The ‘Event’ of Nationalism

Abstract

This essay focuses on the role played by a series of events and how they were interpreted to have a foundational meaning for the creation of Mexican identity, nationhood and statehood. It compares the creation of Mexican statehood with the portrayal of Cuban nationhood, via the use of the supernatural signification and resonance associated with saints and/or apparitions of the divine. The three test cases used in this study are, for Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and for Cuba, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and the Virgen de Regla. In each case the events on which a sense of nationhood were pinned operate in a dual sense in that their meaning was constructed retroactively. The work of the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, particularly his study, L’Être et l‘événement (1988), is brought to bear in an attempt to argue through how the originary events achieved political meaning over time and did so via a process of nomination.

Este ensayo examina el papel desempeñado por una serie de eventos históricos y cómo éstos fueron interpretados en un sentido fundacional para así crear la identidad, la nación y el estado de México. Se compara la creación del Estado Mexicano con la representación de la nación cubana a través de la alusión a lo sobrenatural cuya resonancia está asociada con los santos y/o la aparición de lo divino. Los tres ejemplos estudiados en este ensayo son: para México, la Virgen de Guadalupe, y para Cuba, la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre y la Virgen de Regla. En los tres casos—según veremos—el nacionalismo se plasmó retrospectivamente. La obra del filósofo francés, Alain Badiou, particularmente su estudio, L’Être et l‘événement (1988), se emplea para analizar la manera en que los eventos originarios poco a poco alcanzaron un sentido político a través de un proceso de nominación.

Keywords:

• Mexican identity
• Mexican nationhood
• Mexican statehood
• Cuban nationhood
• Virgin of Guadalupe
• Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre
• Virgen de Regla
• the event (Badiou)

Palabras clave:

• identidad de México
• estado de México
• nación de México
• nación cubana
• la Virgen de Guadalupe
• la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre
• la Virgen de Regla
• el evento (Badiou)

Notes

1 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007), 203.

2 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, 203.

3 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, 23–24.

4 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, 205.

5 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, 205–06.

6 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, 216.

7 David Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2001), 228.

8 Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2007), 50.

9 As Moses says: ‘I am slow of speech and tongue’ (Exodus 4:10) and then in Exodus 4:11: ‘But he said, “Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person” ’. Though he is at first reluctant Moses does eventually obey God's command.

10 What follows is based in the main on The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's ‘Huei tlamahuiçoltica’ of 1649, ed. & trans. Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole & James Lockhart (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998).

11 See image in ‘The Banner of Cortes’, <http://www.holymary.info/bannerofcortes.html> (last consulted 18 March 2015).

12 See the discussion in Monique Sherer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of the Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, The American Historical Review, 107:2 (2002), 1412–40 (p. 1422).

13 See Carlos Serra y Pickman, La Virgen de Regla (Sevilla: Imprenta Raimundo Blanco, 1935), 9.

14 Sherer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery’, 1422.

15 Sherer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery’, 1430.

16 Sherer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery’, 1422.

17 For a discussion of the cult of the Black Madonna in Poland, see Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black Madonna, 11–47.

18 Mary Lee Nolan & Sidney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989); quoted in Sherer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery’, 1414, n. 6. For further discussion of the cult of the Black Madonna in Europe, see Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Arkana 1996) and Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004).

19 Based mainly on Testimony of Captain Juan, Investigation of the Virgin's Apparition, Santago del Prado, 1 April 1687, fols 12–18^v, AGI-SD 363, Archivo General de las Indias; see also María Elena Díaz, ‘Writing Royal Slaves into Colonial Studies’, in Rethinking the Past, Retrieving the Future/Repensando el pasado, recuperando el futuro, ed. Verónica Salles-Reese (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Univ. Javeriana, 2005), 252–69.

20 For further discussion of the espousal of ‘santería’ by the revolutionary regime in the 1960s and 1970s, see my essay, ‘How Popular is Cuban Popular Culture?’, in Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect, ed. Geoffrey Kantaris & Rory O’Bryen (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013), 93–112.

21 León-Portilla is referring to the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer; see his ‘Aztec Codices: Literature and Philosophy’, in Aztecs, ed. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma & Felipe Solís Olguín (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), 64–71 (p. 65); the codex concerned is reproduced at p. 66.

22 Quoted in John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 110.

23 See E. E. Kellett, A Short History of Religions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 37–98 (Judaism); 166–99 (early Christianity); 331–69 (Mohammedanism).

24 Robert L. Winzeler, Anthropology and Religion: What We Know, Think and Question (Plymouth: Altamira Press, 2008), 103.