Provincial Political Cultures and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Mexican Fiction

This article examines the representation of provincial political culture and practices in selected fictional works of two prominent Mexican writers of the late nineteenth century: Emilio Rabasa and Heriberto Frías. Particular focus is given to Rabasa’s portrait of a fictional pronunciamiento, a widespread form of political protest and negotiation in nineteenth-century Mexico that has recently been subject to historiographical re-evaluation, and Frías’s exploration of the 1893 rebellion of Tomóchic. Rabasa’s fiction supports the development of a political system that imposes the national will upon the unruly provinces by portraying the pronunciamiento as a destructive and chaotic practice, founded in the political ignorance of its participants. Frías’s work, meanwhile, questions the validity of the national enterprise by framing the Tomóchic rebellion as the consequence of a national political system that had disengaged with local and regional voices.