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The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Alan Knight
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This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets of lo mexicano, la mexicanidad, or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history.1 Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons.2 Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English.3 Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexico's history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period.4

Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability.5 The achievements of the ‘stabilised development’ of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income.6 And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexico's relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated.7 Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.

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Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 24 , Supplement S1 , March 1992 , pp. 99 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 See Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York, 1961)Google Scholar and the same author's The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Ramos, Samuel, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (Austin, 1962).Google Scholar That these elusive concepts – delivered, in the case of Octavio Paz, of course, with considerable panache – can ensnare even an acute journalistic mind is shown in Riding, Alan, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York, 1984), ch. 1.Google Scholar

2 Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Thompson, E. P., ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), pp. 35–91Google Scholar; Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corrigan, Philip and Sayer, Derek, The Great Arch (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

4 Of course, all countries are distinct, or peculiar, and it is not difficult to find such claims made for other Latin American countries: for the ‘distinctiveness’ of Chilean history or Guatemala's status as ‘a relatively unusual historical case of conquest and colonialism’: Bergquist, Charles, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia (Stanford, 1986), p. 20Google Scholar; Smith, Carol A., ‘Introduction: Social Relations in Guatemala over Time and Space’, in Smith, Carol A. (ed.), Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988 (Austin, 1990), p. 2.Google Scholar My point would be that Mexico – or Mexican history – is particularly distinct, peculiarly peculiar. However, in part to offset exaggerated claims of Mexican exceptionality (‘como México no hay dos!’), I will, in passing, note comparisons – as well as contrasts – between Mexico's pattern of development and that of other Latin American countries.

5 ‘Stability’ begs a host of questions. Mexico has been politically stable in the sense of avoiding both frequent ministerial reshuffles (compare the French Fourth Republic) and, more significantly, major regime changes (compare Argentina since the 1940s). By ‘social stability’ I mean not social stasis (Mexican society has changed markedly since 1940) but a (relative) absence of major social conflict – such as affected the country prior to 1940, and most dramatically during 1910–20.

6 Hansen, Roger D., The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore, 1971), ch. 3.Google Scholar

7 Recent annual growth rates (GDP, 1989–91) have averaged +4.1% for Mexico compared to –0.6% for both Argentina and Brazil: New York Times, 13 Nov. 1991, p. 1. (Figures taken from the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America: 1991 figures are estimates based on the first semester.)

8 Mexico's place within the bureaucratic-authoritarian spectrum is not clear; at best, it is admitted to the category with major caveats; certainly it is not a paradigmatic case. See O'donnell, Guillermo, ‘Corporatism and the Question of the State’, in Malloy, James M. (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh, 1977), pp. 53 and 80Google Scholar, and the same author's ‘Introduction to Latin American Cases’, in O'donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe C. and Whitehead, Laurence (eds.), Transitions From Authoritarian Rule: Latin America (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

9 While Chiapas has had its share of repression and violence, the picture is more nuanced than that of Guatemala, across the border; the Federal government seeks to control and co-opt, but in doing so it concedes some space for peasant (including Indian) mobilisation, which has tended to increase in recent years: see Harvey, Neil, ‘Peasant Strategies and Corporatism in Chiapas’, in Foweraker, Joe and Craig, Ann L., Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico (Boulder, 1990), pp. 193–198.Google Scholar

10 The guerrilla movements of the 1960s and 1970s, concentrated in the state of Guerrero, were not of the same order: see Mayo, Baloy, La guerrilla de Genaroy Lucio, análisis y resultados (México, 1980).Google Scholar

11 Loaeza, Soledad, ‘La poliítica del rumor: Mexico noviembre-diciembre de 1976’, in Loaeza, Soledad, El llamado de las urnas (México, 1989), pp. 123–125.Google Scholar

12 For a lively discussion of Mexican politics in the election year of 1988 see Cornelius, Wayne A., Gentleman, Judith and Smith, Peter H. (eds.), Mexico's Alternative Political Futures (San Diego, 1989).Google Scholar

13 Knight, Alan, ‘Historical Continuities in Social Movements’, in Foweraker, and Craig, , Popular Movements, pp. 78–102.Google Scholar

14 As an antidote to ‘immediatist’ exaggeration of temporary political trends, see Chalmers, Douglas A., ‘The Politicized State in Latin America’, in Malloy, (ed.), Authoritarianism, pp. 23–45.Google Scholar

15 Tenenbaum, Barbara, The Politics of Penury: Debts and Taxes in Mexico, 1821–1856 (Albuquerque, 1986)Google Scholar; for parallels see Deas, Malcolm, ‘The Fiscal Problems of Nineteenth-Century Colombia’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 14 (1982), pp. 287–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17 Walker, David W., Kinship, Business and Politics: The Marlínez del Río Family in Mexico, 1824–1867 (Austin, 1986).Google Scholar

18 Coatsworth, John, ‘Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico’, American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 1 (1978), pp. 80–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Walker, , Kinship, Easiness and Politics, p. 5.Google Scholar

20 Hale, Charles, The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, 1989), pp. 237–238Google Scholar, quoting Justo Sierra (1876). Some nineteenth-century Bolivian ideologues – such as Mariano Baptista (1886) – went further, advocating annexation to Argentina: Demelas, Danièle, Nationalisme sans nation? La Bolivie aux xixe–xxesiècles (Paris, 1980), p. 23.Google Scholar

21 Haber, Stephen, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialisation of Mexico, 1890–1940 (Stanford, 1989), chs. 1–7.Google Scholar

22 Anderson, Rodney, Outcasts in Their Own Land: Mexican Industrial Workers, (DeKalb, 1976), pp. 112–113Google Scholar; Navarro, Moisés González, Historia Moderna de México: El Porfiriato: la vida social (México, 1970), pp. 807–811.Google Scholar Again, this was a continental phenomenon: Morris, James O., Elites, Intellectuals and Consensus: A Study of the Social Question and Industrial Relations in Chile (Ithaca, 1966)Google Scholar; Pécaut, Daniel, Orden y violencia: Colombia 1930–1954 (2 vols., Bogotá, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 90–106.Google Scholar

23 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 1969), ch. 8Google Scholar; for a Latin American application of the concept, see Trimberger, Ellen Kay, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in japan, Turkey, Egypt and Peru (New Brunswick, 1978), ch. 5.Google Scholar

24 See Rourke, Thomas, Goómez, Tyrant of the Andes (New York, 1969, first pubd. 1936), ch. 15Google Scholar; Mora, Enrique Ayala, ‘Gabriel García Moreno y la gestatión del estado nacional en Ecuador’, in Del Campo, Julio Labastida Martín (coord.), Dictaduras y dictadores (Mexico, 1986), pp. 136 and 142.Google Scholar

25 Cited by Levy, Daniel C., ‘Mexico: Sustained Civilian Rule Without Democracy’, in Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan J. and Lipset, Seymour Martin (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America (Boulder, 1989), p. 481.Google Scholar

26 However, Peter Smith argues that, while the Saenz Peña reform ‘constituted an effective short-run response to a crisis of participation…, its unforeseen consequences created a crisis of legitimacy which ultimately prompted the 1930 coup’: ‘The Breakdown of Democracy in Argentina, 1916–1930’, in Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred (eds.), The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America (Baltimore, 1978), p. 9.Google Scholar

27 Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution (2 vols., Cambridge, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 406–423Google Scholar; Womack, John Jr., ‘The Mexican Economy During the Revolution, 1910–1920: Historiography and Analysis’, Marxist Perspectives, vol. 1 (1978), pp. 80–123Google Scholar, presents a rosier picture.

