Excavating a Past: What Archaeology Can Teach Us about Porfirian Nation Building

While the Porfiriato conjures up images of leaders spellbound by all things European, the period saw an intense interest in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.  The government placed guards at ruins, strengthened federal legislation over the monuments, and in 1885 established the first agency exclusively to protect them, the General Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments of the Republic.  It filled the National Museum (Museo Nacional Mexicano) with relics and reconstructed the nation’s first archaeological site at Teotihuacán.  Taken as a whole, this was Mexico’s first concerted effort to display and control the ancient ruins.  Historians, however, have tended to either overlook the Porfirian interest in antiquity or to characterize it as merely “arty” and “cerebral.”  Far from being an artsy or purely intellectual pursuit, the archaeological project was intertwined with elite efforts to build the nation.  This paper focuses on archaeology as a window into the nationalism of the times.  Looking at the laws concerning the ruins, for instance, shows us that leaders in the early part of the period possessed a defensive sort of nationalism, one that was wary of foreign archaeologists and adamant about retaining artifacts within the country’s borders.  By the turn of the century this approach had been replaced by a more cosmopolitan stance, a perspective guided by the belief that archaeology was a universal science not to be hindered by national boundaries.  This paper examines the Porfirian archaeological project in order to gain insight into the nationalism of the elites and their efforts to build the nation.