At first glance, these two works seem to have little in common besides analyzing local politics in rural communities with indigenous populations. While John Cameron's book studies contemporary democratization in six different municipalities in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, Karen Caplan's book analyzes the local implementation of liberalism in early nineteenth-century Mexico. However, both works share several common themes: an interest in explaining the politics of everyday governance; a focus on the interrelationship among social, economic, and cultural histories and contexts and administrative and political change; and an emphasis on the role that rural indigenous citizens have played in shaping and reshaping political practice and institutions. While this latter point appears more evident in the contemporary setting for those familiar with the political effect of indigenous movements, it seems less obvious in the early nineteenth century, given that traditional historiography has understood liberalism as something merely imposed on indigenous peoples from above.

Through meticulous archival research in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán, Caplan traces and carefully explicates popular forms of liberalism. She argues that indigenous peoples did not usually question liberal changes, but sought to craft them in specific ways. Examples of this in Oaxaca are a reluctance to be taxed, not on the basis of its illegitimacy but on poverty and hence inability to pay; or an evasion of the draft that did not challenge it but emphasized other contributions offered in its stead. Similarly, rural citizens in Yucatán negotiated liberal reforms by establishing a direct relationship with state government that allowed them to circumvent non-indigenous leadership. Rural communities also used different strategies to gain the titles to baldía or “unoccupied” lands that they had used before land titles became mandatory. Throughout national administrative fluctuations, in both centralized and federal systems, indigenous peoples in both states adopted many of these new institutional reforms and publicly supported them, while simultaneously attempting to maintain certain levels of autonomy.

With Indigenous Citizens, Caplan joins a growing and important wave of scholarship that explores indigenous agency in the formation and negotiation of liberalism in Latin America (Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation: Liberalism, Race and Ethnicity in the Andes, 2004; Francie Chassen-Lopez, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico 1867–1911, 2004; Kim Clark and Marc Becker, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador, 2007). Although both Larson and Chassen-Lopez argue that indigenous peoples helped shape republicanism and liberalism in the region, the former compares several countries while the latter focuses on Oaxaca.

By comparing two states in one country, and thus a shared macro political framework, Caplan allows us to understand how local liberalisms could lead to very different outcomes. In Oaxaca, indigenous and nonindigenous citizens as well as public officials had powerful economic reasons to maintain this hybrid autonomy. In Yucatán, however, this autonomy was initially respected but increasingly violated. Whereas Oaxaca was able to maintain this social contract through several administrative changes as the country transitioned between federalist and centralized models, in Yucatán these changes were used by nonindigenous citizens to gain more control of indigenous lands and labor. As long as Yucatan's Mayas had direct access to a state government that responded to their complaints, they were likely to view policy changes as legitimate. However, once avenues for autonomous indigenous power and state access were closed, the Mayas became increasingly frustrated. It is this growing dissatisfaction with the breaking of the social contract—and not liberal policies per se—explains Caplan, that becomes one of the main reasons for the unrest that led to the caste war. The war itself justified further disempowerment and labor exploitation of the indigenous and their ultimate relegation to second-class citizenship.

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes is a unique and seminal contribution to the study of contemporary participatory democracy and rural development in the area. The result of eight years of field work, it is a rare comparison of six recently democratized rural municipalities in three countries. All six municipalities shared the gaining of rural, indigenous control over municipal government, a significant redistribution of municipal income away from the urban and towards the rural population, and the creation of a participatory methodology designed to include more rural actors in policy design and administration. Here is where the similarities end, as Cameron takes us through a journey to very different municipalities with varied economic histories, interethnic relations, models of participatory governance, and levels of effectiveness and/or continuity. The extensive research period allows him to analyze not only the factors that may have led to these changes but also the reasons why some of these new municipalities have been more or less effective, and more or less likely to endure.

Cameron adopts a power analysis, arguing that the historical, economic, and ecological context, both historical and contemporary, plays a key role in explaining these municipal democratization experiences. He claims that while mayoral leadership and institutional innovation are important factors in the creation of these changes, they do not exist in a vacuum but are themselves interrelated to this broader context. For example, the length and extent of hacienda domination, the relative wealth or poverty of the land, the existence or absence of a strong indigenous organization, the existence or absence of a powerful nonindigenous elite competing for power, and a history of the presence or absence of nongovernmental organizations all shape the possibilities for municipal democratization projects and their ability to sustain themselves through time. The differences in central states' level of decentralization allows one to understand how differences in national contexts matter as well. For example, In Bolivia, where a national decentralization model was more comprehensive and specific, rural municipalities have been more restricted in their participatory democracy models than those in Ecuador, where the vaguer and less restraining national model has allowed room for more local creativity.

Other recent works on participatory democracy experiences have focused primarily on nonindigenous communities in Brazil, or on indigenous communities in one country, rendering this book a novel comparative insight into the complicated relationships that shape local democratization in the rural Andes. One of its key findings is the analysis of the relationship between redistribution and participation. While rural citizens value both, Cameron argues, if one has to be sacrificed, material gains (often embodied in very visible material works) have precedence over expanded participation. In other words, in some of the case studies, he finds that participation can be significantly curtailed without widespread resistance as long as rural communities perceive that their material demands are being addressed. Similarly, participatory methodology in and of itself without significant material allocation is also problematic. This not only challenges dominant NGO views about the promise and possibility of participatory democracy but also embodies, in local form, the tensions between benefit-oriented and process-oriented models of democracy that shape contemporary national debates in the region.

One interesting area for further exploration lies in the political relevance of different levels of ethnic identification. In some of these municipalities, indigeneity is a key basis for social and political identification and struggle, whereas in others it is not. Although Cameron points these differences out, one wants to learn more about how these differing levels of identification may affect local practices of governance, as well as perceptions of and responses to govermentality pressures faced by newly elected and appointed indigenous public officials. He suggests that there are important tensions here as indigenous understandings and practices may clash with the logic of everyday governance. Moreover, indigenous governments may compete with and even displace indigenous organizations that helped them gain power. In fairness, an analysis of how this may be shaping subsequent ethnic politics and identifications is beyond the scope of this book. It is to Cameron's credit that his work is so rich that it provokes new questions and suggests new directions that will keep scholars busy for years to come.

Both books are to be commended for providing in-depth, highly contextualized and critical perspectives that underscore the ways in which local politics may not always appear to be what it seems: Liberalism did not always lead to indigenous disempowerment and democratic municipalization is not a panacea likely to address all problems or inequities.

Caplan shows us that local power relationships led liberalism to mean something much more benign in Oaxaca than in Yucatán. However, while the author effectively argues that liberalism was not merely imposed and that the indigenous could have significant agency, she also underscores that their poverty and oppression did not change significantly with liberalism. Respect for their autonomy allowed many of them to keep their livelihood, but it did not lead to an improvement in their conditions.

Cameron, in turn, concludes that these rural democratization experiences can be a mixed bag. On the positive side, they have in every instance led to some redistribution and the gaining of racial respect for the indigenous. However, they have not always led to more significant socioeconomic transformation, deeper participation, eradication of clientilism, nor elimination of poverty. Despite their tempered conclusions however, they are no more narratives of doom than they are of exaggerated hope. They are thoughtful, insightful windows into the realities of everyday power struggles enveloped in daunting and difficult—but not always insurmountable—conditions.