Thomas F. Reese and Carol McMichael Reese. “Revolutionary Urban Legacies: Porfirio Díaz’s Celebrations of the Centennial of Mexican Independence in 1910.” In Arte, Historia e Identidad en América: Visiones Comparativas; XVII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, vol.II, pp. 361-373.Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994.
Revolutionary Urban Legacies: Porfirio Díaz’s Celebrations of the Centennial of Mexican Independence in 1910
Thomas F. Reese and Carol McMichael Reese
This paper is a preliminary report about one component of our work-in-progress on a comparative analysis of politics and urban development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Americas. Our goal is to gain an understanding--within the context of national social, economic, and political programs--of international trends and relationships, particularly among the cities of modern nations that were emerging from and confronting a colonial past. The patterns of retention and rejection of patrimony and heritage, the nature and sources of available expertise and capital, and the relationships between political power and the urban masses all play important roles in determining the focus and structure of our project.
Here we focus on the development of Mexico City during the Porfiriato and in particular on the representation of that development through the celebrations marking the centenary of Mexican independence in 1910, which the government of Porfirio Díaz mounted for an international audience.[1] Mexico City attained the status of a sophisticated and an impressive international capital during Díaz’s thirty-year regime, when the government’s slogan “Order and Progress” aptly characterized its achievements. The centennial celebrations of 1910 coincided with the eight-term president’s eightieth birthday. A month-long series of public events held in September included parades (fig. 1), balls, and banquets; international congresses and expositions (fig. 5); inaugurations of newly completed or improved public buildings, as well as the layings of corner stones of others; and dedications of public monuments (figs. 2 and 3). Official ceremony was at the heart of these events, which the Díaz government directed toward international visitors and journalists. Indeed, panegyrical biographies and laudatory press reports represented the centennial as a debut of sorts for Mexico City, marking its official “coming out” into the society of world-class cities. But the promise of this brilliant debut--to carry the analogy further--was postponed by the Revolution, which erupted less than two months after the close of the centennial festivities.
The impact of revolutionary ideology, of course, diminished the Porfirian efflorescence of Mexico City. However, historical distance from both the Porfiriato and the Revolution, as well as the strategies of contemporary critical theory enable a rereading of this important epoch in the urban history of Mexico. We are attracted to the moment for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the problem of the historical representation in such a moment of conflicting ideologies, when the issue of national identity and the value of concepts such as capital investment, material and social progress, industrial technology, and international exchange were vehemently debated.
The centennial celebrations staged for a world audience the government’s story of Mexico City’s development and newly achieved international identity. Since many commemorative publications recorded the celebrations in text and image, there exist both scripts and photographs that allow us to revisit and analyze the performance of the centennial. The most extraordinary and provocative of these was the Crónica Oficial de las Fiestas del Primer Centenario de la Independencia de México, which Genaro García (1867-1920) published under the direction of the Secretaría de Gobernación in 1911.[2] García’s Crónica Oficial propelled us to ask a series of questions about Mexico’s urbanization and its portrayal in 1910: Who played leading roles in the drama of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development of the city? What were their political positions, their social agendas, and, ultimately, their contributions to the city’s urban legacy? While urban historians have asked such questions about Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, New York, Chicago, and Boston, the “great cities”--the “grosse Städte,” [do we really need this German? does it add anything to the article?] from German urbanistic discourse--whose company Porfirian Mexico joined, they have rarely focused such scrutiny on Mexico City. For the purposes of this paper, García’s Crónica provides an avenue into the city’s past and a basic text for analyzing the problems of historical figuration and meaning.
Importance of the Centennial Celebrations for
Urbanism and Economics
The organization of the centenary celebrations began on April 10, 1907 under the direction of José Casarín, who served as the secretary of the Junta del Centenario. He and Guillermo de Landa y Escandón, the Governor of the Federal District, appear to have drawn up the initial program. Porfirio Díaz’s charge to the committee was to create celebrations that would be “essentially popular and national, giving ample berth for patriotic initiatives and declarations of all social classes”[3] [Spanish quotation moved to FN] Genaro García, however, was not on the initial planning committees, although he may have helped mold parts of the program. Certainly as the director of the Museo Nacional, he was an important source of information. Furthermore, his father Trinidad García was the Diputado Presidente of the new secretariat of Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, of which Genaro served as secretary.
