztec Palace tried to merge the anthropological, historical, and ethnographic aspects of the Mexican Indian. He did not face too many problems because he dealt with the legacy of pre-Columbian Indians—commonly accepted as a technically elevated, albeit barbaric, civilization. Peñafiel's Aztec Palace combined the long-established study of archaeological structures with the ethnographic ideas of late-nineteenth-century Europe. The facade was not at all at odds with the obvious inferiority of Indian race, because only the Western reconstruction of the Indian past was exhibited. But ethnographic knowledge was at the core of the very idea of having an Aztec Palace in Paris, and it determined the items Mexico displayed inside the palace. Therefore, the Aztec Palace was indeed a way for Mexico to be in those interstices of the French anthropological debate.

The international scientific community did not view the Aztec Palace in the way Peñafiel wished, however. He had no qualms about introducing the

Mexican pavilion to the international anthropological community, as an incorporation of ancient ruins into modern architecture.^[52] But for the European scholarly community, not all archaeological ruins were interpreted in the same way. If ruins were considered part of the general evolution of humankind (as Garnier assumed with the Greco-Roman dwellings in his "History of Habitation") they were seen as mythic ancestors of all European culture, removed from the present by mythical time. However, if ruins were considered merely exotic, they were distanced from the European present by a "cultural space."^[53] Hence, although written in the same terminology, Peñafiel's archaeology could not overcome the cultural space. However scientific his archaeology, his palace belonged to the realm of the exotic. Thus for Europeans, the exhibit of Mexican ruins attested to the veracity of evolution; for Mexicans, to furnish European sciences with elements to affirm Europe's superior evolution was at least a first step in entering into the mainstream flow of evolution.

To sum up, in the 1880s a long historiographical labor had at last produced a consensual liberal reconstruction of the Mexican past. At the same time, an anthropological focus had been laboriously developed to account for the past, present, and future of Mexico in a scientific fashion. Through national histories, Mexico consolidated its civic religion and uniqueness, though using the international lexicon of liberal republicanism. Mexico's past thereby obtained a distinctively Mexican coherence and logic, but with a modern, progressive, and evolutionist structure that was easily recognized and understood by modern European standards. In turn, through the anthropological scientific focus Mexicans sought to join modern civilized times in a twofold manner: by catching up with European concerns and prejudices; and by conducting an intricate explanation—made possible by the constant catching up—of their own potential and fitness for joining civilization. Through the kind of understanding of race displayed in Paris, the Mexican elite appealed for European recognition, but it also worked to prove (to itself and to others) that it was on the right track. One has to concede not only that Porfirians displayed all of these ideas but also that they truly believed them.

Seven
Mexican Art and Architecture in Paris

Patriotic history and the scientific claims of an anthropological nationalism became a single formula in graphic arts. The art scholar Fausto Ramírez has lucidly shown the chief dilemma that permeated Mexican art during the late nineteenth century: the dichotomy between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.^[1] What follows explains how this dichotomy was an inherent component of late-nineteenth-century culture. In being modern there was no way to opt for either pure nationalism or pure cosmopolitanism, only—and inevitably—to be part of the continuing dichotomy.

This inquiry into the artistic aspects of the emblematic Aztec Palace in Paris comprises several stages. First, I will examine the architectural foundations of the palace, which reveal much about the political and artistic negotiations behind the construction of a modern nation. Second, I consider the facade of the palace, because in it the summary of history and art acquired its best expression. Lastly, I analyze the many paintings and photographs that made the nation look both modern and truly colorful. These examinations show that there was an art to the art involved in assembling a tangible representation of a modern nation.

The Architectural Foundations

In 1889 a question much pondered by Mexicans was how to show any meaningful art in Paris, "the capital of France, at present the world's most artistic nation," as it was described by the Mexican painter and director of the Mexican art exhibit in Paris, José María Velasco.^[2] This was a problem not only for Mexico but also for all Latin American, African, and Asian countries. They all confronted the dichotomy between national motifs, tendencies, and schools and cosmopolitan techniques and canons.^[3] Their solutions

varied. Whereas Mexico decided to experiment with a particular combination of national figures in a cosmopolitan fashion, Argentina hired the French architect A. Ballu and various French sculptors to construct its pavilion and the sculptures that adorned it.^[4] Chile also hired a French architect—Picq, the creator of the Gas Industry Pavilion. Other Latin American countries decided to play it safe by using the Spanish artistic synthesis that was more or less well recognized by the rest of Europe. Thus Bolivia constructed a Spanish Renaissance building. Still others decided, as Mexico had, to exploit their exoticism. Accordingly, Ecuador constructed a representation of the Inca Temple of the Sun, even though the project was not only designed by French architects but also conceived by the French anthropologist E. T. Hamy, who donated some authentic figures to give the building a more genuine flavor.^[5] That is, it was a ready-made exotic ruin, conceived by French architects and anthropologists, to satisfy French orientalism. Mexico, in contrast, did not hire French engineers, architects, or anthropologists. The expenses were already too high, and, besides, there was no need to hire them, because Mexico already had confident, French-trained technocrats and architects.

As I have argued in chapters 5 and 6, the Aztec Palace, never reconstructed, constituted an experimental architectural form, which was to be constantly referred to in the continuing discussion over how to represent the nation. Although Mexico participated in the Madrid historical exhibition of 1892 and the 1893 Chicago world's fair, it was not until the 1900 Paris fair that the exhibition team designed another pavilion. By then, the 1889 Aztec Palace was regarded as a total failure, a judgment applied not only to the building itself but also to the entire effort to achieve a true national architectural style through the use of pre-Hispanic models. Sebastián de Mier, in charge of Mexican efforts at the 1900 Paris fair, concluded that a real Mexican architectural style did not exist. In his view, to imitate pre-Hispanic styles was as artificial and useless as trying to copy colonial Spanish structures. Both tendencies were simply inadequate for modern standards of comfort, hygiene, and aesthetics. More importantly, neither one fully represented what nineteenth-century Mexico was like. De Mier believed that until a real Mexican style was developed, Mexico's best option was to adopt a proven style. Thus Mexico opted for a neoclassical palace for the 1900 Paris fair.^[6]

Undoubtedly, this decision was motivated more by changing European taste than by the long-lasting nationalistic debates.^[7] Nonetheless, it does illustrate relative agreement among the Porfirian elite on the issue of how to represent the Mexican nation artistically. Open debate over this issue began in the 1860s in literature, painting, and architecture, and the point in question was how to develop a real national style—or, better yet, paraphrasing Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, how to achieve a relative originality for Mexico's artistic forms,^[8] relative because the style had to be Mexican while following the universal patterns of beauty. Intellectual circles, from the Acade-

mia de Letrán (1830s) to the romantic Renacimiento group (1860s), to the more "scientific" La Libertad group (1870s), all dealt with this issue, summarized by one literary critic as "the on-going fights and transitory weddings of banana and marble."^[9]

To bring about a national style might be considered commonplace in the literary and artistic history of any nation. From this perspective, the Aztec Palace could be seen as just one example of the various architectural styles employed in the nineteenth century.^[10] Yet, from the perspective of a history of modern nationalism, these attempts epitomized by the Aztec Palace acquire a different configuration. In fact, the accomplishment of a modern nation was a matter of experimenting with forms; that is, styles. Thus, to achieve a national style (architectural, literary, artistic) was a redundancy, because the nation was style itself. A national style was, at bottom, a question of incorporating styles into a homogeneous and relatively harmonious form recognized as being that of the nation. This incorporation was a manner of constant negotiation among and within political and cultural elites. Accordingly, the 1889 Aztec Palace made use of pre-Hispanic features to portray the nation in the same way that the 1900 neoclassical building also symbolized the nation; each represented a different moment in the negotiation of national representations (that is, the set of styles identified as national at certain historical moments). Both buildings were simultaneously, on one hand, domestic and international experiments and, on the other, statements regarding modernity and nationalism. Let me explore this negotiation through the example of the Aztec Palace.^[11]

The 1889 Mexican pavilion did not receive universal applause. Both Mexicans and foreigners criticized it, but it generated more commentary than any other Mexican building, however great, ever had. The international decline of classicism in architecture, together with the emergence of innovative modern styles, as exemplified by the Eiffel Tower and the Machines Gallery, formed a peculiar and somewhat auspicious setting for the Aztec Palace to be appreciated and accepted. People who favored conservative classical tendencies did not seriously consider the Mexican pavilion; those who supported innovative tendencies were too amazed by such technological experiments as the Eiffel Tower to be very impressed by the Mexican effort.^[12] Even so, late-nineteenth-century ethnographic and orientalist tendencies had provided a special place for exotic architecture, as architectural historian Z. Çelik argued in the case of the Arab pavilions.^[13]

Despite the many official and semiofficial reports that applauded the Mexican pavilion, important architects—for example, the French designer of the Paris Opera House, Charles Garnier—could scarcely conceal their dislike of it.^[14] Albert Ballu, the French architect who designed the 1889 Argentine pavilion and who was also hired by Argentina to report on the advancement of architecture in Paris 1889, informed his employers that the Mexican build-

ing was not to his taste. He asserted that the Aztec Palace looked "somewhat heavy" and that its sculpture was "quite weak." He criticized Mexico for having the audacity to exhibit such sculpture in Paris.^[15] Similarly, in Mexico Alfredo Bablot deplored the contrast between the palace's facade and its modern interior. He claimed that the building presented an antiartistic monotony, "without any of the notoriety, appeal, or optical diversity found in the building's interior, whose forms and lines had nothing of the Aztec."^[16] In addition, and despite the fact that most Mexican media did not print either national or international criticism of the building, El Hijo de Ahuizote often caricatured the indigenist architectural and ideological claims of the Porfirian elite. It especially satirized the irony of the members of a very pro-French elite wearing pre-Hispanic outfits and functioning as idol-shaped columns for a palace of Aztec authoritarianism, which echoed Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship (see chapter 10). Mexican Catholic opinion very much resented the building (which had a teocalli form) for its pagan connotations. For example, in 1890 El Nacional published an article which supported the idea that universal criteria of beauty were derived from God and which, therefore, observed that both the Eiffel Tower and the Aztec Palace were vain efforts at "genuine creations."^[17] Later on, between 1898 and 1900, when an open discussion about a national architectural style took place among architects, the Catholic architect Manuel Francisco Álvarez sarcastically described the Aztec Palace as a structure that "is reduced to mimicking a teocalli , which is to say a truncated pyramid with a rectangular base, in whose top platform human sacrifice took place."^[18] In effect, there was no way to portray the nation in an Indian-like fashion without causing controversies.

The search for a style for the nation was coming to a critical juncture in the 1880s, as a result not only of the previous long-lasting ideological discussions but also of the artistic and economic framework that the Porfirian regime furnished for the debate. For the construction of national architectural symbols there were an old tendency and two new trends. First, there were those who planned a lasting trust in Mexico as a continuation of Spanish colonial times, with colonial architecture as the natural national style. Second, there were those who sought to use the pre-Hispanic past to construct a real national architecture. Third, there were those who favored the imitation of European schools, with its implicit attempt to keep up-to-date on European architectural stylistic developments. All these schools of thought shared a belief in the need to follow advances in modern construction and standards of comfort and hygiene.

French discussions of how to architecturally represent the nation were neither consensual nor definitive. Technological advances were promptly accepted and used by all styles, though they were not unanimously considered art. French architects were trying to bring about a new synthesis, one that could overcome stale classicism, passé romanticism, and the national his-

toricism of the sort proposed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.^[19] Since the 1850S, some architects had favored synthesizing advances in engineering construction with architectural aesthetics, and others affirmed the purely artistic character of architecture. The 1889 Paris fair meant the momentary triumph of the former, with the Eiffel Tower and the Machines Gallery as their major symbols. But at the 1900 fair, the artistic architects took revenge.^[20]

Indeed, the entire "nineteenth century [was] the period par excellence of architectural revivals,"^[21] because modernity had produced progress but also disharmony, "without the power to create and . . . constrained to borrow."^[22] After 1855 a general eclecticism prevailed: in this era of revivals it seemed that no new architectural styles could be created, only technical capabilities to better reproduce and combine old styles. "The relics of the past have been restored with a perfection that was unknown in the epochs of their creation," Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé observed in his commentaries on the 1889 fair.^[23] In such a wide discussion there was a huge spectrum of principles and ideas for Mexican architects to copy.

In discovering the Mexican architectural past, Mexican architects had to face a technical-aesthetic problem that had to do both with the specificities of European eclecticism and with the development of the architectural profession in Mexico. In 1889 Antonio Peñafiel and Antonio de Anza, as well as Luis Salazar, believed that the spatial usage and construction techniques of pre-Hispanic cultures were adaptable to modern building construction. This had already been demonstrated in the Egyptian pavilion for the 1867 Paris world's fair—"a living lesson in archaeology," which summarized Egypt's history in a modern and useful structure—so it was not surprising that the Aztec Palace had a peculiar similarity to its Egyptian precursor.^[24]

But the pre-Hispanic Mexican style was considered, as Garnier's Histoire de l'habitation illustrated, outside the development of modern architecture. Nonetheless, world's fairs were unique stages for using pre-Hispanic (that is, exotic) styles to create a feasible and acceptable form of architectural modernity—or at least such was the belief echoed by Mexican officials and intellectuals. After all, the renowned Crystal Palace of 1851, constructed by Owen Jones, was inspired by exotic archaeological sources—Greek, Egyptian, and Moorish.

Of course, the Mexican pavilion and the Aztec dwelling in the French habitation exhibit appealed to an already established European interest in pre-Hispanic architectural forms.^[25] French classicist architectural studies hardly dealt with Mexican pre-Hispanic architectural forms, although history and archaeology, through the obsession with Egyptian and oriental styles, were fundamental parts of late-nineteenth-century French architecture.^[26] Nonetheless, influential and revolutionary architects like Viollet-le-Duc had written about pre-Hispanic American architectural styles. Both in his exhibit and in his prologue to Charnay's book, Viollet-le-Duc had praised pre-Hispanic

techniques and environmental adaptability.^[27] For him there was only one style—"the manifestation of an ideal based on a principle"—the rest were various forms that helped to distinguish schools and epochs. Style was a rational human process of appreciation and creation, not an attribute of objects.^[28] Hence pre-Hispanic Mexican architecture was less a style than a form: one that was known in Europe but that was not considered an authentic style. Although European archaeologists praised pre-Hispanic architectural forms, architectural historians often referred to their backward use of space and to their general barbarism. Mexican builders were thus caught between European archaeological and architectonic appetites.

Aesthetically, the Mexican revival of pre-Hispanic forms was indeed at odds with the European revivals, but not with the very important fact of reviving. The Aztec Palace appealed to the ethnographic, archaeological, and anthropological concerns of Europeans, but as an artistic depiction it aimed to be approved within the European decline of classicism. Simultaneously, it sought to finally attain what a Mexican architect of the 1910s called the di-rectriz (main guidance) from which to develop a genuine national architectural style.^[29]

Technically, the search for a national architecture had to confront the problems of technology transfer as much as the cross-cultural techno-aesthetic difficulties. Since the 1870s Mexican architecture had kept relatively well abreast of European and American developments in the field. Mexican architects like Antonio Rivas Mercado, who had studied in Europe, played an important role in bringing technical innovation to the country. But more significant in this regard were the various foreign architects who were privately and officially hired to construct buildings in Mexico. Along with technological innovation, however, came conservative resistance to innovative styles.

In Mexico engineering and architecture had been separated as disciplines as early as 1867.^[30] Engineering acquired its own spot in the Colegio de Minería; architecture remained part of the Bellas Artes school of San Carlos. Conflicts between the two professions were common throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when engineers began to construct houses and public buildings.^[31] Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexican architects fought back by seeking to control the architectural forms of the Porfirian regime. Beyond a concern with protecting the economic and political interests of each guild, this struggle was also an echo of international tendencies. Conflicts among European architects and engineers were also common. At the 1889 Paris world's fair, for instance, the Eiffel Tower and the Machines Gallery, the most noteworthy structures in the exhibition, were planned by engineers. French architects complained on the same grounds their Mexican counterparts used: architecture was an art and belonged to artists (that is, to architects).^[32]

In Mexico, architects were technically trained in new construction meth-

ods, but they resented the engineers who constructed the buildings. But in Mexico's presence at world's fairs, engineers were the executors of the ideas of artists and architects. De Anza belonged to the generation that had experienced the separation between engineering and architecture; he himself was both an architect and an engineer.^[33] Luis Salazar graduated in 1873, and although he belonged to the first generation to have been fully trained in engineering, he also studied at the Academia de San Carlos.^[34] The technical influence of both de Anza and Salazar meant that the 1889 pavilion combined architectural eclecticism with the then high-tech exhibitions architecture based on metal structures.^[35]

At the 1889 Paris fair, France's longing for exoticism and its own endeavor to achieve new eclectic architectural forms constituted a mandate to a Mexican government that was eager to link itself to international culture and markets. But the discussion that underpinned the 1889 Aztec Palace was postponed until the last years of the nineteenth century, when a debate about pre-Hispanic style in architecture acquired importance. In such a debate, the Spanish legacy was revived yet again to serve as the matrix for a national architectural representation of the nation. In this exchange the Aztec Palace was commonly cited either as the example to be followed or, more often, as a mistake to be avoided (about this debate, see chapter 11).

It is important to explain why such a discussion achieved a full and vivid expression only in the late 1890s and not in 1889. In the first place, an international—mostly French—decline of aesthetic exotic eclecticism occurred, as signaled by both the classicist revival and the art nouveau tone of the 1900 Paris fair.^[36] Second, by the late 1890s Mexican architecture achieved a hitherto unknown level of professionalization and technical expertise, becoming both an important subject of study and a significant industry. This was made possible in large part by urbanization and a growing demand for both public and private buildings.^[37] Finally, in the 1890s the discussion was also influenced by the emergence of a historical perspective in architecture, fostered by the traditional Mexican architectural training and by nationalism. This historicization of architecture made it possible to see that what had previously been regarded as only trial-and-error episodes in Mexico's architecture, with no apparent history, could in fact be organized in a progressive line of architectural development.

In 1899, in an article discussing the upcoming 1900 Paris world's fair,^[38] Nicolás Mariscal argued that whereas in 1889 the star attraction of the exhibition had been the Eiffel Tower, in 1900 the Palace of Electricity was to be the core of things. To prove his point that France itself had retreated from its extravagant mechanistic demonstrations of 1889, Mariscal noted that the Eiffel Tower was being painted blue to reduce its visibility, a clear sign that the architectural excesses of the preceding decade were now being camouflaged by the French themselves. Mariscal seemed to suggest that Mexico

also ought to abandon its architectural radicalism of 1889. But this occurred in the context of a debate about what building would depict Mexico in the 1900 fair. In this connection, between 1895 and 1899 Luis Salazar published and republished various works on archaeology and architecture to support his idea of a national architecture inspired by the pre-Hispanic tradition.^[39] (It will be remembered that he had proposed a pre-Hispanic design in 1889 and had helped to construct the winning Peñariel and de Anza design.) The Aztec Palace of 1889, together with the Cuauhtémoc monument and the monuments to the Aztec kings Ahuizotl and Itzcoatl on the Paseo de la Re-forma, were the most significant examples of this sort of architecture, and Salazar continued to approve of it. For him, race and civilization were fundamental concepts, whose development should be reflected in architecture. However, Salazar also believed that it was impossible to create a genuinely new style; all attempts were in essence revivals and reconstructions of past models. What he proposed was an eclectic and selective search through the past for useful and needed elements for present usage, just as the Europeans were doing. Indeed, this eclectic selectiveness echoed the entire Porfirian treatment of Mexico's Indian past and present.

