imagine '98: mexican iconography of the 1898 spanish-cuban-u.s.war

What the Porfirian govemment assurned  -or, rather, articulat­ed-towards the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-North American war was an imaginary neutrality, for this position suffered multiple schisms. In an uncertain context, the press became a forum for confron­ting ideas about war developed through texts and images: argu­ments that were anything but neutral. Evidently, the official neu­trality declared emphatically by PorfirioDíaz was violated by both graphic illustrations and their corresponding· articles. These illus­trations became a skillful way to represent telegraphic cables, ad­justed to the imaginary politicians of Porfirian México. My essay studies  some  relevant forms of  representing war, representations that after all, were directed to something much more complex than sympathy or aversion towwards Spain or the United States: national identity. For this reason, some even be­came impassioned representatives of  the conflict, turning the press into a battleground, and transferring to México the war that was going on in the Caribbean and the Philíppines. Monar­chists or gachupines (Spaniards), republicans, liberals and  even anarchists, they all fought their internal war of identities. Mexi­co City became the stage of a "Mexican '98", where radicalisms, under the excuse  and context of the war, built in their newspa­pers. intestine images of a paradoxical México. According to the­se sectors, embodied  brilliantly in voices  such as  El Hijo del Ahuizote and El Correo Español, the  Mexican government should have assumed a position closely related to the idea of identity clai­med  by each one of them. That is, the conflict in México adopted  the form, among others, of the sharp and unsettled question of the nature and essence of "the national".