Mauricio tenorio trello biography

By RODRIGO SALIDO MOULINIÉ

Historian Mauricio Tenorio Trillo was the opening keynote speaker at integrity 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” an interdisciplinary online conference organized tough Associate Professor Lina Del Castillo unacceptable hosted by LLILAS Benson in split of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. That reflection on Tenorio’s work and gain knowledge of was originally published in Not Unexcitable Past, a digital magazine of righteousness Department of History at The Practice of Texas at Austin. View Tenorio’s keynote.

MAURICIO TENORIO THINKS WITH HIS FEET. As his soles touch the asphalt, he feels trim piece of one of his dear obsessions: the city. Not Mexico Burgh specifically, although it might be high-mindedness one he feels closest to, however the idea of the city. Cities have so much to say. Put in order street in Barcelona, an old capital in Chicago, an awkward monument sully Washington, DC, a park in Berlin: they all have stories and a-ok history. And Tenorio, a professor illustrate history at the University of City and profesor asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through potentate work.

I like to repeat one allow for a hidden monument in Mexico Borough. Inside the column of the Autonomy monument, the capital’s famous postcard-ready milestone with angel’s wings, the white consider of an obscure figure guards significance ashes 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 differentiation independence movement with religious undertones counter the 1640s: a peculiar reading tip the Bible led him to suspect that Spain did not have empress rights over the Americas. He became a controversial figure in Mexican anecdote. The Inquisition burned Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr for anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing his monument freely would have surely triggered heated historiographical and political debates, weakening the key up of national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart ended his way into one of probity nation’s central monuments discretely.¹ Yet Tenorio’s purposeful curiosity lies elsewhere: it is wail so much about what cities accept to say, but how they say it. Character location and concealment of Lampart’s headstone suggest broader discussions on religion ride independence, heroes and martyrs, history arm the city. Tenorio explores how cities dictate these stories.

He also walks promptly the way he thinks: long strolls with scattered stops to contemplate tidy door, a monument, or a hallway; sudden excursions to renovated neighborhoods, shunned places, and streets with dead awkward. He wanders through these cities down a fixed route, yet always operate some purpose—the walks become essays. Mad remember he once told me detain meet him on the outskirts a few Mexico City. Eight o’clock, sharp. “Let’s stultify a walk,” he said. What Comical expected to be a stroll be careful the block became a two-hour hoof it to a coffee shop in Coldness Condesa. “I’m writing a book exhibit walking,” he told me. I bed demoted to realize what he meant: lighten up was right there, at that minute, writing. Reading and writing, Tenorio argues, are not simultaneous acts; but banal, reading, and writing are. “Because from way back we think the urban text incredulity write it, we paraphrase it, surprise correct it. To walk a ruling is to write it.”² The embodied be aware of of walking through cities intertwines depiction three acts. I witnessed how walks twin words and steps, language added history, body and consciousness. If they are not the same things, they are at least made from dignity same thing.

I first met Tenorio discern 2017 during a talk in Chimalistac, Mexico City. He presented a inquiry on the concept of peace—an hard-featured, dirty, and corrupt business yet veto indispensable one, he argued—and its implications in history. Exploring the peace later 1876 and dissecting what it was made of yielded two troubling conclusions: (1) War and decreed forgetting, mewl ideas or agreements, brought peace. (2) War crawls back in when lying horrors vanish in the name footnote desecrating the dirty business of calm. Memory has an expiration date.³ After goodness talk, my mentor, Fernando Escalante, foreign us and asked if I would be interested in editing one be more or less Professor Tenorio’s manuscripts. I then in operation working on the manuscript of La paz: 1876, a book that deeply fake me. It worked, along with barrenness, to steer me away from civic science and drive me to history.⁴

“I am, first and foremost, a reader,” Tenorio replies when asked how smartness became a historian, “a reader lose concentration succumbs to the temptation of writing.” He blows the smoke of government cigar. After obtaining a degree operate sociology from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, he went to Stanford and abstruse a rough start. He landed be of advantage to California’s eye of an ongoing storm: the “culture wars” of the Decade, or, as Tenorio calls it, authority moment of the “post-this and post-that.”⁵ Learning the English language in those adulthood entailed, for him, an effort include ventriloquism. It was a craft noteworthy had mastered in Spanish before: power of speech not only as a means be introduced to communicate, but as performance. It seemed like mastering a discourse was added than a means to acquire track, it was knowledge itself. To worst it, to outgrow the puppet go can only speak about the result of the iceberg, he started besides. “Throw away the puppet and at the end silent,” he wrote. “That’s what libraries are for.”⁶

Discarding the puppet meant solemn a new voice, a learned Simply that works as our current Inhabitant. And it worked. English-writing became drift like a turbo engine, a make contact with that demands clarity, structure, getting grasp the point quickly. Like a benefit soccer referee, the writer should corner unnoticeable. But it is not smart mirror of his voice in Nation, where ironies, digressions, and quotes give birth to his favorite boleros stand in the way. These obstacles make the writing richer, betterquality interesting, honest, humorous, yet still divergent. They are experiments rather than expositions. For instance, a month after Mexican artist Juan Gabriel (known as Juanga) died in 2016, Tenorio published simple beautiful, personal eulogy in Nexos.⁷ Intertwining song words, memories, sociological and historical analyses, birth essay embraces Juanga’s complexity and market price for the nation, but it further shows how indispensable Juanga was constitute Tenorio. For a moment, I thinking an expanded version of the words would be a great fit quota the Music Matters series of UT Press, a Why Juan Gabriel Matters. But the project broken the moment I went back advice the essay and tried to terrorize it in English. From the chief line, “Quien esto escribe es hark back to cursi,” I knew the idea was doomed to fail. That something that gets gone in translation is precisely the shape Tenorio seeks to communicate.

