Lizardi and the European Enlightenment: the Search for Intellectual Justification of Creole Identity in Late Colonial Mexico
As his pertinent pseudonym El Pensador Mexicano (The Mexican Thinker) suggests, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi dedicated his life to the examinationof Mexican society, its problems and its potential for development through social reform. He came to intellectual maturity in the late eighteenth century, when the Spanish administration was increasingly alienating its Creole subjects throughout Spanish America with burdensome taxes, protectionist legislation and peninsular dominance in administrative positions, and access to European philosophical texts was broadening through contacts in France and North America. The ideas of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire had already proven attractive to reformist figures in the Viceroyalty of Peru, such as Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo and Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzman, who accepted the view that knowledge derived from direct sensory observation of present conditions rather than purely from close study of classical texts, and thus argued that the improvement of Spanish America could only be realised through the more scientific education of its own inhabitants.[1] Moreover, such pro-Creole arguments were put forward as a partial rejoinder to the European intellectuals – most notoriously, the philosopher-geographer Cornelius de Pauw – who claimed that the native animals, plants and even the men of the American continent had been reduced to a state of degeneracy due to its inhospitable climate and that the same fate had befallen the animals, plants and men introduced to the Americas since its discovery.[2] The European Enlightenment, therefore, was a significant but problematic intellectual resource for Spanish American Creoles, like Lizardi, trying to understand their unique condition as they became aware of the disparity not only in material interests but also in cultural identity between themselves and their Spanish counterparts in the colonies.
This project will analyse the interpretation and application of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment philosophy in the articulation of a Creole identity in the fictional work of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, focusing on his first and major novel, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) and his last, written in 1819 but published posthumously, Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832). Written during a brief interlude from his more prolific journalistic writings as a result of increased censorship of the press, each work narrates the adventures of a young Creole Mexican man stumbling through a life of debauchery, though they differ substantially in style and outcome. Lizardi’s position with regard to Mexico’s violent struggle for political independence is difficult to gauge both from his fiction and non-fiction writings but it seems clear that he considered it a personal mission to disseminate liberal ideas amongst as great a section of the Mexican population as possible in order to further the use of reasoned understanding to improve his homeland’s social and cultural position. Through this study I hope to elucidate the complex cultural relationship thatMexico had with its motherland Spain and Western Europe more generally, seeking a cultivated identity of its own but one that could be validated as a member of the European “club”, during a period in which it was making a troubled transition from colonial to independent status.
In the dedication of El Periquillo Sarniento, which is made to his readers, Lizardi presents the dilemma of identity facing his Creole compatriots at this time of political juncture, highlighting, in a passage packed with complex allusions,Mexico’s various social problems, its diverse and divided population and the heritage left, both political and cultural, by its experience of Spanish colonialism.
Muy bien sé que descendéis de un ingrato, y que tenéis relaciones de parentesco con los Caínes fratricidas, con los idólatras Nabucos, con las prostitutas Dalilas, con los sacríligos Baltasares, con los malditos Canes, con los traidores Judas, con los pérfidos Sinones, con los Cacos ladrones, con los herejes Arrios, y con una multitud de pícaros y pícaras que han vivido y aún viven en el mismo mundo que nosotros.
Sé que acaso seréis, algunos, plebeyos, indios, mulatos, negros, viciosos, tontos y majaderos.[3]
First and foremost, the Creole’s ancestor Spain was an ingrate that sucked everything it could get from its American possessions only to denigrate their cultural worth, to drag its Creole subjects into a fratricidal war rather than grant them a political rolein their homeland and to single the New World out for criticism for such sins – religious corruption, prostitution, drunkenness, robbery, deception – as had been equally committed in the Old World many times over.[4]
Although he mentions that some of his readers would be Indians, blacks and other low status groups, Lizardi knew this was highly unlikely due to the high instance of illiteracy among these sectors of the population. These comments were actually addressed to Creoles, both as a means of demonstrating their difference from European Spaniards by virtue of their association through birthplace with these ethnic groups and as an indicator of the need for Creoles to undertake the education and improvement of the lower class and non-white population so that to be their compatriots would no longer be a negative stigma for Creoles in their own and others eyes. Lizardi simultaneously itemises the ills – war, religious corruption, prostitution, robbery - he wished to purge in order to make his society better and points to a larger problem of Creole identity: how to distance and differentiate themselves from the European heritage that was undeniably a part of their culture, while simultaneously claiming the equality that de Pauwian theories of degeneration denied them. In his analysis, Creoles and Spaniards alike have the same Greco-Roman and Biblical cultural ancestry and the Mexican patria is the only point of difference between them. While proponents of the degeneration theory, however, would use this very difference to support their argument that climatic factors and racial miscegenation were responsible for the decadence of American societies, Lizardi turns this argument on its head to show that Mexico’s social problems had long-standing equivalents, perhaps even their origins, in both ancient and contemporary Europe and, therefore, were not irredeemably linked to the American environment.
