How did Latin Americans, after separating from their colonial masters, adopt the emancipating ideologies of the Age of Revolution? The decades after independence, called the “Early Republican Period” (1820–59), have been under-studied. However, in the past 20 years, we have seen a growing body of research that investigates how Latin Americans overhauled their colonial world and embraced the republican liberties modeled in the North Atlantic. Timo Schaefer's extensively researched and well-written book adds substantively to our understanding of how Mexicans sought to apply these ideologies to the real world.
Schaefer ambitiously attempts to illuminate the rise of liberalism after independence and its demise a few decades later. Specifically, the book traces the fate of “revolutionary liberalism,” by which the author means an ideology that promoted the rule of law and legal equality for all men. By the end of the century, however, not only had revolutionary liberalism failed but “legal equality was repudiated as an institutional aspiration” (6). In the book, Schaefer seeks to explain this evolution and also to ask “what lasting impact, cultural or institutional, did [egalitarianism] have on the development of a modern Mexican state?” (7).
To that end, the study explores the wide diversity of the country's post-independence legal cultures, or “the ways Mexicans practiced, talked about, and otherwise interacted with the law” (17). The book explores legal cultures in three social settings that encompassed the vast majority of the Mexican population: (1) two chapters on mestizo towns, (2) one chapter on Indian towns, and (3) one chapter on haciendas (large agricultural estates). Chronologically, the investigation concentrates on the 1820s through the 1840s. The book then jumps over the Civil War period, with the final chapter focusing on the authoritarian regime of the 1890s. The research relies principally on court and police documents from the provinces of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Oaxaca.
Schaefer puts forth several arguments that join to form a satisfyingly complex picture of the period. He examines the Early Republic's numerous interconnected cultural and ideological tensions, including but not limited to liberalism versus conservativism, nationalism versus localism, and federalism versus centralism. The author weaves the primary sources to reveal how Mexicans related to liberal reform very differently depending on their social sector and setting. Revolutionary liberalism had its strongest expression at the level of the municipal government in mestizo towns, within the civic militias, and in some Indian villages. In contrast, liberalism held less appeal for residents of haciendas and the countryside and soldiers, and in some Indian villages. Where it existed, liberal egalitarianism was strongest in areas with local governmental institutions, but tended to become more diffuse as one moved into areas without those institutions (rural areas and haciendas) or went from local to provincial and national government. Further, the cultural values of these various micro-societies strongly affected how they responded to the premise of legal order and equality. “Egalitarian institutions flourished to the extent that they were able to mobilize social values centered on the practice of labor and care of family” (16). In contrast, areas that established social standing based on private property (haciendas), corporate identity (indigenous towns), or institutional hierarchy (the army) stubbornly resisted revolutionary liberalism.
This is a dense, rich study that weaves together a truly impressive volume of primary sources with well-written, appealing prose. The author successfully strives to give a picture of legal-political evolution without relying on the major violent conflicts that often capture our attention. Rather, Schaefer offers a fine-grained picture of daily life and attitudes. Thus, we learn about legal culture by examining domestic squabbles between spouses, people who tried to avoid military conscription, native communities that sought to become self-governing municipalities, hacendados and urban oligarchs that discussed their social inferiors, and citizens who sought to defend themselves against corrupt officials. Through a careful reading of the sources, the author elucidates the cultural and economic rationale that explains why different social sectors (e.g., hacendados, the rural poor, and indigenous villagers) embraced or rejected liberal reform.
As well written as the book is, it lacks the kind of internal synthesis that would be helpful to the reader. The chapter sections and the chapters as a whole conclude with virtually no summarization or connecting analysis. The book therefore lacks cohesion and initially appears fragmented, as it is up to the reader to figure out how the different sections and chapters relate to each other, what their larger points are, and how they connect to the core theses. Nonetheless, the reader who puts in that effort will be rewarded. The sections on the civic militias were particularly well written, as they illuminate how localism and a value system dedicated to family and work proved consonant with revolutionary liberalism. However, if those same militia volunteers were forcibly conscripted into the army or National Guard, into barracks far from home imbued with different value systems, their liberal norms eroded. Well researched and well written, this book respects the complex dynamism of this time period and makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of it.
