Completed in 1819 and approved by the censorship in 1820, "Don
Catrin de la Fachenda" was the last novel written by Jose J.
Fernandez de Lizardi, and the only one that remained unpublished
until 1832, five years after the death of its author. At first
glance, the novel does not seem -at least morally- to doubt: bad
characters die, "catrinismo" is sensationally defeated and the
truth left standing is monopolized by the clergy, military, and
nobility. Perhaps dazzled by the canonization process that
Fernandez de Lizardi underwent at the hands of liberal
historiography towards the end of the 19th century, critics tend to
read "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" as the representative of a
colonial order that an emergent Mexican nation must destroy in
order to advance, free from those elements that halt progress,
toward the promising period of liberal modernization. However, one
can also trace in the protagonist the signs of the anxiety Lizardi
experienced due to the development of a revolution that sooner
rather than later would impose what he perceives as a materialist
and bourgeois social code. This is probably why all political
expectations in the novel rely on those redeemer-characters that
form part of a colonial apparatus that Lizardi seems committed to
modernize at all costs: clergymen that quote Rousseau, military
officials who declare their loyalty to the king and the law,
creole-aristocrats that do not speak of a nobility based on blood
but of a nobility of virtues, and lettered men who fervently trust
in the power of religion, education and work. Displaying what could
be classified as a monarchical-constitutional reformism, Lizardi
expects such privileged agents to carry out, without violence, the
political and social changes needed in New Spain at the beginning
of the 19th Century. Far from being in line with a view of Lizardi
as revolutionary and liberal, the results of the clash of
discourses that occurs within "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" seems to
confirm the author's nostalgia for a colonial order in which
eternal truth, honor and authority prevail as bastions of the
church, the army and the nobility. In the current edition, Maria
Eugenia Mudrovcic undertakes the analysis of Lizardi's last novel
as well as provides notes that facilitate an in depth understanding
of a text that though entertaining, is complex and contradictory.
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