The remains of Porfirio Diaz

Porfirio Diaz, Mistico de la Autoridad.
By Enrique Krause.
Mexico: FCE. 1987.

Porfirio Diaz y su Tiempo.
By Fernando Orozco Linares.
Mexico: Panorama. 1991.

Profiles in Power: Porfirio Diaz.
By Paul Garner.
London: Longman. 2001.

By Robert Mendoza

I could identify Porfirio Diaz before I knew what George Washington looked like. Don Porfirio’s brass-framed oval portrait had pride of place in my grandmother’s cabinet de curiosities. The glass-fronted cabinet presided directly opposite the piano in the sala de estar (parlor) of a house that no longer exists. My grandmother always apologized for the piano that replaced her original Erard that had been "hacked to pieces by Carrancista machetes" in Merida, Yucatan in 1915.
But it is the cabinet that I remember. Unlike the one belonging to Bruce Chatwin’s grandmother (In Patagonia), it did not preserve a swatch of brontosaurus skin, but was, nonetheless, the repository of our exile family’s past in an antediluvian Mexico. Fifty years later, I can still trace the contours of that vanished room, watch harsh sunlight braze a keyboard, and scent the odor of rusty paper and crumbling leather bindings that emanated from that cabinet.
My grandmother was always proud that her husband had been selected to form part of Diaz’ final honor guard in Vera Cruz, in May 1911. The former President sailed from that port into an exile from which he would never return. Four years later, on July 2, 1915, Diaz died in Paris and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. Although his widow was finally allowed to return to Mexico in 1943, Mexican authorities have adamantly refused to allow the repatriation of Diaz’ remains.
The vilification of Porfirio Diaz commenced in the 1890s (including American socialist journalists such as Carleton Beals and John Kenneth Turner), and swelled in volume after the triumph of the Mexican Revolution. The government schools of the 1930s instilled a simplistic demonology. Generations of Mexicans were instructed that Diaz was a murderous tyrant who had turned the nation’s resources over to foreigners in order to enrich himself and a corrupt oligarchy.
Diaz’ predecessor, Benito Juarez, was enshrined as the "Lincoln of Mexico" (while Father Miguel Hidalgo remained its Washington). This complimentary and hagiographical re-invention of Juarez ignored his dictatorial persistence in office (which was only thwarted by his untimely death). The ideologues of the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) could boast of banishing evil and restoring lost virtue. Stolid Juarez busts are ubiquitous in Mexico, along with Diego Rivera’s Stalinist anti-Diaz cartoons. There are no statues of Diaz; no village, building, or street bears his name. As Enrique Krause has noted in the journal Proceso, the PRI ensured that Diaz became an ex-liberal, an ex-hero, an ex-president, and -- by continuing to exile his remains -- an ex-Mexican.
This state of affairs remained largely unchallenged for the last decade of the 20th century. For 75 years, a small but persistent minority has lobbied, largely through back channels, for the return of Diaz’ remains. They adroitly glossed over the dictatorship and focused on the young, liberal General Diaz’ support of Juarez, and especially his heroic recapture of Puebla from the French on April 2, 1867. (Interestingly, a parallel movement in France to repatriate the remains of Marshal Petain has utilized the same strategy: eclipsing the years of Vichy collaboration in favor of the Marshal’s heroic defense of Verdun during World War I. Neither government has forgotten, forgiven, or budged; both sets of remains remain in exile.)
However, the neo-Porfirians’ fortunes were buoyed by the collapse of the peso, the PRI’s inability to stem serial economic crises, and the Mexican army’s humiliation at the hands of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Enrique Krause’s Porfirio Diaz became a surprise bestseller. In 1992, Televisa (the Mexican national television network) broadcast the first of a 150-episode telenovela based on Krause’s biography. In the following year, Carlos Tello Diaz (Porfirio’s great-great-grandson) published El Exilo: Relato de Familia, which went through eight reprints in a year. Porfirio Diaz’ Memorias of 1894 were revised and republished in 1994. The old demon proved to have charisma beyond the grave. The other fin de siecle was all the rage.
