Un deseo de lo futuro: la imaginación utópica en el México revolucionario (1910-1940)

Abstract

Un deseo de lo futuro: la imaginación utópica en la Revolución Mexicana (1910-1940) examines the proliferation of utopian imagination and its relation to political change during the unsettled times of the Mexican Revolution. Moving away from the canonical cultural archive of the period, the dissertation unearths and analyzes a vast array of mostly unknown utopian interventions that marked the conflict. Through the study of artwork –novels, short stories, plays– as well as political manifestos, social theory and intentional communities I argue that utopian thought played an essential role in the process of consolidating a new national hegemony while, at the same time, imagining the possibility of what I call an u-topian impulse, that is to say, a permanent movement toward what is to come. The study focuses on how the utopian imagination entered into relation with realms such as biopolitics, religion and socialism in the search of proposing not only representations of how future/revolutionary Mexico would look like, but also a theoretical reflection on the ways in which one might dismantle the deadlocks of modern thought and imagine new forms of political intervention.

Centering on the work of physician Eduardo Urzáiz, philosopher José Vasconcelos and biologist Alfonso Herrera, the first chapter deals with a trend of utopian imagination that takes the biopolitical intervention of bodies and populations –the scientific creation of a “perfect” humanity in biological terms– as the center of the new world. The second chapter delves into the theological aspects of utopian thought by studying projects that revolved around the existence or lack of a divine force, as portrayed in the theological-political movement known as Sinarquismo, Rembao’s theological speculations, Flores Magon’s texts and a List Arzubide’s play. Chapter three focuses on the pervasive influence the diverse trends of socialism had in Mexican utopian ideals, as displayed in a Salvador Alvarado’s story, dystopian fictions by Palavicini and Vasconcelos, and the cardenista project of Nueva Italia. The analysis of all these utopian interventions centers on their moments of silence or contradiction, since I argue that in those moments one discovers the need to keep imagining the political to come.