With social peace in Mexico unraveling just five years after the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted from power in 2000, it would seem an apt time for a new book-length study on urban popular movements in Mexico. This is ironic because by the end of the twenthieth century, most Mexicans were optimistic about the possibility that competitive, fair elections would settle questions of authority and law and that political parties would aggregate the interests of the electorate. However, half a decade later, disputes over federal elections generated mass demonstrations from primary to final balloting, urban protests repeatedly paralyzed downtown Mexico City, an ongoing war between drug cartels left thousands dead in the north and west of the country, riots in the village of Atenco near the capital turned deadly, human rights accusations marred police and military, and by the dawn of the new Calderon administration at the end of 2006, intractable plantones (occupations) and paramilitary violence were bringing federal troops into the sleepy colonial city of Oaxaca.

Paul Lawrence Haber makes his contribution to a rich literature on protest and social movements in Mexico, arguing that the urban poor have never been more important. “The nonunionized urban poor,” he writes, “have become the most populous social class: they are more numerous than unionized workers and the peasantry, and they far outstrip what by Latin American standards is a significant middle class” (p. 1). He profiles two urban movements: the Asamblea de Barrios in Mexico City and the Comité de Defensa Popular in the northern city of Durango. As such, Haber works in the tradition of Jonathan Fox, Jeff Rubin, Joe Foweraker, Robert Bedzek, Judith Adler Hellman, and Maria Lorena Cook among others, echoing their conclusions that workers, peasants, and the urban poor have played a significant role in Mexico's contemporary history, challenging powerful actors through petition, protest, and direct action in neighborhoods, municipal councils, and state agencies. Haber also heeds the lessons of Wayne Cornelius and Susan Eckstein, whose classic urban studies in Mexico of the 1970s showed how the then-ruling party used patronage and punishment to maintain control over the urban poor.

The purpose of this study, Haber states in his first chapter, is to consider what the transformation from urban low-income movement to party politics has meant for the country's democratic transition and its future consolidation. He draws the conclusion that party politics, for the most part, is bad for popular movement organizations: It tends to deplete them of key leaders when they run for public office and often reduces once-autonomous and democratic organizations to patronage instruments of political parties.

Haber's chronological account of the movement organizations in the period he covers is generally very good. He is correct in pointing out the paradox of popular movement decline at the very moment when political opening ought to have made organizing easier. Whereas many observers in the 1980s began to speak of the democratizing potential of “civil society,” or of that collectivity of organized groups operating autonomously from the state and making regular demands of it, by the end of the 1990s, these groups seemed nearly irrelevant in politics. The citizens' organizations that had led the cleanup efforts after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, when the government's emergency efforts foundered, were a shadow of their former selves a decade later. The popular organizations that had stood up for workers and city residents rendered unemployed and penniless by rough rounds of austerity, inflation, privatization, and government cutbacks in the early 1980s were all but defunct as well. No major organization or trade union or social institution beyond the Catholic Church was large enough to influence votes or the party platforms of the three major presidential candidates in the watershed 1997 and 2000 federal elections.

This study, while empirically rich, suffers from lack of current data and it does not advance social movement theory significantly. The author's principal focus is on the way movement organizations in Mexico City and Durango reacted to the welfare policies of the Salinas administration (1988–94), and his material all but stops in 1994 with only cursory narrative epilogues at the end of each case study history. Thus, with each of the movement organizations under study in decline by the end of this period, he can offer only two arguments about urban popular movements: first, that they are important to those who participate in and work with them, and second, that they change the culture and political economy in which they exist. These conclusions, which are neither predictive nor empirically disconfirmable, offer the reader no way of understanding what forces overtook the urban popular movement in the post-PRI era, or if in fact urban popular movements were likely to surge again under specified conditions. They also offer no framework for understanding some of the most consequential urban protest events in Mexico's history between 1995 and 1998, primarily focused on the government's human rights record in the southern state of Chiapas, and around the dislocations caused by Mexico's devaluation crisis in 1995 and 1996.

This study will be of use to historians of contemporary urban Mexican politics. However, with regard to the author's own question of how movements and parties interact, new scholarship on urban Mexico would do well to theorize this relationship by synthesizing social movement theory with emerging work on political parties, collective action, and institutional outcomes.