Claiming the Past: The Indigenous Governor of Porfirian Tlaxcala

Próspero Cahuantzi, a recognizably Indigenous person, ruled the small central state of Tlaxcala from 1885 to 1911 during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). Cahuantzi selectively exploited elements from Tlaxcala’s past and present to make himself into the kind of “Indian” that Porfirian elites could accept—one who was assimilable and whose region, insofar as Cahuantzi portrayed it, welcomed different forms of modernization. Cahuantzi embraced his indigenous ancestry and promoted Tlaxcala’s pre-Hispanic legacy to bolster his political station and to ingratiate himself to Díaz and other nation-builders. The governor donated local artifacts to World’s Fairs, presented in Nahuatl (the Aztec language) at nation-building forums, and endorsed chronicles that foregrounded Tlaxcala’s role in making the Mexican nation. Thus, the governor fed nation-builders’ obsession with the pre-Hispanic past and consecrated himself as the modern forebearer of Tlaxcala’s ancient legacy. At the same time, the governor distanced himself and his region from Mexico’s “barbarous” Indians. The paper thus shows how Indigenous actors participated in the nation-building process in the late nineteenth century, and moreover how Indigenous actors understood Indigeneity to be a diverse, mutable, and highly-contextually-dependent category, one that could be engaged when politically useful and dropped when not.