28 Womack, John Jr., ‘The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920’ and Jean Meyer, ‘Mexico: Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s’, in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 153 and 193.Google Scholar

29 Knight, , Mexican Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 517–527.Google Scholar

30 As Arnaldo Córdova observes, ‘in Mexico the Revolution was born along with a burning defence of the past’, in which respect it contrasted with the French or Russian Revolutions (La ideología de la Revolutión Mexicana [México, 1988, first pubd. 1973], p. 87).Google Scholar For the French Revolution's repudiation of the past, see Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 29 and 51.Google Scholar

31 Coatsworth, John, ‘Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative Perspective’, in Katz, Friedrich (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution: Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, 1988), pp. 21–62.Google Scholar Even if this were a false stereotype (which I doubt), it would contrast, for example, with the ‘official’ view of the Brazilian povo as ‘passive, uncomplaining [and] in need of motivation’: Levine, Robert M., ‘Elite Perspectives on the Povo’, in Conniff, Michael L. and McCann, Frank D. (eds.), Modern Brazil, Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective (Lincoln, 1989), p. 220.Google Scholar It is worth noting, however, that the rebellious Mexicans were overwhelmingly rural: during the 1810 insurgency the cities were relatively inert; while, a century later, during the Revolution, riots tended to concentrate in the declining artisanal towns of the Bajío and the major metropolises remained tranquil (Knight, , Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 208–215).Google Scholar

32 Tutino, John, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Eases of Agrarian Violence, 1710–1940 (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. 2; for comparisons with Peru, see Puhle, Hans-Jürgen and Jacobsen, Nils (eds.), The Economies of Mexico and Peru During the Late Colonial Period, 1760–1810 (Berlin, 1986).Google Scholar

33 Tutino, , From InsurrectionGoogle Scholar, chs. 2–5; Van Young, Eric, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar; and the same author's ‘Moving Towards Revolt: Agrarian Origins of the Hidalgo Rebellion in the Guadalajara Region’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 176–204.Google Scholar

34 Taylor, William, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 1979)Google Scholar, ch. 4, and the same author's ‘Banditry and Insurrection: Rural Unrest in Central Jalisco, 1790–1816’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 205–246.Google Scholar

35 Hamnett, Brian, The Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Young, Eric, ‘Millennium on the Northern Marches: the Mad Messiah of Durango and Popular Rebellion in Mexico, 1800–1815’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 28 (1986), pp. 385–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the same author's ‘Quetzalcoatl, King Ferdinand and Ignacio Allende Go to the Seashore: or Messianism and Mystical Kingship in Mexico, 1800–1821’, in Jaime, Rodriguez O. (ed.), The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation (Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 109–127.Google Scholar

36 Thus, as David Brading puts it, ‘the liberation of Peru was a conquest': The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 616.Google Scholar A different bastion of loyalism was the siempre fiel island of Cuba, where the presence of a large and growing slave population, coupled with the recent traumatic experience of the Haitian revolution, ensured that the planter elite would remain loyal to Spain, on the grounds that ‘Cuba será española o africana’: Alier, Juan Martínez, Cuba: economía y sociedad (Paris, 1972), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

37 Brading, D. A., Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 200–204Google Scholar; Miller, Simon, ‘The Mexican Hacienda Between the Insurgency and the Revolution. Maize Production and Commercial Triumph on the Temporal’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 16 (1984), p. 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pittman, Dewitt Kenneth Jr., Hacendados, campesinos y politicos: Las closes agrarias y la instalación del Estado oligárquicoen México, 1869–1876 (México, 1989), p. 68Google Scholar, indicates the backwardness of Morelos as late as the 1870s.

38 Coatsworth, , ‘Patterns of Rural Rebellion’, p. 55Google Scholar, advances the hypothesis of peasant ‘aggression’; however, the evidence remains sketchy.

39 Tutino, John, ‘Agrarian Social Change and Peasant Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Example of Chalco’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 95–140.Google Scholar This may be termed ‘Andean’, in that Andean landlords, striving to maximise returns within a sluggish rural economy, tended to do so by squeezing dependent peasants, rather than engaging vigorously and ‘entrepreneurially’ in the market: see, for example, Langer, Eric, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 (Stanford, 1989), pp. 75 and 188.Google Scholar

40 This is a rough conclusion culled from: Reina, Leticia, Las rebeliones campesinas en México (1819–1906) (México, 1980)Google Scholar; Meyer, Jean, Problemas campesinos y revueltas agrarias, 1821–1910 (Mexico, 1971)Google Scholar; Wasserstrom, Robert, Class and Society in Central Chiapas (Berkeley, 1983), p. 132.Google ScholarCoatsworth, , ‘Patterns of Rural Rebellion’, p. 50Google Scholar, observes that ‘the Mexican data do not clearly indicate the timing of the transition from tax-based to land disputes’, although he also suggests, p. 55, that ‘beginning in the 1840s… rural revolts now usually involved direct assaults on the haciendas as well as civil authority’;.

41 Chalco landlords denounced ‘perverse’ peasants who, by virtue of their wayward independence, obstructed hacienda operations: Tutino, , ‘Agrarian Social Change’, pp. 107–108, 114–116Google Scholar; and, for similar complaints from Morelos, see Bazant, Jan, ‘El trabajo y los trabajadores en la Hacienda de Atlacomulco’, in Frost, Elsa Cecilia et al. , (eds.), El Trabajo y los Trabajadores en la Historia de México (México, 1979), pp. 382–384Google Scholar and Pittman, , Hacendados, pp. 60–61.Google Scholar

42 Reed, Nelson, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford, 1964)Google Scholar; Hart, John, ‘The 1840s Southwestern Peasants' War: Conflict in a Transitional Society’Google Scholar and Reina, Leticia, ‘The Sierra Gorda Peasant Rebellion, 1847–1850’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 249–268, 269–294.Google ScholarPastor, Rodolfo, Campesinos y reformas: La mixteca, 1700–1858 (México, 1987), p. 531Google Scholar, mentions a ‘Mixtec caste war” in the 1830s.

