Pacifying History: past, present and future in the ways of thinking Mexican politics, in the transition from the 19th to 20th centuries

Abstract

During the Porfiriato (1876-1911), there was an intense moment of production on the political stability that Mexico was going through. The aim of this paper is to discuss how, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mexicans polygraphs have used history and conceptions of time in their political works on the Pax Porfiriana. We have chosen the texts of Bernardo Reyes, Justo Sierra and Francisco Madero. The intention is to explain how, from the memory of an anarchic post-independence Mexican past, marked by civil wars and foreign interventions, an image of Díaz as the regenerator of the nation was created; Díaz was portrayed as someone who managed to establish that internal peace during his presidency. From this pacified present, a future would emerge. But such a future, in turn, depended on political choices that its authors sought to defend.