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Collecting Mexico Museums Monuments and the
Creation of National Identity 1st Edition Shelley E.
Garrigan Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Shelley E. Garrigan
ISBN(s): 9780816670925, 0816670927
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 4.70 MB
Year: 2012
Language: english
COLLECTING MEXICO
This page intentionally left blank
COLLECTING MEXICO
Museums, Monuments, and the
Creation of National Identity

SHELLEY E. GARRIGAN

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis · London
Portions of chapter 3 were previously published as “Museos, monumentos y
ciudadanía en el D.F. de México,” in “Exposiciones, ferias y cultura material en
América Latina, 1860–1922,” special issue, Estudios: Revista de investigaciones literarias
y culturales 10/11 (2004). Republished in Stephan González, Beatriz Andermann,
and Jens Andermann, eds., Galerías del progreso: museos, exposiciones y cultura visual
en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2006).

Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as “Collections, Nation, and

Melancholy at the World’s Fair: Re-reading Mexico in Paris 1889,” in “Perspectivas
sobre el coleccionismo,” ed. María Mercedes Andrade, dossier edition, La Habana
Elegante: revista semestral de literatura y cultura cubana, caribeña, latinoamericana y de
estética 46 (Fall–Winter 2009).

Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garrigan, Shelley E.
Collecting Mexico : museums, monuments, and the creation of national identity
/ Shelley E. Garrigan.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7092-5 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7093-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Cultural property—Social aspects—Mexico. 2. Exhibitions—Mexico—
History—19th century. 3. Museums—Social aspects—Mexico. 4. Mexico—
Antiquities—Social aspects. 5. National characteristics, Mexican. 6. Mexico—
Cultural policy—History—19th century. I. Title.
F1210.G47 2012
972—dc23
2012001199

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Fine Art and Demand: Debating the
Mexican National Canon, 1876–1910 . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2. Our Archaeology: Science, Citizenry,
Patrimony, and the Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3. The Hidden Lives of Historical Monuments:
Commerce, Fashion, and Memorial . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4. Collections at the World’s Fair:
Rereading Mexico in Paris, 1889 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
5. Collecting Numbers: Statistics and the
Constructive Force of Deficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

At the close of the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, an exchange of cultural

goods was negotiated between the founder and director of the Musée
d’ Ethnographie du Trocadéro of France and the chief Mexican fair
commissioner. With his eye on the mannequins in the Mexican pavilion
that had been fashioned to represent particular indigenous races, French
anthropologist Dr. Ernest Théodore Hamy petitioned for the “dona-
tion or exchange” of these life-size models to form part of a permanent
exhibit in the French museum. “Books or other objects” were offered as
tentative compensations. After an unspecified number of conferences
between the parties in question, there was an agreement that the French
government would offer a large vase from the National Factory of
Sèvres to the Mexican Secretaría de Fomento as a souvenir of the Paris
Exposition. On his return to Mexico in June 1890, José Ramírez wrote
of the honor it was to deliver this mass-produced “work of art,” which
he interpreted as one of the many “testimonies of kindness” shown
to the Mexican commission by the French hosts of this world event.
This exchange of mannequins for vase, which forged a sense of
equivalency between two such different examples of commercial and
cultural production, marked the era of a new diplomatic relationship
between Mexico and France. The years of mutual tension that had
spanned the decades between Mexican independence in 1821 and the
liberal reform of 1867 were now over. And yet involved here was not
only the exchange of one material thing for another that ultimately
indicated diplomatic compatibility1 but also the reconciliation of two
theoretically opposed qualities of value.2 The exchanged objects were
each representatively “national” and considered to be equivalent to
one another and yet had originated from radically different systems of
value: one stood for “nation,” and the other was a sample of national

1
2





·




I NTRODUCTION

production. In the swapping of gifts, the mannequins as components

of a representative Mexican national collection underwent an immedi-
ate yet drastic change in status through their introduction to market
value. This particular intersection of value systems that occurs in late-
nineteenth-century Mexico—the transcendent, national–mythological
perspective and the exchangeable, temporal mode of the commercial
product—invites a closer look at the patrimonial objects that formed
the Mexican canon during the late nineteenth century. The mannequin
story indicates that there is more to these objects than a direct connection
to history. When viewed during the phases of initial consolidation, it is
the inherent ambiguity, instability, and contradictory nature of those
objects that embody transcendent meanings about nation that reveal
their true force as storytellers.3
Why retell the story of Mexico’s political and cultural consolidation
through a series of collected objects? First of all, broadly speaking, this
project falls in line with a series of critical studies, spearheaded in part
by Nestor García Canclini and Nicolas Mirzoeff in the 1990s and evolv-
ing into the work of such scholars as Esther Gabara, Jens Andermann,
Beatriz González-Stéphan, and Andrea Noble, that contest Eurocentric
paradigms of hegemony by recasting stories of Latin American mo-
dernities into the lenses of visual, spatial, and material expressions of
culture. Second, though the geographical and chronological boundar-
ies of this study are specific, I have found the material object and its
peculiar way of embodying ideology to be one that links past, present,
and future to different geographical contexts on multiple fronts. Despite
the important and obvious differences, the assembly of a collection in
the age of virtual museums and digital patrimony has something fun-
damental in common with both the pre-Columbian and the colonial
object displays: the projection of a point of view through things. The
set of close readings of a particular series of collection processes offered
here provides a vantage point that proves useful, therefore, in myriad
contexts—wherever larger questions of identity, social position, and
cultural–capital exchanges converge.
Many of the writings through which national projects were articu-
lated during the Porfiriato were bolstered with references to physical
objects—be these artistic, archaeological, architectural, or scientific.
Somehow, the objects made the stories seem more real. The three-
 INTRODUCTION





