If finding the remains of a disgraced and reviled English monarch under a Leicester car park could spark a wave of generously revisionist enthusiasm, little wonder that the discovery of the tomb of Mexico's heroic last emperor should become such an immediate national sensation. Late in 1949, Indian labourers digging beneath the altar of the parish church of Ixcateopan, a town in the mountainous southern state of Guerrero, unearthed a tomb containing what the priest and other local luminaries claimed to be the remains of Cuauhtémoc, last seen hanging from a silk-cotton tree after his brutal torture and execution by Hernán Cortés in February 1525. Although within months the tomb was revealed to be an amateurish fraud, the dramatic find ignited two decades of academic controversy and nationalist exaltation, amounting, in the view of the author of this important and highly original book, to ‘the greatest scandal in the cultural politics of twentieth-century Mexico’ (p. 2).
Paul Gillingham uses the fraud at Ixcateopan (the pun in the title is a nod to Forjando Patria, Manuel Gamio's 1916 indigenista manifesto) as a prism through which to explore key aspects of Mexico's economic, cultural, intellectual and political life over the past century and a half. The delay of almost 60 years between the burial of the bones (c. 1891) and their exhumation late in 1949 posed forensic challenges to Gillingham but also offered narrative opportunities. This six-decade period coincides with the rise of indigenismo, a movement in which Mexican intellectuals reappraised the Indian past and sought to rehabilitate impoverished and neglected indigenous communities through archaeological and anthropological research combined with applied social reform. Most studies of indigenismo have focused on metropolitan intellectuals, national policies and federal projects; few have charted local reception, agency or innovation. The novel discursive framework of indigenismo, combined after 1920 with a proliferation of federal agencies and programmes, offered prospective local leaders potential material and political rewards in return for their identification with the pre-Columbian past. Gillingham approaches indigenismo from below and from the periphery by exploring how a local clan used the memory of the last Aztec emperor as an instrument for the promotion of personal and community interests.
The book is ingeniously structured. Major regional and national developments are explored while simultaneously keeping the story of the fraud at Ixcateopan at the centre of the plot. One is reminded of BBC1's recent Sherlock series in which the viewer is exposed to lengthy, seemingly unrelated detours before being returned to the forensic investigation, wiser for the digression. At the local level, the reader is invited to ponder such questions as who committed the fraud, and why. Who was the historical Cuauhtémoc in provincial Mexico, and what made Ixcateopan and the state of Guerrero during the 1880s and 1890s conducive to fostering such a cult? Why was there such a delay between the burial of the bones and their disinterment? Why were claims of authenticity perpetuated long after conclusive evidence of fraud? Gillingham's emphasis on delving into the rationale and world view of local actors and his understanding of the nuances of political geography make for local history at its best. Much as Luis González in Pueblo en vilo (1968) keeps the reader within the intimate confines of San José de Gracia's Catholic clans and agrarista riff-raff while also tracing the town's engagement with regional, national and even cosmic events, Gillingham enlists the reader's sympathies with the existential anxieties of the people of Ixcateopan in the face of rapid and often violent change.
The scope of this book extends beyond a local history. Listing just a few of the diverse themes tackled reveals its ambition: the impact of the mid-nineteenth-century desamortización (enclosure of common lands) upon local class structures and ethnic identities; the place of masonry, spiritualism and modern medicine among a rising small-town bourgeoisie; the place of Cuauhtémoc within creole nationalist thought from the seventeenth century; the engagement of leading nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals, such as Manuel Payno and Vicente Riva Palacio, with Mexico's rich mythic and archaeological past; the growing penchant of the liberal state from the 1870s for promoting the indigenous past and present, both as the bedrock of national identity and as the target for its reform agenda; the instrumentalist response of local communities to this browning of the national reform agenda in their pursuit of state and federal patronage; the way local elites harnessed their knowledge of the indigenous past in their defence of municipal territory facing encroachment by rival municipalities; how these local actors harnessed leading national archaeologists and indigenistas to their cause, or repelled them; and how the events at Ixcateopan intensified rivalry among three generations of Mexico's leading ethnologists and archaeologists. Such are the themes addressed at length in the book, each seen through the prism of Ixcateopan and a single clan's century-long strategy to carry out and protect an ambitious tomb fraud.
Cuauhtémoc's Bones is the first substantial study to trace in depth the relationship between local and national manifestations of indigenismo while exploring broader economic and political processes. The book is also an important contribution to the literature on everyday nation-state formation. By demonstrating that ‘[f]raud lies at the very heart of nationalism: one man's fraud is another man's invention of tradition and a third man's historia patria’ (p. 220), Gillingham confirms Eric Hobsbawm's view of nationalism as ‘invention of tradition’. Yet by showing how Mexicans, from the national palace to the remotest municipality, could be drawn into passionate debates over the memory of the defiant and tragic last Aztec emperor, he also vividly documents Mexico's peculiarly primordialist brand of modern nationalism.
