FORJANDO PATRIA – FORGING A NATION (Video)
Forjando Patria (Forging a Nation) is a philosophy of the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio written during the first decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1930), and published in 1916. Gamio, made a series of theories regarding the formation of a post-revolutionary Mexico that seem to have remained stagnant in time, from where a chaotic Mexico seems to have sprouted. Still, Gamio’s ideas and poetic thoughts must be constantly revisited and analyzed to understand the dynamism and contemporary perception of Mexico in the 20th and 21st century. Jointly, in 2010 the anthropologist Fernando Armstrong-Fumero published a translation of Gamio’s text, where a series of semantics and rhetoric that make up the ideas and expressions used by Gamio in his original text can be elucidated. The Armstrong-Fumero translation will serve as the English translation while creating a correspondence between the original ideas and the interpretation from the translation.
With the original text, the translation, and using the title of Gamio, the experimental video Forjando Patria (Forging a Nation) is a critical study of concepts such as what is Mexican, Mexicana, and/or race in the 2023 Mexico. In addition, it will allow us to know the intersectionality of a population in constant re/construction, and the utopias and imaginaries that arise when the social, the political, the historical, and the cultural, among other agents, are spilled over identity. Mexico is not the only case of a constant struggle between nation and identity, and this visual exercise aims to connect with other geographies and visions about the expectations and projections that societies forge of themselves, and how political and global forces polarize and disturb natural action and self-recognition with the place of origin, history, and collective memory.