43 Powell, T. G., El liberalismoy el campesinado en el centra de México (1850 a 1876) (Mexico, 1974)Google Scholar; Meyer, Jean, ‘La Ley Lerdo y la desamortización de las comunidades en Jalisco’, in Carrasco, Pedro et al. , La sociedad indígena en el centra y occidente de México (Zamora, 1986), pp. 189–212.Google Scholar

44 In the Chalco region, for example, ‘the willingness of the peasants to resort to violence generally slowed the attacks on community landholding by elites and the liberal state’: Tutino, , ‘Agrarian Social Change’, p. 156.Google Scholar

45 Coatsworth, , ‘Patterns of Rural Rebellion’, pp. 50 and 55Google Scholar, dates the shift from ‘tax-based to land disputes’ in the Andes to around 1900; on the Andean timetable, see Langer, , Economic Change, pp. 18–20, 30–31Google Scholar, 51ff., which suggests a ‘tenuous equilibrium’ between landed and peasant interests pertaining in much of southern Bolivia through the nineteenth century. Mallon, Florencia, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands, Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (Princeton, 1983)Google Scholar, shows how ‘peasant struggle’ (and war with Chile) helped delay any ‘capitalist transformation’ of the rural economy of the central highlands well into the twentieth century.

46 On the greater ideological sophistication of later (roughly, post-1860) rebellions, see Reina, , Rebeliones campesinas, pp. 40–41Google Scholar; Katz, Friedrich, ‘Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato, 1967–1910’ in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge, 1986), vol. 5, pp. 12–13Google Scholar; Hart, John M., Las anarquistas mexicanos,1860–1900 (Mexico, 1974), ch. 5.Google Scholar

47 Katz, Friedrich, ‘Rural Rebellions After 1810’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 536–538.Google Scholar For parallels with Guatemala, see Smith, Carol A., ‘Origins of the National Question in Guatemala: A Hypothesis’Google Scholar and McCreery, David, ‘State Power, Indigenous Communities and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1820–1920’, in Smith, (ed.), Guatemalan Indians, pp. 85–90 and 108–109.Google Scholar

48 Hart, John Mason, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley, 1987), ch. 4.Google Scholar

49 Katz, , ‘Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato’, pp. 15 and 19–20.Google Scholar

50 Brading, , The First America, p. 664.Google Scholar

51 Katz, Friedrich, Porfirio Díaz frente al descontento popular regional (1891–1893) (México, 1986), pp. 16–18.Google Scholar For a good example of the failure of Porfirian paternalism, see Stevens, Donald Fithian, ‘Agrarian Policy and Instability in Porfirian Mexico’, Americas, 39 (1982), pp. 153–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Katz, , Porfirio Díaz, p. 21Google Scholar; Guerra, François-Xavier, Le Mexique: De l'Ancien Régime à la Révolution (Paris, 2 vols., 1985), vol. 1, pp. 94–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Womack, John Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1968), pp. 12–36.Google Scholar

53 On the shift from ‘traditional’ to ‘order-and-progress’ caudillos and the origins of the Civilista party in Peru, see Gootenburg, Paul, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, 1989), pp. 84–85Google Scholar; parallels would include the establishment of the oligarchic regime in Argentina following the fall of Rosas and the rise of the tachirenses in Venezuela.

54 Silver remained Mexico's principal export, and mining the most important export sector; this was significant in that a fall in export prices and/or foreign demand had a less profound effect on the domestic economy than it did in countries – such as Cuba or Brazil – which relied heavily on agrarian exports: given the ‘enclave’ nature of the mining sector, the multiplier effect was appreciably less. Hence Mexico was less vulnerable to international recession. Meanwhile, Mexico's agrarian exports grew, but across a diverse range of products; monoculture existed solely as a regional problem – most obviously in the case of Yucatán's henequen.

55 The moradores of the Brazilian north-east, commented a Brazilian senator, were ‘united with the millowners by force of habit, by the influence of ancient customs, by ties of gratitude’; hence they displayed ‘a just and reverential respect toward their landlords’: Graham, Richard, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford, 1990), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

56 Bauer, Arnold, Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 164–170Google Scholar; Legrand, Catherine, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850–1936 (Albuquerque, 1986)Google Scholar, chs. 2 and 3; Rosebery, William, Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin, 1983).Google Scholar As Legrand's study makes clear, ‘precipitate – newly created, usually frontier – peasantries are quite capable of mobilisation and resistance: a classic example would be the peasant movement of La Convención in Peru in the 1960s. However, there is likely to be a significant time-lag between the initial process of colonisation and capitalist development and the subsequent phase of peasant protest; in the case of ‘traditional’ peasantries – such as the Mexicans – it is the initial process itself which tends to provoke resistance.

57 On the poor communications and weak market of the Andean zone, see Caballero, José María, Eeonomía agraria de la sierra peruana (Lima, 1981), pp. 296–298.Google Scholar It is arguable that the economic transformation wrought by the railways in Porfirian Mexico in the 1880s had its Andean analogue in the development of roads and trucks after the 1940s: ibid., pp. 301–3 and Wilson, Fiona, ‘The Conflict Between Indigenous and Immigrant Commercial Systems in the Peruvian Central Sierra, 1900–1940’, in Miller, Rory (ed.), Region and Class in Modern Peruvian History (Liverpool, 1987), pp. 125–162.Google Scholar As mentioned above (n. 39) Andean landlords often compensated for market weakness by squeezing tenants and workers, thus provoking protest; but, by the same token, a weak market inhibited the systematic expansion of latifundia in the sierra. Of course, hacienda expansion occurred, and stimulated significant peasant protest, such as the Chayanta revolt in southern Bolivia in 1927 (see Langer, , Economic ChangeGoogle Scholar, ch. 4). The Chayanta revolt, however, while it fell short of the insurrectionary scope and sophistication of Zapatismo, did prove capable of arresting the (comparatively weak) hacienda expansionism of the region; in which respect it more resembled nineteenth-century Mexican peasant movements, such as Chalco's, which were holding operations fought against economically shaky elites, not wars to the death against aggressive agrarian entrepreneurs, such as that fought by the Zapatistas against the Morelos sugar planters.

58 On the Peruvian enganche see Blanchard, Peter, ‘The Recruitment of Workers in the Peruvian Sierra at the Turn of the Century: The enganche System’, Inter-American Economic Affairs, vol. 33 (1979), pp. 63–84Google Scholar, and – concerning consensus and coercion – the debate between Loveman, Brian, ‘Critique of Arnold Bauer's “Rural Workers in Spanish America”’Google Scholar, and Bauer, Arnold, ‘Reply’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 59 (1979), pp. 478–489.Google Scholar

59 Favre, Henri, ‘The dynamics of Indian peasant society and migration to coastal plantations in central Peru’, in Duncan, Kenneth and Rutledge, Ian (eds.), Land and Labour in Latin America (Cambridge, 1977), p. 265Google Scholar; and see also Mallon, , Defense of Community, pp. 156–164.Google Scholar

60 McCreery, , ‘State Power’, p. 107.Google Scholar

61 The chief victims of the expansion of Peru's sugar plantations were agricultores (‘part of a sizeable rural middle class’), rather than communal peasants; their dispossession and resentment helped to stimulate the rise of APRA – a coastal rather than a highland political phenomenon: see Klarén, Peter F., ‘The Social and Economic Consequences of Modernization in the Peruvian Sugar Industry, 1870–1930’, in Duncan, and Rutledge, , Land and Labour, pp. 229–267.Google Scholar

62 In view of the popularity of dependista thinking it is not surprising that exports have frequently been seen as the motor of Latin American (under) development and the root cause of both peasant dispossession and proletarian militancy: Bergquist, Charles, Labor in Latin America. Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia (Stanford, 1986)Google Scholar, is a sophisticated example of this approach. However, Mexican cash crops such as sugar and cotton were primarily produced for the domestic market.