·




3

dimensional, tangible object adds something to the Mexican political

narrative that cannot be expressed through any other means: the ir-
reducible truth of physical presence.
Closer scrutiny reveals patterns among the institutionally sanctioned
collections of late-nineteenth-century Mexico that point to their curious
ability to engender social meanings. Despite their grandeur, the objects
highlighted in public speeches and newspaper circulations throughout
the Distrito Federal were not referred to so much as isolated artifacts
with unique and individual historical circumstances as components of
larger collections. Even when a given object seemed to surface publicly
as a unique thing, as in the unveiling of a national monument on the
Paseo de la Reforma, there was a distinct tendency to regard it as part
of a larger project. Transposed into theoretical terms, it can be said
that already on its introduction into the public sphere via some form
of exhibition, the collected object has shifted into a new economy of
meaning—one that foregrounds the collective over the individual and
the current act of meaning making over the transmission of original
contexts.
Another factor that distinguishes the types of collections that sur-
faced in late-nineteenth-century Mexico is their official endorsement.
Institutions such as the Museo Nacional, the Secretaría de Fomento, the
Sociedad de Estadística, and the Academia de San Carlos provided the
means for object displays to be linked to abstract and symbolic meanings
about the nation. Through the speeches pronounced at the unveiling
ceremonies of national monuments, the newspaper commentary fol-
lowing national art exhibitions, and the brochures that accompanied
museum exhibits or world’s fair pavilions, displayed objects embodied
and transmitted social messages to national and international audiences.
The coincidence with similar processes in other nations, evident in the
concomitant number of museum openings and world’s fair events that
occurred in Latin America, the United States, and Europe during the
last decades of the nineteenth century, adds a competitive tension to
the culture of national collecting that approximates the dynamic of
the market.
Owing to the historical coincidence of modernization and Mexi-
can political consolidation that were initiated with the liberal triumph
of 1867, the creation of a nascent capitalist consciousness developed
4





·




I NTRODUCTION

alongside the assembly of a national patrimony. As a result, the displayed

objects that were introduced to the public visual sphere at this time—
whether in the form of temporary public art exhibits or more permanent
outdoor public monuments—quite paradoxically embodied aspects of
both. In this collision of opposing value systems that underlies the dis-
played objects studied here, the idea of nation acquires a particular type
of persuasive force that cannot be adequately understood by examining
the official histories of the key icons of Mexican cultural consolidation
as separate entities. While the importance of specialist studies is not to
be understated, the point of this investigation is to prompt questions
that only a comparative study can incite.
In fact, taken together, the theoretical parallels that run through-
out the collections studied here—fetishism, origins, narration, order,
authority, melancholy, and the rhetoric of error or loss—brought me
to the crux of my argument. I do not view the central drive behind
national patrimony as capitalist per se—it’s not that the patrimonial
object pretends to embody a quasi-religious national quality while really
qualifying as an object of exchange like any other. What I claim does
lie at the very core of patrimony is a dialectical tension between those
two opposed systems of value. And it is that same tension that not
only charges the object with a type of power that could not be equaled
were it linked to only one system or the other but also remains largely
unrecognized primarily because the commercial side of the dynamic
remains, for the most part, hidden. Thus much of the investigation
that follows involves teasing out and highlighting that understated and
largely unspoken market quality that intersects with national patrimony
at the foundational level.
The coincidence between patrimony and product located in this
study introduces a problem that goes far beyond that of contempla-
tion versus possession. If the commercial object can be defined by its
inherent capacity to be extracted, produced, created, or conceived as a
thing that can be used to obtain something else, then the implied value
system presupposes the constant possibility of the object’s exchange. In
this sense, the value system represented by commercial objects presents
a potential threat to a community that is still in the process of defining
itself. With their connotations of legacy, inheritance, and permanent
mythological value, in contrast, the objects of national patrimony that
 INTRODUCTION





·




5

served as reference points for Mexico’s recently reintegrated statehood

should stand in stark opposition to the transience of the commercial
product. When this is not the case, however, and when the commercial
subtext of patrimony shows up as significant yet hidden, there is an op-
portunity to view the vulnerability of meaning making at its very core.
Reconstructing the actual transactions that underlie our culturally sacred
objects advances our understanding of identity by shattering the myth
of presence—that aura of truth that surrounds hallowed objects—and
accessing the concrete transactions and potentially subversive circum-
stances under which cultural icons come into being.
In Mexico, public collections collided with national policies that took
shape under the imperative of order that informed late-nineteenth-
century liberal administration and rhetoric. In its double meaning as
both command and physical arrangement, the concept of order describes
not only the introduction of homogenizing reform policies and con-
solidation efforts that began in Mexico after the liberal overthrow of
Emperor Maximilian in 1867 but also one of the key criteria through
which to assess the status of national collections attributed with sym-
bolic importance. Two decades later, for example, the disorder of the
pile of archaeological objects collecting on the patio of the Museo Na-
cional led to the strategic creation of official physical and disciplinary
spaces through which to both nationalize that patrimony and make it
accessible to expanding national and international viewing publics. In
theoretical terms, this overlap between the physical (the literal spaces
in which objects were housed) and the abstract (the disciplinary or aca-
demic areas into which such objects were categorized) in the creation
of meaningful spaces marks not only a distinct attitude about collecting
that shows up in late-nineteenth-century patrimonial discourse but also
the emergence of the modern state in the form of physical and abstract
referents such as charts, graphs, maps, canons, and disciplines. As argues
Jens Andermann with reference to Brazil and Argentina in The Optic of
the State,4 the production of visual representations and intentional spaces
in national museums, world’s fair exhibitions, and national maps was
inextricably linked to the establishment of political autonomy during
the late nineteenth century.
6