For the Crónica, García and his editorial team assembled more than 1000 negatives and 700 prints through commission and purchase.[4] The prospectus for the book included three sections: The Progress of Mexico in this Century, The Festival of the Capital, and the Participation of Foreign Governments. The budget for the production of the book was 28,646 pesos, but as published in September of 1911 with 463 pages and 616 illustrations, the book’s length and the number of its illustrations were two-thirds of what was projected. Significantly, this trimming effort dispensed with the section on the nation’s progress, emphasizing the capital city as the central showcase of the centenary in the publication. In addition, the book opened with the section on foreign participation, leaving no doubt as to which audience the government aimed its documentary.
New Urban Infrastructure
Mexico City’s new image that the centennial unveiled and that García’s Crónica proclaimed was the cumulative result of several decades of achievements in the improvement and modernization of urban infrastructure. The modern city of 1910 countered many international concerns about the nation and its capital. The newly completed drainage projects of the desagüe alleviated the city’s unhealthful marshy conditions and dangerous floods; a new water and sewage system insured the delivery of clean water and the removal of tainted for treatment; and new suburbs provided residential security outside the crowded historic center. Indeed, a prominent event of the centennial was the foreign visitors’ train excursion to the new drainage and water works. Here we must simply sketch the impact on the city’s development of these urban improvements. Whether funded and supervised by the government--as in the case of the desagüe--or backed by private capital invested under government restrictions--like the fraccionamiento of secularized church properties and outlying haciendas--these projects depended on and contributed to the economic boom that characterized especially the later years of the Porfiriato. A few statistics underscore the change in Mexico’s economic profile from the opening of the Porfirian regime in 1877 to its close in 1910: revenues more than quadrupled, from about 20 million to 106 million; foreign debt decreased by two fifths, from 227 million to 147 million; and the monetary value of gold and silver production increased more than five-fold, from 26 to 160 million.[5]
The Modern Secular City
With a modern urban infrastructure in place, the Porfirian government selected sites for new public buildings and monuments that described a new geographic and political iconography, which the centennial advertised. The regime successfully shifted the city’s center of gravity from the old colonial grid, with its strong religious and viceregal associations, and the Zócalo, which fronted the cathedral, to a new westerly urban hub that emphasized the Alameda and new boulevard connections to developing residential districts. Here, between the train station on the west and the edge of the colonial grid on the east, the government concentrated its flagship buildings, such as Adamo Boari’s National Theater (1904), Silvio Contri’s Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (1902-11), Adamo Boari’s and Gonzalo Garita’s Post Office (1902-07), Emile Bénard’s Legislative Palace (1905), and Michel Deglane’s Museum of Archaeology and Fine Arts (1910).[6]
These prestigious projects, which the government sometimes awarded through international competitions, represented Mexico City’s democratic governance, economic prowess, technical achievement, and cultural awareness. And they stood shoulder to shoulder with distinguished new commercial structures such as banks and department stores that often demonstrated the presence of international capital in the city. During the centennial, important ceremonies marked the initiation, progress, or completion of these buildings, and their significance to the events can hardly be overemphasized. All drafts of the centenary program, for example, included the laying of the cornerstone for a new museum, an occasion which was canceled only at the last moment.[7] The centennial preparations also invested selected historic structures with new purpose, placing commemorative markers and plaques on buildings with special significance. Just as the government redefined the city’s architectural image through the centennial, so it rewrote the nation’s political history by transporting icons from the Preconquest and Independence periods to the capital for display. Arrangements were made to ship Precolumbian monoliths from throughout the republic to Mexico City. International negotiations resulted in the return of Morelos’s uniform from Spain, as well as the keys of the city from France. The transfer of the baptismal font of Hidalgo from Cuitzeo de Abasola to the Museo Nacional opened the centennial celebrations on the second of September with a great parade of some 30,000 participants, chief among whom were the school children of the city .
The centennial also underscored the new political and social iconography of modern Mexico City through its co-optation and ornamentation of residential space. In an effort to engage foreign investors and governments alike, the centennial committee housed many diplomatic visitors in major mansions in the new, elite western colonias, such as the Colonia del Paseo and the Colonia Juárez, along the Paseo de la Reforma with its Haussmannian [Parisian] associations. García’s Crónica portrayed these impressive new houses and gardens as if they were embassies, replete with interior views of the ambassadorial corps and their retinues. The centennial committee further dramatized the importance of the city’s foreigners to its livelihood by staging inaugurations, unveilings, and dedications of gifts from foreign colonies--statues of Pasteur from France, Humboldt from Germany (fig. 3), Washington from the United States, Garibaldi from Italy, and a clock tower from Turkey. Generally sited in areas of foreign concentration in the new colonias, these monuments symbolized the international investment and goodwill upon which the Porfirian economy so heavily depended. Indeed, the residential districts that they graced were already international in character, from the varied nationalities of their residents to the eclectic styles of their dwellings: Richardsonian Romanesque, German Rundbogenstil, English Palladian, Italian Renaissance, Mexican Colonial, and French Neo- Grec. [grecque?]