Towards the end of El Periquillo Sarniento, however, Lizardi actually embraces the theory of climatic particularity to demonstrate the inapplicability of universal systems of government, to imply that those with experience of a country’s way of life are best qualified to judge and govern it and to emphasise that differences between one country and another are not innate, fixed qualities on a scale running from superior to inferior but are, rather, merely different and relative to the society, culture and climate in which they operate.While the wayward protagonist, Perico, serves an eight year sentence of military service in Manila, Lizardi has a black man voice the need for recognition of the equal validity of different civilizations around the world since their customs have derived from the peculiarities of their environment.
he de concluir con que el mal tratamiento, el rigor y desprecio con que se han visto y se ven los negros, no reconoce otro origen que la altanería de los blancos, y ésta consiste en creerlos inferiores por su naturaleza, lo que como dije, es una vieja e irracional preocupación... es preciso argüirles de necios cuando hacen distinción de las generaciones, sólo porque se diferencian en colores, cuando esta variedad es efecto o del clima, o de los alimentos, o si queréis, de alguna propriedad que la sangre ha adquirido y ha transmitido a tal y tal posteridad por herencia...Luego nada hay que extrañar que varíen tanto las naciones en sus costumbres, cuando son tan diversos sus climas, ritos, usos y gobiernos.[5]
In the dedication to his novel, Lizardi had intimated that the Creole’s country of birth was the only point of difference between them and the Spanish-born peninsulares but he did so in such a way as to deny that this factor produced any inferiority among the Creoles. With this passage, Lizardi takes a further step towards cultural relativity, arguing that Europeans should not assume that the blacks of Africa or, by inference, the native Americans were inferior by nature simply because their customs differed so substantially from their own. Rather, such differences should be attributed to the influence of environmental necessity and consequent adaptations to society over time and, therefore, should be judged in their own context and not according to the principles that ordered European societies. This argument had important implications for Creole participation in Colonial Mexico’s government and for the defence of Creole identity. The black man states that a society’s customs derived from a combination of climate, rites, practices and governments and that colour or race was not a valid criterion for evaluating a people’s merit. Since the Creoles’ racial equality had been called into question as a consequence of miscegenation throughout colonial history as well as the hiring of Indian women to breastfeed Creole children – an issue to which I shall return below – Lizardi effectively discounts the race issue as a justification for the exclusion of Creole’s from political participation. Moreover, throughout all his fictional and non-fictional work, Lizardi criticises the licentious customs of Creole society but in this passage he implicates the colonial government and the practices it imposed, while he also suggests that if government operated according to local needs by those who knew and understood their environment, in other words by the Creoles themselves, social vices would be much less pronounced.
The combination of two strands of Enlightenment theory, that a region or country’s government should operate according to local conditions and that knowledge derived from reason applied to direct sensory observations, could be used to support the Creole desire to play a larger role in the government of their own patria. While the privileged group of peninsulares, occupying most important positions in the colonial government at the end of the eighteenth century, argued that the climate, nutrition and racial mixing in the Americas had made Creoles too immature and dissolute a race to be capable of governing themselves, the latter retorted with the peninsulares’ ignorance of local conditions and selfish desire to benefit themselves rather than the society they were supposed to be working for.[6] One of the foremost scholars to have analysed and contextualised Lizardi’s work, Jefferson Rea Spell, has already systematicallyidentified instances in El Periquillo Sarniento where Lizardi criticises Colonial Mexico’s legal, justice, education and medical systems, based on the works of various European authors, as a means of pointing out the governmental mismanagement that prevented desirable institutional and social improvements. In an article that also notes Lizardi’s technique of including quotations from Greek, Latin and theological sources to back up his own attitudes, Spell has directly identified the references in the novel to William Buchan, J. Ballexserd, Jean Baptiste Blanchard and Jean Jacques Rousseau with respect to child-rearing and education, to Padre Benito Jerónimo Feijóo on promulgating meritocratic and utilitarian values at the expense of aristocratic ideas about the dishonourable nature of work, to Manuel de Lardizábal on criminal punishments and toCarl Linnaeus, Antoine Lavoisier and Thomas Fuller on medical practices.[7] Spell further suggests that Lizardi’s primary purpose in specifically mentioning these authors’ names, over and above proving that he, as a Mexican intellectual, could converse on the same level as Europe’s philosophers, was to provide a kind of bibliographic guide for his Creole readers to follow, since Lizardi was ‘above all the champion of an improved system of education which would enable Mexico to take a place among the enlightened nations of the world.’[8]