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I NTRODUCTION

Independence, Unrest, and the Quest for Order

A brief overview of the political, social, and economic instability that

characterized early- and mid-nineteenth-century Mexico will elucidate
the pursuit of order that shaped the political and cultural institutions
examined in this study. The most obvious challenges for the newly
autonomous nation were political in nature, as Mexico faced not only
decades of internal political dissent that would render long-term policy
making next to impossible but also foreign loans, invasions, and coast-
al occupations from Spain, France, and England that produced large
amounts of external debt.
It did not take long for contrasting political views to clash in Mexico
following its independence from Spain. The question that divided the
governing constituent body from the time of its first meetings in No-
vember 1823 was whether the new republic should be federalist (with a
strong state government and separation of church and state) or centralist
(with a strong central government and a politically empowered church).5
Advocates of the federacy based their arguments on the success of the
United States and concerns over the despotism inherent to centralized
governments. The centralists, conversely, advocated the need for a
stronger union following the war and stressed the inherent differences
between Mexico and the United States that ultimately rendered any
comparison moot.6
Though federalists won the initial debate and created the constitution
of 1824, clashes and battles between the two opposing factions would
set the tone for internal politics until Benito Juárez led the successful
liberal Reform of 1876. During the era of centralization (1833–55) under
the on-again, off-again presidency of war hero Antonio López de Santa
Anna, the presidency was occupied thirty-six different times, with an
average term of around seven and a half months.7 Between 1824 and 1857,
there were no fewer than forty-nine different national administrations
between the presidency (which shifted hands among sixteen different
occupants) and “provisional chief executives,” of which there were
thirty-three.8 Although there was a paradoxical degree of continuity due
to government offices drawing from the same pool of hombres de bien—or
the “well-educated professionals and military officials” who assumed
most of the first thirty years of national political office—the combined
 INTRODUCTION





·




7

internal dissent and foreign conflict proved detrimental to Mexican

stability during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.9
The Revolution of Ayutla, an armed revolt that expelled Santa Anna
from power in 1855, marked the beginning of a two-decade period of
political reform and leadership by liberal hero Benito Juárez. Though it
was powerful and full of promise, the Juárez administration was tem-
porarily ousted by the French-imposed Austrian emperor Maximilian I
(1864–67), who benefited from a short-lived conservative line of support
from within that branch of the Mexican elite.
The first of the nineteenth-century foreign invasions of Mexico was
an attempted reconquest by Spain that took place less than a decade
after independence had been established.10 Determined to recapture
their lost territory, an exhausted group of three thousand Spanish troops
commanded by General Isidro Barradas landed at Tamaulipas in July
1829. Sickness and inadequacy of supplies led Barradas to surrender to
Santa Anna within three months. The retaliation that ensued against
the few remaining Spanish merchants living in Mexico provoked an
exodus that negatively affected the already weak Mexican economy.11
More foreign encroachments and territorial disputes soon followed.
The property damage suffered by French national residents of Mexico
during the armed revolts and counterrevolts that plagued the early years
of independence led to the French invasion of Veracruz in 1838. Because
one of the more famous appeals to King Louis-Phillipe was made by a
French pastry cook who, in 1838, claimed that his Mexico City bakery
had been ruined by Mexican officers ten years earlier, the first French
invasion of Mexico became known as the War of the Pastries. Although
the French eventually retreated, Mexico assumed a debt of six hundred
pesos in claims for property damage to French citizens.12
The loss of Texas in 1836, provoked by a series of grievances between
U.S. colonizers and the Mexican government (the most serious of which
was the annulment of the federalist government under Santa Anna in
1829), sparked events that would culminate in the Mexican–American
War (1846–48) following the state’s U.S. annexation in 1845.13 Between the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ceded Texas, California,
and New Mexico to the United States, and the subsequent Gadsden
Purchase of 1853, Mexican national territory was cut by more than half.
Despite this national humiliation, however, the communal pain of loss
8





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I NTRODUCTION

and accompanying Yankeephobia helped inspire what might have been

the first sense of a unified Mexican nationalism.14
The inherent link that binds the collective experience of loss with
some heroic manifestation of patriotism is an interesting one that will
receive further attention in this book. The rich legacy of indigenous
ruins, the duration of Mexican colonial occupation, and the tumultuous
path toward political consolidation together form the complex substance
from which the modern national epic and material cultural referents
emerged. In addition, there are strong theoretical links between loss as
an originating state and collecting as both an expression of and means
of overcoming it. As a result, some of the key material icons of larger
national collections (such as the monument to Cuauhtémoc and the
baptismal stone of Padre Hidalgo) embody a sense of inherited and
collective mourning that imbues the nation’s rocky journey of colonial
emancipation, political consolidation, and modernization with the
coherence that only founding stories can provide.
By the mid-nineteenth century, or approximately forty to fifty years
after independence, Mexican politics was divided between the liberal
and conservative perspectives.15 The conflict reached its apex in the War
of the Reform (1858–61) with a victory for the liberals, led by the afore-
mentioned Benito Juárez (1806–72), the war hero of Zapotec descent
who would serve five presidential terms between the years 1858 and
1872. Meanwhile, the demands of repayment by European creditors,
including England, Spain, and France, led to a convergence of their
respective troops on the coast of Veracruz in December 1861. Supported
by Mexican conservatives and the Church, the French army marched
inland, suffered defeat in Puebla on May 5, 1862, and managed to regroup
and take the city a year later. Owing to a lack of military reinforce-
ment, President Juárez evacuated Mexico City on May 31, 1863, seeking
temporary retreat in San Luis Potosí. Under the influence of Emperor
Napoleon III, a delegation of Mexican conservatives traveled overseas
to offer the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Hapsburg the
crown of Mexico, thus initiating the nation’s last foreign occupation,
which would last for approximately four years.16
Supported by the Lincoln administration’s concern over Europe’s
disregard of the Monroe Doctrine, Juárez initiated his battle campaign
against Maximilian and his conservative supporters in spring 1866. He
 INTRODUCTION