Salazar maintained that "paying no attention to pagan constructions . . . and the ancients' needs which do not fit today's [needs], it is feasible to en-sayar [attempt] the creation, if not of a complete new style, at least of an architecture that is characteristically national." Consequently, in searching for useful pre-Hispanic forms, Salazar referred to Garnier's reconstruction of an Aztec dwelling. With regard to the Aztec Palace, he noted that it was not really an incorporation of archeological styles into modern architecture. Instead, he proposed to adapt pre-Hispanic styles to modern architecture, in order to achieve an "improved imitation" and a "fruitful appropriation."^[40]

Salazar's architectural proposal received an immediate and sarcastic response from one Tepoztecaconetzin Calquetzani, who seems to have been either Nicolás Mariscal, director of El Arte y la Ciencia , or the architect Francisco Rodriguez. The author believed that although the pre-Hispanic style was proper for Cuauhtémoc's monument—a monument to an Indian—other uses of the style were a "chimeric and useless undertaking." He also believed that the eclectic selectiveness and combinations of the various pre-Hispanic styles were at odds with modern techniques and uses of space. In particular, he deplored the Aztec Palace of the 1889 Paris world's fair as a structure in which all styles had been fragmented and made into pure fantasy. "Was there ever a sound reason for a rebirth of aboriginal architecture?" he wondered. No. World's fair pavilions "should bear contemporary society's aesthetic feeling, and reflect as truly as possible the host country's arts and architecture." An Aztec Palace would not serve, because it portrayed a Mexico before the Spanish Conquest (that is, a non-Mexico), and the author hoped that the failure of the structure would serve as a lesson to avoid future mistakes. For

him, archaeological ruins ought to be preserved in museums as the remains of a civilization and a race "lost forever in eternity."^[41]

Both Salazar and Mariscal, albeit in very different fashions, were trying to be cosmopolitan. The designs of both men were used in international fairs or in public buildings according to the decisions of their elite clientele who had to take into consideration the domestic debate as well as international fashion.^[42] In fact, their attempts to construct a cosmopolitan style were not determined solely by artistic tendencies, but by the intersection of many tendencies that had to do with race, economics, cultural progress, and nationalism.

In our eyes, the architects of late-nineteenth-century Mexico may seem to have been particularly penetrating in their understanding of the relationship between nationalism and modernity. Both those who favored European classical styles and those who endorsed pre-Hispanic models showed signs of being aware of their own eventuality. Buildings are erected with an inevitable hope that they are permanent, but also with an awareness of the ephemeral character of their stylistic conception.^[43] Some of the Mexican architects involved in the discussion of national architecture understood this and stated their different proposals accordingly. Mexican architects believed that they were living in a time when modern forms and contents were being negotiated. They sought only a provisional solution: to ensayar and to find directrices .

Ensayar meant that it was worthwhile to experiment, not with a new style but with a variant of late-nineteenth-century eclecticism. In the 1880s architects had no alternative but to keep trying to come up with the proper combination of national and international tendencies in order to define the nation architecturally.^[44] Even later architects, promoters of the revival of the colonial style, were uncertain about the real form of a national architecture. Jesús T. Acevedo, an architect trained in the last decade of the Porfirian period, also criticized the Aztec Palace, because he believed that the pre-His-panic structures could "only be the result of archaeological lucubrations." Making use of a biological metaphor, he claimed that colonial architecture was the directriz of evolution from which a real national architecture could emerge.^[45] Also in 1913, Federico E. Mariscal criticized the attempts to recreate pre-Hispanic architecture and pointed out that it was in the colonial period that the elements of Mexican nationhood were combined. Yet these pro-colonial architects only indicated where the roots of a possible transformation could be; they did not elaborate a clear image of what a national style should look like.^[46] They too were experimenting.

In sum, Mexican architecture displayed a great deal of ambivalence and disenchantment about the possibilities of a national architectural style. In their confusion, however, Mexican architects were more modern than they often realized.

Facades

The Aztec Palace was also a showcase for various forms of artistic expression that echoed domestic interpretations of universal principles. On the facade of the building, twelve figures of Aztecs gods and kings were represented. Inside, countless sculptures, canvases, and photographs were displayed.

In order to acquire a bronze existence, the gods and goddesses Centeotl, Tlaloc, Chalchiutlicue, Camaxtli, Xochiquetzal, and Yacatecuhtli and the kings and heroes Itzcoatl, Nezahualcoyotl, Totoquihuatzin, Cacama, Cuitlahuac, and Cuauhtémoc had to have a historical existence demonstrated by historiographical endeavors (see chapter 5). But to actually acquire specific physiognomical characteristics, positions, and overall image, they needed to be artistically conceived. The archaeologist and historian Antonio Peñafiel, in collaboration with the young sculptor Jesús Contreras, undertook this task.^[47]

Tlaloc was described by Peñafiel as a man carrying thunder in his right hand and "a hieroglyph in the face." As represented by Contreras, Tlaloc appeared with a snake in his left hand and wearing Roman-style clothing (see Fig. 10). In fact, in the Aztec mythology Tlaloc was often represented carrying a snake. The historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso had interpreted this snake as meaning "tempestuous cloud." What Peñafiel described as a hieroglyph was indeed a mask that covered the god's face, as was the case with all deities in Nahuatl mythology. Contreras, however, interpreted the mask as being the crown of a Western monarch.^[48]

Centeotl, according to Peñafiel, was the deity of maize, who carried in her hands "a distinctive sign of her functions." She was represented by Contreras in a Greek dress, her hands by her waist, with ears of maize in each (see Fig. 11). Peñafiel chose to highlight the productive aspects of the Aztec past, so Centeotl stood in her role as a goddess linked to maize and agriculture. Moreover, just as the French Republic was customarily represented as a neutral female national symbol, Centeotl was represented as a woman in spite of the fact that Centeotl was often portrayed in Nahuatl mythology indistinctly either as a man or woman.^[49] Chalchiutlicue, in turn, was interpreted by Peñafiel as "the provider of water's benefits" and was represented in vaguely Greek or Persian clothing.^[50]

These three deities—Tlaloc, Centeotl, and Chalchiutlicue—represented, Peñafiel argued, "the protectors of agriculture and soil fertility."^[51] They stood on the right side of the building, representing not only pre-Hispanic religious thought but also national agricultural production and prosperity.

In the left corner of the facade three deities were represented: Xochiquetzal, Camaxtli, and Yacatecuhtli. For Peñafiel, Xochiquetzal represented the goddess of art, Camaxtli the god of hunting, and Yacatecuhtli the god of commerce. Contreras's depictions were frontal female and male figures,

Image not available.

10.
Jesús Contreras, Tlaloc, designed for the 1889 Aztec Palace. 
Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers, 
reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

Image not available.

11.
Jesús Contreras, Centeotl, designed for the 1889 Aztec Palace
 Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers, 
reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

with Grecian-style dress and physiognomy. Yacatecuhtli was described by Bernardino de Sahagún with his viatl —a sort of cane—and as the god Indians believed "started this people's trade and commerce."^[52] In Camaxtli is the ironic spectacle of a god who was not genuinely Aztec placed together with Tlaloc and the rest of the Aztec pantheon in a supposedly pure Aztec Palace. That is, Camaxtli had been interpreted in different fashions—for example, as the god of fire by Chavero, as Jesus Christ on the Cross by Teresa de Mier. Camaxtli was generally venerated as the god of fairs, though in Tlaxcala and Huegotzingo as the god of hunting, but emphatically, Chavero argued, he was a god who, in common with Tlaxcalan Indians, was never captured by the Aztecs.^[53] Nonetheless, Peñafiel needed a deity of productive activities to complement his composition, so he used Camaxtli despite the mythological inconsistency. He interpreted Xochiquetzal as a Grecian-style muse or goddess of art, even though she was more often considered the goddess of sexual pleasure (see Fig. 12).^[54]

In visually reconstructing the nation's noble origins, commerce, hunting, and the arts seemed an accurate trio. But it was a careful selection of characters and emphases, for the trio could have easily been that of barter (having nothing to do with modern capitalist commerce), fire, and erotic love .^[55]

The heroes were located in the central part of the building's facade, on either side of the main entrance. To the right were the beginnings of the Aztec nation: Itzcoatl, Nezahualcoyotl, and Totoquihuatzin, who together formed, according to Peñafiel, "the triple alliance of the monarchies of Mexico, Texcoco, and Tlacopan." To the left was the end of the Aztec monarchy: Cacama, Cuitlahuac, and Cuauhtémoc. Although Itzcoatl was, Peñafiel claimed, "the true founder of the nation and the monarchy," Nezahualcoyotl was epitomized as the poet king and Totoquihuatzin as the representative of the triple alliance that began the hegemony of the Aztecs. Cacama was considered a martyr in the defense of Mexico during the Spanish Conquest; Cuitlahuac, as the vanquisher of Cortés on La Noche Triste. Cuauhté-moc, according to Peñafiel, was "the greatest figure of national heroism" as well as the last Aztec emperor (see Fig. 13).^[56]

All of these figures were copied from the narrative and graphic descriptions in books that had been studied, made available, or produced by the liberal intellectuals who were rewriting Mexico's ancient past (see chapter 5). Chavero's works and those by the older historian Orozco y Berra^[57] apparently were fundamental for the modern depiction of these figures, which were then reinterpreted by Contreras in an eclectic fashion that combined the resources of Western classical sculpture with what were believed to be pre-Hispanic motifs.^[58] The last three rulers of the Aztecs, following Orozco y Berra's history and Chavero's account, were depicted as heroic figures, dressed for battle,

Image not available.

12.
Jesús Contreras, Xochiquetzal, designed for the 1889 Aztec Palace.
 Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers,
 reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

Image not available.

13.
Jesús Contreras, Cuauhtémoc, designed for the 1889 Aztec Palace.
 Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers,
 reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

with furious gazes. The whole made a clever composition: on one hand, the noble beginning; on the other, the epic ending; in the middle, the entrance to the Mexican pavilion and modern Mexico. In the same fashion that nineteenth-century museums depicted the evolution of men and civilization, or in similar fashion to the portico of the retrospective exposition of anthropological research and science, the Aztec Palace depicted the nation's evolution and introduced visitors to Mexico's version of modernity.

The author of this composition, Jesús Contreras, went on to become a prominent personality in the plastic arts of Porfirian Mexico, as well as a permanent member of the Mexican exhibition team. His grand prize at the 1900 Paris fair for his sculpture Malgré-tout became one of the Porfiriato's "greatest hits" (see Fig. 14). He was also a personal beneficiary of the official effort to modernize the national image. Contreras was granted an official scholarship to study in Europe, as were many other artists during this period.^[59] With his focus on bronze, he was only following international trends that, after the decline of neoclassicism and with the growth of bronze sculpture as the material of nationalist symbols, made France, not Italy, the place to be in the 1880s.^[60]

As he eventually did for the 1900 world's fair, in 1888, together with E. Colibert, Contreras presented a proposal for a Mexican pavilion in Paris (see

Image not available.

14.
Jesús Contreras and Malgré-tout, which won a grand prize in the 1900 Paris exhibition.
 Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers, 
reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

chapter 11). Among the designs, Contreras and Colibert proposed a copy of El Templo de la Merced, a stand for musical performances to be constructed in Mitla style, and a reproduction of buildings from Palenque. Throughout 1888 Contreras lobbied hard for his proposal, and not until Porfirio Diaz himself gave orders to Díaz Mimiaga to put de Anza in charge of all architectural works did Contreras cease his insistent petitions.^[61]

Nonetheless, in 1889 Díaz Mimiaga was a great protector of Contreras, who was only twenty-three at the time. Through this sponsorship, Contreras obtained great favors from the government. With Diaz Mimiaga as intermediary, Contreras was put in charge of the sculpture for the exhibit, a task that included not only the works for the facade of the Aztec Palace but also the reproduction in miniature of Salazar's pavilion and some of the interior sculptures—that is, two huge, sculptured candelabra. In tribute to his patron, Contreras also exhibited a bust of Diaz Mimiaga in Paris. He returned to Mexico in 1890, with warm recommendations from Díaz Mimiaga and with great plans to establish a profitable business catering to the mania for statuary that swept modern nationalist Porfirian Mexico.^[62] With this enterprise

in mind, he returned to Europe a year later to purchase the necessary machinery to establish the Fundición Artística Mexicana, a corporation to produce images in stone, bronze, or marble for the state and for private customers. The chairman of the Fundición's board of directors was Porfirio Díaz, and Contreras was the technical director (see Fig. 15). The Fundición was supposed to be dedicated "especially to monumental statues, candelabra, bronze salon statues, and imitation of French, Belgian, and Japanese works."^[63] This corporation was an uncommon example of a combination of artistic concerns with capitalist and patriotic goals.

In his twelve sculptures, Contreras fulfilled both the historic-anthropological-archaeological plan conceived by Peñafiel and the technical and stylistic characteristics given to the building by the engineer de Anza. In addition, he furnished the cosmopolitan Parisian public with visible images of the strange characters of Mexico's exotic story. These characters were not at all at odds with the rest of the fair, and their pre-Hispanic inspiration only made more attractive what otherwise might have been regarded as ordinary sculptures.^[64] Domestically, Contreras represented the first fully secular Mexican entrepreneurial artist.^[65]

Interior Artwork

Contreras's sculptures were requested and paid for by the Mexican government as official efforts to portray the nation. However, inside the Mexican pavilion were other paintings, sculptures, and images that, though not officially sponsored, were also linked directly or indirectly—either by location or by theme—with the national values that the government promoted. Among the various Mexican artistic objects exhibited in Paris, two items were especially welcomed by the French media: Velasco's landscape-painting school, and some canvases with pre-Hispanic motifs. However, it is difficult to believe that late-nineteenth-century foreign art critics would have bothered to look at Mexican paintings so closely had it not been for the convincing inducement of money paid by the Mexican government.

According to art critic Léon Cahun, Mexico, unlike the rest of America, had an original artistic school that depicted both its natural beauty and its heroic history. He especially liked the scene from national history in which "a Mexican orator is seen speaking, before the Senate of Tlaxcala, against the alliance with Cortés." He was also impressed by Velasco's works: "Yes, there is a landscape-painting school in Mexico, and a school that does not owe anything to anyone, that does not imitate anyone, that has been formed by itself, by looking at the marvelous vegetation of the [Mexican] valleys." According to Cahun, Velasco's works differed from those of Corot or Rousseau—who were then in the vanguard of French landscape painting—in the same way

Image not available.

15.
Poster for Jesús Contreras's company, Fundición Artística Mexicana. 
Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers,
 reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

that "Mexico differs from the countryside of the Seine valley."^[66] Cahun believed that in Velasco's painting Mexico achieved what modern art was all about: a unique but universal style.

The Mexican art exhibit was composed mainly of paintings by Velasco, which combined various emphases: tropical or exotic natural beauty, historical allegories of the official historiography, and modernism through technological advances (especially railroads, the epitome of late-nineteenth-century modernism). As representations of natural beauty, these canvases reflect the naturalist scientific concerns of the era. As art historian Juan de la Encina argued in the 1940s, Velasco's work represents the national achievement of a preimpressionist but postromantic positivist naturalism. This process began with official efforts in the midnineteenth century to hire experts to teach aspiring Mexicans how to render representations of the national territory and history (for which purpose the Italian landscape painter Eugenio Landesio was employed). The process was accelerated by the flowering of natural history, geology, anthropology, and archaeology as scientific and objective views of nature.

As portraits of Mexican modernity Velasco's paintings were postcards that served both for the popularization of technology and as international propaganda for the coexistence in Mexico of tropical backwardness and modernity. In particular, the depiction of bridges and railways served as striking contrasts to the wildness of the landscapes. The canvases were thus genuine advertisements for the industrial transformation of Mexico, however slight. They also responded to pragmatic economic interests; that is, before the appearance of photography, and even with the advent of the camera, railroad companies and industries paid to have artistic vistas of their roads and buildings created.^[67]

No one rivaled Velasco's expertise in the various aspects of landscape painting. Velasco managed to make himself indispensable as a masterful depicter of a scientific, nationalist, and modern era. His technical expertise allowed him to achieve the objectivity and accuracy that realism and scientism required,^[68] and his pragmatic and nationalistic imagination allowed him to satisfy different representational needs, both his own and those of his clients.

Undoubtedly, by the early 1890s Velasco's type of landscape naturalist painting had already seen its best moments, at least by European standards. However, it continued to be produced and appreciated.^[69] More importantly, for the industrialized world, landscape painting was a sharp ideal contrast with life in many industrial cities and towns. Canvases such as Velasco's were bucolic visions of a paradise lost. For Mexico's modern national image Velasco's landscape painting constituted also a twofold exercise. First, it was precisely that: a bucolic scenario with a tropical mixture that could furnish a contrast with the newly industrialized world. But it was also a symbolic, flashlike,

and easily learnable report on the state of the nation expressed in a common cosmopolitan language. It wooed emigration, investment, and international confidence through the depiction of nature, progress, and history.^[70]

Among the paintings Velasco exhibited in Paris were two general views of the valley of Mexico, a view of Guelatao (Oaxaca), various waterfall scenes from Orizaba (Veracruz), two views of the Canada de Metlac , and Ahuhuétes from Chapultepec. In all of these paintings the natural, pure, fertile, or tropical aspects of Mexico were emphasized. Also included were the national symbols and icons of the official nationalist ideology, presented as part of an overall realist impression. For, as Cahun argued, "Velasco knows how to make the trees and the mountains live and speak in his own country of Mexico, that is clear: I do not know what he would do in France. . .. No one is a real writer except in his own language. . .. M. Velasco is a genuine painter, and his painting is the robust and healthy child of his native soil."^[71] Thus one of the paintings of the valley of Mexico included some scenes of manners and customs, and the other featured an eagle and a nopal cactus. Guelatao was not only part of Oaxaca, Díaz's beloved state, but also the birthplace of Benito Juárez, the Porfirian-sponsored member of the Mexican pantheon. The painting of the bridge of Metlac pictured a railroad crossing the Mexican tropics, thus placing an emphasis on Mexican progress.^[72] Velasco painted various views of railroads in Metlac, which he exhibited in Paris 1889 and 1900—such as Cañada de Metlac (1897), Puente curvo del Ferrocarril Mexicano en la Canada de Metlac (1881), and Canada de Metlac (1881).

Velasco was not the first to paint the valley of Mexico, but he was the first to combine realism in painting with scientific accuracy, a combination that echoed the interaction of national and international trends. He was a naturalist who had studied zoology and botany in the national school of medicine, from which resulted various paintings reproduced in La Naturaleza , the journal of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural. His realist view thus harmonized easily with the scientific objectivity of a positivist era. In addition, Velasco's scientific objectivism went beyond the realm of nature to gain inspiration from historical and anthropological accounts. As Ramirez argues, whereas Velasco used scenes of manners and customs in his romantic beginnings, he gradually moved toward greater proficiency in realistic representations and drew his inspiration from historical themes.^[73] Comparing the view of the valley of Mexico exhibited by Velasco at the 1876 Philadelphia fair with the one presented at the 1878 Paris world's fair (both of which were also displayed in 1889), Ramirez has shown how the genre scenes of the former gave way in the latter to a grandiose panorama in which an eagle flies, with prey in its fangs, toward a nopal. This change made of Velasco's landscape painting a real national emblem: the city, surrounded by unpolluted wilderness, and the national symbol flying (see Fig. 16).

Velasco began to paint railroads in 1869, and in Paris 1889 he exhibited

Image not available.

16.
José María Velasco, Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel (1877). 
Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City;
 reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico. 
(Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)

two views of the Metlac barranca (see Fig. 17). Since the late 1870s, railroads in landscape paintings had been all too common, for a steel track over wild and untamed nature was unequaled as a symbol of progress. However, by the 1880s Velasco's vistas were echoed by numerous photographic images. At the 1889 Paris fair the Ferrocarril Nacional Mexicano exhibited thirty-four photographic views, and the Ministry of Economic Development displayed photographs of the Mexico-Veracruz railroad.^[74] When the Mexican government promoted the national image of progress, it requested that private companies send photographs of their latest projects, and the requests were answered with the efforts of some of the best photographers available. Nonetheless, most of the landscape photographs were taken by foreigners.^[75] Among the most renowned photographers of Mexican railroads was the American William Henry Jackson. He was hired by the Compañía del Ferrocarril Central and came to México to work in 1882, 1891, and 1893. Jackson was one of the most prestigious photographers of the American West, an important personality among those who fashioned symbolic images of American nationalism. In Mexico he had the same motivations that inspired

Image not available.

