From Tomóchic to Las Jornadas Villistas: Literary and Cultural Regionalism in Northern Mexico

Abstract

This dissertation examines the historically complex relationship between regional identity and Mexican nationalism through an analysis of literary and cultural expressions of regionalism in the northern territory known as the cradle of Pancho Villa’s revolutionary movement, Villismo. This project focuses on a relatively ignored area in the study of Mexican state formation and cultural history. While many academics have focused on southern Mexico, the North has been largely overlooked, at least from a regionalist perspective. Thus, this dissertation fills a gap in the study of regionalism as it examines an area which has been particularly affected both by the forces of nationalism, and globalization in the context of the 1994 enactment of NAFTA.

In this dissertation, I argue that the peripheral location of the region provides marginal groups with an alternative space of resistance from within. This vantage point allows the regional subject to challenge the authority of the state and the hegemony of official history by offering a subversive regional discourse. In order to track the evolution of northern regionalism, I consider three moments in the area’s history which have produced such resistant “texts,” namely the Tomóchic rebellion (1891-1892), the Mexican Revolution, and the development of Las Jornadas Villistas (1994). First, this study examines Tomóchic by Heriberto Frías which reveals the violence upon which the state’s national project is based. This text anticipates both the novel of the Mexican Revolution and the regional discord which eventually sparked the revolutionary violence of 1910. Next, I examine the state of regionalism in the post-revolutionary period by analyzing Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho. I argue that this work is not a novel of the Mexican Revolution, but rather constitutes a regional inversion of this national genre. Finally, I analyze Las Jornadas Villistas, a state-sponsored celebration of Villismo, and the body politics surrounding the location of Villa’s remains as the region’s attempt to reclaim the general’s body and memory for its own use in the wake of NAFTA.

Ultimately, this project forces a reexamination of Mexican state formation from a regional perspective and opens up paths for further research in the field of border studies.