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Mexico at the World's ·Fairs Crafting a Modern Nation Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS I zx PREFACE I xi INTRODUCTION I I PART I·PORFIRIAN MEXICO AND WORLD'S FAIRS 1. France and Her Followers I I 5 2. The Imperatives of Mexican Progress I 28 3· Mexico and the World at Large I 38 4· The Wizards of Progress: Paris 188g I 48 5· The Aztec Palace and the History of Mexico I 64 6. Mexican Anthropology and Ethnography at the Paris Exposition I 8I 7· Mexican Art and Architecture in Paris I 96 8. Mexican Statistics, Maps, Patents, and Governance I I25 g. Natural History and Sanitation in the Modern Nation I I42 10. Irony I IJ8 vii viii CONTENTS PART II ·WORLD'S FAIRS AND MEXICO AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1910 11. Toward Revolutionary Mexico I r8r 12. The 1922 Rio de janeiro Fair I 200 13. The 1929 Seville Fair I 220 EPILOGUE I 24I APPENDIX l. THE PORFIRIAN WIZARDS OF PROGRESS I 255 APPENDIX 2. THE ECONOMIC COST OF WORLD'S FAIRS I 262 NOTES I 267 BIBLIOGRAPHY I JJI INDEX I 357 In traduction On the Universe ofFairs In the modern world, progress is the standard by which the age prefers to measure itself. The history of modern progress is the history of the self­ awareness of progress and modernity; that is, of how modern times produced a comprehensive picture of itself. This transformation was conceivable only by the modern view of history as a totality that progresses-both as a mat­ ter of fact and as a form of knowledge-but that is never completed because the future always remains unidentified. The consciousness of this totality in a particular span of time has formed what historians have habitually called an era, an epoch. Certainly, and however post-this-and-that we may feel, we must modestly realize that the growing secularization, rationalization, and technologization brought about by the modern era, together with our in­ ability to escape our own present, have made "the modern" our inescapable frame of reference. As if we are all partners in crime, we have modernity as our common code: to it we constantly refer; on it we depend. But to what extent? This study of world's fairs seeks to recount a history that belongs to the fleeting realm between the emergence of modern, industrial, and cap­ italist progress and its duration as a seemingly ahistorical and natural stage of humankind, between what is already history, albeit ofyet-unclear mean­ ing, and what is difficult to observe before us because it molds the con­ sciousness of our own times. 1 World's fairs are excellent vantage points from which to examine these phenomena. Indeed, nineteenth-century world's fairs were the quintes­ sence of modern times almost as much as were the cities that hosted them­ London, Paris, and Chicago-because metropolitan centers that were truly bubbles of universal modernity arose in the Western world during this pe­ riod. These cities were cosmopolitan, financial, and cultural nuclei that con- I 2 INTRODUCTION centr::ited and combined both national and international trends. Powerful European and American cities offered both a culture and an order that were believed to be ecumenical and atemporal yet were in fact full ofincongruities and, above all, unmanageable. Late-nineteenth-century cosmopolitan cities combined canonized fashions, habits, and aesthetic forms with the uncon­ trollable chaos ofinequality, marginality, and practices of survival and protest adopted in desperation by large segments of their inhabitants. By contrast, world's fairs were the controlled portrayals of these cosmopolitan cores, as ~uch as they were the cities' greatest spectacles. World exhibitions were conscious universal representations of what was thought to be progress and modernity, and they were thus both the metier and the ideal rendition of the modern city. Such exhibitions aimed to be ob­ ject lessons about those beliefs, and often, indeed, their vestiges became the symbols of modern cities. But a late-nineteenth-century world's fair was also invariably a magnificent show, an "oasis of fantasy and fable at a time of cri­ sis and impending violence. "2 To investigate the nineteenth-century world's fairs is to grasp the inter­ nal composition of the awareness of modernity. The fairs embodied and fos­ tered primary components of nineteenth-century modern existence: the be­ lief in positive, universal, and homogeneous truth; the presumption of freedom achieved and the inherent contradictions of this idea; the concept of ending history by recapitulating the past and controlling the future (that is, the potential for considering the present as the best of all possible times, which has already revealed the essential course of the future); and the creed of nationalism as an intrinsic part of both international cosmopolitanism and economic imperialism. These ideas guide this study, leading it both to the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. UNIVERSAL TRUTHS In the last part of the