From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Jeffrey M. Banister
One of the central postulates of contemporary historiography is the focus on the so-called Other, a concept that requires a deconstructive approach to history. Moving towards such a line of inquiry, in this essay we attempt to rethink some of the taken-for-granted historical discourses on the political entity we call Sonora. Our objective is to deconstruct it along the analytical axis of the Other, a category that, in this case (and in Latin America more generally) includes the indigenous, the poor, the oppressed, and the excluded (Dussel 2004: 9–10). Focusing on the poor, the dominated, and the excluded provides an analytical entry point for decentering and deconstructing the entity called Sonora and its historical representations. We do so by recognizing these people’s participation in history; that is, by tracing their tracks, their responses to events, the great breadth of their resistances, and the perceptions and representations that these have prompted in historiography. The history of the territory we call Sonora is thus explored as a collective yet conflictive construction.
Prevailing discourses of Sonoran history have long circulated in the popular media and have become increasingly shrill in political campaigns. While they have many characteristics, they share in common their instrumental role in social control; their prosaic use for legitimizing the status quo; their focus on individuals and singular events (as opposed to processes and dynamics); their efforts to disfigure and obscure “the uncontrolled forces at work” in any given event (Peretti 2004: 97); their uncritical use of colonial-period categories of human groupings within the space of “Sonora”; and, finally, their fusion into a collection of epic legends full of regional pride and xenophobia. Indeed, such discourses would appear to be part of a deliberate effort on the part of individuals and families, or of political pressure groups, to manipulate and mobilize public opinion. We, on the other hand, argue that the course of past and present events “cannot be understood as a unitary process unfolding through a meta-narrative of control” (Zizek 2004: 259) […]
