The Life, Myth, and Commemoration of Benito Juárez (2024)

Myth and Commemoration, 1872–1910

Juarismo, the cult and myth, began during Juárez’s lifetime. The victory over the empire in 1867 was understood as Mexico’s second independence. Before Juárez, there was only chaos—thus spoke the myth—after Juárez, there was light. Juárez, according to Justo Sierra, “uttered this sentence, engraved on the gate of the Future: ‘Let the people and the government respect the rights of all. Among individuals as among nations, respect for the rights of others means peace.”20 The apotheosis of Juárez, his glorification, began on the day he died.

On the morning of July 18, 1872, artillery blasts roared every quarter hour in Mexico City to signal the death of the president. “The funeral of Juárez erased temporarily the political and personal animosities of the past five years. Speakers praised Juárez as ‘Messiah’ and ‘Redeemer,’ defender of the constitution, hero of American democracy, leader of the Reform, and savior of independence. . . . Juárez alive had provoked controversy; yet many continued to regard him as a hero. In balance, the hero image prevailed, and Mexicans built monuments, erected statues, named plazas and libraries after him, and created two national celebrations to commemorate the anniversaries of his birth and death.”21 Mythmaking in Mexico, like remembering, involved the reconstruction of the past in the light of the present, and particularly in the light of the political necessities of the present.

A state funeral was held for Juárez; the procession lasted hours and Mexicans lined the streets to pay their last respects. “The funeral obsequies of the dead President were in keeping with the simple dignity of his life. The coffin, with no further inscription or title than the letters B.J., and placed in a modest hearse, was conveyed to its last resting place. Five thousand of all that was best in the city and country followed in a mournful procession.”22 Juárez’s coffin was placed next to that of his wife, Margarita Maza Juárez, in a simple vault in the Cemetery of San Fernando, on the grounds of a former convent. The pantheon consists of two patios surrounded by cloisters for burial vaults and porticos of Tuscan columns. In the mid-1850s a National Pantheon for Illustrious Men was established at the San Fernando cemetery. A monument to Ignacio Zaragoza, the victorious general of the Battle of Puebla, on Cinco de Mayo 1862, is located there, as is the tomb of Miguel Miramón, who was executed alongside Maximilian in 1867. Juárez was the last person to be interred at San Fernando.23

In the state of Oaxaca, a grand funeral and procession was held when the news of the death of Juárez arrived a few days later. The Congress of Oaxaca immediately institutionalized a cult of Juárez; July 18 was made an official state holiday, and a portrait of Juárez was required to be hung in all public buildings. The name of the capital city was changed to Oaxaca de Juárez, and the Zapotec Sierra de Ixtlán, where Juárez was born was renamed the Sierra de Juárez. Plans were made for a suitable commemorative monument.

One of Mexico’s patriotic customs of considerable importance is the writing in letters of gold of the names of national heroes on the Wall of Honor in the Chamber of Deputies of the National Congress. Nearly one year after his death, in April 1873, the name of Juárez was inscribed on the wall in gold and joined those of Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and other heroes.24

The great Mexican age of commemorative monuments, or what is called in Mexico historia de bronce—the history of heroes cast in bronze—began in the 1870s and culminated in 1910. In 1873 Congress commissioned a worthy tomb for Juárez called the Mausoleum of Benito Juárez. On a raised stone platform sits a white marble casket holding the remains of Juárez. The top of the casket has a white Carrera marble sculpture of Juárez in a recumbent position; his head is in the arms of a female allegorical figure representing Mexico mourning the dying president. Inscribed on the sculpture are the words “Respect for the rights of others means peace.” Mexican artists Juan Islas and Manuel Islas designed and crafted the sculpture. Covering the sculpture is a small Parthenon-like temple supported by sixteen Corinthian columns. The space between the columns is filled by an elegant iron gate.25 Foreigners described the Juárez mausoleum as one of the world’s most beautiful sculptures and an expression of “great vigor and dignity.” One traveler remarked, “No monument effort in the United States tells such a story of heroic grief or so immortalizes the dignified emotions of a nation.”26

