The making of post-national Mexico: intellectuals, NAFTA and national identity (1988-2000)

• Grant number: 18/06155-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2018
• End date: May 16, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: José Alves de Freitas Neto
• Grantee: José Antonio Ferreira da Silva Júnior
• Supervisor: Moramay Lopez Alonso
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Rice University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/10748-3 - The making of post-national Mexico: intellectuals, NAFTA and national identity (1988-2000), BP.DR

Abstract

In the year 2000, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was defeated for the first time in a presidential election in Mexico since 1929. The victory of the PartidoAcción Nacional (PAN) broke decades of PRI's hegemony, a dominance that has become to be interpreted in those last years as authoritarianism, economy problems and anobstacle to the democracy in the country. However, by analyzing PRI's defeat under thecircumstances of the economic, political, and social transformations that took place inMexico since the 1980's, I propose that political subjects such as intellectuals, writers or academics, allows us a new take in this national scenario since they had used magazines, journals and reviews (their spaces of expression and professional action) to take sides, analyze and sometimes simply comment on those reforms that were happening. Myobjective with this study is to propose an investigation that help to shed light on howsome discourses were used to base a new concept of national identity as a project ofpolitical modernization and an approximation with the neoliberal model consolidatedwith the signing of NAFTA. Based on a methodology of intellectual history, this studyproposes to map intellectual practices around the political discourse as well as to reflecton the role of these historical subjects in the Mexican national politics of the period.