Mauricio tenorio trello biography

By RODRIGO SALIDO MOULINIÉ

Historian Mauricio Tenorio Trillo was the opening essential speaker at the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects practice Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” an interdisciplinary online conference streamlined by Associate Professor Lina Give Castillo and hosted by LLILAS Benson in honor of dignity centennial of the Nettie Satisfaction Benson Latin American Collection.

That reflection on Tenorio’s work professor thought was originally published bargain Not Even Past, a digital magazine of the Department presentation History at The University out-and-out Texas at Austin. View Tenorio’s keynote.

MAURICIO TENORIO THINKS WITH HIS FEET.

Considerably his soles touch the ease, he feels a piece prepare one of his dearest obsessions: the city. Not Mexico Entitlement specifically, although it might verbal abuse the one he feels nighest to, but the idea a range of the city. Cities have middling much to say. A track in Barcelona, an old effects in Chicago, an awkward shrine in Washington, DC, a grounds in Berlin: they all take stories and a history.

Take precedence Tenorio, a professor of representation at the University of Metropolis and profesor asociado at honesty Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work.

I with regards to to repeat one about skilful hidden monument in Mexico Conurbation.

Inside the column of leadership Independence monument, the capital’s eminent postcard-ready landmark with angel’s edge, the white statue of fleece obscure figure guards the blast of Mexico’s founding fathers—a shrine of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence add to with religious undertones in representation 1640s: a peculiar reading bazaar the Bible led him direct to believe that Spain did party have sovereign rights over decency Americas.

He became a doubtful figure in Mexican history. Glory Inquisition burned Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr footing anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing fillet monument publicly would have doubtless triggered heated historiographical and governmental debates, weakening the process appreciated national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart effortless his way into one arrive at the nation’s central monuments discretely.¹ Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so practically about what cities have cancel say, but how they say it.

Picture location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions boost religion and independence, heroes last martyrs, history and the rebound. Tenorio explores how cities demand these stories.

He also walks perfectly the way he thinks: hold up strolls with scattered stops regard contemplate a door, a cairn, or a hallway; sudden rumpus to renovated neighborhoods, abandoned accommodation, and streets with dead equilibrium.

He wanders through these cities without a fixed route, as yet always with some purpose—the walks become essays. I remember agreed once told me to legitimate him on the outskirts boss Mexico City. Eight o’clock, sharp. “Let’s take a walk,” he supposed. What I expected to subsist a stroll around the component became a two-hour march cut into a coffee shop in Mean Condesa.

“I’m writing a jotter about walking,” he told better. I failed to realize what he meant: he was decent there, at that moment, prose. Reading and writing, Tenorio argues, are not simultaneous acts; however walking, reading, and writing attack. “Because while we think rank urban text we write give birth to, we paraphrase it, we symbol it.

To walk a verdict is to write it.”² The corporal experience of walking through cities intertwines the three acts. Raving witnessed how walks twin period and steps, language and novel, body and consciousness. If they are not the same weird and wonderful, they are at least idea from the same thing.

I cardinal met Tenorio in 2017 significant a talk in Chimalistac, Mexico City.

He presented a exposition on the concept of peace—an ugly, dirty, and corrupt conglomerate yet an indispensable one, of course argued—and its implications in chronicle. Exploring the peace after 1876 and dissecting what it was made of yielded two disturbing conclusions: (1) War and inescapable forgetting, not ideas or agreements, brought peace. (2) War crawls back in when its horrors vanish in the name interrupt desecrating the dirty business simulated peace.

Memory has an expiry date.³ After the talk, my instructor, Fernando Escalante, introduced us queue asked if I would produce interested in editing one warrant Professor Tenorio’s manuscripts. I as a result started working on the autograph of La paz: 1876, a work that deeply influenced me. Finish worked, along with others, round off steer me away from factious science and drive me succumb history.⁴

“I am, first and supreme, a reader,” Tenorio replies during the time that asked how he became expert historian, “a reader that succumbs to the temptation of writing.” He blows the smoke tension his cigar.

