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A Melting Pot Boils Over: A Hard Look at Mexico's Cultural Revolution

On Thursday, February 15 at 7 p.m. in PAC 134, history professor Stephen Lewis will inaugurate the spring semester Friends of History's lecture series, Building Bridges: Historians View the Construction of Nationality. Echoing the title of the series, Lewis's talk is called "Building Bridges or Driving Wedges?: Post-Revolutionary Nation-Building in Mexico before 1940."

Lewis was raised in Oxnard and Ojai, California, and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989 with degrees in history and Latin American studies. European history had been his first love, but Lewis was eventually won over to Latin American history because of his appreciation for the Spanish language, his crush on a teacher from Argentina, and his passionate opposition to President Reagan's Central America policies in the 1980s.

When Lewis decided to go to graduate school, he again forsook Europe for Latin America, in part because the European historian's job market was saturated. Lewis added, "With Latin American history, I could express my political ideas in my work." He earned a Ph.D. from UC, San Diego in 1997 with a dissertation he's now turning into a book, "Revolution and the Rural Schoolhouse: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, Mexico, 1913Ð1948."

"I chose this topic after a five-week bus ride through Mexico in 1992," Lewis said. "I knew I was interested in nationalism, state-building, and Indians, and I definitely wanted to stay in the early twentieth century. So, I bought a one-way plane ticket to Chiapas -- the southern-most state in Mexico -- and began my trip.

"Chiapas immediately enchanted me. It seemed stuck in the nineteenth century, complete with rigid class and ethnic divisions. The state is also visually gorgeous with mountains, jungle, waterfalls, and pine forests. After 10 days there, I traveled north by bus. But the images of Chiapas stayed with me."

Chiapas is an excellent laboratory for Lewis's historical study of state- and nation-building. "There are more than a dozen indigenous ethnic groups in Chiapas," Lewis said, "and its proximity to Guatemala complicates the sense of nationalism even more. In my period of study, ranchers and coffee planters, many of German descent, controlled Indian labor and local politics. They fiercely resisted the reforms associated with the revolution, including social and cultural policies."

Lewis is much the romantic -- sincere, intense, and enthusiastic for all his endeavors. He doesn't describe a certain people as "poor" but as suffering "grinding poverty." Photos of Zapata and Pancho Villa adorn his office on the second floor of Trinity. Last year he received both a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and a Spencer Foundation Grant for research in Chiapas. With a colleague at Maryland, he's currently working on an anthology of essays on Mexico's cultural revolution from 1920 to 1940, to be published by Duke later this year.

In his lecture, Lewis will consider the effects of Mexico's post-revolutionary cultural policy. Recent research suggests that no other state in the Western hemisphere produced as much cultural capital promoting a nationalization of culture as the Mexican government during this period. So why did the government sink scarce resources into cultural programs? And what version of Mexican identity became "national"? Finally, did Mexican nationalism bring people together or pull them apart?

Lewis will look at the creation of a patriotic aesthetic, including the muralist movement and nationalist music, cinema, and radio. He will then explore what being "Mexican" could possibly have meant to Indians who didn't speak Spanish or to Catholics persecuted for their beliefs by official government policy. Finally, Lewis will reflect on whether the victors of the revolution used nationalist cultural policy to unify the country in the face of foreign imperialism or to simply forestall future rebellions and legitimize the power of the new regime.

For more information, call Carl Peterson, chair of the Department of History, at x6475.

Thomasin Saxe, College of Humanities and Fine Arts