Conceived in 1998 when the EZLN indigenous insurgency was barely into its fourth year, born at a millennium conference held between the Instituto Nacional de Antropología é Historia and Georgetown University, and published initially in Mexico as Crisis, reforma y revolución, historias de fin del siglo in 2002, this broad-ranging and generally excellent collection of essays has been ‘expanded, reorganised and revised’ for this English-language edition. The participants were asked to ponder the historical lessons of two periods of economic boom and state-led reform that culminated in social revolutions in 1810 and 1910, and to consider the implications of these cycles for the approaching centenary: ‘Once again, amid times of boom and bust, crisis and reform, Mexicans faced deepening inequalities and political uncertainties. Could a new round of civil conflict follow? Could it possibly begin in 2010?’ The book is divided into three parts: it contains three essays on ‘Communities’, ‘because they have been a constant, important and too-often ignored participants in Mexico's history’, four essays on ‘Revolutions’, ‘because they marked the pivotal transformations that made Mexico a nation in 1810 and 1910’, and four essays on the ‘Contemporary Crisis’.
The study starts, appropriately, with two closely observed episodes of communities in turmoil: a riot in Cuautitlán in 1785 in defence of popular religious practices, involving hostility to the parish priest; and the lynching in Atlacamulco of four Spaniards on All Saints' Day 1810, soon after the outbreak of the Hidalgo revolt. Eric Van Young's purpose in telling these tales is to reflect on the relationship between local conflict and the wider ‘general crisis’ accompanying the American and French revolutions. Although he admits that indigenous villagers possessed ‘agency’, responding often violently to the wider changes sweeping through the Atlantic world, Van Young insists that on the eve of the Independence revolutions there was ‘no common political vision’ informing Indian rebelliousness, and he rejects the commonly held view ‘that independence was eventually produced by a significant cross-class and cross-ethnic alliance embracing indigenous villagers, among other groups’. Such alliances would appear only after decades of post-Independence political conflict.
If Van Young argues that active citizenship and a modern sense of nationhood were achieved slowly over the nineteenth century, Antonio Annino insists, in contrast, that towns and villages from the start of the independence movements participated actively in constituting the Mexican state and nation. For Annino, the origins of Mexican republicanism lay in the ‘political moment’ of 1812 when municipalities throughout New Spain asserted their autonomy by adopting the Cádiz Constitution. This ‘slippage of citizenship forged by the pueblos’, he argues, drew upon Hispanic and Indian political traditions and was ‘unique to Mexican republicanism’. This persistent quest for local autonomy became the driving force of federalism, the mid-century Liberal Reforma and the ‘regeneration’ of Liberalism after 1910. Mexico's legendary political instability during the nineteenth century resulted from the struggle of central, state and district governments to recover control over liberal citizenship from pueblos that had become constitutional municipalities even before Independence. Yet Annino's idealistic and populist interpretation (always so scintillating and plausibly told!) requires greater finessing when it comes to explaining everyday practices of citizenship, particularly in ethnically diverse local contexts.
Leticia Reina makes a start in this direction in an ambitious chapter which explores the evolution of electoral culture within indigenous communities over the periods preceding the three crises that the collection addresses. By demonstrating how seriously Indian pueblos took elections, and by identifying how protests against caciques and electoral abuses have coincided with Mexico's major political crises, Reina identifies the very fractures in Mexico's body politic that make Annino's idealistic vision of ethnic citizenship less plausible, and Van Young's dualistic view more convincing, at least for the early period.
Four fine essays constitute the section on revolutions, the core of the book. François-Xavier Guerra's magisterial overview of nineteenth-century Mexico is an object lesson in the deployment of French modernisation theory that all students of Latin American politics should be encouraged to read. Along with several other contributions to this volume, this piece betrays the optimism of the late 1990s, when indigenous movements throughout Latin America seemed to be signalling a more inclusive democratic future; Guerra sees as ‘a profoundly original trait of contemporary Mexico, the central role of mostly indigenous pueblos as permanent and essential actors in political and social life’. I doubt, were he still alive, that Guerra would make this statement in today's grim, narco-afflicted Mexico.
