This chapter proposes a new analysis of Mexican Romanticism, from José María Heredia to the Reforma generation. It considers how many of its canonical authors, such as Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and Ignacio Ramírez, write an important part of their production privileging the first-person plural, and thus, effectively make the collective subject central. This We should, in turn, be read in the light of their considerable political agency. This chapter argues that what defines the complex temporality particular to the Romantic poem is that both the I and the We simultaneously pose each other as presupposition. The I can only exist as a singularity that the We is unable to assimilate and thus excretes. Yet, at the same time, it is only through the outside gaze of the person who does not belong to it that a group may crystallize as a true collectivity.

The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.