Interview with Alejandro Quintero Mächler, author of “Autopsy, Patrimony, and a Christianized Reforma: Manuel Ramírez Aparicio’s Mexican Conventual History, 1861–1862”
Alejandro Quintero Mächler is a research scholar and lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University. His interests revolve around nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual and cultural history, and his book Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX: Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica was published in 2023. You can read his article “Autopsy, Patrimony, and a Christianized Reforma: Manuel Ramírez Aparicio’s Mexican Conventual History, 1861–1862,” which won the 2025 Premio al Mejor Artículo en Humanidades from the Latin American Studies Asssociation’s Mexico section, in HAHR 104.1.
Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles
1. What brought you to study Manuel Ramírez Aparicio’s book Los conventos suprimidos en México and the genre of conventual history in Spanish America?
I first encountered Manuel Ramírez Aparicio’s fascinating book while researching about nineteenth-century Mexican lithography. I was immediately captivated by its eulogizing, melancholy tone; its striking usage of lithographic images to depict the ruination of the suppressed convents; its true interdisciplinarity, combining history and serious antiquarianism with archaeology and the biographical sketch; the elusive voice of the author, of whom I barely knew anything; and its ambiguous ideological stance, which seemed to complicate how the Reforma period has been depicted by the Mexican Liberal and revolutionary tradition. At the time, I was still writing my PhD thesis on a rather unrelated topic—”blood discourses” in nineteenth-century century Spanish America—so I decided to store it safely in my archive of possible “future projects,” postponing any direct engagement with it. Fortunately, I did not have to wait for long.
2. How does Ramírez Aparicio’s book challenge and enhance our comprehension of mid-nineteenth-century anticlericalism in Mexico and globally?
In my view, Ramírez Aparicio’s book is yet another instance revealing the many political and ideological nuances often obscured by simplistic, excessively clear-cut distinctions such as progress versus reaction, liberals versus conservatives, monarchists versus republicans, and so on and so forth. Positions such as Ramírez Aparicio’s, painfully caught between his liberal endorsement of the convents’ suppression and his sincere, Catholic faith, are usually lost amid the noise of partisan historiography and the mounting pressure of present-day political concerns.
In terms of global anticlericalism, the book belongs to what may be considered a veritable transnational genre, what I call “conventual history.” The origins of the genre hark back to Britain’s post-Reformation era—already foreshadowing the islands’ later gothic obsession—offering a readily available template for future dealings with the seismic trauma of anticlericalism. During the nineteenth century, as an ever-growing state implemented increasingly aggressive secularization policies, its urgency increased at both sides of the Atlantic: Ramírez Aparicio’s book, written in the 1860s, was modeled after a very similar Spanish one, written just a decade before. The importation and adaptation of foreign models were sanctioned by a sense of simultaneity. A cursory examination of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s Mexican press reveals that the advance of anticlericalism was believed to be an almost coordinated global phenomenon, regardless of whether they were for or against it. Furthermore, the ambitious, interdisciplinary breadth of these conventual histories was justified by the sheer immensity of what was purportedly threatened: nothing less than the cultural and material legacy of the Catholic Church.
3. How would you characterize the importance of Ramírez Aparicio’s book in the context of nineteenth-century Mexican history and intellectual discourse?
As many other nineteenth-century primary sources, Ramírez Aparicio’s book required, and still requires, a thorough, serious, defamiliarizing rereading. In regard to the writing of history, I believe is one of the most interesting projects of the Mexican nineteenth century, surprisingly contemporary in its eclectic usage of diverse sources, narrative points of view, and manifold fields of study. It also attempts, and succeeds, in striking a historicist balance between continuity and change, loss and hope. It feels closer, in my opinion, to Jules Michelet, Jacob Burckhardt, or any present-day cultural history than it does to his fellow historians, such as Lucas Alamán or José Fernando Ramírez. For some reason, these kinds of so-called “amateur” works have not been given their due. In spite of their richness, inventiveness, and rigor, they are barely mentioned in historiographical accounts to this day, fixated with the rise of “professional” history as an institutionalized discipline. They belong to a still untold story of “historical thinking” in the widest of senses. “What was history?” asked Anthony Grafton in one of his works, devoted to the rehabilitation of sixteenth-century ars historica. I suspect that his question is still awaiting a more comprehensive reply on the part of nineteenth-century Latin America specialists.
Ideologically, Ramírez Aparicio’s book offers a unique, frequently overlooked perspective as well: that of the Liberal Catholic who favored, and directly participated in, the suppression of the convents, while hoping to preserve their spiritual and material value. In doing so, Ramírez Aparicio was struggling to redefine, both for Mexico and for himself, the appropriate relationship between religion and politics: the “spirit” of the former, on the one hand, reduced to its purest principles, should enrich, fuse with, and survive in the latter, giving way to what I term a “Christianized Reforma”; its “body,” on the other hand, its whole concrete materiality, convents included, should become national patrimony, the tangible expression of a bygone era now relegated to (past) history and national museums. Writing at a time of crisis, Ramírez Aparicio’s work is a testament to the historiographical difficulty of finding continuity amid constant or abrupt transformation. Ultimately, as all great works of history, it is a reflection on time and its passing.
4. Which historiographical traditions inspire your work most? What do you find productive about them?
Although I would situate myself, not without hesitation, within “intellectual history,” I feel more drawn to a particular kind of historian than to a specific field of study. Scholars who delve in comparative and transnational studies, who are not afraid to coin novel concepts or open up new fields of inquiry, and who assume a critical stance toward the coercion of disciplinary boundaries, inspire me time and again. Within intellectual history, I particularly enjoy historiography, as it allows me to acquaint myself with long-forgotten classics we sometimes believe—wrongly, of course—that we already know. For instance, I find the works of Stephen Bann on the “representation of history” in the nineteenth century to be highly stimulating, and they introduced me not only to Michelet, Barante, and many others but also led me to the joyful discovery of Walter Scott’s novels and a reappreciation of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris.
In general, I try to follow my instincts and hunches as a reader, which results in a highly heterogeneous intellectual diet: I find philosophy and its conceptual apparatuses stimulating, almost liberating; sociology’s explanatory models thought-provoking; and art history’s visual emphasis a welcome escape from a still logocentric discipline. My article on Ramírez Aparicio, for example, was heavily influenced by Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical reflections on humans as spatially embedded beings, Susan Stewart’s art history of ruins, and Rosemary Hill’s research on the nineteenth-century antiquarian obsession with the Gothic, from Horace Walpole onward. That said, I do believe that revisiting old classics—canonical figures of the humanities such as Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Pocock, Gadamer, and even earlier ones such as Giambattista Vico or unclassifiable ones such as Elias Canetti—never ceases to be stimulating.
5. Is this article part of a broader project? If so, could you give us a preview?
Not directly, though I do continue to work on issues related to the “Catholic Imagination.” At the moment, I’m putting the finishing touches on an article dealing with the “Catholic Imagination” as displayed in nineteenth-century Spanish American travel writing to the Holy Land.
6. Read anything good recently?
Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, the best “campus novel” I have read since discovering John Williams’s Stoner; Peter Brown’s Journeys of the Mind, fascinating insight into the trajectory and creative process of a great historian; Alexander Nagel and Elizabeth Hodorowitch’s Amerasia, a multidisciplinary history of how America and Asia have been merged in the Western imagination since the fifteenth century; Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy, an analysis of the “capitalism within us”; Niklaus Largier’s In Praise of the Whip, a cultural history of flagellation and the arousal of the imagination that accompanies it; and the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthazar, astonishingly vast and thought-provoking, regardless of whether you consider yourself a believer.