The logic of liberalism: Lorenzo de Zavala's transcultural politics.

In 1830 a Mexican aristocrat and politician who helped draft the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and would later go on to assist in the creation of the 1836 Texas Constitution traveled to the United States, a full year before Alexis de Tocqueville's now-famous journey. Lorenzo de Zavala's voyage began in New Orleans and led him north through Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, reaching its longitudinal apex in Quebec before returning south from New York to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. His published account of the journey Viage a los Estados-Unidos del Norte de America (Journey to the United States of North America) (1834), has two purposes, his preface tells us. First, the narrative is intended to serve as a biography of sorts, as he had previously "offered" to "publish [his] memoirs" (1). Second, and more importantly, the text is intended to give "useful lessons in politics" to the citizens of Mexico, instructing them in the "manners, customs, habits and government" of the United States, a country whose social and political institutions Mexicans have heretofore "copied so servilely" (1).

The tension between Zavala's desire to impart "useful lessons" yet not have those lessons learned too well, too "servilely," implies a search for a foundational politics: a liberal praxis that emerges not from the US, but also not necessarily (as we will see) from Mexico. And while Zavala's text does engage political topics and explore the possibility of a transamerican liberalism, it does so in a very specific context. Despite its stated goal of conferring "useful lessons in politics," the work is first and foremost a travel narrative.

Large sections of the text are given over to tourist banalities such as the weather, local topography, or the navigation of the Mississippi river by steamboat. (There is, Zavala supplies helpfully, little risk of "storms, hurricanes and coral reefs," although readers are cautioned to beware "the explosions of the receptacles or boilers for the steam" [34].) Yet the text principally uses the travel narrative to interrogate the idea of a slavish or "servile" devotion to US social and political institutions--a rather sophisticated use of the form. Mary Louise Pratt has shown that "contact zones"--spheres of social or cultural difference where disparate cultures clash and struggle for dominance--are invariably sites of transculturation where cultural institutions are transmitted from colonizer to colonized, but also from colonized back to colonizer (6-7). Historically, travel narratives have been inextricable from colonialist ideology, but Zavala employs the genre to critique US social and political institutions.

There is a paucity of scholarship on Zavala's Viage. John-Michael Rivera's recent critical introduction to the text insists that Zavala's travel narrative offers only a "panegyric look at U.S. democracy, a utopian primer of liberal democratic mores" (ix; see also xviii). Rivera argues that Zavala creates a utopian representation of US liberal democracy and, more importantly, identifies that representation as a functional political model in the hopes that Mexico will emulate that utopian liberalism. Although Zavala's representations of US political institutions are occasionally utopian, the text's net rhetorical effect is to establish a critical, and not utopian, assessment of US liberalism. Zavala's Viage employs the form of the travel narrative to offer a critical comparison of Mexican and US political praxis. If Zavala does ultimately point toward a transcendent, "utopian" liberalism, it is not one found in the United States. Instead Zavala's tourist pose allows him to interrogate both US and Mexican liberalisms. Furthermore, the text concludes that a utopian liberalist philosophy can never translate into a functional liberal praxis.

Early on, Zavala provides a clue about how to read his occasionally utopian representations of US political institutions. Zavala briefly notes, as if winking at his readers, that "we [Mexicans] are not always sincere in our flattery or in our compliments, and we have a saying that 'one kisses hands that he would like to see burned'" (54). The "useful lessons" of the text, then, are couched at once inside and outside both the reproofs of Mexico and the superficial plaudits for the United States, and those "lessons," more significantly, are advanced through the form of the travel narrative. Both tourism and liberalism, I argue, are driven by a universalizing impulse. Through his role as tourist, Zavala is able to scrutinize this universalizing impulse and to reframe liberalism as ideology, to resituate it as a political and philosophical construct. (1) Viage employs the totalizing logic of the travel narrative in order to dislodge US liberalism from its transparent, value-neutral status and (more importantly) to critically assess US liberalist praxis so that it is not, in fact, "copied so servilely" in Mexico. Ultimately, Zavala implies a third way, an imagined transamerican liberalist philosophy lying between Mexican and US democratic liberalism.