{"id":3086,"date":"2018-12-12T14:09:34","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T14:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/16.147.243.36\/?p=3086"},"modified":"2026-08-06T15:09:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T15:09:18","slug":"interview-paul-k-eiss-a-revolutionary-postmortem-body-memory-and-history-in-yucatan-mexico-1915-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/interview-paul-k-eiss-a-revolutionary-postmortem-body-memory-and-history-in-yucatan-mexico-1915-2015\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Paul<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul K. Eiss is an associate professor of anthropology and history at Carnegie Mellon University whose research joins the methods of archival history, ethnography, and cultural analysis. His book, <\/em>In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucat\u00e1n<\/a>, was published by Duke University Press in 2010. You can read his article \u201cA Revolutionary Postmortem: Body, Memory, and History in Yucat\u00e1n, Mexico, 1915\u20132015<\/a>\u201d in <\/em>HAHR<\/a> 98.4.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

1. How did you come to research Salvador Alvarado and his legacy in Mexican politics?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my graduate studies at the University of Michigan, I did a research paper on the period of the civil war and emancipation in Louisiana, with a particular focus on African American workers on sugar plantations as they made the transition\u2014first under Union forces, and then under the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau\u2014out of slavery into some kind of free labor. As I made my own transition to working in Yucat\u00e1n, I thought it would make sense to investigate a similar transition, from indigenous debt peonage into free labor, also during a time of transition between military and civilian rule. When I began my research in Yucat\u00e1n in the early 1990s, I was struck by the degree to which the official history of the revolutionary period, whether in scholarly literature, in pamphlets sold at local bookstores, and certainly documentation produced by the Alvarado government, took the form of a hagiography of Salvador Alvarado, as the great liberator of indigenous hacienda workers. Yet when I spoke with people who lived on the ex-haciendas\u2014many of them descendants of indigenous debt peons\u2014I found that no one had ever heard of Alvarado. This apparent disjuncture, between official history and popular historical memory, was what led me to explore the politics of history, memory and the archives in Yucat\u00e1n.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A bank note tied to henequen revenues, used as currency in Yucat\u00e1n, issued in 1914 by Alvarado’s predecessor, Eleuterio Avila<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

2. Your article begins in 1915, with Salvador Alvarado\u2019s arrival in Yucat\u00e1n, and ends in 2015, with the centenary celebration of this latter event. What challenges were posed by researching across such a broad time span and about events contemporary to the article\u2019s writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first did research on this topic in ’90s, I focused very much on the copious archives of the revolutionary period and also somewhat on the postrevolutionary politics of commemoration of Alvarado as liberator, chiefly on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his arrival in 1965. At the time, I thought, wouldn\u2019t it be nice to fast forward to 2015\u2014two decades in the future\u2014to see how the centennial might be commemorated? Subsequently I turned to other projects, leaving this one on the back burner for years, until about 2013, when I realized that 2015 was right around the corner! I revived the project, anticipating the approaching centennial. In the intervening years since my initial study, advances in the digitalization and text-searchability of published literature made it possible for me to conduct much more comprehensive research on the politics of historiography over the decades following Alvarado\u2019s death. The greatest challenge was not research per se but the writing of this article\u2014that is, of piecing together a narrative that makes sense, across such a long stretch of time, straddling different political regimes and periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Your article derives part of its conceptual framing from an Italo Calvino short story. How generally do you think that literature can contribute to the study of history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greatly. And not just literature. With a background in both anthropology and history, I am quite favorable to transdisciplinary modes of inquiry and writing, whether connecting different humanistic disciplines or even transacting between the humanities and the arts. I am also quite skeptical of what I consider the ideology of disciplinarity: that is, the notion that any field, including history or historiography, can or should be conceived in hermetic, self-sufficient terms. I think that sometimes the most important insights may come when we blend fields, or frames of reference. For me, Calvino\u2019s profound questioning of the senses, in \u201cA King Listens<\/a>,\u201d opened a very different vantage point on power and perception than I would have had if I had confined myself to the ways such issues have been broached in the historiography. Beginning with Calvino was a way to acknowledge that inspiration but also to open up for readers a very different way of conceiving of the central issues in this study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Your article productively approaches the figure of Salvador Alvarado through the double meaning of corpus: as both a body of writing and a physical body. How did this conceptual dualism inflect your approach in the article?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This formulation was inspired not just by Calvino, but also by Ernst Kantorowicz\u2019s classic study of political theology, The King’s Two Bodies<\/em><\/a>, and by performance studies scholars, like Diana Taylor<\/a>, who have critiqued the epistemological separation of textual (i.e., archival) and embodied modes of memory transmission. Given that separation, it struck me that the notion of \u201ccorpus\u201d is a particularly interesting one, as it refers both to body and to text, transcending the ways we tend to separate them and suggesting the possibility of a unifying frame of analysis. In this article, the notion of corpus helped me to craft a narrative that stretched across a century of history, as I tracked the presence and growth of Alvarado\u2019s corpus\u2014at once physical and textual\u2014in a variety of contexts, from the performance of political action to the construction of archives, historiography, the erection of monuments, and the enactment of political rituals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Salvador Alvarado monument, outside Yucat\u00e1n’s Supreme Court. Photograph by Paul K. Eiss<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