17.
José María Velasco, La Cañada de Metlac (Citlaltepec) (1897). 
Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City;
 reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.
 (Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)

his pictures of the American West: "to celebrate the technologization of wilderness" and to show "its availability to tourists."^[76] He photographed railroads in exactly the same way that Velasco painted them.^[77]

However great the effort to mirror reality, naturalist and realist paintings were inescapably ideal and subjective. The camera, in contrast, seemed to be "a near magical device for defeating time, for endowing the past with a present it had previously had only in memory."^[78] However, in the late nineteenth century, although photographs put past and present together in instant flashes easily and cheaply available, they were considered mere testimonies, not art.^[79] In 1889 the objectivity of the photographic image, though powerful, did not possess the authority of an artistic-scientific representation. A Velasco painting included what photography was able to produce, together with the subtleties of color and perspective that inspired his renderings (that is, aesthetic, nationalistic, and moral elements).^[80]

Photography itself was used at this time to depict much more than railroads. The sculptures of the facade of the Aztec Palace contrasted with the numerous photographs of Mexican Indians that were displayed within the structure. For instance, the government of Colima sent various photographs of Indians from Colima; the photography studio of Valleto sent numerous

portraits of cartas de presentación (calling cards); the state of Morelos sent twenty-two photographs of Tlahuica idols; and Yucatán, twenty-six photographs of antiquities. The Mexico City collection included portraits of tipos populates made by the photographic establishment Cruces y Compañía (also known as Cruces y Campa), pictures that had had a great reception at the 1876 Philadelphia fair.^[81] This type of view helped to create a portable image of the exotic for both national and international consumption.^[82]

Photography was considered "The Pencil of Nature," and its objectivity was believed to be beyond style.^[83] The existence of photography was itself proof of modernity, whether it portrayed a railroad or a tipo popular . Paintings, in contrast, had to construct the modern forms through their style and content. That is, whereas photographs could serve as objective reports to prove that Mexico was capable of receiving immigrants and foreign investment, they were not evidence of Mexico's cosmopolitan culture. Once again, to be modern and nationalist was above all a matter of style, and only such painters as Velasco succeeded in this difficult task. Therefore, until the beginning of the twentieth century, his works were indispensable components of both Mexico's presence at world's fairs and the construction of the image of a modern nation as a whole. For, as art historian Justino Fernán-dez has argued, very few artists could make Mexico look the way Velasco did: in his works Mexico was itself being like Europe.^[84]

The Contreras sculptures and the entire facade of the Mexican building were echoed by numerous paintings with pre-Hispanic motifs: El Senado de Tlaxcala by Rodrigo Gutiérrez, Xochitl presenta al rey Tépancalzin el pulque by José Obregón, Funerales de un Indígena by José Jara, together with a replica of the Cuauhtémoc monument. Although pre-Hispanic-oriented paintings had been rendered previously, after 1870 works in this vein acquired ideological value for the Porfirian regime as well as some national and international artistic recognition.

One of the most noted of these paintings was El Senado de Tlaxcala (see Fig. 18). The author, Rodrigo Gutiérrez, had exhibited a painting in the classical style at the 1884 New Orleans fair,^[85] but he had changed his source of inspiration by treating pre-Hispanic motifs, though in identical classicist fashion. El Senado de Tlaxcala was in fact painted at the request of the wealthy lawyer and historian Felipe Sánchez Solis, who needed the image for his general collection of pre-Hispanic antiquities.^[86] The painting depicted a Roman-style senate with Tlaxcalan Indians discussing whether to join Cortés's venture against the Aztecs. Likewise, a canvas by José Obregón, known as El descubrimiento del pulque (originally painted in 1869), was also commissioned by Sánchez Solis, and it depicted the Tula's ruler, Tecpancaltzin, in the act of receiving from Xochitl the pulque beverage extracted from maguey (see Fig. 19). Obregón had a classical academic training, generally devoted to biblical topics. His incursion into pre-Hispanic motifs was especially wel-

Image not available.

18.
Rodrigo Gutiérrez, El Senado de Tlaxcala (1875).
 Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City; 
reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte. (Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)

comed in the 1880s, when both El Senado de Tlaxcala and El descubrimiento del pulque were purchased by the Mexican government for exhibition at world's fairs and on other special occasions.^[87]

These two paintings were emblematic of an official sanction of the Indian past. As with the facade of the Aztec Palace, the paintings sought to order, classify, and civilize knowledge of the Indian past in such a way as to make it accessible and worthy of respect. Reproductions were included in numerous textbooks, including México a través de los siglos . However, in the relationship between artistic-historical depiction of this sort and history and archaeology, the aim was not historical accuracy but rather a mimetic mutual convenience: patriotic history and archaeology procured with these paintings useful representations to reinforce their stories; and these paintings obtained from history and archaeology the inspiration for every detail.

El descubrimiento del pulque echoed the clamor that surrounded the fashioning of a national culture, whose most important speaker was Ignacio

Image not available.

19.
José Obregón, El descubrimiento del pulque (1869).
 Source: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 
from the collection of the Banco Nacional de México. (Photograph by Rafael Doniz)

Manuel Altamirano. According to Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Xochitl was a virgin who, accompanied by her father Papantzin, presented "the honey of the maguey" to Tecpancaltzin, then ruler of the Toltecs.^[88] Xochitl was so beautiful that Tecpancoltzin seduced her, procreating a son who eventually became a ruler. But in the painting, as art historian Justino Fernández observed, Tecpancoltzin was portrayed as a Hellenic Apollo, and Xochitl as a Greek princess. This story of love, beauty, and power could not be better suited to the Western romantic spirit of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indian past was thus civilized through a classical romantic filter.

Contemporaries were aware of the fact that this type of artistic representation took excessive liberties with historical data. Graphic artistic representations of history, because they were considered art, were not criticized for maneuvering reality in order to display not truer and more accurate versions but the most effective visual impressions of historical events. Objectivity was less important than were didactic and artistic effectiveness. Thus, whereas French critics considered El descubrimiento del pulque as an authentic and vivid

representation of the Aztec past, Altamirano acknowledged that the painting was a bit conventional. He pointed out that the Xochitl of Obregón's canvas was not an Indian woman at all: the artist took as his model "for the graceful Xochitl not a bronze-skinned Indian mistress, but a beautiful mestiza whose light swarthy complexion revealed the mixing of European blood." For Altamirano, the image of old Indians in the canvases were too modern, but he believed that El descubrimiento del pulque , "as an ensayo in national painting . . . deserves the best compliment."^[89] That is, in developing a national image, every single effort was an ensayo and that was what was expected.

However, the paradox between accuracy and effectiveness echoed a larger incongruity: the Mexican elite's contradictory consideration of the Indian past and present. Ironically enough, what Xochitl offered the Toltec ruler was pulque, an Indian alcoholic beverage that Mexican criollos considered an important cause of Indian degeneration. In this regard, El descubrimiento del pulque embodied the Porfirian elite's ambivalence toward Mexican Indians: on one hand, the epic past in which a princess presents a king with a respectable alcoholic beverage; on the other, the repugnant present situation of the Indians' addiction to pulque. This last factor was noticeable not only in the disapproval of pulque displayed by the urban elite but also in scientific treatises. Medical studies of the effects of pulque on the so-called popular classes discovered a particular sort of "Mexican pathology" that was distinct from cirrhosis. Some of these studies—for example, the one by Francisco Altamirano—were exhibited in Paris in 1889. A natural proclivity to alcoholism was believed to be present among Indians.^[90]

Despite these scientific reservations, since the 1884 New Orleans fairs, pulque was depicted (and also distributed) as an exotic beverage. In the same way that in 1884 a pamphlet on pulque was prepared,^[91] in Paris 1889, in Obregón's painting, pulque was romanticized into a benevolent and acceptable beverage, not only through its depiction as part of a "past past" but also through the subtle inclusion of a common nineteenth-century erotic motif: the myth of the sexually desirable Amazon-like woman.^[92]

The Art of Art

Mexico's artistic display was admired by Europeans especially for its exotic aspects, and thus the landscape paintings and canvases with pre-Hispanic subjects won recognition in France. Velasco's work (and also a bust of Diaz sculpted by Gabriel Guerra) obtained silver medals, the highest award given to Mexican artistic objects. In addition, Velasco was named a member of the Legion of Honor.^[93] Aside from Guerra's bust of Díaz, only two other artists who shunned the pre-Hispanic received awards: Antonio Bibriesca and Andrés Belmont. The former exhibited a portrait of the French consul in Guanajuato; the latter, a portrait of Porfirio Díaz!^[94]

As with the entire Aztec Palace, the Mexican paintings were seen as laudable and valid, though not necessarily successful, attempts to emulate French models. Nonetheless, Mexico's exotic artistic display was also seen by some European eyes—like Van Gogh or Gauguin who saw in 1889 the architecture and culture of a primitive people—as a potential source of renewal and spontaneity for Western art. But this last perspective was yet to be fully developed in 1889,^[95] and Mexico had to wait for European tastes to change and for its French-trained Diego Riveras to emerge.

Velasco himself, as chief of the arts group, wrote a report on Mexico's performance at Paris.^[96] He believed that the reason Mexico won so few awards in this category was that its art was not exhibited in the art palace, unlike the United States and other countries. Velasco's silver medal was put into perspective by Velasco himself, when he explained that grand prizes were conferred only on exceptional artists, such as Leopold Flameng. Mexico's awards were in the same category as such distinguished painters as Moreno Carbonero.^[97]

In 1889 French painting was experiencing—as we can acknowledge a posteriori—the last moments of the preeminence of neoclassical and romantic styles, which were widely displayed in official salons. These tendencies were embodied in J. L. Ernest Meissonier, who in 1889 was the president of the great art jury. He was a salon painter of famous historic portraits of France's greatest collective unspoken self-esteem: Napoleon.^[98] Although impressionist painters were represented, they would not obtain official recognition until the 1900 Paris fair. In effect, the germs of so-called modern art were present at Paris 1889—for example, Monet and Degas—as they had been in the 1860s' Salon des Refusés, but the 1889 fair was dominated by academic classicist tendencies.

Velasco himself viewed those seeds of modern art with distaste. He admired the museum and the canonic exhibitions more than the streets of Bohemian Paris,^[99] but he did report favorably on some paintings he had seen in the French exhibition.^[100] Among the exhibits of other countries he especially liked the Spanish painter Francisco Pradilla (La rendición de Granada ), but he pointed out the overall weakness of the Latin American exhibits. For him, very few Latin American artists were worthy of mention.

The Mexican artists who came to Paris, Velasco explicitly agreed, were there to learn and copy the art of the city—the artistic capital of the world. But how did the models who were being copied react to this mimetic Mexican exercise? Mexican newspapers reproduced numerous favorable reports from the French media. Indeed, French art critics were officially invited to write about Mexico, and they interpreted Mexican art as functioning within an evolutionary line and thus as still rather childlike and immature. Those epithets, of course, served then (and now) to disqualify, artistic works.^[101] In this connection, Velasco reported to the Mexican commission on his per-

sonal journey through the Mexican art exhibit accompanied by various European artists and art critics, and he described the impressions of the British art critic George A. H. Sala and those of the French artists Meissonier, Pierre Fritel, and François Pierre Guillon.^[102]

If, as has been so often argued, Mexican artists were merely imitating French artistic fashions, they were doing so mostly for domestic consumption. Velasco believed that despite the fact that European art and artistic influence was dominant in Mexico, there existed some autonomy in Mexican paintings of figures and landscape scenes—especially in the latter, because since Landecio's arrival there had been little importation of artistic tendencies to Mexico. Velasco argued that all countries followed France—save England, he believed; and yet, all European countries had an original style. All of those styles were in contact, unlike Mexican art, which remained apart from mainstream artistic tendencies. But Velasco was certain that art was "essential to every country regardless of its development," because "men in particular and societies in general show a tendency toward beauty."^[103] Therefore, there was no option for Mexico but to continue the efforts to develop a national art, though those efforts had to be conscious of their own weaknesses and tentative nature. Therefore, he believed, there was no art in America in part because of the underdevelopment of both art and industry.

In sum, Velasco's was perhaps the most acute Mexican artistic eye to appraise fin-de-siècle Paris. But he left no images of it; he was as parochial and as universal as his paintings, which, according to Manuel Payno, were considered by Meissonier croûtes (bad paintings).^[104] The ideal image of the homogeneous classical French art that he had learned in Mexico was threatened by the rather hererogenous, chaotic, and contradictory images of fin-de-siècle Paris, and he opted to defend the ideal image of France, even if in so doing he seemed to be defending France from itself: "In spite of the great liberty for artists that prevails in France, there are a number among them who maintain good principles, and do not let art just rush in. . .. Today's situation would be very appropriate for despairing, for arriving at a complete baroquism, at the most untasteful extravaganza, if not for a certain number of maestros with great talent who sustain high art."^[105]

To sum up the analyses of the Aztec Palace presented in the last three chapters, some general aspects can be highlighted. First, since reconciliation was the key term in Mexican politics, the whole cultural panorama had to do with joining pieces, with eclecticism, with pragmatic selection from whatever was available to bring about the impression of homogeneity and harmony. Thus, while the architectural facade of the Aztec Palace had to reconcile pre-Hispanic styles with modern forms, it also had to join various understandings of the pre-Hispanic past.

Second, this variety of eclecticism was especially characteristic of modern times because it was consciously ephemeral yet comprehensive and universal. Whereas there were no doubts about progress—for either French or Mexican officials—they were all too aware that whatever they did was only a trial, however scientific and complex it might be. Mexican architects were well aware that an Aztec Palace constituted the strongest chance of having an important impact in France, yet they knew that it was only an attempt whose contribution to a stable national style was yet to be seen. The essaylike nature of their ventures was especially evident in late-nineteenth-century world's fairs that were themselves the greatest state-of-the-art ensayos on modernity in the Western world.

Finally, if experimental eclecticism characterized modern times in 1889, it was because what was in play was forms. Thus classificatory and hierarchical arrangements were inevitably artificial; that is, contingent and eclectic. Late-nineteenth-century nationalism and progress were a matter of facades. The facades were not hypocritical accidental forms, but indeed the only essence available in modern times to constitute collective and individual identities. Consequently, the Aztec Palace manipulated different styles to form a universal nationhood, recognizable to the Western world, and acceptable and learnable for the inhabitants of Mexico.

Whatever appellation the Aztec Palace earned—exotic, uniquely Mexican, traditional, antique, non-Western—it incarnated a specific hierarchical classification set by unequal economic and cultural relations. Of course, the Aztec Palace and its exhibit were less advanced—technologically and industrially— than the rest of the fair was. And yet, formally it was less modern only because it was less powerful: it was the symbol of a poorer nation. It was included in classifications, but it did not participate in classifying. The entire fair, including its Aztec Palace, was forging the terms modern, progressive, and national. Dichotomous hierarchical classification—barbaric-civilized, modern-traditional, exotic-cosmopolitan—would endure, mutating to adjust to changing power relations. But as far as the idea of a modern nation was conceived, and as far as a Westernizing Mexican elite was concerned, to be modern constituted a multifaceted and painful collective outgrowth; in this modern way of being, it was difficult to point out insides and outsides.

Eight
Mexican Statistics, Maps, Patents, and Governance

Above all, nineteenth-century great exhibitions were about science. Science was both the midwife and the firstborn child of modern times, and it would be hopeless to attempt to present a modern appearance without a scientific outfit. The Enlightenment had brought about the possibility of uniting, as Condorcet proclaimed in 1793, all sciences and arts to achieve "an equilibrium of knowledge, industry, and reason necessary for the progress and the happiness of the human species."^[1] Science was considered universal—a form of knowledge that knew no national context. Nonetheless, science was produced in different and competing national settings,^[2] with a paranational consensus about the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. That modern consensus was tightly linked to nationalism. What in modern times was essentially new was not the existence of nationalist sciences but the insurmountable requirement of conceiving nations through science.

French universal exhibitions were an extravaganza of science that proved not only France's modernity but also its national existence. They proved that France was more than the abstract land of freedom and fraternity; it was also the concrete reality of a national entity captured in maps, statistics, and numerous socioeconomic reports. As historian Claude Nicolet has demonstrated, in order for the republican ideology to be reported to other republics (that is, Germany, England, and the United States), it had to "provide something more: the confirmed conviction of being a form of political organization that not only favor [ed] but, to a great extent, depend [ed] on science."^[3]

Mexico's displays in world's fairs echoed to the last detail the dictates of the era of science and nationalism. Accordingly, in 1889 the Aztec Palace housed countless statistics and studies on medicine, administration, chemistry, physics, criminology, electricity, mineralogy, and so forth. Several scientific societies (including the Sociedad Antonio Alzate, the Sociedad de

Geografía y Estadística, the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, the Sociedad de Ingenieros y Arquitectos, the Observatorio Astronómico Central, the Museo Nacional, the Escuela de Bellas Artes, the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, the Escuela Nacional de Medicina, and the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia) exhibited their works in 1889, as they did in Chicago 1893 or Paris 1900.

By 1889 Mexico's political and cultural life had experienced a scientific turn,^[4] which echoed the international Western trend of framing all knowledge in a scientific format. That Mexicans shared that format is evident. What is important to determine is how the demanding and intricate construction of scientific explanations (in all realms of the national life) occurred. Here lies a clue for understanding both Mexico's particular version of modern times and modernity's own coming into being.

During the Porfiriato, Mexico's urban elites created a scientific milieu that included the concept of scientific politics, the terminology of which was endlessly repeated in specialized writings, in political speeches, and in literary pieces. With the consolidation of power in the hands of the Científico group, the country's development could only be dealt with through scientific explanations. Accordingly, in 1901 José Yves Limantour, the Científico par excellence, observed: "Science has just put at our disposal the driving force which we were so lacking." The nation could now be completed.^[5]

For Mexico's technocrats, therefore, to have a presence in world's fairs constituted a great opportunity both to display the progress the country had achieved and to learn about advancements in the unstoppable course of Western progress. For the wizards of progress science was indeed a two-way street: Mexico had to look scientific, and it had to look for science. Consequently, "to make Mexico known in Europe" and "to make Europe known in Mexico"^[6] were the explicit goals of the Mexican team in the 1889 Paris fair: more specifically, to "make our political and social organization known in all its principal forms and with all the unique circumstances that could interest especially immigrants, be they capitalist or worker, permitting them to judge the rights that they can enjoy in this country, the franchise and guarantees granted to them, the public health and security, the criminality, etc."^[7] To accomplish such a goal, the exhibition team arranged its Parisian performance simultaneously as a demonstration of Mexico's modernity and natural abundance and as a call for immigration and investment. What was created, thus, was both a show of symbols and a socioeconomic report.^[8]

For the latter, the goal was crystal clear: to convince Europeans of Mexico's possibilities for investment and advantages for migration. Nonetheless, the goals of the scientists who undertook this task went beyond the pragmatic objectives of the Mexican government. They had their own scientific agenda—to develop their areas of expertise.

In world's fairs, therefore, it is possible to see how Mexicans commanded

the language of science in what were the most important scientific events of the century. The significance of world's fairs in the development of science in Mexico, if evident, is still to be historically pondered. Indeed, Mexico's presence at world's fairs accelerated the processes that had been taking place quietly in Mexican laboratories, scientific associations, and universities. Mexican attendance fostered publications, created new institutions, and sponsored scholarship and scholarly congresses. For instance, in 1889, thanks to the suggestion of a Mexican chemist who was sent to Paris to study laboratories and to participate in international congresses, the laboratory of the Instituto Médico Nacional was conceived. The first general medical geography of the country was published for display in 1889. The first sketch of a national map was synthesized to be sent to Paris. Textile statistics were gathered and exhibited at the 1893 Chicago Columbian exhibition, and general agricultural statistics were prepared for the 1900 Paris fair.

Mexico's scientific image in world's fairs tells us a great deal. In the first place, through these displays the specific status of Mexican science is disclosed at a particular moment in time. Science was difficult to improvise, so scientific formality required a background of laborious and long hours of thinking, researching, and writing throughout Mexico's history. Second, in world's fairs we are able to observe how the profile of Mexican science was reshaped by the inherently trendy nature of professional modern science. That is, in universal exhibitions the particular stage of science in Mexico was remodeled in order to suit particular scientific criteria and developments, thus allowing the historian to see both the new profile of Mexican science and the way in which it was reshaped. Finally, in Mexico's scientific image in world fairs we are able to ponder the width of the scientific gap between Mexico and the mainstream Western nations.

With this in mind, in this chapter and the next one I examine Mexico's scientific exhibition at world's fairs, once again taking as the pivot of analysis the 1889 Paris fair. The larger objective is to analyze Mexico's proficiency in the lingua franca of late-nineteenth-century Europe: science in its diverse forms.

