En busca del alma nacional

In search of the national soul was the title that was going to have a series of essays in which Alfonso Reyes "would try to interpret and extract the moral of our terrible historical fable: look for the pulse of the homeland [...]: discover the mission of Mexican man on earth, interrogating stubbornly all the ghosts and stones of our tombs and monuments. " Although Reyes never wrote such a series, the story told in this book gives an account of the persecution of this desire on the part of the Mexican archaeologists of the victims of the nineteenth century and the first of the following century. When the archaeological discipline was consolidating, these scholars maintained the concern to investigate in the past to find the origin, the pulse of the country and its message: first, among the chords of nineteenth-century universality, they interpreted the prehispanic remains of the Costa del Gulf as evidence of the black race on the continent and remote contact with Europe: then, at the turn of the century, and in the midst of the post-revolutionary chauvinist spirit, they found the mother culture. Throughout this journey, archaeologists delineated their academic forums, their institutions, their profession, their discipline and their agenda, but above all the narratives to articulate the pre-Hispanic history, the national soul.