5. In the article, you seem to suggest that the story of Salvador Alvarado’s legacy is complete: \u201cThe moment of Alvarado\u2019s greatest presence\u2014the 2015 centennial commemorations\u2014was also the time of his final departure, as his challenging and contradictory project was most thoroughly domesticated, as a call for collective well-being\u201d (p. 701). Has this changed at all with the election of Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador? Why or why not?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I found over the course of my research, Alvarado and his legacy became progressively identified with the PRI, both in regional Yucatecan politics and as a mediating point of reference when state-level politicos addressed themselves to national leaders, or vice versa. So in 2015, with the PRI in power at the national level\u2014in the figure of President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2014and at the state level\u2014in the figure of Governor Rolando Zapata Bello\u2014I anticipated a perfect storm for Alvarado\u2019s commemoration, in a very public and charged way. Nonetheless, when 2015 came, the events and initiatives relating to the centennial seemed fairly low-key\u2014as if the PRI were just going through the motions, deliberately ignoring Alvarado\u2019s revolutionary legacies, to present him instead as an example of managerial competency in line with the contemporary party\u2019s neoliberal sensibilities. This led me to anticipate the future, in a sense; if this is how Alvarado was commemorated by the PRI at a high point of regional and national power and on the very centennial of Alvarado\u2019s arrival in Yucat\u00e1n, then truly the king\u2014to recall Calvino\u2019s story\u2014had at last fled the castle. AMLO, to my knowledge, has made no attempt to gesture toward Alvarado; it might seem out of keeping with his populist style if he were to reclaim a figure that has come to be so closely associated with the erstwhile official party. That said, Alvarado has seemed to disappear before, only to return, and I would be happy to be proven wrong (and to write a follow-up essay for HAHR<\/em> in that case). It would be possible, for instance, for AMLO\u2014himself a southerner, notably\u2014to find the Alvarado of Mi sue\u00f1o<\/em><\/a> inspiring for his own regional infrastructural utopianism, as best expressed in his ambitious and controversial plan to build a Tren Maya<\/a> to stimulate economic development and tourism in Yucat\u00e1n. Only time will tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Read anything good recently?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently I read Luis Alberto Urrea\u2019s The House of Broken Angels<\/em><\/a>. It is epic and enjoyable! And for the third time, I reread W. G. Sebald\u2019s The Rings of Saturn<\/em><\/a>, an oneiric work\u2014somewhere in the borderlands between narrative fiction, history and memoir\u2014that I find endlessly fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Top image: Painting of Salvador Alvarado by Fernando Castro Pacheco, displayed in the Palacio de Gobierno, Yucat\u00e1n, Mexico. Photo by Wolfgang Sauber. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>. (Find the original here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul K. Eiss is an associate professor of anthropology and history at Carnegie Mellon University whose research joins the methods of archival history, ethnography, and cultural analysis. His book, In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucat\u00e1n, was published by Duke University Press in 2010. You can read his article \u201cA Revolutionary Postmortem: Body, Memory, and History in Yucat\u00e1n, Mexico, 1915\u20132015\u201d in HAHR 98.4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447,448],"tags":[517,518,519,508,520,521],"class_list":["post-3086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-multimedia","tag-body","tag-memory","tag-mexican-revolution","tag-mexico","tag-salvador-alvarado","tag-yucatan"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.6","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es","pt"],"languages":{"en":{"title":false,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"pt":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3086"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9380,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3086\/revisions\/9380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}