The myth of Juárez—the immaculate Juárez—was created by liberal politicians, journalists, and workers, and appropriated by President Díaz. The president inaugurated the Mausoleum of Juárez on July 18, 1880, on the eighth anniversary of Juárez’s death. Díaz wanted the support of liberals of all ideological stripes. The Porfirian regime honored Miguel Hidalgo as the Father of the Country, Juárez as the great Reformer and defender of the Republic, and—in time—Porfirio Díaz as the natural successor to both heroes, and the hero who brought peace and prosperity to Mexico. In 1887 the United Liberal Press in Mexico City organized a grand ceremony in honor of Juárez on the fifteenth anniversary of his death. A procession of old Reform Liberals, Liberal journalists, delegates of Benito Juárez societies, students of the Mutualist Worker schools, military bands, and more began at the Zócalo in front of the National Palace—where President Díaz was honored—and went to the Pantheon of San Fernando and the Mausoleum of Juárez. “This July 18, 1887, is the first day of this honored date to consecrate the new cult of the hero for all Mexicans at the foot of his funeral altar.”27 In November, Congress passed a law proclaiming July 18 a day of public mourning, creating a new civic holiday. “Newspapers typically marked the day with poems, excerpts from history, and Juárez’s own words. For his part, President Díaz recognized the growing importance of this national day of honor. Every year, Díaz laid a wreath on the tomb of Juarez.

In the National Palace in Mexico City, over the next decade and a half, two busts of Juárez were commissioned and unveiled, as well as a monument composed of an impressive stone pedestal and a sculpture of a sitting Juárez fused from the canons that fought in the War of Reform and the French Intervention. Across Mexico, states raised monuments to Juárez. In the city of Oaxaca stands one of the most important and artistic monuments in Mexico. In Benito Juárez Park, a life-size bronze statue of Juárez holds the Mexican flag with his right arm while the left hand points to a broken crown symbolizing the defeat of Maximilian. The statue of Juárez is standing on a high stone pedestal fashioned after the elaborate and intricate mosaics and the geometric designs from the Zapotec archeological site of Mitla. This monument, inaugurated in 1894, is in the Neoindigenista (Neo-Indianist) style first created for the Monument to Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City in 1887. The other Porfirian monument to Juárez in the city of Oaxaca is the colossal bronze statue of the Benemérito placed on the Cerro del Fortín (Fortín Hill) overlooking the city. The statue of Juárez was cast in Rome in 1891, and the completed monument was unveiled in 1906, on the centennial of the birth of Juárez. The statue of Juárez is holding a book marked “Reforma” and is pointing forward.

In preparation for the centennial celebration of the birth of Juárez, a National Commission (composed of four hundred delegates) coordinated commemorative activities across Mexico from Mexico City. Throughout the country, state delegations and liberal clubs accepted donations “from the people” to memorialize the immortal Juárez. The liberal newspaper Diario del Hogar, in Mexico City, published several articles a month in 1905 and 1906 about preparations for fiestas, parades, statues and monuments in many towns and cities, and in every state. “Citizens have expressed the patriotic idea that there should be statue of the Benemérito in every town and city in the Republic, inaugurated on March 21, 1906.”28 In Zinapécuaro, Michoacán, the pedestal of the statue of Juárez is composed of the ruins of a Catholic church whose clergy supported the French occupation and the imperial government of Maximilian. In the state of Puebla many towns acquired small pedestals supporting busts of Juárez. Governor Florencio Antillón of Guanajuato began construction of a grand building dedicated to Juárez in 1872. In 1903 the Teatro Juárez (the Juárez Theater) in the city of Guanajuato was completed. One of the grand buildings in Porfirian Mexico, the portico is supported by Roman Doric columns and is decorated with six bronze statues of Greek mythological muses. The border town of El Paso del Norte, officially named Ciudad Juárez in 1888, had a commemorative monument planned for the centennial of 1906, but it was inaugurated by President Díaz in 1909. A larger-than-life sculpture of Juárez—cast in Florence, Italy—it shows Juárez in a common pose holding the Mexican flag and pointing forward. The sculpture stands on a column of white Carrera marble, which arises from a grand pedestal of marble from the state of Durango.