63 Miller, Simon, ‘Land and Labour in Mexican Rural Insurrections’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 10 (1991), p. 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar presumes (his terminology) that, when I advanced examples of peasant repudiation of the market, I succumbed to the ‘traditional stereotype of the Indian village's communal introversion’ (or, worse still, its ‘idyllic past of collectivism’), which is but one of several odd arguments in this article. I certainly argued that Mexican peasants (I never said ‘Indians’) tended to resist rather than to espouse market production during the Porfiriato (which generalisation is hardly refuted by a couple of colonial citations); however, I both pointed to processes of internal stratification, whereby entrepreneurial rancheros arose from the common ruck of campesinos (Knight, , The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 112–115)Google Scholar, and I recognised that ‘some peasants… benefited [from enhanced demand], as suppliers of goods as well as labor’ (Knight, , ‘The U.S. and the Mexican Peasantry’, in Nugent, Daniel (ed.), Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention [San Diego, 1988], pp. 47–48).Google Scholar The crucial point, however, is that most Mexican peasants, especially most revolutionary peasants, tended to regard subsistence production as their chief priority and the market as a threatening rather than a beneficial force.

64 As a rough index of the relative impact of commercialisation, note that between 1874 and 1910 Mexican exports increased tenfold, while population rose 52%; between 1880 and 1913 Argentine exports rose ninefold, while population tripled. The best known statement concerning the need to assess the impact of export-led growth in terms of ‘the particular, historically developed class structures through which these processes worked themselves out’ is that of Brenner, Robert, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, vol. 54 (1977), p. 91.Google Scholar

65 Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar, which argument has been usefully developed in the Mexican context by Tutino, , From Insurrection to Revolution, pp. 16–17, 24 and 27.Google Scholar

66 See Samuel Popkin, L., The Rational Peasant. The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1979).Google Scholar These arguments are echoed, in the Mexican context, by Vanderwood, Paul J., ‘Explaining the Mexican Revolution’, in Jaime, Rodríguez O. (ed.), The Revolutionary Process in Mexico. Essays on Political and Social Change, 1880–1940 (Los Angeles, 1990), p. 101.Google Scholar

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68 McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (Oxford, 1977), pp. 6–7ff.Google Scholar

69 Knight, , Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 115–127Google Scholar; Benjamin, Thomas, A Rich Land, APoor People: Politics and Society in Modern Chiapas (Albuquerque, 1989), p. 125Google Scholar; Jacobs, Ian, Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero (Austin, 1982), pp. xix–xx and 80Google Scholar; Garner, Paul, ‘Oaxaca: The Rise and Fall of State Sovereignty’, in Benjamin, Thomas and Wasserman, Mark (eds.), Provinces of the Revolution: Essays on Mexican Regional History, 1910–1929 (Albuquerque, 1990), pp. 163–184.Google Scholar

70 For the nineteenth century, see n. 46. For the Revolution, see Warman, Arturo, ‘The Political Project of Zapatismo’, in Katz, , Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 322–337.Google Scholar

71 Charles, Tilly, Lousie, and Richard, , The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 51–52Google Scholar; Knight, , Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 150–151.Google Scholar

72 See Córdova, Arnaldo, La ideología de la Revolution Mexicana: La formation del nuevo régimen (Mexico, 1973), p. 154.Google Scholar

73 Hunt, , Politics, Culture and Class, pp. 13 and 123–124Google Scholar, offers a good example of the interaction of social groups and revolutionary ideology.

74 Heroics, Jesús Reyes, El liberalismo mexicano (3 vols., Mexico, 1957–1961)Google Scholar offers a paean to Mexican liberalism, celebrating – and perhaps exaggerating – its broad, popular, democratic and inclusionary character; as Hale, , Transformation of Mexican Liberalism, pp. 14–15Google Scholar, points out, this magisterial work significantly neglects the Porfiriato. For a contrasting view, which stresses the pervasive religiosity of Mexican people, see Meyer, Jean, La Cristiada (3 vols., Mexico, 1973–4), vol. 2, pp. 19 and 28, vol. 3, pp. 282 and 304.Google Scholar

75 Warman, , ‘The Political Project of Zapatismo’Google Scholar, argues against Zapatista parochialism, not altogether convincingly. It is worth mentioning that many revolutionary movements, and not simply those of peasant provenance, displayed a strong attachment to the patria chica: for example, the mapaches of Chiapas or the soberanistas of Oaxaca (both led by landlord elites): see Benjamin, , A Rich Land, pp. 123–126Google Scholar, and Garner, ‘Oaxaca’. Conversely, the Zapatistas did entertain a lively notion of the nation. My point would be that Zapatista patriotism, premised on a strong identification with the patria chica, was inherently decentralising, even anarchist; while the patriotism of other revolutionary groups – such as the victorious Sonorans – tended to merge patria chica and patria grande in a powerful centralising ethos, which (in contradiction to ‘patriotism’) might better be designated ‘nationalism’.

76 The ‘Great/Little Tradition’ dichotomy may be crude, but – in my view – it still has its uses: e.g. Knight, Alan, ‘Revolutionary Project, Recalcitrant People: Mexico, 1910–40’, in Jaime, Rodríguez O. (ed.), The Revolutionary Process in Mexico: Essays on Political and Social Change, 1880–1940 (Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 231ff.Google Scholar

77 Gruzinski, Serge, Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Society and Colonial Society, 1550–1800 (Stanford, 1989).Google Scholar

78 Bricker, Victoria Reifler, The Indian Christ, the Indian King. The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin, 1981)Google Scholar, chs. 5 and 9.

79 Taylor, , Homicide, Drinking and Rebellion, pp. 114ff.Google Scholar

80 Bricker, , The Indian Christ, pp. 67–68Google Scholar, argues that Chiapas Indian revitalisation movements did not challenge the existing sociopolitical order; they sought ‘a saint of their own who would be acceptable to the Spanish religious authorities’; and, when they were not repressed, they peacefully coexisted with the prevailing order.

81 Wasserstrom, , Class and Society, pp. 102–103Google Scholar, notes that the Spaniards of Chiapas tended to tolerate heterodox Indian cults ‘except in times of political uncertainty’.