Numbering and Mapping

In Mexico, as in any other modern state, concrete notions of society and state came into being through numbers. Statistics became the technology of ruling and the foundation of late-nineteenth-century scientific politics.^[9] The Paris exposition of 1889 was, of course, a fiesta of numbers, because since the London Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 statistics had been a fundamental part of the picture of the modern world.^[10] In the 1889 fair, every area of display included statistics: hygiene, criminology, agricultural production, industrial production, anthropology, social economy, geography, sanitation,

and so forth. Even the exposition itself had a statistical account in the ninth volume of Alfred Picard's report.^[11]

From the 1770s to the 1840s the science of statistics experienced its golden age, from the statistics produced by the early postrevolutionary regimes to the massive production of numbers by the Napoleonic empire.^[12] Deriving first from astronomy and geodesy and later from biology and physics, statistics had been a common ground of scientific expression that gradually was applied to the social realm, despite, for instance, the influential opposition of Comte's positivism.^[13] By 1889 the idea of mere descriptive social physics based in numbers was already transformed into the deterministic notion of scientific statistics. That is, by the 1880s statistics were defined in French as "the profound knowledge of the specific and comparative situation of states," or better yet, "statistics is history resting, history is statistics in motion."^[14]

In Mexico, as in France, statistics were first associated with the geodesical and geographical sciences but gradually became the expression of the state's actuality and actions. As was the case in France, Mexican statistics were not an inherent component of positivistic science. On the contrary, statistics in Mexico also suffered a transformation from mere descriptive reports to deterministic law; and, as in France, Mexican orthodox positivists rejected statistics as an accurate form of scientific knowledge. For instance, in 1857 Jesús Hermosa observed in one of the first statistical guidebooks of Mexico that statistics was not an exact science but was one "of the fundamentals of politics."^[15] However, by 1880 Emiliano Busto, a statistician and a member of the wizards of progress, defined statistics as "the profound understanding of society"; a science that had "figures as its language," which "gives [society] a precise and assured character, as with the exact sciences."^[16]

Busto's conviction epitomized the Científico consensus that had equipped statistics with a deterministic twist. This determinism was not a natural and harmonious result but an intellectual outcome determined by international and domestic needs. In fact, the orthodox Comtian positivists were inclined to repudiate statistical determinism as a form of positivist explanation of social phenomena. Therefore, as late as 1902 the prominent positivist Agustín Aragón considered that those who used statistics without philosophy were merely ignorant.^[17]

According to Antonio Peñafiel, who in addition to being an archaeologist and historian was one of the main producers of statistics in the second part of the nineteenth century, Mexico's statistics went back to pre-Hispanic times. Following his indigenist bias, Peñafiel believed that statistics in Mexico began with the Chichimeca ruler Nepaltzin, who ordered that the members of his tribe be counted when the valley of Mexico had been reached. He was, Peñafiel claimed, "the first statistician, if by this word one means a ruler who makes good use, like him, of numbers, for the benefit of his subjects and well-being of those he ruled."^[18] Nonetheless, Peñafiel affirmed that

modern statistics in fact began in Mexico with the works of Alexander von Humboldt. These efforts were later developed by the Instituto Geográfico (1833-1838), and by the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística.^[19] However, as late as 1893 the Mexican economist Carlos Diaz Dufoo affirmed (in a book published for the 1893 Chicago world's fair) that the science of statistics was still only beginning in Mexico.^[20]

Following the construction of a social physics based on statistical laws, as affirmed by the most famous statistician of the first part of the nineteenth century, Adolphe Quetelet,^[21] various statisticians emerged in Mexico, such as Antonio Peñafiel, and flourished during the Porfirian peace.^[22] By 1882, thanks to the influence of Antonio Garcia Cubas and Emiliano Busto, Minister Carlos Pacheco created the Dirección General de Estadística, which was administered by Peñafiel.^[23] By the 1890s the demographic, criminal, sanitary, geodesical, geographical, and administrative aspects of Mexico were all addressed statistically. For the 1889 Paris fair, statistics on education, crime, and health, as well as graphic explanations of the Mexican political and administrative legal framework, were prepared.^[24] Therefore, as part of the exhibit of the agriculture group, its director, Pedro J. Senties, undertook an intricate and massive research project. He requested data from the state governments regarding climates, altitudes, directions and speeds of winds, rainfall totals, and other technical information. He also inquired about the characteristics of soils as well as the various types of agricultural products.

Clearly this investigation aspired to present a comprehensive view of the state of Mexican agriculture. Toward that end, statistics were also compiled on salaries for machinery workers and day laborers and on prices of the haciendas and ranchos, together with pictures or photographs of the rural buildings, livestock, tools and feeding equipment. Much of this information was concentrated in tables that contained data on name, price, size, and location of ranchos and haciendas; salaries paid to men, women, and children; machinery used; amount of land under irrigation; and types of fertilizers utilized. However, the task of compiling these statistics was not finished until the 1900 Paris world's fair. The result was a rich source of information that deserves to be included in studies of Mexican agriculture, although it is important to keep in mind its main purpose: to attract foreign investment and immigration by creating an image of a promising modern nation. Thus salaries seem exaggeratedly low in the complete compilation of 1900, and the good conditions on haciendas are perhaps exaggerated.^[25] The demand for this type of statistics grew constantly, making it necessary for the Mexican government to undertake more statistical works for future displays.^[26]

International investors and observers assessed Mexican potential through agricultural statistics and maps, which constituted universal forms of presentation for modern nations. Argentina presented two comprehensive statistical studies whose only difference from those of Mexico was that instead

of referring to races, the Argentine study talked about nationalities (that is, Spaniards, Italians, Chinese, and so forth).^[27] The Franco-Brazilian commission hired a well-known French economist, E. Levasseur (who, as we saw in chapter 3, was hired by Mexico in 1900), to produce Brazil's statistical image.^[28] EL Salvador also efficiently, if modestly, assembled a statistical image.^[29]

For Mexico, and for other Latin American countries, the numerous statistics reported at the 1889 exhibition had a mutually reinforcing international and national use. For France, these statistics were not only arguments expressed in a familiar language, but also a sine qua non for its own statistical existence. For Mexico, statistics were an important part of a larger social, cultural, and physical topography of the nation which included, in addition to statistics, maps, photographs, and natural history studies.

By definition, statistics were comparative, and only through comparison could what was then called the law of large numbers be uncovered.^[30] As historian of statistics Ian Hacking has explained, "that statistics should be comparative is part of their original mandate to measure the power and wealth of the state, as compared with other states."^[31] Thus in an increasingly numerical world, statistics were always welcome, as was shown by the numerous European comparative statistical studies on crime, industrial production, races, and hygiene. In essence, more than one set of statistics was needed in such comparisons, and thus all components being compared acquired equal importance in creating statistical images. In fact, Mexicans compared their statistics with French statistics. In turn, some specific Mexican statistics were used and shown to prove France's progress or backwardness. Indeed, whether Mexican statistics were actually used by French or European statisticians to make a comprehensive comparison (such as that of France and England) was only secondarily important. What was essential for both France and Mexico was that statistics be universally available. Only in a sea of numbers provided by all nations could the statistical picture of the ideal modern nation have emerged.

This could be exemplified even in the revolutionary transformation that statistics underwent with the works of the British biologist Francis Galton. At the 1889 Paris fair Galton measured heads of Parisians, and in the same year he published in London his celebrated Natural Inheritance .^[32] At the same time, the Mexican exhibit at Paris displayed collections of skulls and statistics on the facial angles of Mexicans. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine the type of transformation introduced by Galton in statistics, if not for the availability of statistics collected in many countries. One can argue that in the realm of statistics, the global creation of the picture of the modern world becomes historically noticeable.

Cartography was another tool in the self-creation of a national image. As late as 1880, Manuel Orozco y Berra affirmed that "as of yet, exact knowledge of the vast extent of our country is not possible."^[33] But by 1889 Mexi-

can scientists had already advanced in this regard, mainly because of the efforts of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora (created in 1878).

Thus in 1889 the Mexican exhibition team decided to exhibit a Carta geo-gráfica of Mexico that was to be prepared by the cartography section of the Ministry of Economic Development (which in fact consisted of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora) (see Fig. 20).^[34] The plan for this map summarized all the factors that the Porfirian elite wished to emphasize: the Mexican climate, which offered advantages for agriculture; Mexico City, which proved Mexico's modernity; the political and social organization of Mexico, which demonstrated that order existed and explained the bureaucratic and financial facilities offered by the state to investors and immigrants; the extent and quality of Mexico's communication system, especially telegraphs and railroads; the quantity and quality of civic buildings and monuments, which exemplified Mexico's republican and aesthetic advancements; the condition of public health and hygiene, which were sine qua non ingredients of modern development; the state of Mexican culture, which could be understood as modern nineteenth-century high culture (a review of the most French of the Mexican artists and intellectuals); and the ingredient of exoticism, which made Mexico simultaneously European and modern, yet unique.^[35] This plan was not fully carried out, but it constituted an ideal description of what the map ought to include.

The history of late-nineteenth-century Mexican cartography is closely connected with displays at world's fairs. In 1884 a Carta general geográfica had been prepared for exhibit at the New Orleans fair. A larger and more comprehensive one was displayed in Paris 1889, and it became the basis for the general map of Mexico, which was not finished until 1906.^[36] For the Chicago fair of 1893 another map was made, this time a hydrologic one.

In addition, in 1889 there was an important scientific-cartographic display: the exhibit of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora, which was highly praised by the French scientific community.^[37] The director of this commission was the Mexican military cartographer Agustín Díaz.^[38] He had worked in the Comisión de Límites, which had been established after the Mexican-American war, and was appointed by Porfirio Díaz to undertake a map of Puebla in 1877. As Agustín Díaz himself explained in the catalogue of the commission's display in Paris, the commission was made possible by "the urgent need for drawing and designing better maps than those that had been conceived to that date."^[39]

The French scientific community singled out for praise Mexico's geodesical, topographical, and geographical maps and calculations, as well as twenty issues of La Carte générale de la République contruite à la cent-millionèsime partie, par le système horizontal . In addition, topography and technology were combined in a map of Mexico's telegraph system that was especially prepared

Image not available.

20.
Sketch for a geological map of Mexico, made for the 1889 Paris exhibition. 
(Photograph by the author)

for the Paris exposition. Antonio Garcia Cubas, the most prominent geographer of nineteenth-century Mexico, was also represented in Mexico's cartographic display.^[40] He exhibited his "Statistics and History of the Mexican Republic Comprised by Thirty-one Maps of the States, Territories, and a Map of Railroads with Texts in Spanish, French, and English," a revision of his work for the 1884 New Orleans world's fair.^[41]

The general topography of the nation included more than maps and statistics; geology was also important in descriptions of the national territory. Therefore, another topographic effort was the Carta general geológica , undertaken by the Ministry of Economic Development for exhibition in Paris. Antonio del Castillo, with the technical expertise of the geologist José G. Aguilera, was in charge of this task.^[42] This map encompassed various strategic concerns of the Porfirian government. The study of earth science was tightly related to productive activities such as mining and agriculture.^[43] It was also associated with international anthropological and archaeological concerns about the origins of humankind in America, which in turn formed part of the national discussion of Darwinist theories and racist speculation about the backwardness of Mexican Indians. Thus, among the maps were the Plano geológico del Peñón de los Baños donde se encontró el hombre fósil prehistórico and the Carta general minera de la República Mexicana .^[44]

One hundred copies of the geological and mining maps were distributed

in France and Europe to, among others, the director of the French geological map, the director and professors of Paris's Mining École Supérieur, and the professors of geology of the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle. In Austria they were given to the Geologische Reichsanstalt of Vienna and to professors of mineralogy and geology at the Naturhistorisches Museum, also in Vienna.^[45] In truth, promotion was as important in the sciences as it was in commerce.

To advance geology in the nation, Antonio del Castillo was sent to Paris with the commission to travel in Europe and study all of the advancements and geological institutions.^[46] Therefore, he simultaneously directed the exhibition of Mexican maps and studied French scientific concerns and Mexico's possibilities for being included in those concerns. Consequently, in January 1889 he reported that meteorites in the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle were well appreciated and that for Mexico "it would be beneficial to exhibit them in Paris," because "it would make Mexico known worldwide as the country where the largest number of meteorites have fallen." In effect, natural randomness worked in favor of Mexico's national pride,^[47] and models of Mexican meteorites were in fact displayed in Paris. At least two meteorites, weighing approximately 14 tons, were brought from Chihuahua to Mexico City, copied, and exhibited in replica.^[48]

Together, statistics, maps, and geological studies created a clear picture of the nation's topography. The ideal image of the modern nation could observe its full likeness in such a mirror.

Patenting

Universal expositions were the capitals of invention because they epitomized the marriage of science and technology that accelerated the Industrial Revolution.^[49] Not surprisingly, on these occasions European laws and customs placed great emphasis on property rights and patents. Hence English, French, and American legislation on property rights was tightly linked to world's fairs.^[50]

In Mexico some laws in this regard were derived from the Spanish decree of October 1820, and in newly independent Mexico Lucas Alamán conferred the first patent license.^[51] However, not until the Ministry of Economic Development was created in 1853 did patent rights obtain a clear legal status.^[52] In 1890 a final law was passed that accelerated the process and established better guarantees for the registration of patents. This was not essentially a policy to develop domestic technology, but rather part of the general objective of attracting foreign investment and immigration by protecting the technology of foreigners in Mexico. Therefore, after 1890 the majority of the registered patents in Mexico were foreign. By the 1900s Mexico took care

at world's fairs, especially American ones, to emphasize that a legal framework for protecting patent rights existed in Mexico, again with the hope of inducing American companies to establish factories there.^[53]

In 1889, when the industry group of the Mexican exhibition was collecting Mexican inventions, the tediously bureaucratic registration process meant that most of the items that came to be exhibited in Paris were not properly registered in the Ministry of Economic Development.^[54] In fact, it seems that Mexican regulations were not especially concerned with the protection of patents on items displayed at Paris, though efforts were made to assure the authenticity of some products.

The French government, however, although authorizing certain exceptions to property rights on products exhibited at Paris, also required that the appropriate royalties be paid by those who made use of any invention or product.^[55] Therefore, in the case of inventions or manufactures, Mexican exhibitors were required by the government to obtain a certificate signed by the respective Mexican local authorities of the authenticity of their work.^[56] In this way the legislation on Mexican intellectual and scientific property rights was simplified but not strongly enforced by the central legal and bureaucratic structure.

In part, the government's casual attitude toward patent protection may have derived from the fact that the Mexican exhibit was not especially oriented toward technology. Most displays of native technological advancements focused on those areas in which Mexican industry had been especially successful, namely, textile, vegetable fibers, grain mills, and cigarette production (see Fig. 21).^[57] For example, the Franco-Mexican entrepreneur Ernesto Pugibet displayed his machine to fabricate cigars, while the government of Yucatán and the private inventor Isaac Esparza exhibited various examples of Mexican technology, machines for scraping henequen.^[58] In addition, Maximino Rio de la Loza exhibited a device to avoid railroad accidents (see Fig. 22), Angel Acedo exhibited a dynamo, and José María César exhibited a steam engine. F. Paez, the Acedo Brothers, and Rivera exhibited mills for grinding tortilla corn, and Leandro Ramirez displayed a sewing machine.^[59]

In 1889 Paris also attracted flamboyant Mexican inventors, who followed in the footsteps of Juan N. Adorno at Paris 1855 (see chapter 3). One of these was Antonio Garcia Chávez, an auxiliary of the industry group, who requested 1,500 pesos at the beginning of 1889 to construct an engine for exhibition at Paris. García Chávez claimed he could produce an electric engine that would be "the definitive solution in the use of electricity as a driving force." The project was studied by the official commission, which rejected the request. But a few months later Garcia Chávez presented another project, this time for the construction of an airplane. Once again his project was rejected.^[60] Antonio Carbajal, a physician who often wrote scientific articles for the Gaceta Médica de México , was more successful. He received 500 pesos to

Image not available.

21.
Miguel Saldaña's henequen-processing machine, an example of Mexican technology.
 Source: Patentes y Marcas, Box 34, Exp. 1435,
 reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
 (Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)

design a mask to protect against infection, which was actually exhibited as part of Mexico's display in the hygiene and sanitation class.^[61]

Despite some legislation on technology and the machine, the emphasis of Mexico's display of products at Paris was clearly on agriculture. By 1889 the Porfirian plan for national economic development was oriented toward strengthening Mexico's participation in the Industrial Revolution as a supplier of raw materials and as a consumer of international technology. To foster industrialization through native technological inventions was a rhetorical commonplace, but in fact the Mexican elite had already abandoned the idea of catching up with the rapid pace of industrial technology and aimed only to be a cosmopolitan and wealthy supplier of raw materials. In sharp contrast, Thomas Edison's inventions were of the greatest interest in Paris, and his concerns with patent rights were epitomized by the registration of his patents not only in Paris but in Mexico even before 1889.^[62] Of the new nations, the United States was definitely the technological master. By 1862 Jules Verne had already imagined that technology would develop until "[men are] swallowed up by their own inventions. . .. I bet the Yankees will have a hand in it."^[63] Realists that they were, Mexican authorities were well aware of the impossibility of finding a Mexican Edison.

Image not available.

22.
Maximino Río de la Loza's machine to avoid railroad accidents.
 Source: Patentes y Marcas, Box 33, Exp. 1384, 
reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. 
(Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)

Governing

Statistics, together with economics, eventually became the fundamental support for administrative knowledge, a major component of modern nations.^[64] Public administration was created to meet the needs brought about by modern society: increasing complexity, division of labor, demographic growth, urban expansion, professionalization, and rationalization of time and resources. By the late nineteenth century it was a mixture of organizational skills, written laws, accounting methods, and division of labor supported on two pillars: the liberal political philosophy and the scientific consensus of the late nineteenth century. Through the first, public administration was part of a long-standing philosophical and political definition of the role of the state.^[65] As such, public administration was linked to the particular ways in which each nation constituted a centralized power made into a state and to specific legal traditions that controlled power relationships. By being part of a scientific consensus, public administration became an arrangement of methods, techniques, and laws; that is, the science of modern administration.^[66]

The politico-philosophical and scientific bases of public administration were threatened by three related ghosts: state intervention (fear of socialism), social control (fear of revolution), and corruption. In the French Third

Republic, as we saw in chapter l, these ghosts were alive and present in the French government.^[67]

Economic liberalism and radical political liberalism opposed state intervention. But the fear of social unrest, the need for social control, and the urge to promote public welfare made state intervention necessary. More importantly, the need for state sponsorship in economic development was recognized and exercised, especially by countries like France, which were trying to catch up with industrialization. Therefore, in the late nineteenth century the political formula employed by various European countries was conservative liberalism, which added to the traditional areas of state intervention, such as national security and tax collection, new areas such as sanitation, housing, and industrial promotion. The role of the state as a universal referee expanded, and consequently the need for reliable professional civil servants grew. A well-organized and scientifically trained bureaucracy became an important facet of a modern state and perhaps its very essence, as Max Weber noted at the beginning of the twentieth century.^[68]

Although the idea of public administration was part of the general conception of the role of the state, it possessed its own logic and functioning based on the technicalities of decision making and the geographical and physical organization of government.^[69] In this realm, administrative knowledge was gradually developing relatively fixed forms for routine functions. In time these new developments crystallized and became proofs of modernity and efficiency in the handling of state affairs. Accordingly, regardless of the actual efficiency and honesty of bureaucrats, in modern states it became necessary for each agency to display crisp administrative formalities: trained personnel, an organizational scheme defined according to the fashionable style, and a well-defined division of labor and use of time and space. These formalities became fundamental in the general picture of the modern world.