The new colonias were home to many of the most prominent of the city’s 60,000 foreign residents (about twelve percent of the total population of approximately 500,000), whose presence symbolized the influx of foreign capital (about two thirds of the total amount invested in the country), which under girded the economic strides of the Porfiriato and which critics of the regime decried. Some of this criticism informed architectural debate during the later Porfiriato, when the regime seemed to reward Italian and French designers with its most important commissions and the stylistic silhouette of the city seemed more largely imported than Mexican, even as theorists and practitioners struggled to define what Mexican architectural style should be. Here we are only able to mention this debate and remark in passing that the political and architectural issues that it raises are complex. When one analyzes the residential architecture of the new colonias, for example, one often finds distinct internal dispositions of space that are not English, American, or French, but--we would suggest--uniquely Mexican in arrangement. Furthermore, although many critics urged that Mexico’s Preconquest monuments should serve as sources for an “composición arquitectónica mejicana del porvenir”[8] (we must note that the centennial committee made enormous expenditures at Teotihuacán to prepare for the Congreso de Americanistas), these monuments had little stylistic impact during the Porfiriato, however, beyond designs for commemorative statuary and pavilions at international fairs.
West End/East End: Urban Planning as Design
The centennial’s strategic emphasis on the city’s elite west end indicated that the Porfirian regime accepted the clear[evident?] cleavage in the economic geography of the city, which characterized its late nineteenth-century growth. Wealthier districts rapidly developed to the west and southwest of the historic center, where the ground was higher, drier, and more stable; poorer neighborhoods became increasingly impacted on the east and southeast, where the ground was lower, wetter, more unstable, and therefore undesirable. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, before the successful completion of the desagüe, urban transit companies opened rail lines in the more desirable areas--as was the pattern in the United States--and land-development corporations followed, laying out subdivisions along commuter lines and marketing lots to prospective home builders from the city’s upper economic sectors.
In 1898, Edward Garczynsky, an acute critic of the city’s urban development, characterized the increasing fragmentation of the city and flight of “foreigners and Mexicans alike” to the western and southwestern suburbs, which he described as the result of increasing industrialization and population density in the center and which he attributed to British influence. Garczynsky further described this “classier” south in terms of national clusters of residents: Mixcoac and Tlalpam as Mexican in character, Coyoacán as Belgian and French, and Tacubaya as a balanced mixture of foreigners and Mexicans.[9] While these districts may appear to have been modeled on English garden cities and American streetcar suburbs, we must not forget that many developed around the cores of Mexican colonial establishments. The persistence of older planning patterns, the emergence of newer ones, and the sources of both are yet to be analyzed.
Clearly, geographic determinism played a key role in the sociology of the expansion of the city. The Porfirian government, however, was more involved in planning and attempting to control the development of the city than most scholars have recognized, and below we sketch our preliminary findings about Porfirian planning initiatives. If, as archival evidence indicates, the subdivision of new residential areas beyond the historic center began in an ad hoc manner, under laissez faire circumstances, the government had by 1900 a clear interest in promoting and directing such efforts, which had proved to be lucrative. In general, it has been the tendency of most economic historians to underplay the value of land speculation, construction, and those industries that service these sectors. Furthermore, little analysis has been given historically to the reciprocal interactions of private investment and public contributions in the field of city growth.
Studies pursued by the équipes that Alejandra Moreno Toscano created at the Colegio de México in the 1970s, in which Dolores Morales Martínez produced truly exemplary work, have demonstrated[indicated?] the small capital outlay of early subdivision endeavors in Mexico City, the quick profits gained by investors in initial land sales, and the fortunes amassed by attorneys who oversaw the land transactions.[10] Jorge Jiménez Muñoz’s new study, based on several years of investigation in the notarial archives, clarifies further the financial operations of land development in Mexico City and, particularly, the role of American investors, many of whom--like Edward Doheny--participated in the fundamental growth of Mexico’s railroad and extractive industries and provided asphalt, gas, electricity, and suburban rail service to secondary markets in the capital.[11] Were the new colonies a major source of municipal and national income, or did they become a drain because they required services? How important was the quality of life in the city in the regime’s attempts to attract confidence and capital both at home and abroad? These are questions that remain to be answered for the Porfiriato.