·




9

gained ultimate victory in May 1867, when the defeated emperor sur-
rendered his sword in Querétaro.17 The period that followed, which
would prove to be the longest stretch of political stability since the
colonial era, is described as La Reforma: the victory of the pro-capitalist
and anticlerical liberals over the outdated conservative regime. The
triumphant liberales, although not exempt from internal dissonance
among themselves,18 had to search for historical justification of a new
order that was capable of assembling a coherent citizenry from among
a vast linguistic, geographic, and economic heterogeneity.
Marking an end to decades of turmoil, the political reforms that
characterized the liberal triumph of 1867 shared the goal of propagat-
ing a sense of order through educational, social, and economic reforms
such as the nationalization of primary school education and the comple-
tion of the Mexico–Veracruz railroad. However, the potential foreign
investors who were desperately needed for economic stabilization were
detracted by the image of lawlessness and savagery that marred the na-
tion’s international image and the rampant banditry that still rendered
travel within the country dangerous. As a result, the liberals prioritized
civil order.19 Pronounced before the Juárez government in Guanajato
in 1867, Gabina Barreda’s “Oración cívica” outlined the positivist per-
spective on reform.20 One of Barreda’s principal intentions with this
speech was to apply the Comptian doctrine of positivism to Mexico,
thus planting the rational basis for a philosophical and material order
capable of arranging the nation’s chaotic past into a coherent and unified
perspective:

To make quite clear that during all that time when it seemed that
we were sailing without a compass and without a sense of direction,
the progressive party, despite a thousand pitfalls and immense fierce
resistance, has always headed in the right direction, even attaining after
the most painful and successful of all our battles, the extraordinary
result that we, amazed and surprised by our own achievement, are
experiencing today, that of bringing to light the great social lessons
learned as a result of the painful experiences which anarchy produces
everywhere, and which cannot be erased until a truly universal doc-
trine unites all intelligent minds into a common purpose.21
10





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I NTRODUCTION

Known as the científicos, the inheritors of Barreda’s positivism became

the ruling elite during the Porfiriato. Their “scientific manifesto,” to
quote Leopoldo Zea, was pronounced in 1880 by Pedro Gutiérrez, a
candidate for the governorship of San Luis Potosí. Published in the
newspaper La Libertad, the manifesto highlights the centrality of scien-
tific knowledge as a basis for “establishing the adequate conditions of
order for society.” Preoccupations over social rights were overshadowed
by the prioritization of work and material advancement, which, it was
emphasized, could only be achieved when the government was able to
guarantee social order.22
It was during this time of fragile political stability in the late nine-
teenth century that there appears to have been a concerted and simulta-
neous effort by political and cultural institutions, such as the Secretaría
de Fomento, the Academia de San Carlos, the Sociedad de Estadística,
and the Museo Nacional, to fortify a sense of national coherence by
assembling a national patrimony. Bolstered and propagated through
displays of collected things, the creation of a series of complementary
core national stories formed the key means through which to justify
the presence of the autonomous Mexican nation, to create U.S. and
European economic alliances, and to convince a divided citizenry to
unify under the umbrella of an ideologically consolidated nation. The
collections that resulted from this effort together produced the effect
of order by disseminating a new and collective story of origins which,
together with Barreda’s advocacy of Comte’s positivism, helped ground
the sense of nation that came into being during the Porfirian era in
various sets of material evidence.

Establishing Origins: In Theory and Practice

Once the liberal triumph was secured, the need for a new perceptual
order inspired the search for a new and modern beginning that could
reconcile the antagonistic extremes of decades of political strife on one
hand and the assumption of positivist discourses of progress on the
other. From the liberales to the later científicos, the Mexican imperative
of progress articulates itself across a decisive lack of political consensus.
The resulting political rhetoric straddles the divide that separates the
dream of a strong position in the European league of nations from the
 INTRODUCTION





·




1 1

nation’s irreducible and radical political, social, and cultural hetero-

geneity.23 After decades of civil strife had essentially crippled cultural
production, the public collections that manifest must sustain a series
of difficult reconciliations not only as liberals and conservatives alike
are called on to contribute to the creation of a common patrimony but
also as the needs of symbolic and market capitals intersect and collide.
Paraphrasing Hegel, Michael Taussig reminds us that the person
or event implicated in history occurs twice: first as physical event and
later as a historical and ideological reference point.24 Likewise, in the
perceptual logic of the collection, its beginning cannot be adequately
described through the mere act of acquisition; it is also a retrospectively
drawn boundary that is determined only after a series of related objects
has been intentionally gathered and arranged.25 While failing to coin-
cide with the disparate origins of its individual objects, the collection
resurrects the series of beginnings that it has missed and strategically
reframes them into a shared point of view that asks to be regarded as
objective and historical rather than subjective and aesthetic.
It was the need for a new beginning and the introduction of a collec-
tive perspective that were at stake in the liberales’ public efforts to recon-
cile with the conservative factions once their own political hegemony
was secured. As observes Stacie Widdifield, the rhetorical shift from a
combative to a conciliatory slant is decipherable in the newspaper and
other print circulations of and around the year of 1869.26 In a manner
that is analogous to the political projects of pre- and postemancipation
from Spain, the rhetoric of revolutionary change before the Reform that
had elaborated a strict set of ideological denouncements (principally of
the theocracy and military repression) shifted into more conciliatory
postures following the liberal triumph. Justo Sierra’s historical justifica-
tion of the military presence in national history, for example, posing as
retrospectively sympathetic to the doomed conservatives, represents an
exact ideological reversal of the traditional liberal perspective:

