Porfiriato

The Porfiriato, the period of rule associated with Porfirio Díaz, enters the novel through a congresswoman’s recollection of her family’s historical and social prejudices. Her account places Díaz’s era within a hierarchy that idealizes earlier regimes and treats elite lineage as the measure of who truly belongs to Mexico.

The Porfiriato in a Family’s Historical Imagination

The congresswoman recalls that her family considered conditions acceptable under Porfirio Díaz, but better under Emperor Maximilian and best of all under Iturbide, in an imagined monarchy free of upheaval. This is not offered as an impartial comparison of historical periods. It is the family’s own political memory, a ranking that turns the past into evidence for its preferred order and its claim to social distinction.

In that same worldview, only about three hundred families—some fifteen hundred or two thousand people—counted as real Mexicans. Others were dismissed as embittered Indigenous people, resentful whites, or outsiders supposedly intent on destroying the country. The numbers and labels belong to the congresswoman’s account of her family’s beliefs; they reveal how a narrowly defined elite could convert ancestry and status into a test of national belonging.

Kelly Rivera Parker and the Inherited Social Divide

The congresswoman’s recollection explains why her family disapproved of her friendship with Kelly Rivera Parker. Their objection was directed not simply at Kelly but at her parents, particularly her father, whom they viewed as a social climber seeking access to their private world. They assumed Kelly’s mother was not Catholic and spoke of her with contempt. Yet they never forbade the girls from visiting one another, and Kelly came to the congresswoman’s house increasingly often.

The contrast between the two homes gives this class prejudice a material form. Kelly’s house was comfortable, modern, and designed for receiving guests; the congresswoman describes her own family home as rambling and lacking style, but endowed with the appearance of wealth and permanence. Her family prized that inherited authority as a kind of sovereignty: the ability to owe nothing and answer to no one. Kelly, she says, preferred the house with class over the one with style, and she associates Kelly with stubbornness, force of will, and a desire for pleasure. The recollection therefore unsettles the family’s assumptions: Kelly’s affinity for the old house cannot be reduced to the social position her elders assigned her.

Narrative Function

The Porfiriato is evoked through retrospective testimony rather than a direct account of political events. The congresswoman’s memories disclose the assumptions behind an elite family’s social boundaries, while her own present-day explanation preserves both the language of those boundaries and a degree of distance from them. Historical nostalgia and personal memory converge around Kelly, whose friendship crossed a divide that the family regarded as natural but never fully enforced. The period thus serves as part of the family’s imagined genealogy of privilege, not as a neutral measure of Mexican society.