All Politics is Local (and History, too)

The nice thing about a blog is you can do what you want. No pain-in-the-ass referees or editors. No academic brownie points, but no mindless annual reviews, H-indexes, or gruesome get-togethers that academics call “conferences,” “congresses,” or some such either.

What brought this entry on was an acute attack of thought. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often, but there you have it. While cooling my heels to see how a cake in the oven turns out, I entertain myself reading. Some is work-related. Some of it is the grim state of our world. When one genre starts to depress, I switch to the other. This is what the Econ call maximizing at relevant margins.

I’m back to Mexico again, which never depresses for long because it is too damn interesting. So right now I’m reading into the local history of the state of Veracruz, but I’ve also read a couple of interesting academic biographies too. It all connects up, at least in my aging brain.

Two of the biographies I’ve read have famous anthropologists/archeologists as their subject: Tatiana Proskouriakoff is one and Zelia Nuttall is the other.

So who were these characters, and why should anyone care? Actually, you don’t have to care, because both were interested in relatively esoteric matters. Proskouriakoff was a pioneer in the study of the Maya in Mexico. Nuttall worked in Mesoamerican studies more broadly and was present at the creation. They were vastly different personalities: one, Proskouriakoff, very attractive, the other, Ms Nuttall, not so much. Both were very smart, a fact of which Ms Nuttall seemed intent on reminding her audience regularly. Proskouriakoff, a Russian emigre, grew up in Lansdowne, PA, a streetcar suburb of Philadelphia, more genteel a century ago than it is now. She was secure enough to let those surrounding her come to terms with her brilliance, which they inevitably did.

Nuttall was a product of considerable wealth in Northern California and determined to make a mark in Mesoamerican studies, which she did. She played for DH Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent (1926) what Ottoline Morrell did for Aldous Huxley in Chrome Yellow (1921) We are not always lucky in our memorialists, but we get the ones we deserve. To be sure, Nuttall made pioneering contributions to understanding the Mesoamerican sidereal calendar and its monumental artefacts. But she also pioneered linking the Phoenicians to the cultural base of the Americas, a substantial assertion–quite mistaken–of which her biographer conveniently makes no mention. As a result, her biography has a sort of ‘you go girl’ quality that makes it less convincing and amateurish in its way. Such are the joys of contemporary scholarship.

Proskouriakoff’s biography, a product of a more restrained time just twenty years ago, is considerably different in tone, just as its subject was in her approach to life and professional development. She trained as an architect at Penn State (talk about being alone in the world) and eventually turned an encounter with the Maya into pathbreaking work that lead directly to decoding Mayan glyphs. She had an uncanny ability to examine ruins and– by dint of hard work, her savvy, and her training–envision a reconstruction of the form and appearance the original must have taken. She also had to put up with some of her colleagues in the field hitting on her incessantly, in case you wondered. They were different times and female professionals dealt with the harassment as their background and temperament permitted. You end up admiring her rather than wondering how anyone could have tolerated her. I never met her, unfortunately. We were both cigarette smokers.

Even though Proskouriakoff’s biography was brought out by a far less prestigious press, it is a much more compelling (and better edited) book. A variety of factors are at play. For one thing, Proskouriakoff was a contemporary figure (1909-1985) and basically familiar. Nuttall seems Edwardian, if not Victorian (1857-1933), and just oddly remote and unsympathetic, even though she had a tougher time in life than Proskouriakoff. I suspect, historicism apart, the ability of the authors to evoke a life in some sense reflects their familiarity with the subject. Nuttall emerges from documents, basically. That is always a heavy lift, dependent on the historical imagination, and even deep familiarity with the peculiarities of time, place and mores. Proskouriakoff, whose life was sketched out by a long-time assistant, might have been a figure out of the Bolshevik Revolution, but she only returned to Russia once. She was, all told, a slightly exotic kid from Lansdowne, (where her family settled) a Philly suburb not unlike mine–and honestly, I went to a sort of cosmopolitan secondary school that had its share of people not far different from her. I never heard Russian on my school bus, but Hungarian, Spanish, and even the occasional Italian. So, part of the reaction is, well, yeah, I surely knew people like her.