As Juarismo—the cult and myth of Juárez—was reaching its height in the first decade of the 1900s, a Porfirian iconoclast attempted to unveil the errors in the myth and reveal the true Juárez. Francisco Bulnes, a Porfirian politician, portrayed Juárez in two books (published in 1904 and 1905) as an insignificant provincial lawyer who became an incompetent, even dangerous, president.29 The true Juárez was an ambitious mediocrity who owed his fame to his collaborators, a bureaucratic hack, a passive patriot, and a counterfeit hero. The myth of Juárez was one of the great lies of the country. A wave of writers defended Juárez. The most balanced account came from Justo Sierra in his large, sumptuous book, Juárez: Su obra y su tiempo (1906).30 Rafael Zayas Enríquez won the National Centennial Prize for his Benito Juárez: Su vida, su obra (1906). The American continent, wrote Zayas Enríquez, had presented only three truly great men, Jorge Washington, Benito Juárez, and Abraham Lincoln, the “sublime trinity of pure patriots”31 Most Mexicans preferred a national trinity: “Hidalgo, Juárez, and Díaz, the august trinity of independence, reform, and peace.”32

The 1906 centennial of the birth of Juárez was celebrated throughout Mexico with orations, parades, and concerts, as well as the ringing of bells and artillery salvos. And yet the great monument to Juárez envisioned since 1873, and intended for one of the glorietas (traffic circles) of the Avenida de la Reforma in Mexico City, did not appear. It would have to wait until September 1910, during the celebration of the centenary of independence.

In 1910 the most significant commemorative monument erected during the Centenario was the Monument to Independence. On a large quadrangular stone base are four bronze sculptures of feminine figures representing Peace, Law, Justice, and War. On the front face is the inscription “The Nation to the Heroes of Independence.” On the second tier of the monument are white marble statues of José María Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, Francisco Javier Mina, and Nicolás Bravo surrounding the Father of the Patria, Father Miguel Hidalgo. Two feminine statues at his feet, representing History and Nation, salute him. From the top of this tier rises a 111-foot Corinthian column surrounding an interior iron support structure and a circular stairway. Crowning the column is a twenty-two-foot tall statue of Nike, the winged Greek goddess of victory, made of bronze and covered in gold leaf. The Angel, El Ángel, as Mexicans call it, holds a laurel wreath over the head of Hidalgo in one hand, and broken chains symbolizing national liberation in the other. The Monument to Independence was inaugurated on Independence Day, September 16, and immediately became the most impressive commemorative monument in Mexico. The fiestas of the Centenario promoted the civic religion of the Fatherland, although Carlos Monsiváis noted that the celebrations had one primary objective: “Porfirio Díaz is, literally, the Patria, He is history incarnate.”33

Three days later, the Monument to Juárez, generally referred to as the Hemiciclo a Juárez (an immense white marble semicircular monument) was inaugurated. The Hemiciclo a Juárez was placed in the Alameda, Mexico City’s grand public park, facing Avenida Juárez (Juárez Avenue). This monument is a cenotaph, an empty tomb. The Juárez Mausoleum in the Pantheon at San Fernando is located in a small space that can barely hold one or two hundred people. The Hemiciclo a Juárez, the plaza to its front, and Avenida Juárez when officially closed constitute a ceremonial space for many thousands. The architect Guillermo Heredia constructed the monument in ten months using nearly fourteen hundred pieces of Carrera marble, each one weighing nine tons. The style is Greek neoclassicism, and a semicircle of twelve Doric columns supports an entablature and a frieze. In the middle of the semicircle is the rectangular cenotaph, held up on the backs of two stone lions, and on the forward face, within a circle of laurels, is the inscription “Al Benemérito Benito Juárez. La Patria” (To the Benemérito Benito Juárez. The Fatherland).34

On a pedestal on top of the cenotaph is a sculpture of three figures by the Italian artists Lazzaroni and Cesar Augusto Volpi. Juárez is seated between two female allegorical figures. On his right is Glory crowning Juárez with a gold laurel-wreath. On his left is the Fatherland holding up a torch and armed with a sword. Juárez is holding a book of law and dressed in his usual frock coat and bow tie. “His paternal and indefinite gaze looks into the future, seeing an exalted and fortunate Fatherland.”35

The Brazilian diplomat Erico Verissimo described the Hemiciclo a Juárez as a “masterpiece of bad taste.” He wrote, “That Indian, so serious, silent and Spartan, deserved a simpler homage . . . The whole seems a rather pompous mausoleum.”36 There is no accounting for taste, of course; the white marble Hemiciclo is grand, as great commemorative movements are intended to be. The Monument to Independence was even more grandiose, but today it is surrounded by tall glass buildings that seem to diminish it. The Hemiciclo a Juárez, on the other hand, emerges from the trees of Alameda Park and is as sublime today as it was in 1910.