This nostalgia for the Porfiriato did not indicate that Mexicans suddenly yearned for good old-fashioned repression. The phenomenon of neo-Porfirismo on a popular scale signaled the demise of the PRI. It was part of a historical revision that had been largely limited to scholarly debate: had there ever been a Mexican Revolution? Had not the "revolutionists" (and the PRI) merely expelled Don Porfirio and taken his place? Wasn’t Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa right when he labeled the PRI "a perfect dictatorship?" The PRI had managed a thoroughly modern, streamlined Porfiriato. Unlike the continually aging, serially re-elected Diaz, the PRI ensured that a different dinosauro appeared on the posters every six years. Mexicans tuned in to the period charm and romance of the telenovela dictator’s era as a respite from the grim reality of the Salinas years.
Enrique Krause’s Porfirio Diaz, Mistico de la Autoridad is the earliest and most accessible of the neo-Porfirist biographies. It is an illustrated work with an obvious emphasis on a wealth of period photographs gleaned from Mexican archives. Previously, Krause has written extensively and well on the Diaz regime and its reincarnation in the PRI in journals such as Vuelta, Proceso, and La Jornada. His eminence as a historian, coupled with his credentials as a progressive, suggest that he would be an ideal candidate to update the four volumes that Daniel Cosio Villegas dedicated to Diaz from 1952 to 1972 in his Historia Moderna de Mexico.
Fernando Orozco Linares’ Porfirio Diaz y su Tiempo is a one-volume political biography. It is woefully brief (some 300 pages), considering Diaz’ 85-year life, 35 of which he was President of Mexico. Nevertheless, Orozco manages to address many of the achievements and controversies that marked Diaz’ long regime. He also discusses the parlous condition of the Republic that Diaz took control of in 1875. Mexico had endured nearly five decades of chaos, anarchy, and civil warfare. The United States and France had ravaged its territorial integrity. Diaz’ forcible imposition of Paz y Orden not only ensured the survival of the fragile nation-state, but laid the foundations for foreign capital investment and its concomitant improvements in transportation, communications, and industrialization. Profirio Diaz y su Tiempo deconstructs much of the post-Revolution Diaz demonology, without glossing over the many real failures and outrages of the Porfiriato.
Paul Garner’s Profiles in Power: Porfirio Diaz is as brief as Orozco (fewer than 300 pages), and since it is also a political biography, covers much of the same ground. Garner’s work, however, offers a non-Mexican perspective on Diaz and the broader problem of applying liberal policies to nations steeped in colonial traditions. Diaz’ dictatorship is examined in terms of the 19th century. Garner, like Krause and Orozco, is a revisionist, and he avoids interpreting Diaz through a post-Revolutionary prism. The greatest recommendation for this work (aside from its availability in English) is its recent publication date. Bibliographic output on the Diaz era has seen enormous growth since the1980s.
I must admit that I was well into middle age before I realized that Porfirio Diaz’s remains were misplaced. Like most people with a superficial knowledge of Mexican history, I had accepted the received version of him as an evil tyrant -- a predecessor of Spain’s Franco, only with more medals and a much better moustache. Also, like many others, I had not considered that the pantheon of Mexico’s martyred progressives -- Zapata, Villa, Blanco, Obregon, and Carranza -- had all been murdered by the Revolution. And then there’s the 1968 massacre at Tlaltelolco. Quoting Enrique Krause, "The PRI will never bring Porfirio back to Mexico because they have always feared him. They have always feared him, because their politics are identical. They will keep him in France, because isolated there, he is doubly dead. Because if he is there, they can be safe in pretending that the dictator is he and not the PRI."
In October 1981, I was wandering in Montparnasse Cemetery when I noticed a profusion of wreaths swathed in the Mexican tricolor. The wreaths surrounded a 10-foot-tall Gothic tomb chamber emblazoned with the eagle and serpent. The neo-Porfirista’s 16th-of-September decorations had not yet begun to wilt. Inside the glass and wrought-iron door were more recent bouquets, a statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and many handwritten notes. One, ornately framed, read, "Don Porfirio, Mexico lo quiere, lo admira, y lo respeta" (Mexico loves you, admires, you, and respects you).
I had no idea that Diaz was buried in Paris, or that he could still elicit such fervor. I was momentarily mystified, but then I remembered my grandmother’s glass-fronted cabinet in Laredo.