Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
The Latin American middlemen known as caciques in Mexico and coronéis in Brazil are one of the most widespread sociopolitical features of Mexico and Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The pervasive institutional arrangements established by such political entrepreneurs at local and regional levels, within the framework of the most “center-dominant” polities of Latin America, are well documented in the literature. In this case, pervasiveness does not imply mere continuity. As changes in structure, meanings, and significance have occurred with the passing of time, the phenomena termed caciquismo and coronelismo have undergone social and semantic transformation. It would therefore be useful to begin by reviewing these historical metamorphoses.
Preliminary presentations of this material have been made at the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, and in my recent courses on modern Latin American societies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Thanks are due to colleagues who have commented on earlier versions, especially Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Beatriz Siebzhener, Erik Cohen, Larissa Lomnitz, Stanley Brandes, the late Dov Weintraub, Curt Arnson, Fred Bronner, Iván Jaksić, Edson de Oliveira Nunes, and Linda Lewin. The Rothschild Foundation's generous postdoctoral fellowship allowed me to complete the manuscript. I am also grateful to the Harry Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, whose Director of Publications, Norma Schneider, edited an earlier version of the manuscript.