ABSTRACT
Self-reflexivity is, of course, central to experimentalism in history. It is the self-conscious understanding of the authorial and imaginative roles played by both historical actors and the historian. In Chapter 1, ‘When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepción González and a past that would not stay put’, Marjorie Becker tries to recreate an incandescent moment in the history of Mexico, a moment when ordinary Mexicans spectacularly transformed Mexico’s future. As she explores, in the mid-1930s in the midst of President Lázaro Cárdenas’s efforts to remake rural Mexico and its people, men and women trained to revere the Virgin Mary entered a church, seized the wooden icons of Jesus, the saints, the Virgin, and torched them in the plaza. Later that evening, a number of men and women re-entered the church and danced before the altar. In a rich mix of commitment and self-reflexivity Becker’s chapter explores this moment through a combination of ethno-historical and fictive techniques. The chapter is about specific historical actors’ diverse relationships with time, women’s bodies, and spiritual life. Empathy is always in and out of fashion at the same time among historians – probably because it is seemingly as dangerous as it is rewarding. Becker’s empathy is rewarding because she turns it into self-reflexivity and it is demonstrated as she weaves together important historical issues with actual scenes and imagined dialogue. She creates a composite priest and constructs the Virgin Mary’s role in promoting and discouraging the dance as she enters memories and recreates her own ethno-historical relationship with the villagers.
