Our History
Sell the story and people will buy the product, so goes a hallowed principle of marketing. It works so well in advertising that corporations will spend 7 million dollars on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial, peppered up with celebrtities shilling, just to sell a donut. And what works for donut companies works for nations. Wrap the story in enough celebrity mythology – let’s call it history – and a nation can sell almost anything: bad deeds become star-spangled reveries, while the supposedly sacred symbols veil the product’s toxic contents.
Join us with our special guest Ricardo Catón, as we ponder the past, from the banal to the just plain bad, and the marketing schemes known as national history.
Click to hear Banality of Nationality
Our colleague Dr. Ricardo Catón joins us to discuss how the national history story of Mexico co-opted ancient pre-Spanish conquest symbols to elide Spanish colonialism, and constructed a mestizo melting pot ideal that largely erased the nation’s Afro-Mexican and native heritage in a narrative of national unity.
“Should we make Nahautal, the language of our Mexican nation, or any other indigenous language, our national language? Absolutely not, that was never even a thought.”
— Ricardo Catón, speaking to the effect of Spanish colonialism on Mexico’s national project.
Sources Referenced and Items of Interest
David Frum, “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson,” (The Atlantic, February 2024)
Jason Oliver Chang. Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940 (University of Illinois
Press, 2017).
Beau Gaitors, “Afro-Mexicans: Illuminating the Invisible from Past to Present (Tulane
University School of Liberal Arts Magazine, 2021):
https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/magazine/spring-2021/afro-mexicans
Federico Navarrete Linares, México Racista: Una Denuncia (Grijalbo, 2016).
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Email us: Historyagainstthegrain@gmail.com
History Against the Grain 