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El culto a Juárez: La construcción retórica del héroe (1872–1976)

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-9052345

1527-1900

Samuel Brunk,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Rebeca Villalobos Álvarez's El culto a Juárez is a lucid, innovative, and closely reasoned analysis of the rhetoric around the figure of Benito Juárez during the century after his death. Three extensive chapters cover the history of the cult, a rhetorical analysis of its elements, and an exploration of the “sublime” in two artistic representations. Informed by a deep reading of visual culture, Villalobos Álvarez's work goes beyond the manipulation of Juárez's image on behalf of particular interests to explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics. She argues that Juárez “se ha constituido no sólo en un emblema político, sino en un verdadero símbolo cultural y esto se debe, en gran medida, a la implementación de estrategias que integran rasgos estéticos y argumentativos en una misma forma de representación” (p. 19).Chapter 1 tracks the image of Juárez through the century that followed his 1872 death. The first of three periods in the image's development that Villalobos Álvarez identifies began with his funeral, and during the next two decades he was associated with liberty, order, and law in what was essentially a funerary cult. The second stage began in 1891, when the Porfirian state began to appropriate his memory and Juárez came to embody national unity and the legitimacy of the state. He also became what Villalobos Álvarez—providing an interesting window into the development of indigenismo—calls the “sublime Indian,” celebrated not so much for his indigeneity as for having been able to transcend it. This period included the first public monuments, the most important of them being the neoclassical Hemiciclo a Juárez in the capital. Finally, following the revolution, Juárez became a proponent of social justice, and by the 1930s a fuller embrace of his indigeneity replaced “the sublime Indian.” Public education, muralism, and cinema promoted this reformulation and broadly diffused his image.In what the author calls “el eje vertebrador de toda mi propuesta,” chapter 2 analyzes the cult's properties using Aristotle's three branches of rhetoric: encomiastic, judicial, and deliberative (p. 22). The first of these categories elevated Juárez's image through the reiteration of attributes presented as self-evident, promoting passive contemplation. While the commemorative speech was the classic iteration of this form, the author notes that Juárez's simplified image was also commodified—and linked to popular patriotism—in photographs, stamps, medals, and household articles. Judicial rhetoric, meanwhile, is related to political dispute, and its practitioners used the hero to legitimate other judgments. While political oratory is the obvious form of judicial rhetoric, Villalobos Álvarez again provides visual examples, nicely showing how Juárez was the foil in a series of caricatures from El Hijo de Ahuizote of corrupt Porfirian figures. With regard to deliberative rhetoric, Villalobos Álvarez argues that though we often cynically assume that all rhetoric is propagandistic, it may also include genuine “intellectual objects.” While still related to political power, deliberative rhetoric entails more complex argumentation with the goal not simply of winning a debate but of serving the public good. It promoted Juárez as a model of citizenship, for instance, within the emerging public education system.In chapter 3, the most challenging of the book, Villalobos Álvarez examines how two works of art exemplify the concept of the “sublime” by transcending rhetorical categories and making Juárez into an aesthetic object “que se torna extraordinario y en muchos sentidos inaprehensible” (p. 175). The first of the pieces is the sculpture by Juan and Manuel Islas for Juárez's mausoleum at the San Fernando cemetery, which represents Juárez's corpse paired with a female representation of the mourning nation. Borrowing from his death mask, this work appeals, according to Villalobos Álvarez, to sentiments of “horror y dolor,” but she finds its message imprecise (p. 187). The second work is the giant Cabeza de Juárez erected on the periphery of Mexico City by Luis Arenal as part of the state's commemoration of the centennial of Juárez's death. On the surface, the statue could not be more different from the mausoleum sculpture. Seeking neither beauty nor realism, Arenal's piece achieves sublimity partly through its size alone, which makes it difficult to view as a whole, as well as in its expression of power. Villalobos Álvarez considers it a failed effort to capture the contradictions of Mexico's civic culture and thus as compatible with the revolution's failing political project.This book is a methodological tour de force in its ability to capture the elements of the Juárez myth and how they have functioned. More “culturalista,” in the author's words, than socioanthropological, it is not, however, a study of reception: while Villalobos Álvarez does consider how observers might react to expressions of the cult, those observers are abstractions, not rooted in any particular community (p. 218). As a result, the book is far more about what the cult is than what it does. With that caveat, the book is an analysis from which readers interested in political culture will profit greatly.