Nuttall, unfortunately, however remote she may seem, reminds me of any number of academics, both male and female, thank you very much. Maybe it was just my sojourn in Northern California as a “Latin Americanist” that did it, but it is a personality type, perhaps more acceptable to men in men, but I found it insufferable in either gender. And in a 1955 essay on originality in Economics, George Stigler nailed virtually every aspect of it, starting with “Read my work because I am a genius.” Quite. Nuttall may have had few rivals, but, alas, she has many peers, and gender is the least of it. Proskouriakoff may not have had much time for Linda Schele’s controversial work on the Maya, but she never seems to have taken a personal dislike to her, much less try to do her down. No comment.

From personal experience, it’s tougher to write about a person who scholarship involves an unfamiliar field, either through lack of training or experience. Writing about someone who did heavy lifting in Mesoamerican studies demands any number of linguistic and technical skills that you don’t pick up casually. I never learned Nahautl because I was too intent on learning economics. That was my choice, and it does put limits on what I will try to do. I learned enough paleography to get proficient at reading documents from New Spain 40 years ago. I’d have to relearn now, and I have neither the time nor the patience to do so. You can’t read every book, and you can’t be proficient in every discipline, even though we encourage undergraduates to double (or triple) major, therefore displaying impressive ignorance in more than one field.

Which, at last, bring us to back to Veracruz. I’ve long had a side interest working on a family firm based there, a group of people known collectively as The Lizardi. Part of what got me interested in these people was their little known ascent in international business and finance in the nineteenth century. I always wondered why these guys and not so many others, since Mexico was full of entrepreneurial merchants in the late colonial period who could have just as easily moved their assets abroad (and some, for sure, did).

My naive hypothesis was that the elder members of the Lizardi group were just prescient, you know. One of them said, in the 1820s, “God forbid we get into a war with the United States,” which I took to be pretty, if not uniquely, clear sighted. I figured that the family was spooked by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, which brought the boundary of the United States via Louisiana cheek-by-jowl with Texas, which was still a Mexican colony. Well, we know how that turned out. The Lizardi could read the handwriting on the wall and decided to get out. Seems reasonable. And probably is.

But it’s the kind of gross kind of Anglocentrism that someone who really doesn’t understand what was going on in the Mexican countryside, particularly around Veracruz, that was perhaps of more immediate concern to them. Stay with me briefly: this has both an end and a point.

A lot of us, out of sheer habit or laziness, focus on the Insurgency in the Bajio. That was where the action was, and where Hidalgo was. And that’s not incorrect. In fact, the Lizardi did a lot of business with a big merchant named Cayetano Rubio based in Queretaro. We know their ability to sell, remit payment and vice versa was heavily impacted by the fighting there. Merchandise, if it could move at all, moved under convoy, and it was slow, insecure and expensive. But that was hardly the end of it. Hidalgo’s successor, Jose Maria Morelos, was already active in Veracruz (around Orizaba) in 1812. The Lizardi did nothing but complain about the guerilla bands in Veracruz, probably loosely associated with Morelos, who were active in Veracruz well into the late 1810s, if not later. They were violent, bloody, and also tended to bring internal trade to a halt. If you were import-export merchants, as were the Lizardi, this regional turmoil was probably as bad, if not worse, than what transpired in the Bajio, which simply compounded their misery. I’ve read the letters–it’s there. And frankly more of an issue than what went on elsewhere. The Lizardi were a Veracruz-based operation. As long as they couldn’t count on functioning normally in their home base, they might as well go looking elsewhere. Previous business in Louisiana and Great Britain suggested this was where opportunity lay–and they seized it. Manuel Julian Lizardi became an American citizen in his quest to find a future: money has no smell, right? God forbid there should be a war……God forbid. I’ll become a citizen.

So I’m beginning to understand why the family was anxious to get out of Veracruz–and Mexico–for greener pastures. Yeah, Manifest Destiny was on their mind. But their money was in Veracruz. We care about Manifest Destiny. The Lizardi didn’t.

Long story short: it’s taken years of poking around in lots of local documentation and historiography to begin to figure this out. How on Earth are you supposed to divine the complexities of pre-Conquest Mesoamnerican history and its earliest practitioners if your motivation for doing is basically sisterhood. That may be a necessary condition for getting the story straight. But, take it from me, it will never be sufficient, however well intentioned.