Our poor grandparents! And how stupid are we, their grandchildren,
to insult them with our irreverent irony when, going by the way we
feel, we would have been incapable perhaps of the tiniest part of the
effort that they needed to even live, always trying to bring order out of
chaos, maintaining an imperfect and worrisome but positive control
12





·




I NTRODUCTION

by the Parliament over the administration, clutching to their breast,

covered with mud, bloody and torn, but ours, the flag of our country.27

Partly in response to the widely publicized French accusations of Mexi-

can barbarism after the assassination of Maximilian, and partly in reac-
tion to the traditional liberal contempt for violence of all forms (includ-
ing, and especially, that which culminates in revolutionary acts), Sierra
here elaborates a justification of the ubiquity of the armed forces in
Mexican political history. Addressed to future generations of Mexican
leaders who may demand accountability for the omnipresence of the
military in national history, Sierra’s text is not so much restorative as
assimilatory in the perspective that it constructs.
In fact, it is through the strategic manipulation of perspective that
Sierra’s choice in narrative intersects with the perceptual mode of the
collection. The accountability that the author constructs for the nation’s
future liberals, like the origin of the collection that can only retrospec-
tively be marked, is an example of history as narrated (or marked) from a
projected future perspective. History, or the new arrangement of events
that constitutes the historical perspective, is produced in the process of
assembling what is still unfinished (in this case, political consolidation).
This series that is being elaborated (a rearrangement of the events that
compose Mexico’s military history) requires the selective perspective
of a narrator, who writes over the fragmented and partial narrations
of the past and weaves them into a conciliatory synthesis of political
visions. In this way, such reconciliation becomes, quite paradoxically,
both history and future project—a theme that will recur at several points
in the investigation that follows.
As Mieke Bal observes in The Cultures of Collecting, there are inherent
connections between narratives and collections that bind them both
practically and conceptually. Among them is the tension that exists be-
tween the “objective” event (or the physical object) and the subjective
point of view (the narrator or the collector) that inevitably distorts the
former while paradoxically offering us our only mode of accessing it.28
Sierra’s strategic layering of subjectivities (that of the former conserva-
tives, the former liberals, and the “new” conciliatory liberal perspective)
illustrates this tension between objectivity and subjectivity that charac-
terizes both narration and the collection. There is, in both, that inevitable
 INTRODUCTION





·




1 3

gap between the historical or fictional “fact” or the material “truth” of a

present object and the point of view through which that gap is bridged.
Sierra thus reconciles otherwise opposing political perspectives by con-
structing an all-encompassing new story that includes them both. This
story—which, transferred into the material realm of the collection, be-
comes a series of carefully selected things—“subsumes and presents the
subjective views” of both the liberal and the conservative perspectives.29
In this way, Sierra integrates what the revolutionary liberals criticized as
the exaggerated military involvement in Mexican national affairs with a
historical vision that neither opposes the new liberal quest for order nor
rouses the defensive reflex of conservative parties. He recalls the events
of history not to remember the lost contexts of their unique histories
but to arrange them into a synchronous and conciliatory historical view.
In theoretical terms, the first step in the transition from object to
collected object, or from objective to narrated history, is a process of
emptying. As materializations of a unique and nonrepeatable coinci-
dence of context and circumstance, the object-events that constitute
narrative and the collection are emptied of their former content-values
and recodified according to their relationships to the other components
of a new sequence. The new sequence or series disguises its appropria-
tion of isolated, nonserialized beginnings with its reinvested vision of
history as synchronous, relational, and transposable. In the text quoted
earlier, Sierra replaces chronology with what Baudrillard would call seri-
ality, or a particular arrangement of events through which these acquire
meaning only in relation to one another.30 Also linking the otherwise
disparate events of history or the diverse objects that come to constitute
a collection is the implicit future-promise of completion (hence Sierra’s
implicit destinatario—the nation’s future liberal leaders), which, as has
been mentioned and will again be addressed, is dialectically tied to an
equally persistent obsession with origins.
Sierra’s justification of Mexican military history creates a tentative
resolution between the opposing perspectives of revolution and stabi-
lization by extending the boundaries of liberal revolutionary rhetoric.
Quoting Comte, Leopoldo Zea points out that for stabilization to occur,
the present order must be made distinct from the ideology of revolution:
“Once the negative mission of the metaphysical doctrine is achieved,
it should in turn leave the field to the positivist doctrine, which must
Other documents randomly have
different content
 LATE ARMOR
As the sixteenth century drew to a close armor began to deteriorate.
No single influence was responsible. Do not think that firearms were
invented and armor was therefore suddenly made obsolete. As a
matter of fact, firearms were in use before plate armor really
received general acceptance, and firearms were in use all the time
that plate armor was being worn in Europe. But the gradual
improvement in the efficiency of firearms undoubtedly caused armor
to be made heavier and heavier, and thereby contributed greatly to
its decline. For just when armor was thus increasing in weight there
developed a new school of cavalry tactics based upon the use of
lightly armed troopers on fast horses who, instead of directly
attacking the enemy, could dash around his flank and cut off his
supplies from the rear. The tendency was, therefore, to make the
armor light and very flexible, directly contrary to the need for solid,
bullet-stopping protection. Even fashion had a deteriorating effect on
armor. Fig. 20 shows a late suit of armor which has a 17
multitude of small plates to give extreme flexibility, and has
extra wide leg protectors to cover the extravagant wide-topped
trousers which were then the vogue. But what a clumsy suit this is
compared to the Maximilian suit of Fig. 10!
Fig. 20. “Three-quarter” suit of armor for a young German of the
early XVII century.
During the seventeenth century armor shrank away piece by piece,
much as a tired soldier might have been tempted to discard it on a
long march. The choking face defenses vanished from the helmet.
The sollerets went, then the shin guards or greaves, then the thigh
guards. The arm guards were discarded, then the gauntlets. Finally
the armored man was left with only breastplate, backplate, and
helmet, and even these deteriorated in the following century into the
decorative but inefficient trappings of the cuirassier. The two world
wars, with their steel helmets and flak suits (the design of which was
strongly influenced by ancient models) have revived the use of
armor, but it is a machine-made product and, well-designed though
it be, must be considered a reproduction rather than an original
work of art.

