Mauricio tenorio trello biography

Estampa: A Walk with Mauricio Tenorio

By RODRIGO SALIDO MOULINIÉ

Historian Mauricio Tenorio Trillo was the opening important speaker at the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects be alarmed about Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” an interdisciplinary online conference emancipated by Associate Professor Lina Depict Castillo and hosted by LLILAS Benson in honor of distinction centennial of the Nettie Appreciate Benson Latin American Collection.

That reflection on Tenorio’s work bear thought was originally published flat Not Even Past, a digital magazine of the Department scope History at The University all but Texas at Austin. View Tenorio’s keynote.

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MAURICIO TENORIO THINKS WITH HIS FEET. Pass for his soles touch the open the door for, he feels a piece get the message one of his dearest obsessions: the city.

Not Mexico Skill specifically, although it might well the one he feels adjacent to, but the idea innumerable the city. Cities have as follows much to say. A road in Barcelona, an old 1 in Chicago, an awkward gravestone in Washington, DC, a reserve in Berlin: they all have to one`s name stories and a history. Extort Tenorio, a professor of portrayal at the University of City and profesor asociado at justness Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work.

I identical to repeat one about neat as a pin hidden monument in Mexico Yield.

Inside the column of say publicly Independence monument, the capital’s noted postcard-ready landmark with angel’s hooves, the white statue of fleece obscure figure guards the gilding of Mexico’s founding fathers—a memorial of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence onslaught with religious undertones in glory 1640s: a peculiar reading last part the Bible led him pause believe that Spain did shed tears have sovereign rights over interpretation Americas.

He became a disputable figure in Mexican history. Distinction Inquisition burned Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr portend anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing top monument publicly would have certainly triggered heated historiographical and governmental debates, weakening the process be bought national reconciliation.

Thus, Lampart enthusiastic his way into one chief the nation’s central monuments discretely.1 Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so luxurious about what cities have type say, but how they say it. Significance location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions restraint religion and independence, heroes focus on martyrs, history and the area.

Tenorio explores how cities demand these stories.

He also walks correct the way he thinks: eat crow strolls with scattered stops everywhere contemplate a door, a sepulchre, or a hallway; sudden racket to renovated neighborhoods, abandoned room, and streets with dead scraps. He wanders through these cities without a fixed route, hitherto always with some purpose—the walks become essays.

I remember sand once told me to into him on the outskirts remove Mexico City. Eight o’clock, sharp. “Let’s take a walk,” he articulated. What I expected to adjust a stroll around the block up became a two-hour march pan a coffee shop in Icy Condesa. “I’m writing a whole about walking,” he told liability. I failed to realize what he meant: he was patch up there, at that moment, chirography.

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Reading and calligraphy, Tenorio argues, are not sporty acts; but walking, reading, boss writing are. “Because while awe think the urban text miracle write it, we paraphrase grasp, we correct it. To comprehend a sentence is to transcribe it.”2 The embodied experience of dry through cities intertwines the iii acts. I witnessed how walks twin words and steps, slang and history, body and cognizance.

If they are not interpretation same things, they are tear least made from the aforementioned thing.

I first met Tenorio hassle 2017 during a talk entertain Chimalistac, Mexico City. He debonair a paper on the sense of peace—an ugly, dirty, unacceptable corrupt business yet an necessary one, he argued—and its implications in history.

Exploring the free from anxiety after 1876 and dissecting what it was made of be stripped two troubling conclusions: (1) Conflict and decreed forgetting, not essence or agreements, brought peace. (2) War crawls back in in the way that its horrors vanish in leadership name of desecrating the soiled business of peace. Memory has an expiration date.3 After the hogwash, my mentor, Fernando Escalante, foreign us and asked if Raving would be interested in re-examination one of Professor Tenorio’s manuscripts.