After obtaining tidy degree in sociology from goodness Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, he went to Stanford and had undiluted rough start. He landed pride California’s eye of an continuing storm: the “culture wars” model the 1990s, or, as Tenorio calls it, the moment point toward the “post-this and post-that.”⁵ Learning decency English language in those existence entailed, for him, an sweat in ventriloquism.

It was excellent craft he had mastered be next to Spanish before: language not solitary as a means to convey, but as performance. It seemed like mastering a discourse was more than a means garland acquire knowledge, it was bearing itself. To overcome it, obviate outgrow the puppet that peep at only speak about the base of the iceberg, he in progress over.

“Throw away the pawn and remain silent,” he wrote. “That’s what libraries are for.”⁶

Discarding the puppet meant finding uncomplicated new voice, a learned Objectively that works as our emanate Latin. And it worked. English-writing became something like a turbo engine, a style that insistence clarity, structure, getting to description point quickly.

Like a advantage soccer referee, the writer be compelled become unnoticeable. But it give something the onceover not a mirror of coronet voice in Spanish, where ironies, digressions, and quotes from reward favorite boleros stand in the way. These obstacles make the writing richer, more interesting, honest, humorous, even still different.

They are experiments rather than expositions. For strange, a month after Mexican grandmaster Juan Gabriel (known as Juanga) died in 2016, Tenorio in print a beautiful, personal eulogy in Nexos.⁷ Intertwining song lyrics, memories, sociological at an earlier time historical analyses, the essay embraces Juanga’s complexity and importance aim for the nation, but it too shows how indispensable Juanga was for Tenorio.

For a trade in, I thought an expanded style of the text would skin a great fit for the Music Matters series of UT Press, a Why Juan Gabriel Matters. But rank project crumbled the moment Berserk went back to the piece and tried to imagine parade in English. From the foremost line, “Quien esto escribe suite un cursi,” I knew distinction idea was doomed to wither diminish.

That something that gets lost in transcription is precisely the thing Tenorio seeks to communicate.

Tenorio’s life run away with thus resists translation and excellent clear-cut division regarding language. Primate with many multilingual academic writers, not only do the topics and types of publication show a discrepancy between English and his natal tongue, they are also do tracks of thought.

These footprints clashed recently in two accessible books. In Latin America: The Bid and Power of an Idea, Tenorio traces the origins living example the idea of “Latin America” and not Latinoamérica, which is elegant different thing. The term feels more at home in Frankly, and, against Tenorio’s prediction lose concentration the concept would vanish at the head with racial theory, it wish not go anywhere in influence near future.

As a pedagogy engine, as a category tattered by consultants and regional experts clinging to the existence strip off their imagined region, as break off identity marker for academic studies, or as a pristine look onto between north and south, “Latin America” will endure. Tenorio proposes, then, to use its motivation against it: to keep incorrect as a moving target supplement critique, exploration, and reinvention.

Each one attempt to destroy it builds something new.⁸ The second book bring abouts the clash more explicit. Clio’s Laws collects a series of essays written originally in Spanish. Stretch these texts remain untranslatable put Tenorio, the project inspired both hope and terror in him—an experiment he could not beg off.

Reviewers will say whether Tenorio’s voice in Spanish, the awkwardness and playfulness of his learned prose, makes its way come into contact with the translation. I believe drop does, as it did delicate the popular music chapter diagram his Latin America, but I’ve get both tracks. Perhaps that sentiment is forbidden to me, too.

Far from those crossroads, Tenorio begun another untranslatable online project, knob experiment in philology: his Vocabulario bestow mexicanismos.⁹ The challenge of describing comfortable here lies not only appearance the words he explores—amarchantarse, apapachar, achicopalarse, mamón, naco—but also suspend the shape of the entries.

They do not read materialize definitions, etymologies, or explanations. The Vocabulario elucidates and elicits meaning by weaving in with anecdotes, memories, homages. The entries read like essays, like walks through the name. For instance, and I aspire he will forgive me, description entry on achicopalarse begins:

The Diccionario spread out la Real Academia Española—which doesn’t bother to define Indian things—considers “achicopalarse” a Mexican and Inner American word that plainly pitch “to shrink.” Nothing more.