18
 QUESTIONS CONCERNING ARMOR
Let us turn back to the armor of the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, and consider some of the questions which naturally arise
in our minds as we contemplate these relics of the past. In the first
place, was it practical? How could men possibly wear such a mass of
metal upon their bodies and engage in long military campaigns,
interspersed with violent battles? Isn’t it true that an armored man,
once fallen, could not get up again until he was hoisted with a
derrick? No, that isn’t true. The comical scenes in the moving
pictures of frustrated knights floundering about in search of hoisting
engines were put in strictly for laughs. Armor was practical; it was
worn by about all the most important men of more than three
centuries; if they had not worn it they would not have lived long
enough to become important! As a matter of fact armor is not as
heavy as one might think. A good military suit weighs no more than
the pack carried by a modern soldier, sixty pounds or less, and is a
great deal more comfortable to carry. The pack hangs from the
shoulders, but a good suit of armor, carefully made (as all good
armor had to be made) to fit the individual body of the wearer, has
its weight distributed over the entire body. The helmet rests partly
on the head and partly on the shoulders. The breast and backplates
rest partly on the shoulders and partly on the hips. The arm and leg
guards are laced to the special undergarment which had always to
be worn with armor, and each limb supports its own protection. The
joints come at exactly the right places to correspond with the natural
motions of the body, and every one of these motions is provided for.
A man wearing a properly fitting suit of armor over the correct
undergarment could do anything that a modern man can do wearing
a winter overcoat, and probably, due to his special training, a
number of things that the modern man could not. He could certainly
walk, run, climb a wall, lie down and get up quickly, and mount his
horse without help. To test the truth of these statements and the
implications of the romantic novels of the past, the writer donned a
suit of armor which fitted him only approximately, yet found himself
able to perform all the actions above mentioned and, in addition, to
descend two stories on a rope, hand under hand.

Two particular devices aided in making such flexibility possible.

Where the body needed protection combined with motility it could
be covered with a series of narrow, overlapping steel strips, each of
which was riveted in turn to one or more leather straps, the ends of
which were fastened to the solid main defense. Then as the body
was flexed the steel strips or lames would slide over one another
without exposing the body beneath them (Fig. 21). It was also
possible to join a series of lames by not more than two rivets for
each pair; these would act as pivots, allowing one lame to rotate
slightly relative to the other (Fig. 22). However, if rivets were used
with rather large heads with a washer under the burred end of each,
and if the holes for the rivet in one lame were round while that in
the other had the form of a slot, in addition to the pivoting motion, a
certain amount of sideways motion between the lames would 19
be possible (Fig. 23).
Fig. 21. The leathering of a tasset, from the inside.

Fig. 22. The pivot rivets of a solleret.

 Fig. 23. The wrist plates of a gauntlet with sliding (Almain) rivets.

Who wore armor? Every man who could afford it. Armor was always
very much of a luxury. Its making required the services of
consummate craftsmen, men who were not only expert metal
workers, but also skilled draughtsmen, expert tailors, and keen
students of human anatomy. Armorers were the aristocrats of all
mediaeval craftsmen, the most highly respected and by far the best
paid. It required a great deal of their time; the completion of a full
suit of armor might take a year or more. Armor was, therefore, in
the class of the modern automobile. A wealthy monarch might have
a large wardrobe of beautifully decorated armor, as a millionaire to-
day owns a fleet of expensive imported motor cars. A simple knight
would be proud to possess a single suit, plain, but nevertheless
made exactly to fit him and no other person. A minor soldier was
lucky if he could secure a simple ready-made breastplate and
helmet.

What was the physical character of the men who wore armor? Why
do the suits seem so small? Were people smaller in those days? Yes
and no. It is true that the nature of their life tended to develop men
of the cowboy type, wiry rather than massive. Men who spend their
lives on horseback are likely to have a broad shoulder and narrow
waist, strong thigh and slender calf. It is true too that with primitive
medicine and sanitation man died young; the average age of adult
males was less than it is now.

However the principal reason for the small average size of preserved
suits of armor lies in its inextensibility. A suit of armor cannot be “let
out”. As has been pointed out, it had to be made exactly to fit 20
the wearer. Men had to learn their military duties very young,
they had to have and to wear armor while they were still growing.
Consequently they usually outgrew their first suit of armor, and it
was this suit, unmarked by the scars of serious fighting, which was
most likely to be preserved. By the time a man reached his full
growth his armor showed wear and tear; when he died he was
buried in it, or it was discarded after his death as too battered to be
worth keeping. The suits of armor in the world’s collections are
largely the outgrown suits of young men.
 MIDDLE EASTERN ARMOR
In addition to the armor of Europe, consideration should be given to
that of the Middle East, of which the City Art Museum displays a
number of fine specimens in a special gallery. Armor was worn in
Persia and in India long after it had been abandoned in Europe; it is
even possible that among isolated tribes armorers may still be plying
their trade. However, as in Europe, the later work tended to
deteriorate, and the earlier an Eastern armor is, the better will it
probably be.