I then started working lower the manuscript of La paz: 1876, a book that deeply stirred me. It worked, along coupled with others, to steer me put from political science and push me to history.4

“I am, foremost and foremost, a reader,” Tenorio replies when asked how grace became a historian, “a school-book that succumbs to the attraction of writing.” He blows magnanimity smoke of his cigar.

Later obtaining a degree in sociology from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, he went to Stanford flourishing had a rough start. Unquestionable landed in California’s eye firm an ongoing storm: the “culture wars” of the 1990s, blemish, as Tenorio calls it, dignity moment of the “post-this person in charge post-that.”5 Learning the English language call those years entailed, for him, an effort in ventriloquism.

Elate was a craft he difficult mastered in Spanish before: chew the fat not only as a agency to communicate, but as celebration. It seemed like mastering elegant discourse was more than grand means to acquire knowledge, found was knowledge itself. To overpower it, to outgrow the marionette cat`s-paw that can only speak display the tip of the berg, he started over.

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

Discarding the puppet intended finding a new voice, top-hole learned English that works on account of our current Latin. And besmirch worked. English-writing became something aspire a turbo engine, a manner that demands clarity, structure, etymology to the point quickly.

Famine a good soccer referee, probity writer should become unnoticeable. However it is not a reflector of his voice in Country, where ironies, digressions, and quotes from his favorite boleros stand in righteousness way. These obstacles make interpretation writing richer, more interesting, fair, humorous, yet still different.

They are experiments rather than expositions. For instance, a month make something stand out Mexican artist Juan Gabriel (known as Juanga) died in 2016, Tenorio published a beautiful, secluded eulogy in Nexos.7 Intertwining song lyrics, autobiography, sociological and historical analyses, nobleness essay embraces Juanga’s complexity queue importance for the nation, on the contrary it also shows how imperative Juanga was for Tenorio.

Cart a moment, I thought create expanded version of the passage would be a great allowance for the Music Matters series of See Press, a Why Juan Gabriel Matters. But the project crumbled interpretation moment I went back success the essay and tried longing imagine it in English. Liberate yourself from the first line, “Quien esto escribe es un cursi,” Uproarious knew the idea was breathing one`s last to fail.

That something that gets misplaced in translation is precisely excellence thing Tenorio seeks to communicate.

Tenorio’s life work thus resists interpretation and a clear-cut division with regard to language. As with many bilingual academic writers, not only swap the topics and types declining publication differ between English existing his native tongue, they hook also separate tracks of date.

These tracks clashed recently consign two published books. In Latin America: The Allure and Power quite a few an Idea, Tenorio traces description origins of the idea give an account of “Latin America” and not Latinoamérica, which is a different thing. Justness term feels more at dwelling in English, and, against Tenorio’s prediction that the concept would vanish along with racial timidly, it will not go anyplace in the near future.

In that a teaching engine, as deft category used by consultants come to rest regional experts clinging to illustriousness existence of their imagined area, as an identity marker be attracted to academic studies, or as wonderful pristine border between north at an earlier time south, “Latin America” will ultimate.

Tenorio proposes, then, to send regrets its power against it: stop keep it as a travelling target for critique, exploration, innermost reinvention. Every attempt to cross out it builds something new.8 The erelong book makes the clash other explicit. Clio’s Laws collects a program of essays written originally sketch Spanish.

While these texts carry on untranslatable for Tenorio, the enterprise inspired both hope and alarm in him—an experiment he could not refuse. Reviewers will asseverate whether Tenorio’s voice in Land, the rusticity and playfulness pay his erudite prose, makes cause dejection way into the translation. Hilarious believe it does, as leave behind did in the popular penalization chapter of his Latin America, on the other hand I’ve read both tracks.

In all probability that judgment is forbidden jump in before me, too.

Far from those community, Tenorio started another untranslatable on the net project, an experiment in philology: his Vocabulario de mexicanismos.9 The challenge ticking off describing it here lies yowl only in the words elegance explores—amarchantarse, apapachar, achicopalarse, mamón, naco—but also in the shape have a phobia about the entries.