Hence, for a nation to prove itself modern, it had to show that it was ruled by modern public administration, and at world's fairs Mexico aimed to show its recent advancements in government administration, to establish that Mexico had a theoretical awareness of how to govern a modern nation scientifically. Of course, the countless propaganda books distributed by the government invariably contained a section on administration (that is, territory, ministries, division of power, and so forth), and the organization of the wizards of progress was an attempt to prove the modernity of Mexican public administration. In addition, for the 1889 Paris fair Emiliano Busto suggested that he write a comparative analysis of the Mexican and French public administration systems, which would include "all the diverse services that compose [the Mexican government,] accompanied by statistical charts and tables."^[70] Busto was the oficial mayor of the Mexican Ministry of Finance, a member of the Mexican commission in Paris, and a bureaucrat with long involvement in financial affairs both in the state of Guanajuato and in the fed-

eral government.^[71] The study was published in French and Spanish, in a handsome edition,^[72] and completed in no more than six months.^[73] Busto himself kept Porfirio Diaz informed of the progress of his work.^[74]

Busto's book was part propaganda, of course, and its goals were harmonious with the general objectives of Mexico's display in Paris. Hence, once Busto's initiative was approved, the Ministry of Economic Development asked that his study provide immigrants, capitalists, and workers with the needed information about "the rights they enjoy in this country, the franchise and guarantees."^[75] But it was also assumed that Busto's book was to be a scientific study, and therefore the Mexican government arranged for it to be distributed to European newspaper editors and publicists, as well as to such distinguished scientists as Louis Pasteur and Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.^[76]

The book was a detailed description of the division of powers and of the organization of the six Mexican ministries vis-à-vis the ten French ministries. For each Mexican ministry, a complete organizational chart was prepared and compared with its French counterpart. Administration was, according to Busto—who literally translated the definition from a French study—"the conjunction of public services meant to assist, under government direction, the execution of laws, decrees, and rules that have as their objective the benefit of the state, the protection of its interests, or the maintenance, within just limits, of the exercise of public liberties."^[77] Indeed, the role of the state was explicitly delineated in the concept of public administration: on one hand, the promotion of both private and state economic interests and, on the other, social control. Busto explained that the backwardness of Mexico's economy and society meant that the Mexican government had a larger role to play than did that of the French state. Along these lines, he maintained that taxes in Mexico served not only, "as with the French government," to provide national security, education, and communication services but to protect "railroad business in order to obtain speedy and reliable lines of communication." Accordingly, Busto affirmed, the Mexican government presented "the attributes that Josat finds in the universal tutor."^[78]

In fact, Busto's book was based largely on a recently published study of the organization of the French Ministry of Finance, written by a rather obscure bureaucrat named Jules Josat, deputy bureau chief at the French Finance Ministry, who has left almost no historical record.^[79] For Josat, scientific administration was the natural component of modern states: "If, within a state, the government is the soul that inspires, the administration is the body that acts."^[80] Busto followed Josat's study in detail, even imitating the format and analytical schemes of his books.^[81] Meticulously, Busto examined every agency of the various ministries, explaining its function and organizational structure and then comparing each with its French counterpart. Overall, Busto's work constituted a comparative proof of Mexico's administrative advancement, a confirmation of Mexico's disciplined society in which,

as he observed in explaining the goal of financial administration, "the entire lives of citizens . . . seem to have been enveloped in the ingenious net woven by the men of the treasury division."^[82]

Busto's book was by no means an innovative or landmark study of Mexican administration, although it was indeed the first comparative study in this area.^[83] However, it is quite revealing from the point of view of the construction of a modern national image. The very fact of its rapid, improvised, superficial, but elegant production says a great deal about the state of so-called scientific administration in Mexico. And it is precisely because of its comparative character that Busto's book acquired historical significance.

Doubtless Busto's work was rapidly executed following the latest studies—which proved to be ephemeral—of French administrative techniques. Busto must have believed that Josat's study of the reorganization of the French Ministry of Finance would have a significant influence on French thinking about public administration. In addition, Josat's study facilitated Busto's work because its organizational focus and charts invited comparison even in purely visual terms (for example, chart to chart). However, Josat had no major effect on the history of French public administration. Indeed, unlike the medical sciences, hygiene, and natural history (see chapter 9), in the domain of public administration, Mexican officials tended to be much more naive and generally unaware of the terms of the discussion. Mexican theoreticians of bureaucracy pale before Mexican physicians, hygienists, or naturalists.

In no small measure, this was the result of the particular history of Mexico's administrative structure, which by the 1880s had found a new form of centralized authority with which to solve the nineteenth-century enigma of how to rule the country. This solution, of course, favored pragmatic authoritarian rule through violence, coercion, cooptation, and bargaining, devices that had little to do with innovative technical or theoretical administration. Further, in Mexico the philosophical, political, and scientific implications of administration were debated not in the rather confined and precisely limited realm of administration but in a wider ideological arena: within Mexico's liberal constitutionalist tradition.

Whatever its virtues or flaws, Busto's book achieved its immediate objective: to show Mexico, through comparison with France itself, as a well-structured, disciplined modern nation. Through comparison, Mexico's governing style was diffused into the structure, forms, and entire fashion of what was then understood as scientific administration. Mexico's administration could be read by the modern world as epitomized by the fair, in French and in a familiar conceptual structure. In addition, as with statistics, within a comparison the elements being compared acquired equal import and mutual relevance. In any comparison, similarities and differences acquire meaning only insofar as they make reference to a common ground of understanding, which the elements being compared mutually create. Busto's book at-

tempted to prove that Mexico's administration belonged to that common modern ground of public administration. Mexico's administrative structure, thus, was presented as a particular version of a universal form, and Mexico appeared to be not only echoing it but also contributing something to it through Mexican particularities. By doing so, and regardless of its actual impact on French officials, Busto's book gained for the Porfirian regime what nationally could be presented as a seal of approval. Mexico's administrative similarities with France could be internationally, but above all nationally, introduced as proof that Mexico was moving on the right track. And Mexico's administrative differences with France were presented by Busto as merely ad hoc additions required by the country's uniqueness. By attaining this seal of approval, Mexico could presumably claim to have the right to reap the fruits of a modern administration: investment, development, security, and political rights.

In addition, through comparisons the very idea of universal truths of general applicability in administration was reinforced. For France and for Mexico, the fact that an obscure Mexican official in a newly politically stabilized country could demonstrate that the formalities of modern scientific administration were being observed proved the universalism of modern administration. Through this mechanism, such works as Busto's aimed to take the historical particularities of Mexico's governing style and fashion them in the form of a common (with all modern nations) universal present of modernity.

It was in liberal constitutionalist discussions that the philosophical, political, and scientific aspects of administration had been debated in Mexico since the 1860s. The very idea of scientific administration as the solution to such problems as the role of the state and social control was deliberated in constitutional and political terms.^[84] The new conservative scientific liberals of the late 1880s favored strong government and order. Conservative liberalism (epitomized in a statist administration charged, as Busto maintained, with more functions than the traditional notion of universal referee) was believed to be an organic result of both Mexico's violent history and economic backwardness. As Busto implied, in a recently pacified new country, only a strong state could create a real nation and lead it to the standards of international progress—hence the doggedly repeated battle cry of "less politics, more administration," in which administration was not at issue but rather seen as an assortment of scientific techniques, methods, and theories that needed to be applied in the daily exercise of governance.

In effect, Busto was not concerned with the actual creation of a professional group of employees or civil servants but with learning the technical and methodological formalities to clothe the new ideology that was presented as the end of ideologies, as the completion of politics itself: administration. Thus the ethical aspects (such as corruption) of public administration, which

were often talked about by professional bureaucrats in Mexico,^[85] and which were a regular issue in the debate over public administration in England or France,^[86] were not considered in Busto's work on administration. Busto was less interested in explaining the training, recruitment, honesty, and functioning of bureaucracy in Mexico than in showing the parallels between the formal structures of ministries in France and Mexico.

In sum, in world's fairs the Mexican elite utilized all the formalities of public administration as the attire of a nation that was aiming to catch up with modernity. During the 1880s and 1890s, for countries like Mexico, the apparatus of public administration was only a formal framework, a technically useful overlay for the habits, legal forms, and particular arrangements of the Mexican elite. Such a framework became both a learning process for new administrative methods and techniques and a normative criterion only applicable at specific moments and for particular sectors of the population. Within these limits, Porfirian bureaucracy doubtless worked rather well. Public administration was thus the black-tie attire indispensable for attendance at the reception of modern nations, the idea being that pragmatic rule clothed as modern public administration would gradually function in a modern manner . . . as if in the old tale, had the mendicant persisted in dressing like a prince, a king he would have become.

Nine
Natural History and Sanitation in the Modern Nation

Natural History

In promoting modern Mexico, the efforts of the Porfirian elite to develop the nation's natural resources went beyond reports on mining and agriculture; studies of the flora and fauna of Mexico were also part of this concern. Natural history had been part of the Spanish process of colonization since the eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century the study of nature was reinforced by the development of scientific chemistry, biology, and medicine within an evolutionist paradigm.

Mexico had a well-established natural history tradition,^[1] and naturalists persisted in their work during the second half of the nineteenth century, albeit within serious economic limitations. By the 1870s this tradition began to have large and impressive displays in Mexico's presence at world's fairs.^[2] At the 1889 fair Mexican naturalists had one of their best performances. In 1888 the newly created National Medical Institute had undertaken the task of studying and classifying Mexico's flora and fauna, as well as many other natural history studies that often were published in the institute's journal El Estudio (which in 1890 became Anales del Instituto Médico Nacional ). In fact, the distinguished Mexican naturalist Francisco Altamirano, a member of the institute, was appointed by the Mexican government to classify all botanical collections sent to Paris.^[3] He presented a catalogue of 300 different plants with their botanical classifications according to the French scheme, which enabled him to point out various promising scientific or curative plants.^[4] He was the first to translate into Spanish Francisco Hernández's study of New Spain's natural history (the twenty volumes of which he sent to Paris).

As early as 1884 the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora had secured a place for natural history in Mexico's displays at world's fairs. For the New Orleans exposition of 1884 the modern classification of Mexican species began again, but just after the New Orleans fair, this collection had a tragic

end—important scientific material was lost when the steamship City of Mérida sank in Havana on 29 August 1884.^[5] The commission began a new collection, and in 1889 a carefully selected grouping of fossils, plants, insects, and animals was sent to Paris.^[6]

On a different front, the natural history exhibit mounted by the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora was such a great success in New Orleans that the Mexican government decided to found a Natural History Museum administered by the commission.^[7] Following the example of the New Orleans exhibit, this museum included sections on geology, paleontology, botany, and zoology.

In the second part of the nineteenth century, natural history in Mexico was especially active in a reexamination of the old faith in curative or economically productive discoveries of new products.^[8] It had long been common in Western scientific "mythology" to hope for miraculous cures from exotic plants. Mexican native medicine and botany had been studied as early as Francisco Hernández's De historia plantarum Novae Hispanae (1570-1577), commissioned by Philip II.^[9] In the nineteenth century, the creation in 1868 of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural was a landmark in such studies. Numerous studies of Mexican flora and fauna were published in La Naturaleza —the society's remarkable periodical—and in the Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística throughout the second part of the nineteenth century.

At the 1889 Paris fair, in addition to various volumes of these publications, numerous collections of indigenous medicinal plants were exhibited, with the explicit goal of "enriching Mexican therapeutic sciences and fostering exports of useful Mexican flora."^[10] With this type of natural history exhibit, Mexican officials had a twofold intention: to satisfy the exoticist desires of Europeans, and to provide scientific data to foster both scientific interchange and economic investment.

In the latter sense, Francisco and Maximino Rio de la Loza were important chemists and botanists who were envoys of Mexico at world's fairs. Maximino, considered a Mexican inventor,^[11] exhibited in Paris, according to the Mexican catalogue, various "scientific works written for the exposition," including the description of a device to avoid railroad accidents and some pills to cure epilepsy.^[12] Francisco's work was of more importance, and in it he followed in the steps of his father, Leopoldo Río de la Loza, the greatest chemist of nineteenth-century Mexico.

Thus in April 1889 Francisco Rio de la Loza was commissioned to study laboratories for chemical analysis in Paris and in other European countries.^[13] As with all Mexican scientific envoys, he was concerned both with the promotion of Mexico in Europe and with the development of his own profession in Mexico. He therefore proposed to Minister Carlos Pacheco that Mexico's vast botanical diversity could be of great interest to Mexican and

foreign scientists because of its industrial and medical potential.^[14] Francisco Rio de la Loza's trip to Paris was fundamental for the final design of the laboratory of the National Medical Institute. In 1889 he exhibited many documents and plans for the creation of the institute and sent back his analysis of European institutions. In 1891 the institute's laboratory was inaugurated with the objective of "[studying] the national flora, fauna, climatology, and medical geography."^[15] The institute was part of the Ministry of Economic Development, and one of its specific objectives was to recover the Mexican Indian medical tradition.^[16]

Also included in the display of natural history were various paintings of native animals, many of them by José María Velasco. What most amazed visitors was the collection of dissected diminutive Mexican birds. In the enthusiastic words of La Laterne of Paris, that diminutive world of birds "would have overburdened Buffon himself."^[17]

The beauty and utility of nature's gifts to Mexico were thus exhibited to satisfy both the economic interests of the nation's elite and the economic needs and cultural desires of Europe. This meant the appropriation of native beauty and productivity and thus the recuperation of a long-standing natural history tradition in Mexico, which was redirected according to the scientific trends of late-nineteenth-century European sciences.

Sanitation, Hygiene, and Public Health

A truly modern Mexico had to be necessarily a sanitary Mexico. To understand the sanitary aspects of Mexico's modern image, a brief examination of nineteenth-century European (especially French) hygienic thinking is indispensable.

If Paris was a stage of industrial growth, miasma, unemployment, epidemics, and worker discontent, then its fairs had to present the utopian and scientific solutions to those problems. Therefore, the Parisian fairs became idealized shows of the latest developments in social economy. For example, in the 1860s Fredéric Le Play founded the Société des Études Pratiques d'Économie Sociale , the ideas of which he applied to the organization of Group 10 (material and moral improvement of workers) at the 1867 Paris imperial exposition.^[18] By the 1900 Paris fair, Charles Gide and Alfred Picard had made social economy a domain apart from either liberal or socialist cooperativism. Social economy was part of progress, and as such it was considered a scientific enterprise.^[19]

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the proponents of hygienic reforms and assistance discussed whether the state should be in charge of hygiene and sanitation. For the liberal paradigm, the state possessed well-defined areas of intervention (such as national security and public administration), but assistance and hygiene were not fully legitimized as areas of

state jurisdiction. By the 1880s social economy (with its Saint-Simonian overtones) and the idea of assistance had to deal with whether to sanction or oppose state intervention in the private sphere in the name of hygiene and sanitation.^[20] In fact, the role of the state in assistance and hygiene remained a controversial issue until the beginning of the twentieth century.^[21]

Another realm of debate was hygiene itself. World's fairs often displayed the scientific progress of hygiene and, above all, the emergence of a public hygienic consciousness. Jules Rochard, a distinguished hygienist and author of Traité d'hygiène sociale (1888),^[22] described the status of hygiene in Paris 1889.^[23] He delimited three main concerns in the 7,600-square-meter Parisian exhibit on hygiene: food, sanitation of cities and houses, and the water supply and sewer system. The fountain of the Greek goddess of health, Hygie, crowned this exhibit.^[24]

Indeed, by the late 1880s hygiene in Europe was acquiring a scientific configuration, surpassing its utopian quasi-philanthropic emphasis in favor of a more clearly defined scientific and political role.^[25] The early-nineteenth-century utopian hygienists became the professional technocrats of the late nineteenth century, with complex and ambivalent relationships with the government.^[26] In turn, the medical profession passed from a corporate guild to an entity with clear connections and power within the state, owing to their scientific expertise.^[27]

By the beginning of the 1880s, in the context of uncertainty about the way in which diseases were transmitted, such scientific tools as sanitation questionnaires were developed;^[28] these tools—again, in a context marked by scientific uncertainty—served as a way to incorporate statistics, geography, socioeconomic explanations, and microbiological Pasteurian theories in the understanding of the origins and transmission of diseases. The development of this type of technique eventually furnished the state with a scientific basis for justifying intervention in the private realm in the interest of improved sanitation.^[29]

From the historian's point of view, however, one can argue that by 1889 the scientific transformation of hygiene was stalled. For hygiene to acquire its new political and scientific status, various related phenomena needed to come together, and this process was not yet complete in 1889. For their part, Mexican scientists were reading these debates on sanitation and hygiene.

In the scientific realm, the development of statistical data and innovative scientific techniques was rapid (most especially the Pasteurian bacteriological revolution in hygiene that began in the 1880s). These factors eventually transformed both the scientific standing and the social role of hygiene. By 1889 hygiene had acquired a scientific status but had not yet fully gained the scientific authority and the political status that would eventually come by virtue of the Pasteurian discoveries—and also by the hygienists' own influential articulation of their scientific expertise as an essential component of

national security and nationalism.^[30] In 1889 public hygiene in Europe, concerning most of the important diseases, was still being debated in a rather eclectic, pragmatic fashion that included not only Pasteurian microbiology but many others forms of explanation as well. The origin and transmission of diseases were studied by those who variously favored the contagionism, anticontagionism, and germ-theory approaches.^[31] In the end, from those who believed that the advancement of civilization would eventually bring about the end of diseases to those who used statistics to establish the relationship between misery and illness, almost all approaches had something to contribute to the explanation of diseases in a context of uncertainty.^[32]

In the sociopolitical domestic realm there were two interrelated phenomena. First, European governments came to be dominated by a centralized bureaucratic technocracy that was eager to discover new areas for state intervention, among the most fundamental of which were public sanitation and health. Here hygienists finally found authority and power for their particular expertise. Second, as a consequence of these trends, by the 1880s in France and other European countries feeling was growing that a direct relationship existed between poor hygiene and national decline. If France lost markets and wars, it was because its population was sick and poor, whereas countries like England and the United States had improved the health of their peoples.^[33] Indeed, despite scientific maturity, what had been a matter of fact since the midnineteenth century was that civilization, good sanitation, and hygiene came together in the educated mind. A modern nation had to be a spotless and white nation.^[34]

Regardless of the actual sanitary conditions of the country, Mexico's display at the world expositions echoed the modern basic concerns with hygiene and, to some extent, social economy. Representing a country and a capital city with grievous sanitation problems, the Mexican exhibit on hygiene attempted, first, to show and learn the methods and advances that European scientific hygienism had achieved. Second, Mexico's hygienists in world's fairs depicted not only the state of Mexico's hygiene and sanitation but also their own standing as a new technocracy of experts. Thus they showed the French experts and public, and also the Mexican authorities, the importance of their task. Finally, regarding the tension between statism and liberalism on the issue of hygiene, the Mexican exhibit at fairs underlined the nation's unmistakable statism, which reflected both the domestic power base of the elite and the need to modernize the nation, an undertaking in which the state was fundamental. In effect, through Mexico's presence at Paris 1889 we can see how the need for sanitation reforms became an important component of economic and political development and also of Mexico's particular nationalism.

Mexico's official participation in world's fairs attempted to change the

country's long-standing image as an unhygienic and unsanitary place. During the first part of the nineteenth century the sanitary problems associated with endemic national strife had to be faced, and in 1841 the Consejo Superior de Salubridad (Superior Sanitation Council) was created to deal with the issue. The role of this agency was to advise the government on sanitation concerns and to regulate the practice of medicine by establishing examinations and licenses and by monitoring medical activities in Mexico City.^[35] In this way the growth of hygienism was clearly related to the professionalization and consolidation of the modern medical profession in Mexico. In 1872 the council was reformed to give more emphasis to the issue of public sanitation, and in 1879 it was reorganized into a federal consultative group, with a federal budget, becoming a genuine scientific agency and also a modern sanitation police force.^[36] Until 1885 Dr. Idelfonso Velasco headed this medical corporation, and with his death Dr. Eduardo Liceaga became the director of the council, a position he held until the end of the Porfirian regime.

Hygiene in Mexico was more than a mere scientifically determined necessity, however. Scientific hygiene emerged in Mexico as part of the politico-cultural transformation called modernization that the country underwent during the years of Porfirian stability. Scientific hygiene was of major importance for the betterment of the sanitary conditions of the nation, and it was also indispensable to achieving a modern urban culture.