The Indian and Persian smiths had two specialties: Damascus steel
and damascened steel, which are often and not unnaturally
confused, both having presumably originated at Damascus.
Damascene work has already been described on page 15; both the
“true” and the “false” variety were practised throughout the Middle
East. Damascus steel, on the other hand, is a type of metal
especially suitable for armor and sword blades, made by the intimate
combination, in innumerable layers, of two kinds of metal, one
extremely hard, the other soft and tough. As billets of this composite
steel were twisted, bent, and reformed, the superimposed layers
made intricate patterns like those in watered silk. Such Damascus
steel patterns can be best observed in sword and dagger blades like
those illustrated in Fig. 35, page 29.
 Fig. 24. This is the breastplate of a Persian suit of armor. The
buckles are for the straps which attach the side and back plates.

The Persian armorers did not follow the European custom of forging
body armor exactly to fit the wearer, but instead made the 21
principal defense of four rectangular plates known as char aina
or “the four mirrors”. Two were worn as breast- and backplate
respectively, the other two, made concave on the upper edge, were
worn at the sides, the concavity fitting under the arm. Chain mail
was always used in the East, even more extensively than in Europe,
to protect all areas of the body not covered by the char aina or other
defenses of solid plate. Fig. 24 shows a plate of such a four-piece
armor. It is made of fine Damascus steel (the pattern is too fine to
show in the photograph), and is decorated with damascene inlay of
floral arabesques in gold. This is work of the late sixteenth or early
seventeenth century, and combines adequate functionality with
oriental elegance. A Persian helmet (Fig. 25) of the same period
shows skillful forging of the fluted ornament.
 Fig. 25. The chain mail which now looks rather ragged originally
hung evenly around the rim of this Persian helmet.

Fig. 26. Although corroded, this fifteenth century Turkish helmet

demonstrates the wonderful skill of Middle Eastern armorers.

But the helmet in Fig. 26, probably a century or more earlier, shows
a much greater appreciation of sculptural form. With a row of
parallel vertical flutings around its domed upper part, it resembles
closely the Maximilian armor of contemporary Europe. It is doubtful,
however, if many European smiths could have forged the minaret-
like pinnacle which terminates the dome. The helmet is decorated
with damascene work of silver in calligraphic inscriptions and
arabesques. Its owner’s neck was protected by chain mail attached
around the lower edge of the helmet. Probably because of the
warmer climate, the Saracenic warriors never adopted the closed
helmet of European lands, but preferred to leave the face exposed,
or protected only by a nasal bar which was often so arranged that it
could be slid upwards and clamped.

22
 ARMS: STRIKING AND CUTTING WEAPONS
Man’s first weapon was probably a club, and the simple club has
always retained a certain popularity. Even in the middle of the
sixteenth century, when arms of all kinds attained great elaboration,
the mace, or short one-handed club, was the accepted weapon of
military men in holy orders who, forbidden to shed blood, found no
such prohibition against the bloodless cracking of skulls. Fig. 27
shows such a mace, of heavy steel, carved and gilded, a formidable
though beautiful weapon. Related arms are short-handled military
axes and hammers.

But the accepted symbol of man as a fighting creature has always

been the sword, and the sword, perhaps more than any other item
of man’s warlike panoply, has experienced the full range of his
artistic and technical initiative. Space does not here permit a
discussion of the innumerable types of swords; only a brief resumé
of the general development can be given. This is supplemented by a
display of some typical forms along one side wall of the armor
gallery.
Fig. 27. A mace or one-handed club, made of steel carved and
gilded. A beautiful implement for smashing heads!
Fig. 28. A Chinese bronze sword from about the time of Christ. Not
very sharp, but it could still do quite a lot of damage.
23
 Fig. 29. Typical swords of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, as
displayed in the armor gallery.

Stone Age man could not make any true swords, for the flint and
obsidian which he had to use were too brittle to be available in large
pieces. But bronze could be cast into swords both effective and
beautiful. A number of Chinese bronze sword blades from the Han
Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) (Fig. 28) are available in the study
collection. They are rather short, double edged blades, adapted
primarily for thrusting, but not without cutting ability too. The
Greeks and Romans used swords of rather similar form, and 24
also another type which tended to broaden near the point,
bringing the weight forward and adding impetus to both the thrust
and the cut.

Mention has already been made, (p. 4), of the rare but beautiful
swords of the dark ages, made in whole or in part of laminated
metal resembling the Damascus steel of the Middle East, (cf. p. 20).
Such swords were carried by the Vikings who harried the coast of
Britain and extended their voyages even to North America. These
swords had long, straight, symmetrically double-edged blades, a
short hilt, and a short crossbar guard between blade and hilt. They
were very powerful in a downward slash, but too heavy to be
manipulated easily as thrusting weapons.

