The memory hole

Secretary of Public Education Alonso Lujambio is right when he says that “no textbook is written in blood, and none is the word of God,” but much of Mexican history — which is written in blood and often did involve the word of God (or the gods).

Three hundred years of Mexican history — which is a century longer than the Republic existed  — have been removed from grade school texts, specifically the period from the Conquest through Independence.  Somehow, Mexico went from a nation dominated by the Nahuatl-speaking worshippers of Huitzapotchli to one run by Spanish speaking Roman Catholics through a process one must wait until high school to discover.

Mexico’s culture (or cultures) is a result of syncretic processes over the course of centuries, and — without writing a whole dissertation on the subject (there’s five years of posts here, if you want to read through), it’s impossible to talk about contemporary Mexico, or any part of Mexican history after 1810, or, for that matter, any particular aspect of Mexican political and cultural life, without at least paying attention to those three hundred years of Spanish domination.

Of course  Santayana’s “Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it” comes to mind.    Without indulging in too much rhetoric, it looks as if the attempt is to impose a forgetting of history, in order to doom people to repeat the lesson of long-term foreign domination.  And, the Secretary of Public Instruction has forgotten the lessons of the colonial era himself — people, like the Viceroys did when they wished to ignore the King’s dictates, may “hear but not obey”.

Which also comes to mind is Marx (Karl, not Groucho):  “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”   Attempts to undo the Mexican experience have led, over the past few years, to tragedies large and small:  Tlatelolco,  Acteal, Oaxaca… all rooted in attempts to override the people’s history and create a Mexico without a past.

School reform was a popular issue with the people, and most have been in favor of radical changes.  The farce is that these unacceptable textbooks — and the mockery they are already drawing (one day into their distribution) — not the cuts in the education budget (to support the “war on drugs” for the benefit of the latest colonial power the leadership would like to pretend doesn’t exist) is likely to do more to undermine the credibility of that leadership than almost anything else.