The following was written for a Chicano History class I'm taking right now through my local community college.
The “Indigenous Problem” of Porfirio
Diaz’s regime fascinated me in that dark way history’s ugly sides often do. That
lesson functioned as a cautionary tale of the real, tangible impact, to all
sides and parties, of systematic discrimination and its targeted destruction of
a group’s narrative agency. However, the unintended consequences of Diaz’s move
to replace the Mexican working population provide another lesson, a
pragmatically optimistic trust in the resilience of humanity and our innate
tendency toward agency and self-determination, the very tendencies that, once
the many layers of prejudices, of injustices, and of imperialist vices are
stripped away, form the core of the original American experiment.
Porfirio Diaz, dictator of Mexico
for thirty-four years, created a “technocracy,” ruling with a group known as
the Científicos. His government, which lasted from 1876 to 1910, embraced a
system of “scientific politics” intended to usher Mexico into the modern world.
The Porfiriato coincides neatly with some of the most significant technological
innovations of all time, and Diaz pragmatically turned this era into a source
of his political power. But a modern Mexico required doing away with the old Mexico.
He viewed Mexico’s unskilled and indigenous workforce as an impediment to
national development, and he sought to replace them with European immigrants.
To do so, the Mexican government
began to encourage Americans to consider Mexican laborers. Their “advertising”
was blatantly racist and often contradictory. Mexicans were hard working, but
less productive. They were not troublesome, but they were untrustworthy. They were
wholly “less than,” but because of that, they could be hired far cheaper, and
with less obligation on the part of the farmer or executive, than other labor
sources.
Large landowners and wealthy
capitalists in the United States were happy, of course, to adopt this new labor
force, because Chicanos worked hard, were seen as temporary, and, above all
other reasons, could be paid far less than their Anglo counterparts. The low
wages they received were rationalized by the socially prevailing view that
Mexicans, whether they were seen as fully Indian or as a “mixed-blood” race,
were racially inferior. This belief, a product of the racial pseudo-sciences
and burgeoning eugenics movement popular at the time, fit in well with the
modernization platform of the Porfiriato.
The US economy bolstered and the
Mexican government ideologically satisfied, poor Mexicans, particularly those
of indigenous and mestizo heritage, were left essentially an exiled people. They
were not wanted in their homeland, nor in their adopted land, though they were
needed there. They would no longer be anything but alien, unwelcome in the
societies in which they attempted to move.
I am deeply fascinated by the concept of narrative
space, the idea that the stories and histories of a people are written, not
just constrained, but truly written
by the amount of space they are permitted within the larger narratives of world
history. As the saying goes, history is written by the victors. A society or
group diminished to a footnote learns to exist in the space of a footnote. Conquest,
as we’ve shown throughout this course, does just that. In the context of
narratives and historical storytelling through which I learn, marginalization
is literal. A conquered people is reduced to the margins.
This is why I seized in particular upon the exile
narrative produced by the “Indigenous Problem” of the Diaz regime. For peoples
without a homeland, the exile narrative offers a place in which to exist. The
exile narrative is unique among historical archetypes because it is a product of
the conquest narrative, while conquest is, by design, final and fatal. “All
exiles are distinguished,” says the Broadway musical Evita, and to a large extent, while they may yet be poor, trod
upon, or disenfranchised, they are. Exiles are distinguished because they are
survivors. Jewish history, for example,
is marked by the exile narrative. For a religion centered on the idea of a
chosen people and a promised homeland, the cycle of exile and return is traumatic.
But the presence of this narrative in the Torah, that is, in their theological and
ethnic core, lends a spiritual justification to this cycle of persecution. The
exile narrative therefore becomes an object of celebration and resilient
beauty. Israeli Jews often refer to themselves as sabras, meaning desert cactuses, in reference to their survival
against three millennia of seemingly impossible odds. In Unit 1, I noticed the
parallel with the eagle, snake, and cactus motif of the Mixteca legend and
today, of the Mexican flag. Perhaps it takes a desert to remind humanity that
they are spiritual cacti.
Interestingly for a story so tied to one nation, the
culture of this narrative has become a symbol for outcast peoples worldwide.
The sentiment immortalized in Psalm 137 (By the rivers of Babylon we sat down
and wept when we remembered Zion…) is common to African-American and
post-colonial literature, and “Pharaoh, let my people go” is a universal
rallying cry for the oppressed. In this class, it was visible in the origins of
La Raza and the early Robin Hood-esque heroes, and in modern Chicano culture it
surfaces, as it does throughout the Pan-Latin American community (the community
that to this day embraces and identifies with La Raza), in the frequent usage
of “fuerza” and “juntos” in slogans, prayers, catchphrases, and more. We are
stronger together, for we are alone in the world, the perception goes.
“The Internationale,” an anthem used throughout the
world by Marxist and Socialist groups, contains the lines “No one will grant us
deliverance/Neither god nor emperor/To create happiness for man/We depend on
our own labor.” The emotions harnessed in verses like these reflect the pent-up
political frustrations of the disenfranchised and show the innate draw of
collective philosophies, of anything that can promise universal fraternity, or
at least brotherhood with one’s fellow exiled or defeated countrymen. It is
also this very spirit that would lead to the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the downfall
of Porfirio Diaz.
Sometimes I refer to myself as “a scholar and a
storyteller,” my cheesy way of classifying my way of processing learning into
narratives. My own educational philosophies are complex, convoluted, and
contradictory, but I continue to draw back to the central humanist idea that
learning is at heart a living story in which the student is a participant. I am
becoming more aware lately of the impact of self-awareness of the narratives in
which one resides and operates, the power of turning the narrative on its head.
The writers, philosophers, and advocates of La Raza
took this to new heights, blending past, present, and future identities in that
way that really, only Hispanic cultures can. Unfortunately, I cannot quote a
Mexican or Chicano writer, but I think of Ruben Dario’s “To Roosevelt” and Jose
Marti’s “Nuestra América,” both of which, through a complicated system of
references to Roman myths and Aztec gods, to progress and to tradition, call
for a hemisphere united, despite and because of, its centuries of persecution,
its syncretic cultures, and the one superpower that often moves contrary to the
benefit of the other states. Learning to stop separating “American history”
from “history of the Americas” is helping me rethink the imperialist lens
through which I have subconsciously viewed the world.
To see the exile narrative played out by an American
people is, in a way, a lesson in my own citizenship. As a Christian, my
religious identity is tied to the exile narrative of the Jewish people, though
my ancestors themselves did not live the exodus. In the same way, interpreting
a narrative of exile and ultimate survival in American history forms a part of
what it is to be an American. For the immigrants at the turn of the century, to
become necessary in a new place after being evicted from the old as “useless”
was a radical act, a continuation of the American tradition of innovation. Of
course, early Chicanos’ ability to rise was largely defeated by widespread
racism, but, without knowing it, these immigrants nourished the American ideal
that the ragtag, the exile, could make something new. Hearing these stories for
the first time, stories long buried under Manifest Destiny and How the West Was
Won, raises new questions of choice and will, of the origins of American
culture and the culture of the Americas, and of the immutable human spirit.
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