“Para Brindarnos Con la Caja de Pandora”: Romantic Nationalism and Beleaguered Mexican Moderados

The U.S.-Mexican War was the beginning of fraught times for the Mexican Republic.  To be sure, losing roughly half of its territory and a quarter of its population was a terrible blow to the nation’s sovereignty.  But in addition to this affront from the North, Mexico was plagued, both during the war and after, with serious internal instability.  Historiography often casts the war as the spark that led to the conflagrations of the next twenty years from the Wars of La Reforma and the French Intervention, to the final, existential battle between Liberals and Conservatives.  War and peace quickly bled into each other, culminating in Juarez’s victory and a transformed Mexico.  Politicians and generals, sometimes both, were involved in moving Mexico from instability to stability, threading the needle between the twin perils of tyranny and anarchy.

Historically, it is one thing to define a political platform, and to describe the military objectives emanating from this or that commander.  It is another to explain how men and women away from the front and away from Chapultepec articulated a solution to chronic political instability.  As such, in this paper, I aim to supplement the traditional political history of Mexican nationhood by taking a cultural history approach to political instability: how did liberal factions use cultural resources to advance their vision of political stability and to articulate their unique vision of a modern Mexico in the wake of war?  Using a series of poems embedded within a moderate liberal newspaper, El Republicano, I call attention to the process by which politics impinged upon liberals’ daily lives.  Perhaps even more than cannons or legislative sessions, cultural reflections upon the trials of war were a vital force in the articulation of an elite vision of what Mexico should be when the dust finally settled.