“An occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness”: Narrating nationalism in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico

Jennifer Hayward

In her 1843 travel narrative Life in Mexico during a Residence of Two Years in That Country, Frances Calderon de la Barca manipulates the travel narrative genre in order to present a political and proto-ethnographic analysis of Mexican society and culture. Like many women travelers throughout the nineteenth century, de la Barca aspires to the status of factual and reliable observer but is unable to claim that authority on the basis of gender; to increase the credibility of her observations, therefore, she asserts a privileged perspective based on her status as a European and contrasts English civilization with Mexican primitivism.

Despite her attempts to create clear binaries in national identities, however, Mexico exceeds the colonial space she defines for it. However rigorously de la Barca reinforces this space as inferior, exotic, and gothic, Mexico does have European connections as well as a highly-developed indigenous culture of its own. To compound her increasingly difficult nationalist negotiations, de la Barca struggles to claim the status of the civilized English traveler. As a Scottish national, a British émigrée, and the wife of a Spanish diplomat (who was the first Ambassador sent by that country to Mexico after Independence), her subject position as a “real” English subject is troubled at best.

In this paper, we argue that de la Barca initially attempts to reinforce her status and subject position as a European—and specifically English and imperial—traveler in Mexico by configuring and collapsing her Scottish identity under the rubric of an English nationalist perspective. However, despite her best efforts, de la Barca confronts the limits of imperial nationalist identity when her vision of a primitive, picturesque and stable Mexico returns the gaze, making de la Barca’s own problematic European identity the object of surveillance.

By the end of her narrative, de la Barca inscribes a much more complex and negotiated vision of Mexico, of national identity, and of her own subject position. In so doing, she creates a travel tale that contributes to developing discourses about the “new world,” as well as about European travelers and the narratives they crafted to shape their experiences abroad. The geopolitical dynamics of Frances Calderón de la Barca’s class, gender, and national anxieties, in relation to the larger politics and policies of her day, demonstrate the intersections between nationalist discourses and the project of nineteenth-century travel writing.