“A dramatic ontological circumstance”: history and double consciousness in the Mexican intellectual tradition

Abstract:

There is a long debate in the Mexican intellectual tradition about how the country relates to its own history, particularly with the process of Mexico’s entrance into modernity and the no less recurrent emergence of explanations that tried to justify the country’s “backwardness”. In the article, we propose to think about this problem in two moments: firstly, through a generation of intellectuals that in the mid-twentieth century characterized this hard relationship with history through notions such as escape, inauthenticity, trauma, denial, rupture, etc. In a second moment, the same problem is approached, but from the perspective of the Mixtec leader and activist Francisco López Bárcenas, who proposes a renegotiation of the very notion of time that presides Mexican national history idea.

Keywords:
History; Double consciousness; Mexico