Purpose: The Mexican Revolution, which brought an end to the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz, entailed a radical reorganization of the government, a new constitution, and a new way of writing history. The Revolution remains a landmark in Mexico’s official history; the current president, for instance, positions his administration as a “Fourth Transformation”after the Revolution, Reform, and Independence. As such, it provides a useful point of comparison with previous understandings of the past.
Task: Quoting Yael Zerubavel, Thomas Benjamin notes that “a basic ‘story line,’ the master narrative, ‘is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past'” is key to the construction of the nation. Can this concept help us understand previous depictions of national history? How did ideas of the past change over time?
second, reply to classmates response below
The idea that the ‘master narrative’ “is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past” reminds me a lot of our readings early on in the class. I remember the week 4 discussion when we all discussed how important heritage was to the Mesoamerican people. I think that this concept described in the prompt could tie into why bloodline was so important in Mesoamerican society. Martinez ch. 4 discusses how indigenous societies were constructed by familiar bloodlines, and the social classes relied on genealogy. This emphasis on heritage could represent “a general notion of their shared past”, and this comfort over a shared past could have been why those societies thrived, which would effectively prove Benjamin’s point. These ideas changed when the Spanish invaded because the indigenous people had the colonizers to worry about instead of other indigenous groups, and the Spanish were in control so the indigenous people had less of a choice as to who to surround themselves with. And then I think the division evolved to be of either Spanish decent or indigenous.