nineteenth century, the ultimate foundations of progress were held to be science and industry. Both were paranational, nat­ ural, objective, and unstoppable forms ofhuman production and knowledge. The world's order and self-confidence were set accordingly. The era of progress assembled ari ideal picture of itself, and this picture became the optimal model of how the world ought to be. Only modern times were ca­ pable of delimiting a comprehensive view of how all that belonged to them looked. Once this modern world picture emerged, cosmopolitanism was made possible in all spheres: science, art, costumes, and technology. As a common experience of accelerated time and simultaneity, since its inception the modern world picture was composed ofvarious and often con­ tradictory versions. And yet, as a more or less harmonious abstraction, the INTRODUCTION 3 picture was by necessity articulated and developed independently of views and facts of the world. Mter all, what has been regarded as modern has never referred to the real world; it has conformed to notions about the most ad­ vanced and optimal world as made publicly intelligible by economic, polit­ ical, and intellectual elites. Nineteenth-century universal exhibitions were consciously erected to sat­ isfy the requirements of this comprehensive picture; in turn, they reinforced the authenticity of such a picture. They were conceived to be a miniature but complete version of modern totality. And in the quest for universalism and completeness, world's fairs reincarnated the principle that had fostered late-eighteenth-century encyclopedias: they reinforced the possibility of conceiving a general picture of the world. They epitomized what Ortega called "the disquieting birth of a new reliance based on mathematical rea­ soning. "3 They could never be more than an attempt, however, because the modern world was too multifarious and complex to be homogeneously and harmoniously represented. Therefore, the idea of modern became an un­ obtainable and supreme metaphor, one which nonetheless was included in each thing that was thought to be modern. World's fairs were thus selective versions of the picture they aimed to rep­ resent. They were moments when industry and science could exist with all of their virtues and none of their imperfections. They were natural resi­ dences of industrial innovation, as well as of scientific and commercial de­ velopment. Therefore, nineteenth-century world's fairs were indeed petite cosmos of modernity formed, observed, and copied for all modern nations­ extravagant spectacles for the confirmation of universal truths. For today's historians, it is not clear whether the exhibits at world's fairs aimed to confirm belief in scientific and industrial progress by making the beliefs come true or aspired to be celebrations that honored those univer­ sal truths in a quasi-religious way with countless symbolic appeals: the chal­ lenge of the weight and strength of a steel building, the numerous indus­ trial, commercial, and social statistics, the bright reality of electric lights, and the very altitude of the Eiffel Tower. This study examines how Mexico joined the world's fair circuit in order to learn, imitate, and publicize its own possession of the universal truths of progress, science, and industry. It shows how the Mexican elite, in doing so, had to confront an ideal reality that was difficult to understand in its full scope and simultaneity. Yet it was easy to imitate. Consequently, Mexico had to undertake an additional selection in the already selective nature of world's fairs, in order to make the idea of the modern world even more suit­ able for the Mexican elites' own circumstances and interests. That additional selection is what came to be known as Mexican: Mexican sciences, Mexican art, Mexican nationhood.... 4 INTRODUCTION In participating in world's fairs, however, the Mexican elites learned the universal truths in order to consolidate their national and international in­ tegrity. In fact, they mastered what was fundamental in those universal truths: form, style, and facade. This mastery w~ especially visible in three aspects of Mexico's presence at late-nineteenth-century fairs: the scientific exhibits, the statistical demonstrations, and the constant use of a scientific discourse to express everything from an understanding of public administration to the effects of pulque on the Indian population; from the measurement of skulls to the calculation of the resistance of the hymens of Mexican women. These tools were used to emphasize the necessary components of a modern na­ tion: a well-defined and well-integrated territory, a cosmopolitan culture, good sanitation conditions, and a racial homogeneity that squared with West­ ern notions of white supremacy. THE IDEA OF FREEDOM World's fairs promoted the idea of freedom as it has been understood in the political, economic, and social thought of the West since the late eighteenth century.

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