82 Van Young, , ‘Millennium on the Northern Marches’Google Scholar and ‘Quetzalcoatl’.

83 Bricker, , The Indian ChristGoogle Scholar, ch. 8. Paul Vanderwood's work-in-progress on the Tomochi revolt stresses its religious and messianic character: ‘Comparing Mexican Independence with the Revolution: Causes, Concepts and Pitfalls’, in Rodríguez, (ed.), The Independence of Mexico, pp. 321–322Google Scholar, and the same author's ‘God's Law versus State Rule: Tomóchic, 1891–1892’, paper given at the Conference on ‘Popular Culture, State Formation and the Mexican Revolution’, Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 27 Feb–2 March 1991. In this respect Vanderwood differs from Francisco Almada, R., La rebelión de Tomochi (Chihuahua, 1938)Google Scholar, who explains the revolt in terms of secular politics and factionalism.

84 De Queiroz, Maria Isaura Pereira, O messianismo no Brasil e no Mundo (Sāo Paulo, 1965), pp. 139–308.Google Scholar

85 Good examples are: Díaz, Fernando Díaz, Caudillos y caciques (México, 1972)Google Scholar; Meyer, Jean, Esperando a Lozada (México, 1984)Google Scholar; and Olveda, Jaime, Gordiano Guzmán, uncacique del siglo XIX (México, 1980).Google Scholar

86 Meyer, , La Cristiada, vol. 3, ch. 4.Google Scholar

87 Taylor, , Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, pp. 124 and 146.Google Scholar

88 Katz, , ‘Rural Uprisings in Preconquest and Colonial Mexico’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 70–76.Google Scholar

89 Taylor, , Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, p. 126Google Scholar, attributes the relative weakness of Mexican messianism at least in part to the absence of ‘messianic leadership by hereditary native nobles’. On the contrasting roles of the Indian nobility (caciques/kurakas) in Mesoamerica and the Andes compare, for example, Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964), pp. 154–165Google Scholar (which concludes, p. 163: ‘by late colonial times cacique status could in some degree buttress a family's prestige but it could no longer in itself be regarded as a rank of major authority’) and Rasnake, Roger Neil, Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and Power among an Andean People (Durham, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

90 Hu Dehart, Evelyn, ‘The Yaqui Indians of Sonora’, in Katz, (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, pp. 148–149.Google Scholar

91 Salvucci, Richard, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539–1840 (Princeton, 1987), p. 18Google Scholar, citing Woodrow Borah.

92 Hassig, Ross, Trade, Tribute and Transportation. The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (Norman, 1985), p. 149Google Scholar; Macleod, Murdo J., ‘Forms and Types of Work and the Acculturation of the Colonial Indians of Mesoamerica: Some Preliminary Observations’, in Frost, (ed.), El Trabajo, p. 80.Google Scholar

93 Brading, , The First America, p. 138Google Scholar; Mariátegui, José Carlos, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin, 1988), pp. 180–181.Google Scholar ‘Pluralism’ is used here in Furnivall's sense: it denotes a society ‘of disparate parts which owes its existence to external factors and lacks a common social will’: Smith, M. G., The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, 1974), p. vii.Google Scholar The relative absence of paternalistic colonial authority in the Andean highlands – as compared to Mexico – was stressed by the visitador–general José Antonio de Areche in 1777: see Borah, Woodrow, Justice by Insurance. The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley, 1983), p. 411.Google Scholar

94 Ricard, Robert, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley, 1966)Google Scholar; Brading, , The First America, p. 103.Google Scholar

95 Lafaye, Jacques, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar; Brading, D. A., The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 9–14.Google Scholar

96 Womack, , Zapata, pp. 70–71.Google Scholar Similarly, the Opatas of Sonora (1904) ‘do not like to be regarded as Indians; they prefer to be called “Mexicans”’; indeed, they claimed a ‘patriotic’ lineage dating back to the 1830s: Sheridan, Thomas E., Where the Dove Calls: The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico (Tucson, 1988), pp. 18 and 22Google Scholar (quoting Ales Hrdlicka).

97 Womack, , Zapata, pp. 100–102.Google Scholar There were colonial premonitions of this more ‘relaxed’ attitude toward ‘Indian’ revolt, at least in central Mexico: Taylor, , Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, pp. 120–121.Google Scholar The situation in the Andes was clearly different: fears of caste war and ‘racist polarization’ remained strong and were, if anything, aggravated in the late nineteenth century: Tristan Platt, ‘The Andean Experience of Bolivian Liberalism, 1825–1900: Roots of Rebellion in 19th-Century Chayanta (Potosí)’, in Stern, Resistance, pp. 315–20. Half a century later, the Bolivian revolution, by giving land and votes to the Indians and creating a network of powerful campesino caciques, revived these fears: ‘in Achacachi… an Aymara peasant leader has established a little dominion for himself, issuing permits to go through the district. As this is only two hours drive from La Paz there is distinct nervousness in the city and nobody is very anxious for the government to adopt firm measures as they fear a massacre’: report of J. Thynne Henderson to Foreign Office, 23 Dec. 1959, FO 371/148757, AX 1015/1.

98 Meyer, Jean, Esperando a Lozada, pp. 235–256Google Scholar, concludes his analysis of the Lozada movement by pointing to an ‘obvious’ feature of nineteenth-century Mexican history, namely, ‘the tight links which bind rural movements and national history together’ (p. 256).

99 Katz, , ‘Rural rebellions after 1810’, p. 555.Google Scholar

100 See Dix, Robert H., Colombia: The Political Dimensions of Change (New Haven, 1967), pp. 203ff.Google Scholar, concerning the ‘hereditary hatreds’ of Colombian politics (p. 211) which, Dix stresses (p. 213), spanned social classes, and were not confined to warring elites.

101 Stevens, D. F., Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico (Durham, N.C., 1991), p. 113.Google Scholar

102 For an excellent study of the political economy of Puebla see Thomson, Guy, Puebla de los Angeles. Industry and Society in a Mexican City (Boulder, 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 5; Sowell, David, ‘The 1893 bogotazo: Artisans and Public Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century Bogotá’, journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 21 (1989), pp. 267–282CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes the political activism of Bogotá's artisans and their shift (roughly) from the liberal to the conservative camp. Again, there are interesting parallels with revolutionary France: Hunt, , Politics, Culture and Class, pp. 152–153.Google Scholar

103 Wasserstrom, , Class and Society, p. 126Google Scholar, on San Cristóbal; for Colombia, see Delpar, Helen, Red Against Blue. The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863–1899 (University of Alabama, 1989), pp. 29, 34–35 and 41.Google Scholar

104 For a forthright and stimulating statement of this position, see Tutino, John, ‘Patterns of Culture in Mexican History: From Colonial Hegemony to National Conflict’Google Scholar, paper given at the VIII Conference of Mexican and North American Historians, San Diego, 19 Oct. 1990. Similar assumptions – concerning the un- or anti-popular character of liberalism – are to be found in European historiography: e.g., Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914’, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 268.Google Scholar

