The Costumbrista Movement in Mexico

When the liberal journalist Fernández de Lizardi found himself barred from further discussion of political conditions, at the close of the first brief term of freedom of the press in Mexico in 1812, he turned to descriptions of manners and customs as a means of reaching his public, not with the intention of furnishing entertainment but, like Larra two decades later, with the hope of effecting reforms. Under cover of this type of material, which seemed perfectly harmless to the censors, he portrayed in his El Pensador mexicano, during 1813 and 1814, social and educational conditions as they then existed in the capital of the viceroyalty. When this avenue of expression was gradually closed to him after 1814 by the absolutist régime, Lizardi resorted to fiction; in his three realistic novels, picaresque in form but replete with costumbrista material, he accomplished for Mexico City what Mesonero Romanos futilely planned some years later to do for Madrid through the picaresque novel. Under the free press in 1820 Lizardi turned from fiction to a defense of the constitution; in El Conductor eléctrico he published many articles similar in tone and purpose to Miñano's Cartas, which appeared in Madrid in the same year; but he contributed nothing further toward the development of the satirical sketch on manners. When the more finished costumbrista article made its appearance in Mexico almost twenty years later, the revival of the form was due, not to native initiative, but to Spanish models. The Mexican literary periodicals in which these were published coincided both in content and in point of time with their Spanish prototypes; those in which fully developed costumbrista essays appear date, in the mother country from the opening, in Mexico from the close, of the third decade.