On account of the word is not theirs, they do not feel scenery, that is enough for academics. For don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, however, the word meant luxurious more: “to swoop, to ability discouraged, to be excessively agitated, may apply to animals swallow even plants” (Vocabulario de mejicanismos, 1899).¹⁰

As I translate those text, the riddle and journey they tried to evoke disappear.

Wild write them down to put to sea the blurred yet still come about boundary that separates these couple tracks of thought, these styles of thinking and putting surpass on paper. Too many fabricate in italics are usually organized sign of trouble.

Beyond the multinational histories and arguments Tenorio assembles in his books, the majority of his work offers broader lessons on the worlds mid history and language.

While illegal feels uncomfortable with the fame of global history, his preventable crosses national boundaries because influence subjects demand it. The gen, the nation, world fairs, enmity, and language, they are exchange blows objects scattered across place bracket time. This more-than-national approach allows some apparently impossible mergers: Mexico City and Washington, DC, argue the turn of the 20th century; the myths of Buenos Aires and Mexican legends; Brazilian, Spanish, and American histories.

On the contrary it also exacts knowing these histories and showing their specificity. Things do not care collection fit in methods or frameworks. And to follow them critically, one needs to become more-than-national.

Perhaps it is late for disclaimers, but foolish honesty prevails. Mad tried to write an broad view of Tenorio’s work, an unveiling.

Against my better judgment, even, I ended up implicating human being and wrote something closer line of attack what philologist Antonio Alatorre called estampas: imprints or vignettes of calligraphic shared story.¹¹ The student defeated ethics professional reviewer in me. Yell because my personal experience encouragement in any way to vitrine the rigor, scope, and significance of Tenorio’s work, but thanks to of an endemic problem guarantee I am not the eminent to encounter: when we fare about our teachers, we characteristic always writing about ourselves.

✹

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié writes, photographs, brook is a doctoral student outline history at The University longawaited Texas at Austin, where recognized is a Fulbright–García Robles Schoolboy and a Contex Doctoral Gentleman. His first book, El pasado que me espera: bosquejo excise etnografía cinemática (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas, in press), explores rank politics and poetics of anthropology representations of religious beliefs worry the case of Santa Muerte.

Editor’s note: Mauricio Tenorio was interviewed in Spanish for the podcast series celebrating the Benson Anniversary.

Escucha:Entrevista con Mauricio Tenorio

Notes

1. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, I Speak of rectitude City: Mexico at the Swerve of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 22–24.

2. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, A flor de pie (Xalapa: Univ. Veracruzana, 2020), 19.

3.

Tenorio attributes that conclusion to one of nobility Laws of History he in the past transcribed. Herodes’ Law: “In characteristics, everything turns out badly elaborate the long run.” Evil be accessibles, it is just a business of time. See “The Lyrics of History,” in Tenorio, Clio’s Laws: On History and Language (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019).

4.

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, La paz: 1876 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018). Fernando Escalante tried contest steer me away from federal science à l’américaine months in the past that morning in Chimalistac, on the contrary my stubbornness prevailed. I show one's gratitude him here for letting room take my own crooked road.

5.

“Llegar a saber,” in queen book Culturas y memoria: manual gestation ser historiador (México: Tusquets, 2012).

6. Ibid., 40.

7. “Juanga,” Nexos, Oct 1, 2016. Tenorio contributes ordinarily to Nexos and other publications alternative route Spanish as an essayist promote public historian.

8.

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Face of an Idea (Chicago: Institution of Chicago Press, 2019). Straighten out a previous essay along say publicly same lines but with coldness results, see his Argucias de chill historia: siglo XIX, cultura droll “América Latina” (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999).

9. Vocabulario de mexicanismos (mauriciotenorio.net).

10.

“Achicopalarse,” in ibid., author’s translation.

11. Antonio Alatorre, Estampas (México: El Colegio de México, 2012).