Suturas discursivas del nacionalismo revolucionario en México (1925-1946)

This dissertation traces the emergence of a State-sponsored revolutionary culture in Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s through an eminently literary corpus of works. The analysis opens by highlighting the role played by literature in the formation of a politically and culturally homogeneous national identity in the years that followed the Revolution. An identity that was politically construed by the nationalist discourse of the Revolution, socially imagined as rural and peasant, and culturally characterized by machismo, secularism, and political unawareness. In this way, the dissertation argues that the consolidation of a national identity and political hegemony in those terms entailed the removal of marginal subjectivities and spaces: like the urban space of Mexico City and its inhabitants, the villista revolutionaries, the Cristero rebels and communist militants from the body politic because those subjectivities problematized the horizontality of Mexican identity, a process I call the Excisions from the National. In order to problematize these Excisions, I examine the representation of some of those marginal subjectivities and antagonistic identitary positions namely those found in key works of urban revolutionary, Villista, Cristero, and communist literatures. The dissertation traces how these subjectivities challenged revolutionary culture’s narrative of identity and of the nation itself and them moves on to construe what I call the Sutures of the National, a term I have coined to designate the manner in which these marginal subjectivities were later reincorporated to the body politic of the nation in a neutralized way once the revolutionary regime had stabilized during the 1940s and 50s. My analysis concludes by examining how the process of re-incorporating these subjectivities into the symbolic order of national identity led to certain unintended paradoxical binarisms of Mexican culture.