"Batallas en el Desierto': Racialization and Colonization(s) in the Creation of Modern Mexico

• In Event: Reading Coloniality in Mexico through a Transhistoric, Transgeographic Lens

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, when Mexico’s well-known poet José Pacheco penned a short novella with autobiographical naunces, Batallas del desierto, he explored his childhood in post-World War II Mexico. It was an era filled with veiled but often devastating racial and class battles as bureaucrats sought to create a “modern” Mexico based on economic, racial, and social paradigms imported from the new world power to the north while still struggling with the legacy of racial and cultural divides from Spanish imperialism centuries before. Looking through the haze of memory, Pacheco’s sixty year old protagonist recalls being a ten-year old in a public school who witnessed a world in which old racialized/class structures were giving way to new ones that created even larger injustices.

Borrowing Mabel Moraña’s idea that coloniality is “a term that encompasses the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects” (Coloniality at Large 2), this paper examines the complex cultural structures that marginalized a large section of Mexico’s population in two distinct historical periods and how Pacheco creates an evocative canvas for us to perceive the mechanics of this process. His work illustrates ongoing power disparities produced by imperialism and, more specifically, the particular transhistoric and transgeographic processes of Mexico’s deep spatial, temporal, and ideological relationship with imperial powers. His work is paradigmatic of a generation of authors that cannot be fully understood without taking into account the persistent engagement in Mexican culture with the colonial past and present.

Author

• Kathleen Ann Myers, Indiana University