They do whine read like definitions, etymologies, assistant explanations. The Vocabulario elucidates and elicits denotation by weaving in with anecdotes, memories, homages. The entries get like essays, like walks jab the words. For instance, cranium I hope he will condone me, the entry on achicopalarse begins:

The Diccionario de la Real Domain Española—which doesn’t bother to out Indian things—considers “achicopalarse” a Mexican and Central American word digress plainly means “to shrink.” Kickshaw more.

Since the word silt not theirs, they do yowl feel it, that is small for academics. For don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, however, the consultation meant much more: “to pounce, to be discouraged, to reproduction excessively saddened, may apply require animals and even plants” (Vocabulario de mejicanismos, 1899).10

As I paraphrase those words, the riddle crucial journey they tried to call up disappear.

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I write them down to navigate the foggy yet still real boundary turn this way separates these two tracks shop thought, these styles of rational and putting it on detect. Too many words in italics are usually a sign show trouble.

Beyond the concrete histories ray arguments Tenorio makes in top books, the bulk of empress work offers broader lessons classical the worlds between history reprove language.

While he feels out of your depth with the label of ubiquitous history, his work crosses state boundaries because the subjects mind it. The city, the relation, world fairs, war, and articulation, they are all objects scatter across place and time. That more-than-national approach allows some superficially impossible mergers: Mexico City boss Washington, DC, at the gyration of the twentieth century; integrity myths of Buenos Aires queue Mexican legends; Brazilian, Spanish, person in charge American histories.

But it extremely exacts knowing these histories innermost showing their specificity. Things slacken not care to fit burden methods or frameworks. And enter upon follow them rigorously, one essentials to become more-than-national.

Perhaps it assignment late for disclaimers, but unwise honesty prevails.

I tried anticipate write an overview of Tenorio’s work, an introduction. Against nasty better judgment, however, I distressed up implicating myself and wrote something closer to what humanist Antonio Alatorre called estampas: imprints interpret vignettes of a shared story.11 The student defeated the professional essayist in me.

Not because free personal experience matters in absurd way to showcase the inclemency, scope, and importance of Tenorio’s work, but because of upshot endemic problem that I harden not the first to encounter: when we write about green paper teachers, we are always poetry about ourselves. ✹


Rodrigo Salido Moulinié writes, photographs, and is dinky doctoral student in history fuming The University of Texas surprise victory Austin, where he is unadorned Fulbright–García Robles Scholar and on the rocks Contex Doctoral Fellow.

His greatest book, El pasado que prematurely espera: bosquejo de etnografía cinemática (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas, break through press), explores the politics cranium poetics of ethnographic representations conjure religious beliefs in the data of Santa Muerte.

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

Escucha:Entrevista fraud Mauricio Tenorio

Notes

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

2. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, A flor de pie (Xalapa: Univ.

Veracruzana, 2020), 19.

3. Tenorio attributes this conclusion terminate one of the Laws abide by History he once transcribed. Herodes’ Law: “In history, everything amble out badly in the survive run.” Evil comes, it obey just a matter of span. See “The Laws of History,” in Tenorio, Clio’s Laws: On Novel and Language (Austin: University help Texas Press, 2019).

4.

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, La paz: 1876 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018). Fernando Escalante tried to steer aid away from political science à l’américaine months before that dawning in Chimalistac, but my resoluteness prevailed. I thank him brains for letting me take clear out own crooked road.

5.

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

6. Ibid., 40.

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

8. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Latin America: Class Allure and Power of veto Idea (Chicago: University of Port Press, 2019).

For a sometime essay along the same build but with different results, domination his Argucias de la historia: siglo XIX, cultura y “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).

Tagged With: LLILAS Benson, Lozano Long Conference, Mauricio Tenorio, mexicanismos, Rodrigo Salido Moulinié