Mexico, the Puzzle: A Conversation about Civil Society and the Nation with Ilan Semo

Ilan Semo was interviewed in his apartment in Mexico City in February 1999. I edited a transcript of the interview and invited him to make changes and corrections in April 1999. He returned a revision in July 1999, including several additional pages on the role of nongovernmental organizations in Mexico.	1
DAVID THELEN
DAVID THELEN:The Mexican Revolution (1911-1920) powerfully reinforced the nation-state, and many people looked to Mexico as a model of progressive nationalism. What is happening to the nation in Mexico now?	2
ILAN SEMO:How does it look, the question of the nation today? When we ask, what is a nation, we ask a question that was asked by Ernest Renan after the Franco-Prussian War. As he saw that Lorraine no longer belonged to France, Renan asked what a nation is. He tried to define some properties. At first Renan thought that each nation was characterized by a language. He concluded that that was not true, of course; the United States has many languages; Belgium has two languages; the old Soviet Union and Spain each had many languages. So language has not very much to do with nations. Religion does not define a nation. Since it is so difficult to find common features that characterize a nation, Renan said that the way to find out whether a place was a nation was by referendum or plebiscite of all the people that are attached to that place. I think that's a good way to define the nation. Twenty years ago, people might have voted to define Yugoslavia as their nation, and now they might vote for Croatia. The Basques have voted almost to separate from Spain in the last elections, but without elections, they are part of Spain. Renan said that if we really try to analyze nations, we do not need legal definitions, economic definitions, but to find out what it means for a person to belong to the nation. Why do nations rise so quickly and then are destroyed so quickly? The Soviet Union looked like a nation, but then it was not a nation. People will tell us what they want a nation to mean at different times and places.
In the nineteenth century some nationalists tried to develop national languages that all citizens of a nation would speak and share. But by 1900 no more than 10 percent of the people who lived in Mexico spoke Spanish. At the time of Italian unification, a tiny fraction of Italians spoke what we now know as the official language. The nineteenth century was a century when the factories of national language were only starting. Bureaucracy was the first factory of language—it generated marriage certificates, birth certificates, documents required for getting a job in a bureaucracy. Such documents require national languages. Schooling is a factory of language; the army is. They are factories for destroying all the local ancien régimes.	3
If no more than 10 percent of Mexicans spoke Spanish, what did they speak? Their own languages, in Martin Heidegger's notion of language. For Heidegger, language is the home of man, where he sings and feels. In Mexico there were between eighty and one hundred languages. I do not want to call them Indian languages because the speakers do not call themselves Indian. The Otomi calls his language Otomi. Of course, from the perspective of the national state, from a Spanish perspective, their otherness would become Indian. But if we look at their languages, their homes, they do not call themselves Indians, they call themselves Mayans, Otomis, Mijes, and so on. Mexico is a mosaic of communities, of small societies, that are able to preserve their languages from attack by the national state as it seeks to destroy their enclaves. Attack comes from the schooling system. An attack comes from the bureaucratic system in the sense that it does not recognize anything spoken in any language except Spanish. A national language is a permanent attack on the identity that gives those communities the capability to resist the emergence of a national state.	. . .