Death and its commemoration have long been integral to Mexican culture. From pre-Hispanic rituals, through colonial Catholic rites, to nineteenth-century satires by Guadalupe Posada, the trope of death has weighed heavily on perceptions of the nation's evolution. Recent times have magnified this unusual obsession. From Octavio Paz's perorations on its central role in Mexican self-identity to the recent orgy of drug cartel massacres, which saw severed heads and cadavers posted as trophies, and the revived and popularised worship of Santa Muerte, it has demarcated Mexican cultural life from other countries. Few tourist venues exploit memory so coarsely as the ‘mummies of Guanajuato’, for example. The nineteenth century reignited this secular compulsion, as half of the nation's territory was snatched by Mexico's upstart northern neighbour. the United States, boosting nostalgia and defensive reclamation of heroes who defended what remained of the nation's honour and identity. The rule of Porfirio Díaz offered an opportunity to reassert a badly damaged sense of origins. Matthew D. Esposito's work concentrates on the political manipulation of national myths and heroes through the stage management of funerals, the ‘pantheonisation’ of the remains of defenders of the nation, the construction of monuments and memorials, and the co-option of the masses into the process of nation-building.

The book traces various themes. The ‘modernisation’ of main cities brought the incorporation of new outlooks and techniques into the burial process; notoriously, the electrification of the capital's tram system was adapted for elaborate hearses, which impressed the populace, though Díaz for a time suspended their use, suspecting that something as mysterious as electricity might not be suitable for spiritual ends. The perfection of state funerals is analysed: ‘as hegemonic political discourses, funerals smoothed out the rough edges of contentious history to harmonise realities in the present’. The cultivation of the celebration of national holidays became an art form in its own right, whether ‘patriotic transaction or false pretense’; it certainly helped that Díaz's birthday and saint's day coincided with 15/16 September, allowing the dictator to ally himself with the grandeur of the Independence Day celebrations that he inaugurated. The fusion of state funerals and organised celebrations is deconstructed to ‘disclose the cultural politics that reinforced the Porfirian dictatorship at its peak’. Special attention is given to the way in which these techniques were used to create the ‘exalted trinity of our national religion’, that is, by constructing an almost seamless linkage between Hidalgo, Juárez and Díaz, via the vocabulary and rituals of martyrology. An almost macabre fascination emerged with disinterring and reconsecrating the remains of national heroes, such as the skull and bones of Independence leaders like Hidalgo – shades of the fetishisation of Santa Anna's leg in earlier times.

In a very thoroughly researched and detailed manner, Esposito explores these and other features of the lengthy dictatorship's manipulation of popular support and consolidation of its own power by appropriating the glories of the past. There is no shortage of anecdotes to illustrate the extreme effort expended. For example, there were no fewer than 110 state funerals in the 35 years of the regime, an average of one every four months for a generation! In the first year of electric operation of the tram system, which by 1906 carried 90 per cent of funerals, over 1,000 people were killed or injured by the cars. Given the irregular structure of the rail system, it took over a month to transport the corpse of the anticlerical General González Ortega from Zacatecas for his state funeral in the capital, but 100,000 people filed past his body overnight. In 1889 Lerdo de Tejada's corpse was repatriated from New York. Having reached Ciudad Juárez by rail, the cortège then stopped for 30 minutes in each of ten major halts en route to the capital, to receive ceremonial respect by worthies and populace. Never one to miss the significance of an anniversary, Díaz even contrived to marry his niece, Delfina, on 2 April, the date of his greatest victory, the defence of Puebla in 1867 (the only battle Mexico won on its own ground in the nineteenth century, despite losing the war to the French), so that national festivities would forever co-celebrate his militarism and his marriage. A wealth of similar detail makes the book a fascinating read, with plenty of helpful photographs and illustrations from Posada too.

The theoretical position of the book combines Gramsci's ‘hegemony’ and Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’: ‘For three decades the Porfirian state promoted more concrete notions of national community than any previous government in Mexico. This is how citizens of marginally unified countries imagined their nations into existence. It is also how subjugated peoples imagined the mortality of states.’ Such arguments are repeated consistently throughout, and Esposito does a good job of illustrating hegemony in action, though he does also concede that not all the popular celebrations at such events are purely hegemonic, as anyone who has observed the scenes in the Zócalo on Independence night or spent the Day of the Dead in a village cemetery will recognise. In Octavio Paz's words, ‘Somos un pueblo ritual … El Mexicano se siente arrancado del seno de esa realidad, a un tiempo creadora y destructiva, Madre y Tumba … La muerte Mexicana es el espejo de la vida de los mexicanos. La muerte nos seduce.’

To explore this acknowledged conundrum, Esposito could well also have employed Anthony Smith's concept of ‘ethnoscapes’ to explore the antiquity of the links between hegemony and popular belief in national identity. In his Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 1999), Smith suggests: ‘The territory they come to occupy by chance must be turned into a historic necessity. Land must become an ancestral homeland and landscape an ethnoscape. Only in this way can land and landscape inspire popular devotion and mass sacrifice, both of which are necessary if an often heterogenous population is to be moulded into a “nation”.’ Could Mexican funerals be such an ‘ethnoscape’?