[Unedited] My dissertation examines the way in which specific historical bodies such as the soldadera (a female camp follower), the mulata, and the figure of Emiliano Zapata have been appropriated in Mexico by different cultural genres such as literature, music, popular balladry, and film. All of the historical figures that I consider occupy the site of a powerful tropological discourse that has saturated the public imagination throughout the 20th c. Hayden White, among others, contends that trope, which is figurative language, constitutes a 'mode of thought.' As a mode of thought, trope can govern the expectations that are held of certain people. This project is concerned with defining those expectations within the confines of the nation-state, and more importantly, explaining how they are disrupted. This leads to my critical query: why do certain historical bodies constitute the sites of such discursive tension? The figures I examine in this study suggest something deeper in the concept of nationhood than the reigning paradigms of identity; their bodies become metaphors for the tensions within the spaces they occupy. In order to embrace this project, I explore the idea of tropes within traditional Western rhetorical practices and then enter into dialogue with indigenous thought and aesthetics. The process by which noted historical figures become aesthetic tropes in both popular cultural production and high art constitutes the crux of this study. For example, the soldadera and the mulata are given anonymous, even pejorative names that reveal their striking omnipresence in the national imaginary; nevertheless, they are erased from the national narrative. In effect, the participation of the soldaderas in the Mexican military was never officially recognized or remunerated; they were deplored as cumbersome parasites. Similarly, mulatas enter the imaginary as exceptional, exotic figures whose exuberant sexuality is perceived as dangerous to traditional culture. Yet their image is nonetheless pervasive in 20 th century Mexican culture. In light of the nation's historical amnesia regarding the place of Africans, I examine the way in which different musical genres and cultural traditions in the state of Veracruz articulate Mexico's legacy of blackness. Unlike the nameless anonymity of the soldadera, mulata and Africans, Emiliano Zapata begins as a specific individual with a proper name and history. However, the specificity of his historical context becomes abstracted through the appropriation of his name by the indigenous groups who, by assuming his patronymic as Zapatistas, forcefully insert their anonymity into the national narrative. Despite its program to achieve mestizo middle-class values, national culture repeatedly turns back to figurations of marginal subjects. How these figures inspire art forms as diverse as corridos, film, fiction, and music as well as the power of these uniquely marginalized figures to travel across genres so irreverently is what drives my intellectual endeavor.