Moreover, Lizardi’s evolving vision of how Mexican society could improve is presented in his fictional work, applying Enlightenment concepts and reforms to the specifics of Mexican reality and experience. Following the example of Bourbon reforms in France and Spain directed towards prioritising agriculture, industry and education, under the advice of enlightened thinkers such asRousseau, Padre Feijóo and Pedro Rodrígues de Campomames, Lizardi’s fiction included this precept in support of his Creole agenda.[9] During the course of his military service, Perico is aboard a ship carrying silver between China and Acapulco that runs into difficulties and the precious cargo has to be thrown overboard if the passengers and crew are to survive. The honourable Colonel who, thus far in the novel, has had the greatest success in reforming the Itching Parrot, takes the opportunity to argue that (contrary to colonialist assumptions) there were resources of much greater value in the Americas than gold and silver:
con el sacrificio de ésta compraremos todos nuestra futura existencia. Compraremos la vida con el dinero, y veremos que la vida es el mayor bien del hombre, y el primero a cuya conservación debemos atender; y el dinero, los pesos, las onzas de oro, no son más que pedazos de piedra beneficiados, sin los cuales puede vivir el hombre felizmente... no queramos perecer abrazados de nuestros tesoros como el codicioso Creso.[10]
All the men onboard the ailing ship are invigorated by these words except for one rich businessman, dubbed the egoist, who follows his valuables into the ocean and dies a desperate death, while everyone else, once the ship regains a safe position, manages to recover the lost cargo.
In addition to his critique of colonialist mercantile emphasis on precious metals that stifled economic and political development within the colonies themselves, Lizardi thus also allegorises the Rousseau-inspired social contract that ought to exist for Mexico to function properly. The egoist, the only man to act against the common good by refusing to make any sacrifice of his own, perishes as a result of his untempered self-interest, while the rest ultimately lose nothing since they worked together for the best interests of all. To make his point even more emphatically, Lizardi suggests that the egoist had been the ship’s problem all along as the ship recovers immediately after the removal of his possessions, which seemed to be ‘los más pesados que llevaba el buque’.[11] Perhaps the egoist, whose obsession with precious metals and total disregard for the wellbeing of his fellow travellers, represents the peninsulares in Mexico and even the Spanish colonial system as a whole. Although Lizardi allows the gold to be retrieved and thus seems to negate the Colonel’s earlier speech, I would argue that the author endorses this turn of events only after the egoist, or Spanish domination, is gone and the rest of the ship’s passengers, symbolically the Creoles, can take charge of Mexican resources for themselves and use them to the good of all rather than the personal profit of one. They have to accept the Colonel’s humanitarian theory before the precious resources can be used appropriately. The pragmatic Lizardi would not deny that gold and silver could be valuable commodities but his central point is that their extraction should not be pursued at the expense of all other enterprises: the prioritisation of precious metals had been in Spain’s best interests, not those of Mexico or its Creole population.
At the centre of Lizardi’s concept of society as portrayed in El Periquillo Sarniento were the values of work and utility, which needed to be instilled in Mexico’s population through a suitable program of education, ideas which had already gained currency in Europe through the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers.[12] Rousseau, for instance, chose for his ideally educatedEmile (1762) the profession of carpentry since he considered it to be ‘clean and useful... it calls for skill and industry’ and would thus mould Emile into a socially useful citizen.[13] With the advent of North America’s declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, both establishing Republican systems of government, utilitarian attitudes towards public education solidified since it could be used to inform, prepare and condition the population as regards their rights, privileges and obligations as citizens.[14] Lizardi shared the enlightened belief that due to the essential rationality of mankind, society could be improved through the education of man, an education that would make the benefits of contributing constructively to society through useful work self-evident and attractive to the individual.[15] After failing to succeed in several occupations, including the clergy, medicine, pharmacy and begging, as a result of his steadfast determination to avoid as much work as possible while gaining as much stature as possible, Perico finally contributes eight years of solid, productive service to the army in Manila. His capable instructor, the Colonel, explains the importance in creating good citizens of positive social values towards work that had too long been lacking in Perico’s Mexican life:
Has adquirido, desterrado y en tierra ajena, un principalito que no pudiste lograr libre en tu patria; esto, más que fortuna, debes atribuirlo al arreglo de tus costumbres, lo que te enseña que la mejor suerte del hombre es su mejor conducta, y que la mejor patria es aquella donde se dedica a trabajar con hombría de bien.[16]