Fin de siècle optimism is evident too in Alan Knight's comparison between the 1810 and 1910 revolutionary cycles, and his reflections on the current crisis. Knight chose not to revise his essay, which was written in 1999, arguing that an ‘historical document’ should not be altered with the advantage of hindsight. Hence, after a useful comparison between the structural conditions that precipitated the social revolutions of 1810 and 1910, Knight is left pondering the still distant 2010, betraying a sneaking admiration for the PRI's capacity for political survival in spite of being the handmaiden of neoliberal reforms which were loosening its hold over the electorate. In a short postscript, Knight reflects on how the electoral defeat of the PRI in 2000 confirmed Mexico's democratic opening and seemed to remove the possibility that a conjuncture of structural conditions might precipitate Mexico again into social revolution.
Ignoring the ‘centennial revolutions’ script, Friedrich Katz explores instead the impact of Mexico's experience of international wars on state and nation building: ‘International wars have shaped Mexico's history to a degree that has been far greater than has been the case in most Latin American countries’, he writes. Katz observes interestingly that participation of ‘the popular classes’ in the wars of Independence, the Mexican–American War, and the European Intervention ‘created a national consciousness at a time when Mexico lacked the elements that in other countries created such consciousness’. In the core of the chapter he demonstrates how three later wars in which Mexico was not directly involved, the Spanish–American War and the two world wars, ‘all led to increasing US power and Mexican dependence’. Katz's focus on Mexico's external relations is a necessary reminder that, alongside the assertive pueblos that endear so many scholars to Mexican history, external factors have exercised a determining influence.
In a wonderful, sweeping, Tannenbaumian analysis, John Tutino returns us to Mexico's reified ‘peasant communities’. In a chapter that brings his influential synthesis, From Insurrection to Revolution, up to date, Tutino adds an ecological dimension to the moral economy approach of his 1986 study, introducing the concept of ‘revolutionary capacity’ and relating this to ‘ecological autonomy’, defined as ‘the ability of families and communities to generate most of their basic subsistence independently’. After tracing the relationship between the ecological autonomy and revolutionary capacity of the Mexican peasantry from the early nineteenth century to high Cardenismo in the 1930s, he then charts the decline of the ecological autonomy of peasant communities after 1940, concluding that ‘most people, powerful and poor, live grounded in material realities – the few concentrating powers, the many struggling to survive. The end of ecological autonomies, the material bases of popular revolutionary capacities during the modern age, suggests that the age of revolutions is over.’ This conclusion is confirmed by the final four contributors.
Lorenzo Meyer develops an instructive comparison between two periods of neoliberal restructuring and their attendant political crises, from the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, concluding that ‘the use of state power, breaking constitutional and legal norms, to improve change promoted as new freedom was the ultimate contradiction of both liberalisms that led to revolution in 1910, and to electoral transformation in 2000’.
Guillermo de la Peña, using a dizzying proliferation of acronyms, provides a superbly clear and comprehensive account of recent developments in civil society and popular resistance in the rural sector, explaining his omission of the EZLN on grounds that ‘the story has been told repeatedly’ and adding presciently that ‘it is perhaps just beginning’. Enrique Semo provides a fascinating insider's view of how the Left has responded to neoliberalism, democratic opening and the renewal of popular insurgency. Commenting on Semo's chapter, Tutino observes that the Left's decision ‘sometimes to celebrate, but never to forge an alliance … with the Chiapas insurgency’, and its turn to electoral participation, ‘signified acceptance of processes of limited change – the end of dreams of fundamental transformation’. Finally, Elisa Servín elegantly analyses the rise and fall of the revolutionary party, highlighting the struggle after 1982 between nationalist-protectionist politicians and neoliberal technocrats, while reminding us, in the spirit of this excellent collection, that ‘municipalities became the first enclaves of political alternation, confirming their historical importance as privileged sites for political and social participation’. She concludes on a warning note that ‘the political class seems caught in the romance of power, daily removed from a society with rising expectations and new mobilisations’.
Long in the making (and in the reviewing!), this is an excellent set of essays that will serve students of Mexican history and politics for many years to come.
