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CHAPTER 1
Genealogies
Enlightenment Legacies and the Education of Don Lucas Alamán
From a strictly formal point of view, the history of the National Museum of Mexico began on March 18, 1825, when President Guadalupe Victoria signed it into existence, at the behest of his young and dynamic minister of internal and external relations, Lucas Alamán. Inasmuch as it endowed the new nation with one of the staple institutions of nineteenth-century independence movements, the foundation of the museum entailed at the same time a gesture of recognition, a taking hold of the social spaces, the intellectual resources, and the material properties independent Mexico had inherited from the viceroyalty of New Spain. As it began to take shape between 1823 and 1825, during Alamán's time in office, the museum was, to a large degree, Alamán's creation; its coming into being bears testimony to Alamán's own coming of age in colonial New Spain, to the cosmopolitan interests and relations he acquired during the War of Independence, and to his ability to reconfigure viceregal legacies to establish the foundations of a national institution.
Lucas Alamán was born in 1792 into a silver-mining family in Guanajuato. He received his early training in Latin and mathematics. Just as important was the autodidact part of his education, in the enlightened salons of Guanajuato's intendant Juan Antonio de Riaño (1757–1810), bishop Manuel Abad y Queipo (1751–1825), and Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811). Soon, these men would be pitted against one another in one of the most infamous moments of Mexico's War of Independence. On September 28, 1810, Hidalgo's rebel forces laid siege to the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, a grain storage and marketplace in Guanajuato, where royalist troops under Riaño's command and well-to-do Creoles had retreated and were holding out. The insurgents set fire to the door, invaded the building, and, overriding Hidalgo's orders, pillaged the stores and massacred loyalists. "That afternoon and night and the following night," wrote Alamán years later in his Historia de México (1844–49), "they sacked all the shops and houses in the city belonging to Europeans. On that fatal night the scene was lighted by great numbers of torches, and nothing was heard but the noise of blows crashing against doors and the ferocious howling of the rabble applauding their fall and rushing in triumph to remove goods, furniture and everything else." These early images of a rabble just waiting to pillage the "Europeans" not only remained with Alamán the rest of his life as a political motif but also probably had something to do with his notion of how precarious a culture and its objects could be.
By the end of 1810 Alamán moved to Mexico City to escape the ravages of war and to complete his education. There are no surviving descriptions of Mexico City when Alamán lived there in the 1810s, but Alexander von Humboldt depicted the city some years earlier, at the time of his visit in 1803. Humboldt found the medium-sized city, with its population of over 130,000, not lacking in grandeur. He was impressed with "the imposing character of its natural surroundings": the Chapultepec Forest to the west; the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the north; San Ángel and San Agustín de las Cuevas (Tlalpan), with their enormous orchards, to the south; and Texcoco Lake, as "beautiful as the most beautiful Swiss mountain lakes," to the east. Organized orthogonally, the city grew around the cathedral, the mint, and the viceregal palace. In equal measure, Humboldt's attention was drawn to the Botanical Garden, the Royal Academy of San Carlos, and the Seminario de Minería (School of Mines) in "a building [that] could adorn any main plaza in Paris or London." All these institutions were newcomers on the urban scene, the result of the Bourbon reforms aimed, on one hand, at increasing productivity and commercial efficiency in the colonies and, on the other, at filling out the educational void left by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, with the further intent of making the colonial elites loyal to the Crown.
After his arrival in Mexico City, Alamán took classes at all these institutions. He studied first at the School of Mines. Founded in 1792, its mission was to impose the latest technical developments in the modern sciences of chemistry and mineralogy on mining activities in New Spain, which had taken the lead in silver production among Spain's American possessions. The school boasted prestigious faculty like Fausto de Elhuyar (1755–1833), who had taught at Uppsala and Freiberg before becoming the first director of the School of Mines in Mexico, and Andrés del Río (1764–1849), author of the celebrated mineralogical treatise Elementos de oritognosia o del conocimiento de los fósiles (1795). The education of mining engineers, it was hoped, would revive tapped-out mines by finding lower-grade ore and would improve proven moneymakers, like the Valenciana mine in Alamán's native Guanajuato. Alamán graduated from the School of Mines in 1813.