But the path to proclaiming these goals had not been a smooth one: hygiene as a scientific endeavor and as public knowledge was a difficult task to undertake in Mexico during the troubled years that preceded the Porfiriato. Before appropriate measures could be taken, Mexican physicians had to convince authorities and the general public of the utility of hygiene in the face of the manifold political and economic problems that beset the country. Public hygiene, as the director of the council observed in 1867, possessed an importance that was "barely known to the common people, but of high administrative interest in civilized nations even when its brilliance is not enough to dazzle the multitudes."^[37] By the 1880s, however, the significance of sanitation and hygiene were well recognized and fostered, both by the state and by private associations—that is, the church, scientific associations, and social clubs. By 1889 the Mexican hygiene experts, headed by Dr. Eduardo Liceaga, the most distinguished hygienist of late-nineteenth-century Mexico, were just beginning to decipher the scientific and political implications of hygiene and sanitation in a modern fashion. It was precisely in 1889 that Liceaga headed a team of hygienists who proposed to the Ministry of the Interior that a modern sanitary code be proclaimed for Mexico. This code was in fact publicized at the International Congress of Hygiene at the Paris fair.^[38] In it, hygiene in Mexico acquired its modern scientific connotations, and it

included a real inventory of the concerns of modern hygiene: air, water, dwellings, physical education, epidemics, management of residuals, food, and so forth.^[39]

Drainage in Mexico City became the main sanitary project of the Porfirian regime. For the 1889 exposition numerous sketches and maps of the Mexican drainage works were prepared by the two main sanitary engineers of late-nineteenth-century Mexico: Roberto Gayol and Miguel Angel de Quevedo.^[40] Quevedo wrote a report on the state of the works for distribution in Paris.^[41]

In this fashion, Mexico demonstrated in Paris that sanitary engineering was also part of Mexico's modern image. As in Europe, in Mexico it was believed that the miasma of the valley of Mexico was the cause of several diseases (such as typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera). Potable water and a sewer system for such a valley as Mexico City's (surrounded by lakes and mountains) was the great solution. Hence throughout the Porfiriato the drainage of Mexico City became the most salient evidence of Mexico's modern hygiene, one that was continually exhibited on many international stages.

The sanitation concerns of Mexico went beyond the miasma approach and its concomitant engineering concerns. In constructing a hygienic picture of Mexico in 1889, Rodrigo Valdés arranged a description of the army, the regular police force, and the rural police force. The description included photographs of soldiers and their uniforms, which were in tune with the general tendency to portray tipospopulares . This worked to attract Europeans who longed for the exotic and to depict the physical, nutritional, and civic advancement of those social classes that were often considered savage. In addition, in the hygiene and assistance class, Mexico's exhibit included various mineral waters from different regions of the country and a hygienic and antiseptic mask designed by Dr. Antonio Carbajal, as well as various plans for the construction of hospitals, mental institutions, and penitentiaries in Puebla and Mexico City.^[42] But Mexico's main display in this regard was in the professional education class. There, documents related to the creation of the National Medical Institute were exhibited, together with the memoir of the sanitary works of Mexico City, Dr. Flores's history of medicine, and the first medical geography of Mexico (by Dr. Domingo Orvañanos), as well as various other medical studies.^[43] In the medicine class, the military hospital of Mexico City exhibited anatomical models and replicas of infected arms and legs, together with the head of an Apache Indian.

In addition, Mexico sent envoys to congresses on public assistance, dermatology and syphilology, mental medicine, and hygiene and demography.^[44] Antonio Peñafiel (a medical doctor), José Ramírez, Angel Gaviño, and Manuel Flores attended the hygiene congress.^[45] In regard to hygiene, Mexico was especially cosmopolitan: not only were representatives sent to Paris, they were also asked to travel around Europe distributing Mexican scientific works and learning new methods and theories. While Peñariel, Gaviño, and

Ramirez were in Paris in 1889, another distinguished hygienist, Ignacio Alvarado, was in New York sending reports for the preparation of Liceaga's sanitary code.^[46]

With all of this, Mexico displayed its strong interest in the methods of modern hygiene, which in turn was harmonious with the positivist bent of the Mexican elite in the late 1880s. Mexican hygienists also participated in the international debate on hygiene. For instance, while French and European hygienists were deliberating the causes of yellow fever and its means of transmission, Dr. Manuel María Carmona y Valle exhibited in Paris his Leçons sur l'étiologie et la prophylaxie de la fièvre jaune , with a preface by Eduardo Liceaga, published in 1885. In fact, the etiological microorganism that causes yellow fever was discovered by Carlos Finlay in Havana in 1881, but eight years later, the means by which it is transmitted were not yet clear, and Carmona y Valle's study contributed the vast Mexican experience to the international study of the disease and quoted Pasteur and Koch before the bacteriological revolution in hygiene was completely accepted.^[47] In essence, while Finlay isolated the microorganism micrococcus tetragenous febris flavae , Carmona y Valle isolated what he called a mold peronospora lutea , for which he claimed to have found a form of vaccine. However accurate the discoveries of Carmona y Valle may have been, the fact is that they were part of international debate on yellow fever.^[48]

Leprosy was another disease the treatment for which attracted the efforts of Mexican medical men. In 1851 Dr. Rafael Lucio published his Opúsculo sobre el real de San Lázaro o elefantiásis de los griegos which was republished by the Ministry of Economic Development in 1889 for exhibition at Paris. In it, Lucio for the first time described a particular kind of leprosy called man-chada , which he found in Mexico.^[49] In the same way, Mexico exhibited in Paris a collection of articles in French taken from one of the most important medical journals of late-nineteenth-century Mexico, El Estudio , published by the National Medical Institute. In it the advances of Mexican hygiene, surgery, biology, and criminology were reported.^[50] In these articles, as in other short studies and books, Mexico's physicians and hygienists demonstrated that they shared the concerns of international science and that they were keeping abreast of its progress. These studies emphasized advancements in the etiology of diseases, in anthropology, and in an area of concern that dealt with the relationship between women and hygienico-medical science.

This concern took various forms. At the same time that Rafael Lavista detailed in El Estudio his diagnosis of a clitoral tumor of eleven centimeters found in a syphilitic woman patient, in Paris Francisco Flores was displaying an impressive expertise in statistics and legal medicine in his book El himen en México . This was a study of the hymens of 181 women, classified according to complex formulas, demonstrating that the ring-shaped hymen was the

most common among Mexican women. Flores believed that this discovery would help forensic medicine to protect female virginity because, he affirmed, "today virginity is one of the jewels sought so much by men. . .. What is more beautiful than that white flower of virginity still unaccosted by the vicious zephyr."^[51] This was scientific study at its best, but it was conceived in the language and moral axioms of late-nineteenth-century Mexico. And it was yet another example of the type of comparative-statistical anatomical and anthropological work that sought to scientifically establish the particular anatomical characteristics of the Mexican people within universal science. In the same way, in 1881 Dr. Florencio Flores wrote a comparative analysis of the pelvises of Mexican and European women which concluded that "if the European pelvis as described in books should be held as the normal type, [then] the Mexican pelvis, in relation to it, should be considered as a physical defect." However, for Mexico, he argued, such a pelvis was normal.^[52]

By the same token, La Gaceta Médica de México of the Academia Mexicana de Medicina, three volumes of which were exhibited at Paris, reported in 1889 a new reglamento for prostitution in Mexico City, drawn up by Domingo Orvañanos, Manuel S. Soriano, and Luis E. Ruiz. In it, the regulation of prostitution was considered important both from the sanitary point of view (that is, fewer men infected) and from the fiscal point of view (that is, more taxes collected). This meant, as historian Alain Corbin argued for the case of France, the triumph of regulationism over the political, medical, and economic aspects of female prostitution.^[53]

Thus the particular Mexican version of the modern regulatory paternalistic treatment of women was displayed by Mexican officials at Paris through many medical, anthropological, and legal studies. These studies, in turn, echoed certain fundamental ideas found also in Federico Gamboa's famous novel, Santa (1903), in which it is said that Santa belonged as much to the police as to sanitation, or in the poem of the then renowned suicidal poet Manuel Acuña, La Ramera : "Poor woman, who abandoned and alone . . . instead of a hand to save her, finds a hand that pushes her to the abysm."^[54]

Along similar lines, Mexican women were barred from the discussions of the very publicized (nationally and internationally) Congreso Pedagógico Higiénico that took place seven years before the 1889 fair. All of the hygienists who were in Paris in 1889 attended the 1882 congress, but no woman was present at either event. Thus, an Orvañanos or a Ramirez might speak at the Paris fair on the statistical control of prostitution and the sanitary police on the domestic role of women, but the congress itself had resolutely opposed the participation of women. Because hygiene in education involved the discussion of personal hygiene and sexual conduct, Mexican scientists, however advanced their scientific knowledge, did not want to break from las buenas costumbres (good manners) and speak to female teachers about these sub-

jects. There were a few dissenters. Carlos de Olaguíbel y Aristas, for example, supported the idea of female participation, not only because of the all-important role women played, especially in the education of girls, but also because of their need to emancipate women from domesticity. But the majority argued that because the congress was about science and not sentiment, women were not needed, despite general agreement that men and women possessed the same brain capacity. A vote was taken, and women were not allowed to attend the session. The doctors preferred that the subject of their discussions—women—remain at home.^[55] The same rule was maintained within the medical establishment, which made it almost impossible for women to obtain medical degrees.^[56]

Mexican doctors also took advantage of world's fairs to study these kinds of concerns. In August 1889 Dr. Alberto Aizpurul was appointed to travel to the exposition to study advancements in the treatment of female diseases and syphilis. He was asked to travel not only to Paris but also to London and New York.^[57]

What best condensed the stage and concerns of Mexico's hygienists in the 1889 exposition, however, was Domingo Orvañanos's Ensayo de geografía médica y climatología de la República Mexicana , specifically published for the exhibition in two volumes with a prologue by Eduardo Liceaga.^[58] This was one of the main scientific displays of Mexico in Paris, and although it was not originally intended to be exhibited there, the exposition accelerated the research and the completion of the book. With the fair booming, in 1888 Orvañanos was tapped to undertake a detailed study of the nation's climates and diseases as part of the creation of the National Medical Institute and of Mexico's display in Paris 1889.^[59] Orvañanos quickly sent letters to the various states requesting detailed information in questionnaire form on climate and diseases.^[60] These were in fact the Mexican versions of the French enquêtes (questionnaires). Gustavo Ruiz Sandoval and Ramón Rodríguez Rivera designed a questionnaire to be distributed to local authorities and physicians. Among many other items, this questionnaire requested data on rainfall, climate, water conditions, general occupation of the population, home conditions, most common diseases (epidemic and endemic), race, and the existence of leprosy, yellow fever, and goiter.

In 1886 José Ramírez and Rodriguez Rivera published Noticias climatoló-gicas de la República, recopiladas por la Secretaría de Fomento, para la formación de la Geografía Médica Mexicana . It was a preliminary study, which Orvañanos continued for the Paris exposition and published as an ensayo (a first-draft attempt) because it was indeed incomplete. In effect, the 1889 fair fostered this study as part of Mexico's construction of a national image because the work combined (as did the French questionnaires of the 1880s in the context of general uncertainty as to how diseases were transmitted) three forms

of knowledge, which were, in turn, three ways of describing the nation: social and geographical mapping, statistics, and various explanations of the origins of diseases (Pasteurian and non-Pasteurian).

The book consisted of two volumes: the first contained Orvañanos's studies; the second, forty-six maps. Orvañanos's study was divided into three parts: a geographical sketch of Mexico's climates, a description of the main diseases in Mexico, and an appendix.^[61] The appendix compared mortality rates in Mexico City with those for the entire country. Following a geographical textbook published in 1889 by Alberto Correa, Orvañanos estimated Mexico's population at 11.25 million.^[62] He divided the population into four races: Indians, Europeans, Blacks, and mestizos.^[63] Then he analyzed the atmospheric pressures and altitudes of Mexico in order to specify what he termed the air diet of the inhabitants of the various regions. He concluded that altitude anemia had not yet been demonstrated and that more research had to be done. This was a direct response to the common European notion that altitude had an effect on the inhabitants of Mexico City.^[64]

Next, Orvañanos dealt with nutrition, following the studies by Samuel Morales Pereira,^[65] which discussed the malnutrition of the majority of the population, whose basic diet consisted of maize, beans, and pulque. Then he analyzed various diseases.

Orvañanos's geographical and etiological study of diseases is emblematic of the way late-nineteenth-century Mexican hygienists interacted with the scientific methods of the international discipline. In fact, Orvañanos often quoted French, German, and U.S. studies, as well as reports sent from Mexico to other countries. For instance, in his treatment of leprosy, he first mapped the areas of concentration of the illness (mainly in Western Mexico) ^[66] and then discussed the etiology of the disease according to seven possible explanations that were addressed in detail. These seven explanations were a combination of old and new scientific ideas with traditional notions about disease origins. From the outset he accepted the idea of genetic causes. Regarding contagious transmission, he argued that there was neither a place nor a race on the face of the earth that had escaped leprosy; thus, he concluded, climatic and racial causes were less important than was transmission by contagion. Orvañanos supported the contagion thesis but nevertheless explained the counterargument. He believed that contagious transmission took place through sexual intercourse, and he argued that researchers who opposed the contagion thesis had been misled by leprosy's long incubation period. He identified the agent of the disease as the bacillus discovered by Hansen in Norway in 1874 and since internationally accepted.^[67] Then he disqualified various possible causes that were collected in the questionnaires (such as obstruction of perspiration, use of salted water, overconsumption of pork). Regarding the treatment of leprosy, Orvañanos was cautious, and

he proposed the undertaking of a real census of the districts in which the disease was epidemic.

As we can see from his analysis of this malady, Orvañanos not only was aware of the bacteriological advances in late-nineteenth-century hygiene but also shared the uncertainty and ambivalence about transmission and treatment.^[68] Although he was prompt to point out the microbial origins of the disease, he could not come to a conclusion regarding the means of transmission, so he fell back on a combination of causes (genetic and social). Social causes were often called physiological misery, a polite way of saying poverty. Indeed, he explicitly located himself within the debate between contagionists and anticontagionists, and he clearly explained his position according to the data he had collected. Regarding the role that the state should play in hygiene, he called for more data before a final decision was made between more state interventions and more private care.^[69]

Both the advanced methodology of Orvañanos and his uncertainty can also be observed in his examination of yellow fever. He located cases throughout the country and argued that what caused it was a microorganism: "an alga for Dr. Freire of Brazil; a fungus for Dr. Carmona y Valle of Mexico and for Dr. Finlay a micrococcus." But he wisely added that these explanations "contributed to affirming the ideas of the general medical world, that the essential cause of yellow fever is a microscopic being."^[70] In effect, Mexican scientists were active participants in the study of this disease.^[71]

As I have argued above, the scientific display mounted by Mexican hygienists in Paris also aimed to consolidate their technocratic role within the state. The role of Mexican experts in international exhibitions, as well as in the political and scientific life of Mexico as a whole, has to be understood through the development of the medical profession in Mexico. Physicians were the most important receptors and disseminators of idealist, positivist, hygienist, and to a large extent, liberal ideas in nineteenth-century Mexico. For them, the Porfirian peace brought about the continuation of their professional associations, which functioned as centers of scientific and political education.

Eduardo Liceaga, Porfirio Parra, Antonio Peñafiel, Domingo Orvañanos, Francisco Flores, José Ramírez, Angel Gaviño, Agustín Reyes, José L. Gómez, Jose D. Morales, Nicolás Ramírez de Arrellano, and Francisco Altamirano were all physicians and hygienists who occupied posts at the medical school in Mexico City, in various scientific institutes and societies, and in government agencies, especially in the sanitation council, which became their own source and space of power.^[72] By the end of the 1880s they had gained recognition by the state, and once the Científicos group was consolidated in the 1890s they became one with the political and economic elite, a position they retained throughout the 1900s and 1910s.

However, the achievement of this role for the medical profession was far from harmonious. Within the profession there were scientific and ideological disputes, especially regarding the involvement of the state. Furthermore, the number of influential doctors and hygienists remained rather constant throughout the Porfirian regime, revealing that a small and closed elite controlled the profession's influential political role. By the 1890s the elite members of the medical profession had acquired such direct links with the government—in terms of control of the medical school, sanitary engineering contracts, and personal ties with politicians—that other doctors complained about the unhealthy centralization.^[73]

There is good reason to believe that overall the Mexican elite hygienists were first-class scholars but most of them were also formidable politicians. Eduardo Liceaga, for example, was not only the director of the sanitation council during nearly the entire Porfirian period but also Mexico's envoy to important international conferences on sanitation, in addition to being the person in charge of the Mexican hygiene displays at various world's fairs. At the 1889 fair he was awarded a bronze medal, although he was not present in Paris. He had just left for Mexico to transport rabbits infected with Pasteur rabies vaccine in order to establish the Mexican antirabies institute.^[74] By the 1900s Liceaga was the acknowledged master of hygiene in Mexico, allocating to his colleagues and friends work on sanitation projects (such as campaigns against tuberculosis and yellow fever) and participation in congresses and fairs around the world.^[75] In 1900 the Diario del Hogar often criticized him for his servile attitude toward Díaz's reelection, for his ongoing leadership of the Superior Sanitation Council, and for having monopolized Mexico's international hygienic presence for himself.^[76]

Hygiene had a different nationalist value in Mexico than it did, say, in France. In France, hygiene became an ingredient of nationalism as a matter of security and racial purity, whereas in Mexico hygiene became part of nationalism because it was crucial for two main developmental goals—foreign investment and immigration. Some people believed that if the image of Mexico were to change from that of an unsanitary nation to a healthy one, immigrants and capital would flood the country. Therefore, for Mexican hygienists, the bacteriological revolution, or the triumph of a particular version of conservative (that is, statist) liberalism, was important for their achievement of power within the state. Their command of the universal scientific language and their role as communicators and creators of the image of a sanitary country assured them of a significant role within the government. For instance, at the international hygiene congress in Paris, Angel Gaviño translated Mexico's sanitary reforms into the language of French sanitation measures by proclaiming Mexico's new sanitary code. He also furthered the Mexican government's desire to show that Mexico was a sanitary and

hospitable place by maintaining that Mexico was up-to-date in its sanitary knowledge and that it was joining the modern nations thanks to French advancements, especially to Pasteur's work.^[77]

Once hygienists had consolidated their role and power in the 1900s, they could scarcely distinguish between reasons of state and reasons of science. Accordingly, at the beginning of the twentieth century Liceaga wrote to his wife from an international sanitation congress in Costa Rica that "in sum, being healthy comes first; only then does one think of the rights of man, of freedoms, and moral improvement." In 1902 Liceaga was even more explicit in linking the interests of the state with those of Mexico and the hygienists when, in an international congress in Havana, he claimed that "to the state, man is priceless. The public wealth completely loses this valuable resource when a man dies. . .. The state has to spend money on assistance and in this way loses public wealth. . .. Those [illnesses] that cause his death are infinitely more costly than those that demand the greatest acts of reparation."^[78]

Hygienists also had to lobby the government, both to further their scientific development and for their political and economic well-being. Contracts for sanitary engineering works were often disputed, and hygienists were always involved. By the 1900s many of the hygienists had interests in the development of Mexico's cities (in terms of transportation, sanitary services, and real estate), as well as in the new business of insurance.^[79] For instance, in 1907 the governor of Guanajuato wrote to Liceaga about the celebration of a Pan-American medical congress in Mexico, primarily to let Liceaga know that he was about to send the data required; in passing he mentioned to Liceaga that "our" streetcar business was doing wonderfully. He explained to Liceaga that "in the course of one year, your stock will be worth twice as much."^[80] Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that all of this was achieved only after political power based on scientific expertise was attained.

In Mexico hygiene indisputably became a state matter. In a country in which the construction of a nationalistic ideology, industrial promotion, and integrity were based on state sponsorship, statism in hygiene was not an issue. Since the Mexican hygienic congress of 1883, various participants had recommended that a centralized national agency be created, beyond private interests and beyond the various state jurisdictions, for the handling of hygiene and sanitation.^[81] Along similar lines, in 1892 Liceaga, Manuel Septien, and Rafael Lucio argued that civilization and hygiene went together but that private initiative could go against the general well-being and should be controlled. In order that "the interests of capital are not to come before the rights of humanity,"^[82] Liceaga believed that the state had to control and sponsor welfare policies. For Septien, the solution was the creation of a Ministry of Sanitation (something that was not instituted until after the Revolution of

1910).^[83] In a word, in a nonwhite, backward country the issue of hygiene was a duty of the enlightened caudillos, and not even radical liberals were opposed to state intervention in this area.

The Porfirian hygienic image of Mexico was eventually held up to the mockery of public opinion in Mexico City (see chapter 10). In large part this was because even though knowledge of hygiene grew, the sanitary conditions of the city remained terrible. Despite the achievements of the Porfirian hygienists, in 1916 Alberto J. Pani called Mexico City the most unsanitary urban area in the world.^[84] It must be conceded that Porfirian hygienists produced the proper scientific hygienic image of Mexico for both national and international consumption. The actual sanitary transformation was, of course, most visible in places like Mexico City, but the vast territory and the general indigence of most of the population made the Porfirian achievements look insignificant to a close observer. Only Mexico's hygienic image was comprehensive and cosmopolitan.