105 Díaz, Díaz, caudillos y caciquesGoogle Scholar; Thomson, Guy P., ‘Agrarian Conflict in the Municipality of Cuetzalán (Sierra de Puebla)Google Scholar: The Rise and Fall of “Pala” Agustín Dieguillo, 1861–1894’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 71 (1991), pp. 205–258.Google Scholar On the appeal of liberal federalism in Oaxaca, see Pastor, Rodolfo, Campesinos y reformat: La Mixteca, 1700–1856 (México, 1987), pp. 447–448.Google Scholar

106 Nugent, Daniel, ‘Land, Labor and Politics in a Serrano Society: The Articulation of State and Popular Ideology in Mexico’, PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1988.Google Scholar

107 In Oaxaca, for example: Berry, Charles R., The Reform in Oaxaca. A Microhistory of the Liberal Revolution (Lincoln, 1981), pp. 163, 165–166, 177 and 187Google Scholar; Pastor, , Campesinos y reformas, pp. 472 and 513–514.Google ScholarJacobs, , Ranchero RevoltGoogle Scholar, and Schryer, Frans J., The Rancheros of Pisaflores. The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Toronto, 1980)Google Scholar, offer good examples of liberal ranchero communities in central Mexico; Brading, D. A., The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 96–98Google Scholar, discusses the socio-economic bases of popular liberalism in general.

108 Voss, Stuart, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Sonora and Sinaloa, 1810–1877 (Tucson, 1982), pp. 50 and 80–81Google Scholar, on the weakness of the Church in the north-west. Popular anticlericalism and irreligion have been little studied and, perhaps, underestimated. For some examples: Green, Stanley C., The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832 (Pittsburgh, 1987), pp. 217–218Google Scholar; Roeder, Ralph, Juárez and his Mexico (2 vols., New York, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 56–57.Google Scholar During the Revolution, voceadores allegedly sold their newspapers more briskly by flipping them open at the pages containing Orozco's (often virulently anticlerical) cartoons: Reed, Alma, Orozco (New York, 1956), pp. 6–7Google Scholar; were there nineteenth-century precedents for this sales pitch?

109 ‘Fear and even terror of military retribution might restore order’, Christen Archer writes of the Spanish counter-insurgency of the 1810s, ‘but in their hearts the Mexicans had come to abhor Spaniards and Spanish rule’: ‘“La Causa Buena”: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years War’, in Rodríguez, (ed.), Independence of Mexico, p. 91.Google Scholar

110 Sims, Harold, La expulsión de los españoles de México, 1821–1828 (México, 1974)Google Scholar; Cabellero, Romeo Flores, Counterrevolution. The Role of the Spaniards in the Independence of Mexico, 1804–1838 (Lincoln, 1974)Google Scholar, chs. 5–8.

111 Mallon, Florencia, ‘Politics and State-Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Morelos, 1848–1858’, Political Power and Social Theory, 7 (1988), pp. 1–54Google Scholar; Brading, D. A., The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 93–94Google Scholar; Knight, Alan, U.S.–Mexican Relations, 1910–1940 (San Diego, 1987), pp. 58–59 and 64–67.Google Scholar

112 Staples, Ann, ‘Panorama Educative al Comienzo de la Vida Independiente’, in Vázquez, Josefina Zoraida et al. (eds.), Ensayos sobre historia de la educatión en México (México, 1983), pp. 153–154Google Scholar; Jacobs, , Ranchero Revolt, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar Again, note the parallel with Colombia: Delpar, Red Against Blue, pp. 48–9.

113 The Zapata family offers an example of popular rural liberal affiliation; the Cabrera family of petty-bourgeois, urban allegiance. See Wornack, , sZapata, pp. 399–400Google Scholar; Meyer, Eugenia, Luis Cabrera: teórico y crítico de la Revolutión (México, 1972), pp. 11–13 and 203–204.Google Scholar On Colombia, see Delpar, , Red Against Blue, pp. 40–41 and 50Google Scholar, and Dix, , Colombia, pp. 211ff.Google Scholar

114 Recent work by Guy Thomson and Florencia Mallon stresses the importance of wartime mobilisation in the formation of popular political affiliations in Morelos and Puebla: see, for example, Thomson, , ‘Agrarian Conflict’ and ‘Bulwarks of Patriotic Liberalism: The National Guard, Philharmonic Corps and Patriotic Juntas in Mexico, 1847–1888’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 22, no. 1 (1990), pp. 31–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mallon, Florencia, ‘Popular Liberalism and Popular Culture: An Andean-Mexican Comparison of Peasant Consciousness in Historical Motion’Google Scholar, paper given at the Conference on ‘Popular Culture, State Formation, and the Mexican Revolution’, Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California San Diego, 27 Feb–2 March 1991.

115 Dix, , Colombia, pp. 240–244Google Scholar; and for vivid biographical details, Y Donny Meertens, Gonzalo Sánchez, Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos: El caso de la violencia en Colombia (Bogotá, 1983).Google Scholar On revolutionary and postrevolutionary France (specifically, La Sarthe): Bois, Paul, Paysans de l'Ouest (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar

116 A similar distinction – between ‘sentiment evocation’ and ‘ideological persuasion’ – is put forward by Lincoln, Bruce, Discourse and the Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (Oxford, 1989), p. 10.Google Scholar

117 As I have argued elsewhere, I have my doubts about the strength and precocity of the supposed ‘Leviathan’ state which many experts see rising in the immediate aftermath of the armed Revolution: Knight, Alan, ‘The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a “Great Rebellion”?’, Bulletin of Latin American Research (1985), pp. 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

118 For an excellent résumé, see Sánchez, Gonzalo, ‘The Violence: An Interpretative Synthesis’, in Bergquist, Charles et al. (eds.), Violence in Colombia. The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (Wilmington, 1992), pp. 75–124.Google Scholar

119 On the politico-cultural significance of the brass band, see Thomson, , ‘Bulwarks of Patriotic Liberalism’.Google Scholar

120 Brading, , The First America, p. 662.Google Scholar Nicaraguan liberalism, too, acquired powerful patriotic and emotive force, not least thanks to the exploits of Sandino – who, himself, had been strongly influenced by Mexican examples and traditions: Hodges, Donald C., Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin, 1986), especially pp. 80–85.Google Scholar

121 Perry, Laurens Ballard, Juárez and Díaz: Machine Politics in Mexico (DeKalb, 1978)Google Scholar, dissects the practical failures of Juarista liberalism.

122 Dabbs, Jack Autrey, The French Army in Mexico, 1861–1867 (The Hague, 1963), pp. 85, 123, 131, 145 and 219–237.Google Scholar

123 Knight, , U.S.–Mexican Relations, pp. 32–39 and 145Google Scholar, suggests that direct foreign intervention – invasion being the extreme case – is more effective in stimulating patriotic and anti-imperialist reactions than economic ‘dependency’, however marked or pervasive.