The same year, he attended lectures by Vicente Cervantes (1755–1829) at the Botanical Garden in the viceregal palace. Trained in Madrid, Cervantes had arrived in New Spain with the express mandate to establish a botanical garden and a chair of botany in Mexico City. His botanical lectures, inaugurated in 1788, were aimed at introducing Linnaean taxonomies and the most current European botanical knowledge into a modern curriculum. At first, this provoked serious polemic in Mexico City by confronting supporters of universal classifications against those of local, use-based categories. By the time Alamán attended Cervantes's lectures, an entire generation of young botanists had become adept at the Linnaean system. Thus, Alamán's education, like those of his fellow Creoles, was the product of Enlightenment reforms that liquidated an older paradigm that tolerated a crossover view of natural phenomena, ultimately guided by analogies and teleological reasoning, in favor of arranging knowledge about the natural world according to some ultimately reduced set of universal principles. In retrospect, this training would be of immense use as Alamán carried out an extensive and fruitful correspondence with Mexican and foreign scholars in various sciences. Besides training in the sciences, Alamán cultivated the arts, learning to play the guitar and studying drawing and painting at the Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1781 and aimed at developing a young Creole's buen gusto — that is, his taste for the forms of classical antiquity and his capacity to recognize and reproduce them.
Around these formal institutions for learning, Alamán would have encountered a vibrant semipublic sphere that brought together the city's political and scientific elites. There were periodicals — such as the Diario de México, founded in 1805 by law-trained Carlos María de Bustamante (1774–1848) and by Jacobo de Villaurrutia (1754–1833), a magistrate at the Real Audiencia, and the socially and politically critical El Pensador Mexicano, founded in 1812 by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827). At the same time, the late eighteenth century saw the emergence of collections and private cabinets. In 1790 an article in the Gazeta de México described various collections of "curiosities" around Mexico City. Those amassed by José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Mexico's foremost Creole intellectual, and by José Longinos Martínez (1756–1802), one of the naturalists on the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain led by Martín Sessé and José Mariano Mociño, stand out for their abundance in "objects from the three reigns" of nature. Stimulated by scientific expeditions to the New World in the last decades of the eighteenth century, private collecting was increasingly modeled on instructions produced specifically for the expeditions in an effort to define collectibles (rocks, taxidermies, pressed plants, and, increasingly, antiquities) and to discipline collecting practices. Although many of the collectors mentioned in the Gazeta in 1790 were no longer around when Alamán lived in Mexico City, their collections had survived, passed on to other hands; Longinos's cabinet, for instance, was transferred to the Colegio de San Ildefonso after his death in 1802. Besides, new collections had emerged on the urban scene. Humboldt lavished special praises on the beautiful collections of physics, mechanics, and mineralogy at the School of Mines. He found the Botanical Garden "small but extremely rich in rare natural productions" of "much interest for commerce or industry." He took note of the collection of ancient casts at the Royal Academy of San Carlos. And he was especially impressed with the private cabinet of Ciriaco González de Carbajal (1745–181?), a magistrate at the Real Audiencia, who owned "very remarkable oryctognosic and geological collections" and a "superb cabinet of shells, formed during his stay in the Philippines, where he deployed the same zeal for the natural sciences, which distinguished him in Mexico."
González de Carbajal's interests were not limited to the natural sciences. Having served as a member of the Comisión de Antigüedades of the Academia de la Historia in Madrid, he was instrumental in promoting the Royal Antiquarian Expeditions (1805–8), which deployed Guillermo Dupaix and his draftsman Luciano Castañeda to study the ruins of New Spain, as far as Palenque, Oaxaca, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The expeditioners returned with detailed notes and descriptions, drawings, antiquities, and natural history samples. Viceroy José de Iturrigaray founded the Junta de Antigüedades and commissioned González de Carbajal, Dupaix, Ignacio Cubas (178?–1844), a secretary in the viceregal archives, and José Mariano Beristáin y Souza (1756–1817), an eminent theologian and bibliographer (author of the celebrated Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional, 1816–21), to study preconquest manuscripts and monuments — among them, the manuscripts produced by Dupaix's expeditions. Though the Junta was beginning to feel the shortages of war by the time Alamán arrived in Mexico City, it is hard to imagine that the young Creole would not have become acquainted with its work and with some of its members, especially considering that Dupaix had close ties with Fausto de Elhuyar, the director of the School of Mines, where Alamán was a student.
Such was then Alamán's education during the three and a half years he spent in the capital of New Spain. He acquired solid training in the sciences, some education in the arts, especially in the classical arts, and probably some very basic idea of the fledgling field of Mexican antiquarianism. In 1814 he traveled across the Atlantic, to study, by his own account, the great artistic monuments of Europe. His itinerary was modeled on that of Antonio Ponz (1725–92), a member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid who had published the eighteen-volume Viage [sic] de España o Cartas en que se da noticia de las cosas más apreciables y dignas de saberse que hay en ella (1772–94), partially in response to foreign disparagement toward the Spanish arts as backward and of little value. Ponz traveled around the peninsula, compiling detailed information on Spain's architectural and artistic patrimony, which he complemented with illustrations. It is not difficult to understand how the Viage would have resonated with Mexican readers at a moment when Creole scholars like Beristáin, Alzate, and León y Gama were similarly engaged in vindicating New Spain against foreign detractors or how Ponz's descriptions and illustrations would have inspired the artistically inclined Alamán.
