Cuauhtemoc's Bones: Forging Identity in Modern Mexico

摘要

If finding the remains of a disgraced and reviled English monarch under a Leicester car park could spark a wave of generously revisionist enthusiasm, little wonder that the discovery of the tomb of Mexico's heroic last emperor should become such an immediate national sensation. Late in 1949, Indian labourers digging beneath the altar of the parish church of Ixcateopan, a town in the mountainous southern state of Guerrero, unearthed a tomb containing what the priest and other local luminaries claimed to be the remains of Cuauhtemoc, last seen hanging from a silk-cotton tree after his brutal torture and execution by Hernan Cortes in February 1525. Although within months the tomb was revealed to be an amateurish fraud, the dramatic find ignited two decades of academic controversy and nationalist exaltation, amounting, in the view of the author of this important and highly original book, to 'the greatest scandal in the cultural politics of twentieth-century Mexico' (p. 2).