Abstract

HEAU-LAMBERT, Catherine  and  RAJCHENBERG S., Enrique. La identidad nacional: Entre la patria y la nación: México, siglo XIX. Cultura representaciones soc [online]. 2008, vol.2, n.4, pp.42-71. ISSN 2007-8110.

The political and symbolical heart of Mexico has always been located, according to the national history, in the highlands of the center, since Teotihuacán, the Aztecs and the political powers in our days. It is the space from where the New-Spain was built and the national constitutions were elaborated and the other territories were organized. Nevertheless, the historical analysis indicates that the representation of the national territory, that is to say, its symbolical appropriation, suffered a huge void: the elites from Mexico-city never got to integrate symbolically and sentimentally the whole space where the sovereignty of the nation should be exercised. In the facts, the great North as much as the strategic isthmus of Tehuantepec in the South, stayed out of the symbolical representation of the "true home" or fatherland territory which always coincided with the central mesoamerican area. Moreover, according to the perception of the XIXth century liberal elites, the large northern territories were unworthy vacuum deserts and only inhabited by feral and barbarous Indians. On the contrary, the angloamerican settlers imagined and represented these territories as a kind of "promised land" that would be transformed in garden of Eden thanks to the pioneers work. If we do accept that the social representations orient and guide the action, the contrasted representations of the northern territories by Mexican elites and angloamerican settlers do in part explain an anomalous and enigmatic fact in the Mexican XIXth history: the signature of the McLane-Ocampo treaty by Benito Juarez in 1859.

Keywords : territory; northern Mexico; fatherland; nation; social representations; McLane-Ocampo treaty.