124 Lee Woodward, Ralph Jr., ‘Changes in the Nineteenth-Century Guatemalan State and its Indian Policies’, in Smith, , Guatemalan Indians, pp. 60–70Google Scholar; Micelli, Keith, ‘Rafael Carrera: Defender and Promoter of Peasant Interests in Guatemala, 1837–1848’, The Americas, vol. 31 (1974), pp. 72–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

125 Williams, John Hoyt, ‘Race, Threat and Geography: The Paraguayan Experience of Nationalism’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, vol. 1 (1974), pp. 173–191.Google Scholar

126 Mallon, , Defense of CommunityGoogle Scholar, ch. 3, and the same author's ‘Nationalist and Antistate Coalitions in the War of the Pacific: Junín and Cajamarca, 1879–1902’, in Stern, , Resistance, pp. 232–279.Google Scholar

127 Domínguez, Jorge, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 114–115Google Scholar; Hodges, , Intellectual Foundations.Google Scholar In both Cuba and Central America, however, the association of US interventionism and nationalism did not prevent some politicos from encouraging intervention out of partisan interest; this phenomenon was much rarer in Mexico.

128 For the classic Marxist association of nationalism and the market, see Bourque, Gilles, L'État Copitaliste et la Question Nationale (Montréal, 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 1. This association informs Heraclio Bonilla's position in his interesting debate with Mallon and Manrique concerning Peruvian peasant ‘nationalism’: see Mallon, , ‘Nationalist and Antistate Coalitions’Google Scholar and Bonilla, , ‘The Indian Peasantry and “Peru” during the War with Chile’, in Stern, , Resistance, pp. 219–231.Google Scholar

129 See Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China (Stanford, 1962).Google Scholar

130 Mallon, , Defense of Community, p. 121Google Scholar, notes that the Peruvian peasantry's potential for ‘organization by a reformist nationalist coalition’ went untapped, in contrast to the Mexican (or Chinese) revolutionary experience of nationalist mobilisation; Bonilla, , ‘Indian Peasantry’, p. 227Google Scholar, questions the depth of this potential; for later lamentations, see Mariátegui, , Seven Interpretive Essays, pp. 163–164Google Scholar, and Cotler, Julio, ‘De Velasco a Belaúnde: el problema de la construcción nacional y la democracia en Perú’, in Pablo González Casanova (coord.), El estado en América Latina: Teoría y práctica (México, 1990), pp. 349–366.Google ScholarDemelas, , Nationalisme sans nation?, pp. 11–28Google Scholar, sees a similar development of popular nationalism in Bolivia at the time of the War of the Pacific, leading to ‘un sentiment nationale populaire durable’; but the evidence is thin and certainly the potential, to the extent that it existed, again went untapped.

131 Smith, Carol A., ‘Origins of the National Question in Guatemala: A Hypothesis’, in Smith, , Guatemalan Indians, pp. 83–92Google Scholar, on the ‘redrawing (of) national divisions’ along ethnic lines following the Carrera period.

132 That anticlerical liberals would make appeal to the symbolic figure of a cleric (even a defrocked cleric) is interesting, but does not undermine the force of the argument; the manufacture and invocation of symbols need not follow strictly ‘logical’ forms. Juárez, like most mid-century liberals, was a believer (Roeder, , Juárez, vol. 1, pp. 81 and 130)Google Scholar and even twentieth-century anticlericals, who flaunted their antipathy to Catholicism, were not averse to appropriating Catholic symbols or invoking the authority of Jesus (Knight, , ‘Revolutionary Project’, pp. 247–250).Google Scholar See also n. 190 below.

133 Mora, Ayala, ‘Gabriel García Moreno’, pp. 157–160.Google Scholar

134 McClintock, Cynthia, ‘Peru: Precarious Regimes, Authoritarian and Democratic’, in Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan J. and Lipset, Seymour Martin (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America (Boulder, 1989), p. 348.Google Scholar

135 Rafael Belaúnde Terry to Charles W. Hackett, 4 Jan. 1938, Hackett Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

136 Hughes, Jeffrey L., ‘The Politics of Dependency in Poland and Mexico’, in Triska, Jan (ed.), Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (Durham, 1986), pp. 342–369.Google Scholar

137 Scholes, Walter V., Mexican Politics During the Juárez Regime, 1855–1872 (Columbus, Mo., 1957), pp. 36–37Google Scholar; Knight, , US-Mexican Relations, p. 32.Google Scholar

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139 Knight, , US-Mexican Relations, pp. 39–46.Google Scholar

140 Anderson, Rodney D., Outcasts In Their Own Land. Mexican Industrial Workers, 1906–1911 (DeKalb, 1975).Google Scholar

141 Vanderwood, Paul J., ‘Explaining the Mexican Revolution’, in Rodríguez, , The Revolutionary Process, p. 98.Google Scholar

142 Nugent, , ‘Land, Labor and Polities’.Google Scholar

143 Benjamin, , A Rich Land, p. 206.Google Scholar

144 Knight, Alan, ‘Land and Society in Revolutionary Mexico: The Destruction of the Great Haciendas’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, vol. 7 (1991), pp. 73–104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarHandy, Jim, ‘The Most Precious Fruit of the Revolution: The Guatemalan Agrarian Reform, 1952–1954’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 68 (1988), pp. 675–705CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes similar points about the (aborted) Guatemalan reform.

146 Schryer, Frans J., Ethnicity and Conflict in Rural Mexico (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar, ch. 15; Sanderson, Steven E., Agrarian Populism and the Mexican State: The Straggle for Land in Sonora (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar, ch. 7.

146 Hamilton, Nora, The Limits of State Autonomy. Post-revolutionary Mexico (Princeton, 1982), pp. 162–183.Google Scholar

147 During the 1920s and 1930s the Mexican agrarian reform first eroded, then eliminated, large commercial haciendas, which practised demesne farming, produced for vigorous markets, and in some cases exported; the Bolivian reform – probably the closest competitor in terms of scope and radicalism – eliminated more ‘traditional’ haciendas, which were largely divided into small, subsistence peasant plots (or extensive pastoral tracts). The Mexican reform, in other words, attacked a (loosely) Gutsherrschaft system, the Bolivian a Grundsherrschaft system. Aside from figures of area or recipients, therefore, the former was arguably a more radical process.