One issue undermined this image and frustrated the efforts of Mexican hygienists: race. Although this issue was properly the domain of experts in anthropology, archaeology, and the national epic, it had a direct impact on the hygienists' role in constructing the national image. How, in a nationalist and scientifically racist era, could a country of Indians be completely disinfected? The response of the Porfirian Científicos was to constantly look for, classify, reclassify, and adapt possible answers from international science, arts, and politics, but they found no final solution. How could they? The longstanding identification of the Indians with miasma and dirt was something that neither Western exoticism nor scientific hygienism could overcome. Nonetheless, hygienists knew that real modern nationalism needed modern hygiene, sanitation, and medicine. Whereas proof of Mexico's cleanliness could not be final because of its Indian and hybrid races, late-nineteenth-century hygienists knew that only through the constantly up-dated combinations of domestic uniqueness with international trends could they make their country look truly modern. That is precisely what, in 1889, the first issue of El Estudio maintained by making a call to create both a science of the nation and a national science: "A truly national medicine would be that which could boast facts discovered in this country, and possibly in some cases only applicable to this country. A Mexican pathology, a Mexican surgery, a Mexican therapeutics, a Mexican hygiene and obstetrics, these titles would give us the right to be respected in the scientific world beyond our seas and borders."^[85]

Detailed analysis of the construction of the scientific components of the national image has shown us the complex texture of the allegedly positivist and Frenchified Mexican elite. That is, on one hand the Mexican elite possessed

dissimilar levels of expertise in the various sciences, depending on the particular history of the science in question in Mexico and on the specific economic interest of the Porfirian regime. On the other hand, after this brief excursion into the particularities of science in Mexico as exhibited in international fairs, we can recognize what some historians of science have rightly claimed;^[86] that is, in certain areas Mexican scientists were as close as they had ever been—or would ever be—to the mainstream development of their respective disciplines. The scientific gap, albeit still wide, had never been as narrow for Mexico as it was in the late nineteenth century. This was because the technological revolution was just beginning to acquire its characteristic hyperaccelerated pace and because, in certain scientific fields, Mexican scientists, though often few, were working modestly but efficiently.

Ten
Irony

If the Eiffel Tower exhibition was a pocket picture of the modern world, then Mexico's exhibit was a reflection of that depiction. To conclude that the picture was false because it neither reflected the world as it actually was nor depicted the so-called real Mexico would be too simplistic. Of course, the harmony, well-being, and comfort on display at the exhibition were continually belied by the actuality of international conflicts, nationalism, urban poverty, and agrarian crisis. But the values and ideas that the fair mirrored were seldom rejected by most observers as the authentic and objective ideal of how the modern world ought to be if those values and ideas were pushed to realization. In effect, when it came to a belief in progress and the value of science, there was a general consensus that defied irony and contradiction. It was through such a consensus that irony was made possible, but as a denunciation of hypocrisy or distortion and not as a total negation. Nonetheless, there was a harsher sort of irony, one that indeed questioned progress, as was the case with Baudelaire's comments on the French exposition of 1855 or Henry Adams's insightful comments on the 1893 Chicago fair.^[1]

For Mexico and its historical image, the main source of contradictions came not from Europe but from within Mexico itself. In France, for instance, the national image that Mexico was at such pains to project was received either with indifference or with an ostentatious paternalism that is so often the imitator's reward. It is more important to examine how the trappings that supposedly went with modern nationhood (that is, a cosmopolitan yet exotic appearance, hygiene and sanitation, good administration, and economic and social stability) squared with daily life in Mexico, especially that of Mexico City, where an urban, literate middle class had created a confined and small public sphere.

By the late 1880s the growth of a significant public opinion in the modern sense of the term was contradictorily both encouraged and censored by the Porfirian regime. The technological advancements in communications and publishing, as well as the growth of an urban, literate middle class, fostered the emergence of many national and local newspapers, journals, magazines, and pamphlets from all sorts of clubs and organizations.^[2] However, political dissidence was constantly repressed, and media opposition, though functioning throughout the Porfirian regime, suffered continuous setbacks.^[3]

Nonetheless, the possibilities for wording subtle political and social commentary before reaching the point of repression were ample. In literary, artistic, political, and scientific media, therefore, a certain free public opinion was restrained only by the writer's capacity for allegorical innovation. Ironic commentaries on Mexico's modern image were expressed essentially in humor.

Through humor, Mexico's modern national image, as depicted in Paris and other world's fairs, was used to make statements about Mexico's political and social problems. The irony was twofold: it was the confrontation of an ideal type with crude versions of Mexico's reality; and it was accomplished by sharing the values epitomized by Mexico's presence at world's fairs and by ridiculing the way in which the image of modern Mexico had been formed. Humor was not merely an escape but also a deliberate vehicle for a form of criticism that was rich, profound, and somewhat politically acceptable.

Diverse aspects of reality in Mexico were arranged and highlighted in various ways, according to various world views. This produced not one but many versions of what Mexico was actually like, just as, say, there were many versions of how real Paris diverged from the ideal account represented by the various world's fairs. At this level of contradiction many ironies emerged and formed an endless source of humor. However, only rarely did those who used versions of the real Mexico to satirize the Porfirian ideal go on to challenge the larger myth that inspired that ideal. That is, the critiques of the ideal Mexico were direct and obvious, but the critiques that were directed toward the larger ideal picture of the modern world aimed only to prove the fraudulence of Mexico's image, not to challenge that larger picture. Mexicans referred to the larger idealized picture of the modern world only to praise it more by showing that other versions of Mexico were more fitted for the cosmopolitan parameters. Rarely did they refer to the other critiques of the modern image of the world articulated by Europeans. When they did, as in literary circles, it was only marginally, as when the modernists were condemned for following the critiques of modernity when the country was not yet modern. The first goal, it was argued, was to be modern; then the country would worry about the surmenages (mental strains) of modern times (see chapter 11). In the last analysis, what most critiques attempted was to show that the image of modern Mexico was indeed modern but only partially Mexican: it

had only the shape that the Porfirian regime gave it, without discussion and without considering the circumstances of the nation.

Humor and irony in Porfirian Mexico also derived from other sources: the critique of specific circumstances, the ephemeral, everyday jokes, and, overall, from the sense of humor that prevailed during the era—which the historian cannot fully recapture. That is, today's understanding of yesterday's irony is inevitably partial: time has erased from our understanding many aspects of yesterday's irony; and it has made other things more ironic for us than for those who experienced them firsthand.

The official and semiofficial press reported on the events surrounding Mexico's exhibitions at all world's fairs by paraphrasing the official despatches and intentions. As we have seen, this press coverage was part of the total desired effect.

Both the lack of democratic decision making and the presence of corruption in the creation of Mexico's modern image were aspects of Mexico's display at world's fairs to which the public was not privy, in exactly the same way as the working side of all exhibit paraphernalia was hidden underground. Accordingly, criticism of the official national image revolved around uncovering these seamier aspects and contrasting the idealized image of Mexico with what was seen as Mexican reality. The goal was to criticize the wizards of progress not so much for being wizards as for being charlatans: it was their illegitimate handling of the national image that made them open to criticism, not their attempts to perform magic in the name of progress.

The newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote , a remarkable example of Mexico's nineteenth-century critical consciousness, sought to reveal the hidden aspects of Mexico's national image. It did this by making ironic allegories out of the official allegories, while often sharing the same basic abstract and pragmatic official goals (for example, progress as a doctrine, and immigrants and foreign investment as a development policy). These ironies were commonly constructed out of political opposition to specific policies of the Porfirian regime. For instance, if Mexico's goal was to attract immigration, for El Hijo del Ahuizote the national image presented at Paris in 1889 was both unsuccessful and—worse—only a way to cover up corruption:

The colonization of the territory
goes with these popes à la Juan Tenorio:
I called settlers and they turned a deaf ear
because they do not expect to grow fat here,
for another voice and not mine responds
to what Schnetz and Company do.^[4]

Similarly, if the country were to show a true version of the great universal

values of progress in industry, art, and sciences as practiced in Mexico, then the composition of the nation's exhibit would have been quite bizarre:

From the industry go our delicacies
(reelection, budget, contractors),
from the arts priceless collections
(contractors and land demarcations and elections),
and from economic science and law
(debts from the king and viceroys).^[5]

With this mockery, EL Hijo del Ahuizote criticized Porfirio Díaz's reelection, the land-demarcation policies, the recent loan signed with a German bank, and also the very pretentiousness of aiming to display progress in industry, arts, and sciences in Paris. The main lore of this poem was a real piece of caustic humor that strived to emphasize the usurpation of universal symbols by the Porfirian regime. The gracelessness of a dancing crab was chosen to insinuate the hopeless irony of Mexico's presence at Paris: "De los cangrejos el son / marchemos contentos a la expocisión " ("From the crabs comes the tune / Let us march happily to the exposition").^[6]

The less jocose liberal criticism of EL Diario del Hogar dealt equally harshly with the Porfirian ways of attracting colonization and immigration through an idealized picture of what they believed to be an unreal Mexico: "Wanting is not the same as portraying—the commission's list of accomplishments [at the 1889 Paris fair], recounted through the golden glow through which it sees Mexican exhibitors, will beyond doubt be unable to attract immigration, capital, and industry."^[7] Moreover, with the typical anti-Americanism of nationalist liberals of late-nineteenth-century Mexico, EL Diario del Hogar complained about the very exhibition of Mexican products at Paris: "What are we to exhibit when everything in Mexico is Yankee?"^[8]

Critiques along these lines were best exemplified by a sarcastic article that ridiculed almost all of the elements and tools used by the Mexican government to create the national image, while commenting on the official call for products to be exhibited in Paris 1889:

What shall we exhibit? The rapidly acquired wealth of certain individuals; an extensive library of concessions given to all sorts of foreigners; a map of the country with vast stretches of territory highlighted in blue, private property that could be called municipalities, districts, even states; a collection of memoirs from state and army dignitaries justifying their chunk of the budget . . . ; a photograph album of our deputies, senators, powerful generals (generalotes ) . . . , several volumes from the officialist daily press that continually declare that Mexico, with the current government, is an earthly paradise where everybody lives happily. . . . The people will not positively respond to the official call.^[9]

Political opposition based on the satirization of symbols and tactics of expositions, as well as the very irony of exhibiting, endured throughout the

Porfirian period. Land concentration, corruption, propagandism, and caudillism were often addressed in this ironic fashion. A shorter, more efficient, and often less censored—perhaps safer—style also appeared: the political cartoon. Visual, poetic, and humorous expressions communicated abundant irony and discontent in such an evasive and ambiguous way that repression was difficult. If the official style was a baroque, romantic, eloquent, and often tedious rhetoric, full of scientific metaphors, then the refuge of the opposition was the short, conceptually baroque, but rhetorically economical, instantaneousness of cartoons.

By the 1884 New Orleans exposition, the cartoons of the Época Ilustrado used the fair as a source of metaphorical ironies for not entirely political purposes. Both the authoritarianism of the Porfirian regime and its aristocratic tendencies were then criticized by utilizing the different meaning of the verb exponer .^[10] So the wealthy aristocracy of Mexico City was portrayed on trips to New Orleans, playing with the irony of a widespread Catholic morality and with the Porfirian aristocracy's need to show off, as in the double entendre of a wealthy man with his aristocratic daughter who asked: "Dad, now that there is an exhibition, don't you want me to be exhibited [or to expose myself]?" Along similar lines, the czar of Porfirian letters, Ignacio M. Altamirano, was caricatured in the act of pompously saying to what seems to be a farmer ready to exhibit his products: "I do not expose my literature [or I do not put my literature at risk]," referring to his unwillingness both to exhibit his writings in New Orleans and to put at risk his literary position. In the same way, the famous band of Mexican musicians that was sent to New Orleans by train appeared in a cartoon that showed it crossing the Nochistongo canyon. The vicissitudes of the trip and the endeavors of the Porfirian regime to exhibit exotic Mexican tipos populares were summarized in the caption to this cartoon, in which the musicians observed: "Indeed, this time we were exposed," by being exhibited at New Orleans and by being put at risk at Nochistongo.^[11]

Along similar lines, in its 1899 coverage of the national exposition that preceded and heralded Mexico's exhibit at the 1900 Paris fair, El Hijo del Ahuizote again used the cartoon as a form of effective criticism. On that occasion, its first page carried a cartoon of the statue Doña Paz Trancazo ,^[12] sculpted by "the caudillo from Tuxtepec, hero of La Noria" (see Fig. 23). The fat woman carrying a dagger, called "La Matona, " was a savage allegory of the Porfirian regime and of another allegory, for the free republic was represented as a woman in countless nineteenth-century sculptures.

The 1889 Paris exposition easily became an object of critiques and a source of metaphors for criticizing the policies and nature of the Porfirian regime. Parodying the allegorical obsession and cloying style of late-nineteenth-century European art, Díaz was held up as a symbol of dictatorship in an allegorical painting allegedly to be exhibited at the 1889 fair. In it, surrounded

Image not available.

23.
"Doña Paz Trancazo, Ice Sculpture, by the Distinguished Artist from Tuxtepec, 
Who Is Caudillo of La Noria and Palo Blanco [Porfirio Díaz] ." Source: EL Hijo del Ahuizote, 29 January 1899, 65.

by red roses, was the figure of Diaz as a female angel carrying the "Oliva de la Paz ," a giant gun; the caption read "la primavera tuxtepecana " ("Springtime in Tuxtepec"; see Fig. 24).^[13] And by the 1900 fair, a cartoon showed the wizards of progress carrying a huge sword called "the Tuxtepecano wonder."^[14]

In the same way, paraphrasing the allegoric images of late-nineteenth-century France, a mythological painting entitled Niobe and Her Sons was published by EL Hijo del Ahuizote (see Fig. 25).^[15] The cartoon showed a woman who personified the Mexican Constitution of 1857 and her two sons (sufragio libre and plan de Tuxtepec ), killed by the arrows of abuso (abuse) and inconsistencia (inconsistency), respectively. This metaphor incorporated a triple contextual reference that was well understood at the time: the Greek myth of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, who turned into stone while bewailing the loss of her children; the late-nineteenth-century neoclassical Greco-Roman revival in which Europe found most of its metaphors; and Díaz as traitor to the Constitution of 1857. By addressing these three levels of reference, the ironic ef-

Image not available.

24.
"Allegorical Painting: Springtime in Tuxtepec." 
Source: El Hijo del Ahuizote, 17 March 1889, 1.

fect was quite comprehensive, a parody both of modern cultural trends and of Mexican politics.

In another cartoon, the occasion of the Paris exposition was used to criticize both the constant threat that the United States represented to Mexico's industry and the government's failure to enact protective legislation. Once again, playing on the ambivalent meanings of the verb exponer , the cartoon argued that Mexican industry was already expuesta (put at risk) vis-à-vis the American industry (personified by a tiger in the cartoon), and this was in fact an exposición permanente (a constant risk).^[16]

In the same way, the various foci of the fair were used to caricature Mexico's internal political life. EL Hijo del Ahuizote observed that Mexico's great exhibit of machinery consisted of: "The loans machine; the debts machine;

Image not available.

25.
"Mythological Painting for the Paris Exposition: Niobe and Her Sons." 
Source: El Hijo del Ahuizote, 3 February 1900, 1.

the machine of personal contacts, the machines of suffrage and tuxtepecanos ; the machine to scrape dignitaries; the engine of the legislative houses, the smasher of the free thinking, and the thrasher of the national territory trademark 'Deslinde, ' the reaper 'Reelection,' the perforator 'Dictatorship.'"^[17] In such a way the undemocratic actions, the land policy, and the repression of the Porfirian regime were all satirized by utilizing the commonplaces of an era of world's fairs.

In view of Mexico's presence at Parisian exhibitions, Porfirio Diaz was often satirized as the Napoleon of Mexico. These satires were ironic in two senses—they suggested that Diaz was too mediocre to be like the great Napoleon and that Diaz was indeed aiming to become Mexico's eternal emperor. Ironically enough, Díaz asked Manuel Díaz Mimiaga, the Mexican

commissioner for the 1889 Paris exhibition, to acquire for him a specific French biography of Napoleon. Díaz Mimiaga could not find the edition but sent instead a Belgian edition of Napoleon's life to serve as inspiration for Mexico's Napoleon des tropiques .^[18]

Along similar lines, the status of science in Mexico, as revealed by the nation's exhibit at the 1889 Paris fair, was satirized by EL Hijo del Ahuizote with the lines: "There is very little science. / Patience, to the contrary, / I believe, is more plentiful than it should be."^[19] This sort of ironic comment was expressed even better in a poem published by the same newspaper:

Haven't we Dubláns with doubloons
and Pachecos with checks?
Haven't we in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Mariscals, Romeros, and Ramóns
who can vociferously praise the contest
and announce it, preach it, and claim it?
Haven't we Peñafiels
who can supplant the Eiffels,
and the lighthouse of the Paseo de la Reforma,
to which they can give more altitude and a different shape,
so that as time goes by
they embellish the exposition with their tower
that colossally rises with arrogance
and looks like that of Paris in France?^[20]

The poem refers to Manuel Dublán, then minister of finance, and to Carlos Pacheco, minister of economic development and chief of Mexico's exhibit in Paris. In this satire, the lavish expenditures and personal opportunism of the two ministers were sarcastically treated, along with Mexico's pretensions about displaying itself in Paris. The modern image of Mexico was one that was controlled by the Porfirians to praise themselves. Moreover, Mexico's propaganda network was attacked with the reference to those who announced, preached, and claimed Mexico's image in Paris; that is, the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ignacio Mariscal, Matías Romero and the Mexican minister in Paris, Ramón Fernández).

By the same token, by making fun of the natural history concerns of the 1900 Paris fair, El Hijo de Ahuizote criticized the corruption and authoritarianism of the Porfirian regime in the form of animals that were to be sent to Paris. If Mexico's natural history collections were to be an important aspect of its presence at world's fairs, then these fictitious animals ought to be sent to represent the real Mexico: a burra (female donkey) that had carried Diaz for sixteen years (that is, the country), Ignacio Mariscal's parrot that spoke English (referring to his pro-American tendencies), Bernardo Reyes's eagle (that is, his recent appointment to the Ministry of Defense), and José Y. Limantour's raven (the Compañía de Fianzas).^[21]

The very organization of the fair prompted criticism of the high cost and the corruption that surrounded the whole event. For El Diario del Hogar , the wizards of progress had no other merit than being "very close friends of the Minister of Economic Development,"^[22] and the same newspaper complained about the astronomical expenses of Mexico vis-à-vis those of countries like the United States.^[23] In 1888 El Economista Mexicano commented on the need for better organization of the Mexican presence at world's fairs. It argued that at the 1884 fair there had been many problems: "That avalanche of commissions that come and go, that contest among employees, causes the loss of objects and the delay in the distribution of prizes."^[24] In June 1889 El Diario del Hogar was astonished by the sum already expended (2.5 million francs) and observed: "There is no doubt that Mexico has been splendid. However, in a few years we will starve to death."^[25] The same complaints were made about Mexico's organization in 1900. For instance, Federico Gamboa recalled the disorganization and unreality of Mexico's presence at the 1900 exposition. He received a diploma for his books exhibited in Paris. "Oh, farces, farces, farces," he observed, "through Jesús Contreras I learned that all the boxes containing books were not even opened by the jury!!!"^[26] Nonetheless, he himself had previously proclaimed that his "most beautiful literary chimera" was "to be read in Paris."^[27] For him too, the problem was not with Paris but with those who were handling Mexico's image there.