The Hemiciclo a Juárez has served as Mexico’s altar for the anniversary celebrations of the birth and death of Juárez every year for more than a century. When Mexico’s sovereignty is threatened or upheld, Mexicans go to the Hemiciclo and honor the legacy of Juárez.

Myth and Commemoration, 1910–2017

The civic cult and myth of Benito Juárez, invented in the late 19th century, has been sustained into the 21st century. Juárez and the Constitution of 1857 inspired the liberals and insurgents who overthrew the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in 1910–1911, and made a revolution to create a democratic, progressive, and modern Mexico. “In the Mexican civic culture of the 20th-century, President Juárez is remembered as a major historical figure who helped transform the vestiges of colonialism into a new period of independence and modernization. His commitment to restoring the Mexican Republic, however, constitutes his ‘finest honor.’”37

The new trinity was now Independence, Reform, and the Revolution. Francisco I. Madero, the leader of the revolt that forced Díaz into exile, was called the modern Juárez.

Madero was a spiritualist, and the spirit of Juárez, Madero likely believed, counseled him.38 After his assassination in February 1913, he was glorified as the “Apostle of Democracy.” Madero’s successor, Venustiano Carranza, a serious student of Mexican history viewed himself as the modern Juárez. His army was named the Constitutionalist army after the Liberal army in the War of Reform. Carranza decreed the Juárez law of January 25, 1862, to justify the executions of his enemies and the enemies of the revolution. When the Carranza government was militarily under pressure in 1914, Carranza re-established it in Veracruz, as Juárez had done during the War of the Reform.

Revolutionaries were inspired by Juárez’s constitutionalism, nationalism, and anti-clericalism. They believed in democracy, but like Juárez, they found it most inconvenient to practice and sustain. “Mexican historical memory is vigorous,” writes Héctor Aguilar Camín,” but not democratic. It tends to celebrate rebellion more than negotiation, and violence more than politics.”39

In the 1920s and 1930s the victorious revolutionaries created and celebrated their revolutionary anniversaries. They renamed streets and avenues after revolutionary martyrs and heroes and built commemorative monuments to the revolutionaries and the revolution itself. President-elect General Álvaro Obregón was assassinated on July 17, 1928, and for a time this date overshadowed the anniversary of Juárez’s death on July 18. The Monument to the Revolution, finished in November 1938, overwhelms all commemorative monuments in Mexico City in size. Juárez remained relevant to Mexico. When Mexico went to war against the Axis powers in 1942, Juárez the implacable war president was a useful symbol for the national government. During the Cold War, the “resurrection of the Juárez cult was employed to define and identify Mexico’s principles of nonintervention and popular self-rule, this reinforcing political independence from the United States.”40 The cult and myth of Juárez was taught in the free national school textbooks. In 1961 the cover of one textbook featured a painting of the three national heroes: Hidalgo, Juárez, and Madero. In the National Palace in Mexico City, the rooms that the Juárez family lived in have been restored and are open to the public. On the centenary of the execution of Maximilian, on June 19, 1967, the national government raised a giant monument to Juárez on the execution site in Querétaro. During the “Year of Juárez,” proclaimed by President Luis Echeverría in 1972, David Alfaro Siqueiros designed a forty-foot-high Benito Juárez monument in the shape of a triumphal arch. With its colorfully painted rectangular upper body and six-ton iron head, it is a sight to behold.