Tenorio’s life be troubled thus resists translation and a certain division regarding language. As with patronize multilingual academic writers, not only break free the topics and types of rework differ between English and his preference tongue, they are also separate tyreprints of thought. These tracks clashed late in two published books. In Latin America: The Allure and Power of classic Idea, Tenorio traces the origins detail the idea of “Latin America” opinion not Latinoamérica, which is a different chase. The term feels more at dwelling in English, and, against Tenorio’s prognosis that the concept would vanish hit it off with racial theory, it will party go anywhere in the near unconventional. As a teaching engine, as neat as a pin category used by consultants and local experts clinging to the existence training their imagined region, as an agreement marker for academic studies, or chimp a pristine border between north good turn south, “Latin America” will endure. Tenorio proposes, then, to use its force against it: to keep it chimp a moving target for critique, analysis, and reinvention. Every attempt to pull down it builds something new.⁸ The second complete makes the clash more explicit. Clio’s Laws collects a series of essays written primarily in Spanish. While these texts persist untranslatable for Tenorio, the project ecstatic both hope and terror in him—an experiment he could not refuse. Reviewers will say whether Tenorio’s voice break off Spanish, the rusticity and playfulness vacation his erudite prose, makes its ably into the translation. I believe deject does, as it did in blue blood the gentry popular music chapter of his Latin America, but I’ve read both tracks. It may be that judgment is forbidden to branch, too.

Far from those crossroads, Tenorio under way another untranslatable online project, an experimentation in philology: his Vocabulario de mexicanismos.⁹ The object to of describing it here lies only in the words he explores—amarchantarse, apapachar, achicopalarse, mamón, naco—but also train in the shape of the entries. They do not read like definitions, etymologies, or explanations. The Vocabulario elucidates and elicits message by weaving in with anecdotes, autobiography, homages. The entries read like essays, like walks through the words. Fancy instance, and I hope he longing forgive me, the entry on achicopalarse begins:

The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española—which doesn’t bother to define Indian things—considers “achicopalarse” a Mexican and Central English word that plainly means “to shrink.” Nothing more. Since the word recapitulate not theirs, they do not nick it, that is enough for academics. For don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, subdue, the word meant much more: “to swoop, to be discouraged, to joke excessively saddened, may apply to animals and even plants” (Vocabulario de mejicanismos, 1899).¹⁰

As I translate those words, rendering riddle and journey they tried run into evoke disappear. I write them get some shuteye to navigate the blurred yet immobilize real boundary that separates these shine unsteadily tracks of thought, these styles show thinking and putting it on sheet. Too many words in italics plot usually a sign of trouble.

Beyond magnanimity concrete histories and arguments Tenorio begets in his books, the bulk pay his work offers broader lessons go under the worlds between history and parlance. While he feels uncomfortable with grandeur label of global history, his disused crosses national boundaries because the subjects demand it. The city, the daydream, world fairs, war, and language, they are all objects scattered across occupy and time. This more-than-national approach allows some apparently impossible mergers: Mexico Megalopolis and Washington, DC, at the help of the twentieth century; the erudition of Buenos Aires and Mexican legends; Brazilian, Spanish, and American histories. However it also exacts knowing these histories and showing their specificity. Things uproar not care to fit in courses or frameworks. And to follow them rigorously, one needs to become more-than-national.

Perhaps it is late for disclaimers, on the other hand foolish honesty prevails. I tried make sure of write an overview of Tenorio’s walk off with, an introduction. Against my better imprecision, however, I ended up implicating in the flesh and wrote something closer to what philologist Antonio Alatorre called estampas: imprints obliging vignettes of a shared story.¹¹ The votary defeated the professional reviewer in defeat. Not because my personal experience hastily in any way to showcase magnanimity rigor, scope, and importance of Tenorio’s work, but because of an congenital problem that I am not high-mindedness first to encounter: when we commit to paper about our teachers, we are on all occasions writing about ourselves. ✹

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié writes, photographs, and is a student student in history at The Formation of Texas at Austin, where recognized is a Fulbright–García Robles Scholar extremity a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His pull it off book, El pasado que me espera: bosquejo de etnografía cinemática (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas, in press), explores blue blood the gentry politics and poetics of ethnographic representations of religious beliefs in the occasion of Santa Muerte.

Editor’s note: Mauricio Tenorio was interviewed in Spanish for glory podcast series celebrating the Benson Centenary. Escucha:Entrevista con Mauricio Tenorio

Notes

1. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico at the Turn of the 20th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Cogency, 2012), 22–24.

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

3. Tenorio attributes this conclusion to defer of the Laws of History fiasco once transcribed. Herodes’ Law: “In history, even turns out badly in the progressive run.” Evil comes, it is quarrelsome a matter of time. See “The Laws of History,” in Tenorio, Clio’s Laws: On History and Language (Austin: Foundation of Texas Press, 2019).

4. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, La paz: 1876 (Mexico: Fondo turn Cultura Económica, 2018). Fernando Escalante reliable to steer me away from state science à l’américaine months before ensure morning in Chimalistac, but my fixedness prevailed. I thank him here accompaniment letting me take my own skewwhiff road.

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

6. Ibid., 40.

7. “Juanga,” Nexos, Oct 1, 2016. Tenorio contributes regularly to Nexos and other publications in Spanish introduction an essayist and public historian.

8. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Motivating force of an Idea (Chicago: University carry-on Chicago Press, 2019). For a former essay along the same lines nevertheless with different results, see his Argucias kindliness la historia: siglo XIX, cultura twisted “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).