Along similar lines, a cartoon in El Hijo del Ahuizote portrayed Diaz throwing away posts, commissions, and money for Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair. Behind Diaz a group of friends carried signs that read "To Pacheco's Friends." A poem explained the cartoon:

Don't think of this as a waste
of what doesn't cost us anything. . . .
This is an opportunity
to travel a lot (a trotemoche )
on ships, on trains, and on carriages.^[28]

In such fashion were the lavish expenditures of the wizards of progress held up for criticism. In addition, the personalities of the wizards of progress were ridiculed as part of the general criticism of the Porfirian regime. For instance, various Mexican newspapers sent distinguished intellectuals and politicians as their representatives at world's fairs—among them, Amado Nervo, Ireneo Paz, Carlos Diaz Dufoo, and even Angel' del Campo.^[29] They became part of Mexico's propaganda network. By the 1900 Paris fair, Ireneo Paz was already a convinced reelectionist and the representative of EL Imparcial . For his pains, he was caricatured as a Mexican Indian servant who, in the stereotypical Spanish language of Indian servants, said to French President Loubet: "Quesque dice mi amo Don Porfirio que comostasté, que cómo le vasté y que si querusté religirse no más me diga pa' que li haga yo un clu " ("Says my mas-

ter Don Porfirio, how are you, how are you doing, and if you want to reelect yourself you only need to tell me and I'll organize a club for you)."^[30]

In the same way, Manuel Flores's well-known taste for alcohol was ridiculed in a cartoon that combined his alcoholism with a critique of the Mexican pavilion at the 1900 exposition. Amado Nervo's hyper-Catholic moralism was a perfect object of mocking contrast with Bohemian fin-de-siècle Paris, and so is the cartoon depicting Nervo with a cancan dancer to whom he is saying, "You should enter a convent." Alas, this may have paraphrased Hamlet's statement to Ophelia: "Get thee to a nunnery."^[31]

For the purist liberal press, however, the values epitomized by France and its fairs were unquestionable. The problem for them was with the Porfirian handling of the Mexican display, but France itself was considered the leading nation of Europe. France was all the more respected in view of the threat that the United States posed for Mexico. Thus in July 1888 El Diario del Hogar observed: "In Europe, France is the heart of the Latin race, like Mexico in America; both nations have suffered wars brought on by the invading spirit of northern nations; both are the vanguard of reason."^[32]

This respect for French modernity was shared by conservative liberal statists in the Porfirian regime and by the more purist liberals of the opposition. Angel Pola in El Diario del Hogar was more explicit in the beginning of 1889 when he observed that Mexicans were both Mexican and French: "We make policy, feel, think, speak like the French and we are satisfied by France's beneficial influence, because it is a civilizing one that does not alter our nationality but perfects it."^[33] In politics and in sciences, he went on, "What are we? / Mexicans. / Where do we come from? / From Spain. / Where are we going? / To France."^[34]

Other members of the liberal press shared the excitement for the great values epitomized by the exposition but made it a point not to attend owing to Mexico's circumstances. El Diario del Hogar observed in March 1888: "Despite the fraternity between France and Mexico, in all the republic there is a waning of enthusiasm that has no precedent in our history; the mistrust is general in every sense; no one responds with good will to the official calls." The newspaper concluded that "the people of Mexico are sensible; they will not take part in the great party of progress that the friendly people of France are celebrating."^[35] Mexican criticisms of the idealized image of Mexico were especially harsh regarding the essential ethnic and philosophical nature of the nation under Porfirian rule. Here all political tendencies had their own views: Hispanism, indigenism, liberal indifference, cosmopolitanism, and so forth. For some, Mexico's image was too Indian; for others, not native enough; for still others, too cosmopolitan. Therefore, both Mexico's attempt to be innovative in architecture and its exotic displays were seriously criticized. Peñafiel, one of the designers of the Mexican pavilion for the 1889 fair, was sarcastically criticized for his attempt to make Mexico as unique as

France through the bizarre combination of pre-Hispanic motifs and modern architecture, as epitomized by the Aztec Palace. For some critics, Mexico could never be France, and attempts to try would only produce an ironic amalgamation:

The plains of Narvarte
can easily be Champ de Mars.
And the square ditch, if it fills
with rainwater, will be the Seine.
From Paris will be brought the Caja de Agua,
as they call our palace there.^[36]

Of course, conditions in Mexico could hardly match Parisian standards, and the very contrast of Paris with Mexico City produced these ironic poems. Regarding those who would represent the country in an Aztec fashion, El Hijo del Ahuizote echoed the French criticism of the Mexican Aztec Palace as a Caja de Agua, to complement their mockery. In turn, El Diario del Hogar called the Mexican pavilion "a henhouse"^[37] and referred to its design as the "Mexican architectural style of the Peñafielistic system."^[38] With more democratic decisions, this newspaper argued, the Mexican pavilion would not have taken such a ridiculous form. Other newspapers defended the Mexican pavilion against this criticism, however. La Crónica observed that French criticism of the Mexican pavilion showed great ignorance: "[They do not] understand that if one were dealing with an artistic creation, there would have been numerous Mexican artists that could have sparkled their talent, but what the pavilion was about was historical accuracy."^[39]

In fact, many harsh words were penned about the very unfitness of native things and people to be modern and universal. El Diario del Hogar sarcastically observed that in Paris the Mexican products would be most unfavorably contrasted with French counterparts: "sugar-cane liquors and tequila . . . to compete with those products from Lyon, Champagne, and Bordeaux."^[40] Along the same ironic lines, the idea of an Aztec Mexico was severely satirized by the liberal opposition. Although by the 1880s indigenism was nothing new in Mexican intellectual and political discussions, some purist liberals criticized the prominence given to an official indigenism in Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair. Moreover, they criticized the authoritarian form of this choice, observing that the Mexican pavilion had been decided on without even calling for a public contest.^[41] Catholic opinion was, of course, opposed to anything pre-Hispanic and constantly criticized any attempt to give the nation any image save that of a Spanish Catholic country. The underlying irony resulted both from the bizarre idea of an Aztec Mexico in the Parisian belle epoque and from the authoritarian decision to give strong pre-Hispanic features to the national image. Therefore, not only did the Aztec Palace become an object of mockery, so did the display of exotic

Mexican people, foods, and art at Paris. In fact, if we were to judge this discussion by the indigenist standards of twentieth-century postrevolutionary Mexico, we would have to conclude that by the late 1880s the official Porfirian indigenism was much more progressive than were either the liberal or the Catholic critics.

Be that as it may, at the time the regime's critics had a field day with Porfirian indigenism. For example, El Hijo del Ahuizote ridiculed the idea of Mexican nativism in Paris: "President Carnota [sic ] was very pleased last night upon seeing us eat with utensils and drink champagne as if it were water. Ramoncito presented us with some cans of mole poblano , hot memelas [oval corn tortillas] made right there and some jars of pulque." The sarcastic report concluded, "Carnot toasted the absent and present Aztecs."^[42] Here, the irony not only skewered Mexican Francophilia combined with commercialized nativism (processed Mexican products) but also aimed a subtle insult—"present Aztecs"—at the Mexican wizards of progress for whom, we may be sure, any adjective having to do with Indians was no compliment. By 1899 a cartoon in El Hijo del Ahuizote showed Minister Gilberto Crespo appointing wizards of progress for the 1900 exhibition and other Científicos suggesting to him that Mexican envoys ought to be exotic but "[Europeans] shall see that we are indeed Indians, but refined ones."^[43] Moreover, both Porfirian indigenism and Riva Palacio's new role as official historian—with his México a través de los siglos —were satirized by El Hijo del Ahuizote in a cartoon: an "Aztec picture for the history book México a través de los yankees ." In such a way, orthodox liberals criticized the official histories, indigenism, and rapprochement of the Porfirian regime with the United States.^[44]

The cartoon entitled "Our Facade in Paris: Sketches of the Universal Exposition" was even more revealing in this regard. It was a complete satire of the allegorical efforts of the Aztec Palace's facade (see Figs. 26 and 27). Instead of the original columns upholding the facade that represented Indian gods, in the cartoon two Indian-like figures of Diaz represent the Tuxtepec Plan and Díaz's reelection. These columns sustained the "palace" which, in the cartoon, is the Porfirian regime. At the right, instead of the original Indian burner, we see a burner with the face of Diaz Mimiaga, the director of the Mexican commission in France. At the left was a burner with the face of Minister of Economic Development Carlos Pacheco. In such fashion, the two main personalities behind Mexico's presence at the 1889 fair guarded the totemlike columns of Don Porfirio. On the architrave, six figures symbolized ironic motifs. One of these images, plancarteo , was the bust of the Catholic priest Antonio Plancarte, then controversial abbot of the Guadalupe temple who was lobbying for the Vatican crowning of the Image of Guadalupe. His image on the Aztec Palace symbolized the new rapprochement of the Porfirian regime with the church, which went against the Jacobinism of purist Mexican liberals. Ignacio Mariscal, minister of foreign affairs, was the figure

Image not available.

26.
Facade of the Aztec Palace at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition.
Source: José Francisco Godoy, México en París (Mexico City, 1891).

in yancomanía , which referred to his links with U.S. interests. The medal called empréstitos was a bust of Francisco Z. Mena, fellow general and friend of Diaz who, as Mexican minister to Germany, negotiated a German loan for Mexico in 1888. Minister of Finance Manuel Durán was portrayed in the medal entitled niquel because of his policies of circulating coins of nickel instead of silver or gold. Joaquín Baranda, minister of justice, was psicología , a sarcastic reference to the repression of the media in Mexico City. Tío Pedro represented Gen. Pedro Hinojosa, the war minister.

The six images were supported by the two columns personifying Díaz—an allegory of Porfirian power. On the right, in a pre-Hispanic outfit but imitating the dress of a matador, was a figure that seemed to be Gen. José Ceballos, then governor of Mexico City.^[45] On the left, imitating Jesús Contreras's sculptures, was Interior Minister Romero Rubio in an Aztec-Roman outfit. Crowning the cartoon were two imitations of plumed serpents: a German lender and a Yankee businessman. In this way, the entire Aztec Palace was made a strong, oppositional, political statement.

The scientific aspects of the national image were also caricatured. Although science had become a public culture, its abuse at the hands of the Porfirian elite who monopolized it were criticized by liberals and conservatives, although the value of science was never questioned. What was especially an object of mockery were the efforts to portray Mexico as a hygienic

Image not available.

27.
"Our Facade in Paris" (detail). 
Source: El Hijo del Ahuizote, 4 August 1889, 4-5.

and sanitary nation. Statistics and complaints about the lack of sanitation, insecurity, and high mortality in Mexico City were constantly published by the free media.

Newspapers reported on the need for annual killings of dogs and on public expenditures for monuments and fancy suburbs but not for sanitation.^[46] In September 1888 EL Diario del Hogar complained about Peñafiel's mortality statistics and argued that the mortality rate was in fact growing in Mexico City: "In 25 years the population would disappear if it weren't renovated by births."^[47] The following May the same newspaper, in a wild exaggeration, argued that owing to the high mortality in Mexico and the low rate of population growth, in four years and three months Mexico City would be depopulated.^[48] These complaints continued into the 1910s. The free media could not resist contrasting Mexico's hygienic display at the Paris fairs with the reality of conditions in Mexico City and the indifferent behavior of the Superior Sanitation Council. The irony of a hygienic image vis-à-vis an unsanitary city was joined with criticism of the political involvement and privileges of the members of the council, such as Eduardo Liceaga. In 1900 EL Diario del Hogar observed that "the year 1900 began yesterday with the farce of ballots, an odd invention by Dr. Liceaga that has as its goal, according to what he explained in his last manifesto, to strengthen even more the un-

conditional adhesion to the reigning Caudillo."^[49] In the same vein, while the wizards of progress prepared hygienic statistics to be sent to Paris in 1900, El Hijo del Ahuizote published a "dialogue" between two microbes, one from the miasmas of San Lázaro and the other from Peralvillo:

Speaking in the serious style
of all epidemics
the stink here is that of corpse
combined with cemetery.
To no one is it a secret
that this slovenly place is fertile ground
for typhus that here acclimates itself
for smallpox that hearths
for cholera that is contagious
and for measles that kill.^[50]

The role of Liceaga and the Sanitation Council was caricatured in a cartoon that depicted Liceaga as the owner of a funerary agency, saying that with the influenza epidemic of Mexico City, "my business is doing very well."^[51] Dr. Carmona y Valle was also ridiculed for his constant search for microbes: "so many microbes he found / that with microbes he constructed the support of his fame."^[52]

The much-publicized drainage system of Mexico City was ridiculed by El Hijo del Ahuizote as work begun "during the reign of the illustrious Chichimec Emperor Nezahualcoyotl" and "by mere chance completed under idem idem Zapoteca Porfioyotl."^[53] By 1901, in view of yet another Mexican hygienic display at the Buffalo exposition, a cartoon satirized the usual street exhibits at world's fairs. The "Rue du Caire" in Paris 1889, and the "Streets of Mexico" in Buffalo 1901 were ridiculed, together with the customary exhibit of the drainage system in Mexico City. A clown, Díaz, is shown introducing Mexican "Drainage with All Its Odors," on "Escape-If-You-Can Street" (see Fig. 28).^[54]

The public character of science is worth noting. For the growing middle class, which was both literate and urban, science had become a common form of knowledge. Both the logic and rhetoric of science became a form of common sense for this group. The phenomenon was part of the modern image, but it also created contradictions. The critiques of the Porfirian regime often took a scientific shape, an indication that the presumed scientific nature of Mexico's national image was accompanied by public consumption of scientific ideas and language. But the popular consumption of science backfired against the official image in the form of parodies of science used for political opposition.

The public nature of science was present in the media and literature of the last part of the nineteenth century. World's fairs were important sources for popularization of the sciences, and news and commentaries about them

Image not available.

28.
"Escape-If-You-Can Street." 
Source: El Hijo del Ahuizote, 2 June 1901, 308.

accelerated the public consumption of scientific ideas and rhetoric. In 1887 Emilio Rabasa parodied science in La gran ciencia as the corrupt maneuvers and violence required to stay in power, and he utilized biological, mechanical, and evolutionist metaphors to develop his plot. So did such famous writers as Angel del Campo, Manuel Acuña, and even Amado Nervo. In the same way, the news received about the scientific displays in world's fairs produced criticism and increased the interaction of scientific production and public opinion.

The science of geography, popularized in school and through political decisions that sought to form an accurate picture of the nation and its people, was identified with Garcia Cubas. In fact, such geographical references as those represented by Garcia Cubas were commonsensical in the era. Rabasa began his novel La bola by observing, "I do not know why this district capital does not appear either on the geographical maps of Mr. García Cubas, or in the numerous Mexican geographical treatises that have been published up to now."^[55] In world's fairs, the geographical sciences were rapidly popularized, and García Cubas's books were translated and widely distributed. By 1891 a cartoon in El México Gráfico ridiculed the bureaucratization of Garcia Cubas as the official geographer of the Porfirian regime. A poem observed:

Without making any stops
or even moving for a second

he knows the entire world
at least by map.
He happily spends his life
encrusted like a mollusk
into a grayish desk
in a section of [the Ministry of] Economic Development.^[56]

Nonetheless, the overall faith in science was shared by the literary urban elites, and they showed an avid interest in news about great discoveries and new advancements, such as when the famous poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera wrote in his weekly chronicles of the "sad toys that the new wise man invents . . . the magician of Menlo Park [Edison]."^[57] For them, the new technology promised comfort and a seemingly endless supply of therapeutic devices, from the "electric belt of Dr. McLaughlin" and the tonic "for impotence, the energizing San Germán wine," to "Dr. de Garay's spa."^[58]

As we have seen, critiques of the Mexican presence at world's fairs, however sarcastic, nevertheless shared the same basic assumptions about the modern world and its future. This consensus was expressed in another realm: the private uses in Mexico of the prestige furnished by world's fairs.

Like the Mexican government, private Mexican companies transformed their success at world's fairs into domestic legitimacy. Once a cigarette factory, or an artist, or a scientific association was honored at an international fair, domestic credibility became indisputable. Within a consensus on the supremacy of modern values and production as epitomized by France and its fairs, the recognition granted by the ideal picture created tangible superiority within Mexico.

Mexican cigarette companies, along with those of Brazil, were especially well received at world's fairs, and it became a commonplace for them to list the honors received at fairs on their cigarette packets. In an emerging mass-consumption society, to display these recognitions through publicity became cashable legitimacy. For instance, EL Valle Nacional earned a gold medal in the 1889 Paris exposition,^[59] and by 1890 all its publicity mentioned the award, including a reproduction of the medal. Similarly, the company of Ernesto Pugibet—a Franco-Mexican entrepreneur who exhibited both machines to manufacture cigarettes and the cigarettes themselves—decorated its boxes of El Buen Tono, Mascota, Ideal, and Judic cigars with a woman dressed in Paris fashion with a French diploma in one hand and a cigarette in the other and with the legend "Universal Exhibition of Paris 1889. The highest prize for the manufacturing of cigars." The Noriega cigarette company advertise-

ments contrasted the Eiffel Tower with the Mexican pavilion (see Fig. 29). After all, this was the company that had made an Eiffel Tower out of cigarettes in the halls of the Aztec Palace.

The media often questioned the official propaganda of the Mexican government. The numerous books and pamphlets sponsored by the Mexican government were nationally criticized for their lack of objectivity and their inadequacy. In 1900 EL Diario del Hogar announced the publication of yet another propaganda book by Zayas Enríquez to be sent to the 1900 Paris exposition. It observed: "It is a pity that the basis on which such a beautiful monument of our progress rests is false and deplorable." It argued that books such as Zayas Enríquez's demonstrated "a shameful degree of backwardness in democratic practices, which make the Mexican people seem like a meeting of ignorant imbeciles."^[60]

No one was more critical of this propaganda than Francisco Bulnes, the enfant terrible of the Porfirians. In El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanas (1899) he devoted a section to what he called "jauja y reverso " (opulence and its other side), an analysis of the propaganda books published by Mexico and other Latin American countries. "After reading the books that explain our riches, Europeans are convinced that the wage laborers in Latin America are great gentlemen who plow the land with English demi sang horses, have a balcony at the opera, look eye to eye a la Patti , whose wives need but to shatter gravel in order to bejewel themselves, and that on filtering the water of our rivers enough gold dust remains for children to play with."^[61]

Bulnes explained that Mexico was indeed promising for immigrants, but because of foreigners' competitive advantages, not the country's tropical wealth. Bulnes believed that Latin America offered no commercial and industrial competition for Europeans. However, Mexico had to compete with other countries to attract immigrants. In 1889 Ireneo Paz, in his articles for El Diario del Hogar , compared Mexico's performance with that of Brazil and of Argentina because, he believed, those, not the United States, were the countries with which Mexico was competing.^[62] Paz's underlying assumption was that the United States, because of its industrial development and socioracial configuration, was unbeatable as a pole of attraction for European immigration. But in 1899 Bulnes did not hesitate to blame political chaos and hypocritical international propaganda for Mexico's failure to attract immigrants. His pragmatism and irony are worth quoting:

The pure and respectable truth is that in Latin America nothing is given for free to any foreigner, no gold dust, no gravel full of diamonds, no rubies for the handles of hoes and pickaxes; among us, every foreigner has to work, and very hard if he is to make a fortune, but if he works hard, we neither want to nor can compete with him. To acquire real value, our resources need large capital investment, which in turn requires true government, whether democratic or dictatorial, it does not really matter, as long as they are governments

Image not available.

29.
Tobacco advertisement depicting the Aztec Palace. 
Source: AGN, Centro de Información Gráfica, Teixidor Collection; 
reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
 (Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)

in the full sense of the word, and not a hideous parade of petty politicians in the constant act of robbery and in the anarchic task of black beetles.^[63]

He then compared the data presented in Mexican propaganda on immigrants with that of Switzerland, showing the immense advantages of Switzerland in terms of salaries, cost of living, security, sanitation, and general development. The Mexican wizards of progress in charge of writing the nation's propaganda (or employing others to write it) were dismissed by Bulnes as lay priests. Bulnes, a master of irony, painstakingly dissected the general format of those books and made fun of their different parts: "territory: double the real one," "customs: those of Arcadia," "rain: whenever the farmers ask for it," "public hygiene: that of a rock crystal," "administrative morality: that of a Druid virgin," "proletariat: opulent," while in regard to crime, cost of hospitality, abuses, judiciary deficiencies, people's vote, and so forth, there was "sepulchral silence."^[64]

In sum, the irony of Mexico's modern public image vis-à-vis Mexico's actuality endured as part of the general criticism of the Porfirian regime. But the constant confrontation of the ideal and real visions of Mexico never weakened either the propaganda attempts of the Porfirian regime or the grad-

ual generalization of relatively fixed features of a modern national identity. Those who criticized and mocked Mexico's modern image at world's fairs desolemnized that image by showing the way it was constructed, as well as its corrupt and undemocratic side. But they neither rejected the general ideal of that image nor the need for Mexico to create it. That was the greatest irony of all: the fact that at the receiving end, those who were supposedly included in the image did not recognize themselves, but this nonrecognition became the fuel (for official and nonofficial attempts) to restart the process; that is, in the last analysis, for Mexico this type of irony fed the impulse to begin again the "keep-trying" cycle—an imperative of a modern national image.