Alamán's five-year journey through the continent amounted to something of a grand tour — that quintessential eighteenth-century institution, as exercised by Goethe and by English aristocrats, meant to bring about the young traveler's greater Bildung. To see with his own eyes the legacies of ancient Rome and Greece, to sharpen his artistic sensibilities in front of the products of the Renaissance and Humanist periods, and to acquaint himself with an international circle of like-minded cognoscenti was a way of complementing the text-based learning of the classroom with the experiential weight of the senses and the sociability of the man of the world. During his five years abroad, Alamán frequented the Royal Cabinet for Natural History in Madrid, the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle and the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, as well as smaller museums and cabinets. He arrived at an especially interesting moment, when national museums were formed and art sacked by Napoleon was being repatriated from Paris to countries of origin, following Napoleon's defeat. This must have had some effect on the future founder of the National Museum of Mexico.
At the same time, for Alamán, the tour led to the formation of long-lasting ties with scholars and future business partners. Alamán first landed in Spain, where he met Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1741–1818), director of the Royal Botanical Garden, and fellow Mexican Pablo de la Llave (1773–1833), who was at the time organizing the natural history specimens in the Royal Cabinet. De la Llave would later return to Mexico to take charge of the natural history specimens at the National Museum. On his next stop, in France, Alamán made some of his most interesting acquaintances. There he met the controversial Servando Teresa de Mier (1765–1827), who had been exiled from New Spain for his 1794 sermon conflating the Mexican deity Quetzalcóatl with the apostle Saint Thomas; abbé Henri Grégoire (1750–1831), the French bishop turned revolutionary, constitutionalist, and suffragist; and Humboldt, with whom Alamán would correspond after his return to Mexico and whom he tried to interest in a new visit to the young republic.
From France, Alamán continued on his tour, going to England and Scotland and then on to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with "the avowed intention to study the nature and effects of the governments on their respective countries." In Berlin he met the celebrated geologist and paleontologist Leopold von Buch (1774–1853), and he stopped for almost two months in Saxony to observe methods of extraction and the new machinery employed at the Freiberg mines and to forge long-term friendships with engineers. In Switzerland he struck a fruitful friendship with botanist Auguste Pyrame de Candolle (1778–1841), as reflected by the letters exchanged between the two in the following years. When Alamán sent de Candolle dried plants from his native Guanajuato, the latter obliged by naming a new species after Alamán, And when de Candolle sent one of his more promising students, Jean-Louis Berlandier (1805–51), to act as botanist to the Mexican-sponsored geographical expedition to Northern Mexico in the late 1820s, Alamán facilitated Berlandier's integration and provided de Candolle with reports on the progress of the expedition.
Alamán returned to Mexico in 1820 and published a paper on the causes of the decline in the production of the mines in New Spain, showing his intentions to return to the family business of mining. Events throughout the Spanish Empire dictated otherwise. By May of 1821, Alamán began to dabble in politics when he attended the Cortes of Spain, to which, under the reestablished Constitution of 1812, he had been elected as the deputy from Guanajuato. This was the short period in which many of the former Spanish colonies in Spanish America were considering stepping back from full independence in favor of a commonwealth arrangement, with each of them having federal power. In the Cortes, Alamán promoted mineralogical matters dear to the hearts of the Guanajuato mine owners, and he took a side in the debate about the Crown's American subjects, presenting a strong case for autonomy. He pointed out that the citizens of New Spain were free and had the same rights as the Spanish under the new Constitution, but in fact they were being subjected by Spain to the ancient order. Spain's attempt to repress American autonomy was failing, at the cost of much bloodshed; its one chance was to accept some kind of federalism, with Americans having the right to choose their own governors, a system of political administration that had been proved viable in the United States.
Alamán was in Madrid when Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, followed by Agustín de Iturbide's (1783–1824) self-proclamation as emperor, which doomed the federalist project. Alamán made recourse to all his "brilliant eloquence, undaunted courage, and unanswerable arguments, to vindicate the cause and conduct of his self-delivered country: he showed that Mexico was independent because the very events had dissolved her dependence; that Spain had long left Mexico to her own resources and was confessedly unable to protect her from aggression; that with most affectionate and dutiful perseverance, Mexico had continued faithful to the mother country." And he hoped that the fidelity between Mexico and Spain would turn to friendship, allegiance, and affection. These arguments made little difference to the Spanish. While the viceroy of New Spain, Juan O'Donojú, surrendered to the forces of independence by signing the Treaty of Córdoba on August 24, 1821, the Spanish monarchy made a retrograde attempt to reconquer Mexico, besieging the fort of San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, which would hamper Mexico's commercial relations into 1826. All boats arriving to Mexico would have to pass through the Isla de Sacrificios. Other countries recognized Mexican independence sooner, de facto if not de jure.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From Idols to Antiquity"
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