Statues and commemorative monuments of Juárez are located across Mexico, in small towns and big cities; “this solid and dependable, squat figure has become the most ubiquitous of national monuments.” Juárez is one of the victims of cabezotismo, or giant head syndrome in the style of the ancient Olmecs and the huge stone heads found on the coast of Tabasco. The Three Heads Park in Ensenada, Baja California (Juárez, Hidalgo, and Carranza), is an excellent example of cabezotismo. Nearly all of the truly classic commemorative monuments from the Porfirian period were copied in inferior ways in the 20th century. Simplistic, modernistic, or deco, Hemiciclos are found across the country.41 Mexico City’s international airport is officially named the Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez. There are Benito Juárez schools all over Mexico. In the city of Oaxaca is the Benito Juárez Autonomous University. The twenty-peso bill has a portrait of Juárez on one side and an engraving of the Hemiciclo a Juárez on the other. Over the years, of course, there have been many postage stamps of Juárez and of the Hemiciclo a Juárez.42 Most, if not all, cities in Mexico have Juárez avenues, parks, and gardens.

In the second half of the 20th century, statues and monuments of Juárez multiplied internationally. On the eve of the Second World War, Hollywood—with official encouragement from the government in Washington, DC—produced the antifascist film Juárez, in 1939. Hollywood created a Mexican hero of national resistance for an American audience, and the United States wanted closer ties with Mexico in a more dangerous world.43 The United States has Juárez monuments in Washington, DC, and in New Orleans, New York City, Houston, San Diego, Chicago, and elsewhere. There are Juárez monuments in Australia, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Italy, and—again—elsewhere. In Latin American countries, too, there are Benito Juárez avenues, streets, parks, schools, and even provinces.44

The commemoration of Benito Juárez in Mexico has not evolved without criticism and even rejection by some segments of Mexican society. Catholic activists, ideological conservatives, and more academic historians recognize the errors of the man and the flaws of the Reform. In 1939 Manuel Gómez Morín and like-minded associates created the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, the National Action Party) to oppose the ideological and political monopoly of 20th-century “revolutionary” (meaning, to them, communist) Mexico. Benito Juárez, for Gómez Morín, “demonstrated the best and the worst of the liberal tradition—both as a defender of political liberty and an instigator of electoral fraud.”45 The first PAN president of Mexico, Vicente Fox (2000–2006) commented some years after his presidency that he was a better president than Juárez.46

Indigenous Mexicans, even the Zapotec, have problems with the cult of Juárez. In the greatest commemorative monuments of the bronze-hued Juárez, it is a problem that the Porfirians made Juárez as white as Carrera marble. “There was hope,” writes Natividad Gutiérrez, “that republicanism equality would eventually ‘civilize’ the Indians.” Victor de la Cruz, a Zapotec poet, notes, “The so-called national heroes are fabrications of the dominant society.” Native intellectuals are searching for their own indigenous heroes but firmly believe that ideological and cultural plurality is not respected in Mexico. Indian students in one survey favored Juárez and President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), the “Indian president.” It is still not easy in an ethnically divided society like Mexico to integrate and “believe in the same cultural archetypes.”47

Commemorative memory is becoming more plural in Mexico today. Different political parties, ethnicities, regions, and successive generations have different heroes. Official history and outdated myths are criticized and eventually ignored. Commemorative monuments in Mexican cities are harder to see and appreciate, as glitzy glass towers or Pepsi billboards surround them. This is not just a Mexican trend but also a modern and an international development. Historical revisionism is everywhere. But there is a countertrend in the early 21st century, and that is of nationalism against globalization. Mexico has experienced a precarious national existence. In the 19th-century, Spain, the United States, Great Britain, and France invaded Mexico. In the late 19th century, massive US investment in Mexico provoked a discussion in US and Mexican newspapers about the “inevitable absorption of Mexico into the United States.”48 The United States mobilized twenty thousand troops on the Mexican border in March 1911, during the Mexican Revolution. José Ives Limantour, the minister of the treasury, wrote in his memoir, “The danger that threatened the sovereignty and independence of Mexico was not imaginary.”49 In the 20th century the United States intervened in Mexico twice, and in the 21st century Mexico faces an American president who is a populist demagogue and has an animus for Mexico and the Mexican people. “Nationalism unseen for decades has swept across Mexico.”50 The stakes are always high for Mexico, and for that reason, Benito Juárez remains significant in Mexican memory, myth, and history. “Mexican memory unites Mexico,” according to Castañeda. “Without it the country as we know it might simply not exist.”51