‘In all matters of importance, style and not content is the important thing’: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Populism is a concept which, despite repeated critiques, refuses to disappear from Latin American studies. This article reviews some of the literature, suggesting that populism is best defined in terms of a particular political style, characteristically involving a proclaimed rapport with ‘the people’, a ‘them-and-us’ mentality, and (often, though not necessarily) a period of crisis and mobilisation; none of which makes it exceptional, abnormal, ‘unmediated’ or irrational. Mexican – among other – examples are invoked. The article questions some received opinions: that populism is typically urban, relates to particular historical stages of development, or distinctively derives from either multi-class alliances or elite manipulation. It also queries the fashionable notion of ‘economic populism’. Finally, the article notes the recent phenomenon of ‘neo-populism’, embodied by Salinas, Menem, Fujimori, etc., which a suitably loose (‘stylistic’) definition can usefully accommodate, thus suggesting the continued, if limited, utility of the concept.

This study examines Emperor Maximilian's efforts in using public rituals, patriotic symbolism, and the emblems of nationalism to devise an appropriate past for his Mexican empire. The ‘republican’ celebration of independence and its heroes formed the cornerstone of an effort to reconcile feuding political factions, build social cohesion, and ultimately legitimate his regime. The article concentrates on the independence ceremonies, speeches, and statuary employed by the empire. Ultimately, the political dissension existing in Mexico could not be surmounted by symbols alone. Nevertheless, the attempt reveals the creative use and limits of public rituals in the political realm.

This article examines the creation of an Indian ideal within Indigenismo in the years 1920–40. While scholars argue that Indigenismo described a degenerate Indian ‘other’, this article shows that it often represented the Indian as a model for revolutionary politics and culture. This is evident first in Indigenista celebrations of Indian cultures during the 1920s, and in their valorisation of Indians as rational political actors with modern sensibilities during the 1930s. In validating this ‘modern’ Indian, Indigenistas created a limited framework for legitimate ‘Indian politics’ which took place within the national culture. However, they also labelled Indians who challenged revolutionary programs as ‘primitive’ and ‘pre-political’.

This paper studies the participation of an important group of Mexican postrevolutionary intellectuals, leaders of the cultural-educational project during the early 1930s, in the construction of two closely related concepts: the ‘peasant problem’ and its nucleus, the ‘revolutionary peasant’, both central to the political and ideological consolidation of the new regime. It discusses the approaches that lead them to propose a new ‘peasantness’, suitable for the political and economic interests that dominated the process of formation of the postrevolutionary State. It also considers the struggle that developed within the group between the ‘productivists’, linked to Marxism-Leninism, and the ‘cultural-populists’, more concerned with the cultural survival of the Indo-campesino groups, for the right to define these concepts. The analysis is based on El Maestro Rural, edited by the Secretaría de Educación Pública since 1932.

This article analyses Adalberto Tejeda's agrarian experiment in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, during the years 1928–32. This experiment was unique in two respects. First, disregarding the central government's policy, which sought to end agrarian distribution completely, it parcelled out land to the peasants on an unprecedented scale; secondly, it proved, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the time, that agrarian reform implemented through the full range of channels offered by the 1917 federal constitution could serve as a tool of social justice and equality, and hence as a central factor in the advancement of social welfare and democracy in Mexico. This article seeks to show that the failure of the Veracruz experiment offers an explanation – perhaps a cardinal explanation – for the perceived failure of Mexican agrarian reform in general.

During an economic crisis in Ecuador, three models of and solutions to the agrarian problem were proposed. A peasant path of agricultural development was formulated by peasant leaders and socialist activists. A large-landholder model was promoted by modernising large landowners. A medium-landholder model was advanced by promoters of European immigration and urban mestizos seeking land through state colonisation projects. The adherents of each approach identified certain groups as the cause of low agricultural productivity and national crisis, articulating racial ideologies by defining those groups as inherently ‘traditional’, and thus debating the boundaries of inclusion to the national community.

This article, inspired by a TV interview with the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, revises the ways that the fiction in One Hundred Years of Solitude has been accepted as history. In particular, it raises some questions about how literary critics and historians have accepted as history García Márquez's rendition of the events during the strike that took place in Colombia in 1928. It examines the repressive nature of the Colombian regime and of the strike itself; it also examines the idea that following the strike there was a sort of ‘conspiracy of silence’ to erase the truth from the nation's history.