148 Casanova, Pablo González, Democracy in Mexico (Oxford, 1970), pp. 124–126.Google Scholar

149 The classic formulation is Marx's discussion of the English Factory Acts: measures undertaken by the state – ‘acting in the interests of capital in general’ – in order to curb capital's ‘werewolf hunger for surplus labour’, which would ultimately jeopardise its own very existence: Holloway, John and Picciotto, Sol, ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Theory of the State’, in Holloway, and Picciotto, (eds.), State and Capital. A Marxist Debate (London, 1978), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

150 Cotler, , ‘De Velasco a Belaúnde’Google Scholar; Harding, Colin, ‘The Rise of Sendero Luminoso’, in Miller, , Region and Class, pp. 179–206.Google Scholar

151 For a good analysis of PRONASOL, see Dresser, Denise, ‘Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal Problems: Mexico's National Solidarity Program’, unpublished paper, Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1991.Google Scholar Compare PRONASOL's apparent success with the relative failure of the SINAMOS programme instituted by the Peruvian military: McClintock, Cynthia, ‘Velasco, Officers and Citizens: The Politics of Stealth’, in McClintock, Cynthia and Lowenthal, Abraham F. (eds.), The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered (Princeton, 1983), pp. 300–306.Google Scholar

152 Knight, Alan, ‘Social Revolution: a Latin American Perspective’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 9 (1990), pp. 175–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

153 Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘Revolution’, in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulás, Revolution in History (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 26–27Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, ‘Parliament and People in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, vol. 92 (1981), pp. 118–119 and 124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

154 On the relations between the political elite and private enterprise, see Maxfield, Sylvia and Montoya, Ricardo Anzaldúa (eds.), Government and Private Sector in Contemporary Mexico (San Diego, 1987).Google Scholar

155 Rouquié, Alain, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley, 1987), p. 8.Google Scholar

156 However, the avoidance of systematic centralised repression has not ruled out a good deal of localised violence, especially where a powerful agrarian bourgeoisie confronts an active campesino movement: Schryer, , Ethnicity and Class Conflict, pp. 279–280Google Scholar; Ibarra, Abraham García, Los Bárbaras del Norte: La Contra Mexicana (México, 1988).Google Scholar In addition, the existence of a diverse and fairly free press does not mean that the lives and livelihoods of independent journalists are risk-free.

157 Mariátegui, , Seven Interpretive Essays, pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

158 Cárdenas, Enrique, ‘La gran depresion y la industrialización: el caso de México’, in Thorp, Rosemary (comp.), América Latino en los años treinta. El papel de la periferia en la crisis mundial (México, 1988), pp. 260–280.Google Scholar

159 Blackbourn, and Eley, , Peculiarities, pp. 55–60 and 75–83.Google Scholar

160 Ibid., pp. 75, 83 and 86–87. Note that these ate precisely the ingredients – an integrated national market, state legitimacy, political centralisation and cultural homogenisation – that Cotler sees as crucially lacking in Peru: ‘Democracy and National Integration’, p. 4.

161 Corrigan, and Sayer, , Great Arch.Google Scholar

162 Shutnway, Nicolas, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley, 1991), p. xiGoogle Scholar and passim.

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174 Carr, Barry and Montoya, Ricardo Anzaldúa (eds.), The Mexican Left, the Popular Movements and the Politics of Austerity (San Diego, 1986).Google Scholar

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176 Shumway, , Invention of ArgentinaGoogle Scholar; Gilly, , ‘La anomalía argentina’, pp. 190–191.Google Scholar

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178 For good analyses of varieties of revolutionary bossism, see Joseph, Gilbert M., Revolution From Without. Yucatán, Mexico and the United States, 1880–1924 (Durham, 1988), pp. 115–121 and 207–213Google Scholar; Schryer, , Ethnicity and Class Conflict, ch. 8Google Scholar; Romero, Laura Patricia, ‘La conformatión del caciquismo sindical en Jalisco. El caso de Heliodoro Hernández Loza’Google Scholar, and Márquez, Enrique, ‘Gonzalo N. Santos o la naturaleza del “tanteómetro político”’, in Assad, Carlos Martínez (ed.), Estadistas, caciques y caudillos (México, 1988), pp. 293–313 and 385–394Google Scholar; Rubin, , ‘Popular Mobilization’, pp. 252–253Google Scholar; Saldaña, Tomás Martínez, El costo social de un éxito político. La político expansionista del estado mexicano en el agro lagunero (Chapingo, 1980), pp. 52–98.Google Scholar

179 The most celebrated recent case is that of the oil workers’ boss, Joaquín Hernandez Galicia, La Quina. For other, more humdrum, examples of cacical impermanence, see Saldaña, Tomás Martínez and Mendoza, Leticia Gándara, Política y sociedad en México: el caso de los Altos de Jalisco (México, 1976), p. 70Google Scholar; Márquez, , ‘Gonzalo N. Santos’, pp. 392–393Google Scholar; Roxborough, Ian, Unions and Politics in Mexico. The Case of the Automobile Industry (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 80, 86, 101 and 105–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

180 For example, Schryer, , Ethnicity and Class Conflict, pp. 259–266.Google Scholar

181 As Hobsbawm argues (‘Mass-Producing Traditions’, pp. 269–270) the social stability achieved under the French Third Republic did not depend on the invention of republican traditions; but the latter – for all their contradictions – certainly helped bind the infant republic together.

182 Knight, Alan, ‘Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940’, in Graham, Richard (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin, 1990), pp. 71–114.Google Scholar As an official ideology Mexican indigenismo has its faults, both theoretical and practical; but it can hardly be said to suffer from comparison with, for example, Guatemalan official thinking on the ‘Indian question'; indeed, some Guatemalan spokesmen, subscribing to the view that ‘all that is good in Mexico…is Latin’, saw fit to ‘decry the indigenista fervor in Mexico’: Adams, Richard N., ‘Ethnic Images and Strategies in 1944’ in Smith, , Guatemalan Indians, p. 147.Google Scholar

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190 Hence the interesting (alleged) reaction of a prominent revolutionary – ‘perhaps the fiercest enemy of Catholicism in Mexico’ – who, when his gringo interlocutor concurred that ‘in 400 years there had never really been a really decent Mexican bishop or priest’, ‘looked startled for a minute, and then turned purple with anger. “What do you mean?” he roared. “Everybody knows Mexico has produced some of the greatest figures in all the history of the church!”’: Sands, William Franklin, Our jungle Diplomacy (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 157.Google Scholar

191 Hall, Linda, ‘Banks, Oil, and the Reinstitutionalization of the Mexican State’, in Rodríguez, , Revolutionary Process, pp. 189–211Google Scholar; Knight, , US-Mexican RelationsGoogle Scholar, ch. 5.

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199 For example, Sanders, Sol, Mexico: Chaos On Our Doorstep (Lanham, Md., 1986).Google Scholar

200 Comment of Luis Téllez, Subsecretary of Agriculture, University of Texas at Austin Binational Colloquium on Mexican Agriculture, 15–16 Nov. 1990. Things have moved fast: in November 1991 President Salinas committed his administration to privatising the ejido: see Proceso, 11 Nov. 1991, pp. 6–17.Google Scholar

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202 The yet more recent elections of August 1991 revealed considerable support for the PRI, not least in regions – like the Federal District – where the ruling party had fared badly in 1988. Again, however, there were allegations of fraud and, in two cases where powerful opposition candidates lost gubernatorial contests in contentious circumstances (Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí), the winning PRI candidates subsequently stood down (or were stood down by presidential order). Again, therefore, we see an administration sensitive to adverse opinion but reluctant to take its chances in entirely limpid elections.

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