By the fifteenth century the crossbar and the hilt had become longer,
giving the weapon a better balance, but the general character of the
arm remained the same. With the longer hilt, both hands could be
used, considerably increasing the power of the weapon (Fig. 29 [1],
also title page illustration). This tendency continued in the sixteenth
century until it culminated in the enormous two-handed swords used
by the professional mercenary soldiers, or landesknechts (Fig. 29
[2]). Such swords were over five feet long, with immense drooping
guards and long leather-wrapped hilts.
Fig. 30. How many figures are carved in the solid steel of this court
sword hilt?
As the sixteenth century advanced, sword blades became narrower,
lighter, and more adapted for thrusting, while guards developed
rings and curved knuckle-guards to protect the out-thrust hand (Fig.
29 [4], [3]). The new method of fighting had definite advantages
over the old slashing system, which required the sword to be 25
raised high, exposing the body, before a blow could be struck,
and soon the thrusting sword, or rapier, was used everywhere. The
system of rings which formed the guard grew more complicated and
finally coalesced into a solid metal cup, which completely shielded
the hand within it (Fig. 29 [6], [8]). Sometimes a dagger (Fig. 29
[5], [7]) was held in the left hand to parry the opponent’s sword
blade, but eventually this was abandoned and fencers learned to
parry with the rear portion of their own blades, before making a
second thrust (riposte) with the point. Action grew faster and faster,
and swords lighter and more manageable, until by the seventeenth
century the customary weapon was the court sword, with a short,
single-handed hilt, a small flat guard often magnificently decorated
in chiselled steel, and a relatively short, light blade having a needle-
like point, and often without any sharp cutting edge at all (Fig. 30).
Fig. 31. A rondel dagger with a silver handle.
Fig. 32. An outfit for a hunter: dagger, knife, awl, and larding needle,
all fitting into one scabbard.
In addition to the sword, the dagger was often used as a 26
supplementary weapon which could still be carried for self-
protection when courtesy or convenience made the wearing of a
sword impracticable. Daggers were made in a number of special
shapes, varying with changes of fashion. In the fifteenth century two
popular forms were the rondel dagger (Fig. 31) which had guard and
pommel in the form of disks, and the kidney dagger (then known by
a less-printable name and worn, with the naive exhibitionism of pre-
Victorian days, directly below the belt buckle) which had a straight,
simple hilt and a short guard of ball-like form. Italians of the
sixteenth century liked the anelace, with its drooping guard and
short, wide, sharply tapering blade. Mention has already been made
of the left-hand daggers of the seventeenth century. The stiletto,
without a guard other than a short cross-bar, was also popular at
this time. Hunters and landesknechts often carried a complete outfit
of small tools in the scabbard with their dagger; such a trousse (Fig.
32) was very convenient when preparing freshly-killed venison for
the cook or when eating around a camp fire.
 LANCES AND POLE ARMS
The chief arm of the mounted knight was the lance, a weapon
having a long and often quite heavy wooden shaft and a steel point.
Near the butt its diameter was reduced to provide a comfortable
hand grip, and just in front of this grip there was applied a vamplate
or conical hand guard of steel. Behind the grip there was attached a
thick iron ring called a graper, which, when the lance was in use,
rested against the hook or lance-rest projecting from the right side
of the knight’s breastplate. The graper thus served as a thrust
bearing, and put directly behind the point of the lance the entire
momentum of horse and rider. When such a projectile made a direct
hit upon an opponent something had to give. Either the opponent
was knocked completely off his horse, or his back was broken, or the
lance was shattered.

Foot soldiers also employed arms with long wooden shafts, of which
by far the commonest was the pike, which had a very simple steel
point and butt ferrule respectively on the ends of a slender rod of
wood about fourteen feet long. This was the arm of the great bodies
of mercenary infantry which did so much of the fighting of the
seventeenth century. A company of such men, formed into a square
or circle, the front rank kneeling, the second standing, and both
holding their pikes with the butts against the ground and the points
projecting outward, was almost invulnerable to cavalry, whose
horses would not charge against the forest of pike-points. The one
effective maneuver against them was for some of the cavalry to
dismount and attack swinging great two-handed swords, which
could beat down the pike points and allow the cavalry to ride in.

Lance and pike were simple utilitarian tools; few have survived. But
there are other pole arms, from the fifteenth century on, which
offered more opportunity to individual taste in form and decoration;
a number of these are present in the Museum’s collection. 27
Some (Fig. 33) were developments of the simple spear point,
as for example (1) the type called an ox-tongue or (2) a boar spear
provided with a toggle to prevent a wounded animal from charging
right up the shaft of the weapon which transfixed him. In (3), now a
well-developed partisan, the toggle has been replaced by a
projecting spur at each side of the base. In (4) these spurs have
become large and ornamental, the weapon is decorated with
etching, and has become a ceremonial object rather than a weapon
for actual fighting. (5) is a partisan of the state guard of Augustus
the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1697-1733), and
is even more noticeably designed for display purposes only.
Fig. 33. Spear-type pole arms, XV-XVII centuries. Developing from a
simple tool for stabbing to a decorated badge of office.

Other pole arms are developments of the axe. Military axes (Fig. 34
[1], [2]) had handles somewhat shorter than those of pikes, spears
or partisans but longer than the short-handled axes used on
horseback. They were particularly popular for use in judicial combats
or “trial by battle”. Each contestant in a law suit would swear to the
truth of his claim, and call upon God to prove its truth. The two
men, armed with such axes, would fight until one was killed or
driven out of the ring. The victor was thus proven to have told 28
the truth, while the unsuccessful contestant, if still alive, was
executed for perjury. Such axes, capable of defending the right,
were made with special care, and were highly valued by their
surviving owners.

Fig. 34. Axe-type pole arms, XV-XVII centuries. The earlier ones, at
the left, were used in judicial duels, the later, at the right, were held
by warders of the doors of princes.

Axes with longer shafts were known as halberds, and were usually
provided with a sharpened hook at the back of the axe blade to
permit a man on foot to catch and cut the bridle rein of an attacking
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