Una nación santa: de héroes y profetas. Historias. Revista de la Dirección de Estudios Históricos Num. 79 (2011) mayo-agosto

Abstract

Wilhem Dilthey, El mundo histórico, México, FCE, 1944, pp. 309-312.Otto Rank, El mito del nacimiento del héroe, Barcelona, Paidós, 1981, pp. 97-98.Hugo F. Bauzá, El mito del héroe, morfología y semántica de la figura heroica, México, FCE, 1998, pp. 23-25.Joseph Campbell, El héroe de las mil caras. Psicoanálisis del mito, México, FCE, 1959, pp. 9-30 y 336-345.Thomas Carlyle, Los héroes, Buenos Aires, Espasa-Calpe, 1951, p. 9.Paul Bénichou, Tiempo de los profetas, doctrinas de la época romántica, México, FCE, 1984, pp. 492-493.“Discurso patriótico pronunciado por Juárez en la ciudad de Oaxaca el 16 de septiembre de 1840”, en Jorge L. Tamayo, Documentos, discursos y correspondencia, México, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2006, t. I, p. 38.Anthony D. Smith, Chosen People, Sacred Sources of Nacional Identity, Londres, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 4-40.Heroes, as we know them, are constructions of collective identity. Heroes are built during their life, but death plays the main role, since their ideas outlive them in the creations and institutions marked by their doings. To throw themselves into public life, héroes asume identities borrowed from a number of other heroes creating  moral and physical genealogies. This happens especially when Native heroes become a benchmark in the process of creating a sense of belonging, when they opérate as functional and foundational agents giving support to the rhetoric of national or regional identities. However, is it true, at the beginning of the millennium, that heroes are vanishing from civic and oficial ceremonies and that their strictly human trail rarely accepts the scrutiny of public opinion.</p