My project deals primarily with connections and conflicts between the three institutions that formed Mexicos model of national identity; these institutions are the State, the Church and literature. Since the processes of the conquest and colony almost cast away the pre-Columbian religious and cultural epistemological worldviews, we can say that the Mexican nation was actually established on an unprecedented foundation of Catholic faith, the Spanish language and imperial power. The later has been historically re-issued with every political regime that has governed Mexico, from the nineteenth century dictatorships to the long-lasting regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The project begins analyzing literary texts from the first half of the twentieth century, in which writers critique of the State and the Church aims to uncover the homogeneous identity model these institutions were trying to establish in Mexico. However, I argue that the literature of this period, even with its lucid historical review, was a cultural project in which the religious beliefs of the people were condemned to an ignominious place in regard to social and political life in Mexico. The extreme secularization implicit in their discourses made of religiosity a synonym for alienation, ignorance and superstition. In the last decades, popular religion along with reinforced pre-Hispanic rituals have shown how religion, in a wider sense, can be a way to repair the damaged identity of Mexican believers. The second part of the dissertations works with marginal literary representations from Mayan writers to popular testimonies where the faith and spiritual beliefs are part of a complex rearticulation of a moral agency formerly dismissed by the hegemonic cultural projects of the State and the Church. My analysis is focused in how these texts confront institutional discourses to create a space at the border of the national identity model, which still try to embrace a dogmatic Catholicism, on the one hand, and the anachronism of the Revolution period on the other.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04122010-145515 |
| Date | 18 June 2010 |
| Creators | Gomez-Michel, Gerardo |
| Contributors | Paul K. Eiss, Joshua K. Lund, Juan Duchesne-Winter, Erin Graff Zivin |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04122010-145515/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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