The Time of Place in West Mexico

This chapter is about talk on the history of towns in west Mexico, which I treat as part of a ‘moral geography’ as recently defined by Thomas: a ‘complex of associations among ideas of person, people, place, and history’ (Thomas, 2002: 372). I describe how talk about history helped to link persons to place and particularly to mark some people as townspeople as opposed to villagers. My focus is on the temporal dimensions of such links – hence the title of this chapter. ¹ ‘Place can be defined in a variety of ways. Among them is this: place can be whatever stable object catches our eye’ (Yuan, 1977: 161). ² Following Yuan, ‘place’ is defined here as a singularity that is conceived primarily in spatial terms. ‘Place’ in this sense can be distinguished from ‘position’ but also from ‘event’ as a singularity conceived primarily in temporal terms. It should be emphasized that the distinction is one of degree: any construal of place has temporal dimensions just as any construal of event has spatial dimensions.