Instituent Fictions: The Exceptional Present, The Junta Nacional Instituyente and Mexico's First Post-Independence Fiscal Plan (1822)

Abstract

This article sheds new light on the First Mexican Empire (1822-1823) and its Junta Nacional Instituyente (National Instituent Junta). Convened to replace the Constituent Congress, the Junta's mission was to transcend the impasses of the first independent years. In theory, its work was to take place in a realm prior to that of constituent power in that it would institute the conditions of possibility of constitution. This article focuses on the Junta's Fiscal Plan, Mexico's first since independence, and the debates it generated. It shows how this Plan's most problematic and necroeconomic aspects were passed on the basis of what the article calls an "instituent fiction". An instituent fiction is the fictional narrative according to which imperious necessity justifies exceptional actions; actions which are not constitutive, but institutive of the political and economic grounds of the state to be constituted. This instituent fiction was an essential part of the Junta's, and the First Mexican Empire's, haphazard argumentative apparatus; one that, despite its post-independence autochthony, was self-consciously overrun by the same viceregal vestiges that characterised the belaboured nation that it sought to reimagine.

Publisher

Routledge Journals

Publication Date

10-1-2021

Publication Title

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

Department

Hispanic Studies

Additional Department

Latin American Studies

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1978957

Keywords

Junta Nacional Instituyente, Agustin de Iturbide, Instituent power, First Mexican Empire, Economic imaginary

Language

English

Format

text

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