Elisa ServÍn is Research Professors at the DirecciÓn de Estudios Historicos of the Instituto Nacional de AntropologÍa e Historia in Mexico City. She is the author of Ruptura y oposiciÓn: El movimiento henriquista, 1945–1954.

Leticia Reina is Research Professor at the DirecciÓn de Estudios Historicos of the Instituto Nacional de AntropologÍa e Historia in Mexico City. She is the author of Los retos de la etnicidad en los estados-nacion del siglo XXI.

John Tutino is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Georgetown University. He is author of From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940.

Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change

CRISIS, REFORM, AND REVOLUTION IN MEXICO

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3985-4

Contents

JOHN TUTINO * Preface: Debating History to Face the Present and Imagine the Future…………………………………………………………..viiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………xiAbbreviations of Mexican Political Organizations…………………………………………………………………………………………xiiiLETICIA REINA, ELISA SERVN, AND JOHN TUTINO * Introduction: Crises, Reforms, and Revolutions in Mexico, Past and Present………………………..1ERIC VAN YOUNG * Of Tempests and Teapots: Imperial Crisis and Local Conflict in Mexico at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century…………………23ANTONIO ANNINO * The Two-Faced Janus: The Pueblos and the Origins of Mexican Liberalism………………………………………………………60LETICIA REINA * Local Elections and Regime Crises: The Political Culture of Indigenous Peoples………………………………………………..91FRANOIS-XAVIER GUERRA * Mexico from Independence to Revolution: The Mutations of Liberalism………………………………………………….129ALAN KNIGHT * Mexico’s Three Fin de Sicle Crises………………………………………………………………………………………..153FRIEDRICH KATZ * International Wars, Mexico, and U.S. Hegemony…………………………………………………………………………….184JOHN TUTINO * The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities: Ecological Autonomy and Its Demise……………………………………………..211LORENZO MEYER * The Second Coming of Mexican Liberalism: A Comparative Perspective…………………………………………………………..271GUILLERMO DE LA PEA * Civil Society and Popular Resistance: Mexico at the End of the Twentieth Century………………………………………..305ENRIQUE SEMO * The Left in the Neoliberal Era……………………………………………………………………………………………346ELISA SERVN * Another Turn of the Screw: Toward a New Political Order……………………………………………………………………..363Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………393Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….395

Chapter One

Of Tempests and Teapots

Imperial Crisis and Local Conflict in Mexico at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

ERIC VAN YOUNG

CRISIS. Pathology: The point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse; also applied to any marked or sudden variation occurring in the progress of a disease and to the phenomena accompanying it.

Figurative: A vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; now applied to times of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense in politics or commerce.-Oxford English Dictionary

The late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth have long appeared to historians a turning point in the affairs of the Western world. But even to many contemporaries of the era, whether consciously or unconsciously, a looming sense of crisis, of ineluctable change, hung over much of Europe and the Atlantic world, preoccupying both intellectuals and common people, although they may have deployed different idioms to express it. Much of this anxiety and hope found religious as well as political expression, nourished decisively by the still-vital apocalypticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The meaning and eschatology of these beliefs often centered on the events of the French Revolution, which were to have such transcendent importance for the peoples of Ibero-America, and on the Revolution’s greatest public figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. In New Spain, for example, it is difficult to believe that when the great statesman and historian Lucas Alamn sat down, many years after the events, to describe the capture of Guanajuato’s Alhndiga by Father Miguel Hidalgo’s forces on September 28, 1810, Alamn did not have in mind the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 (or even late medieval French jacqueries), though he did not explicitly say as much. Among the notable political thinkers and artists of the age, some (among them Edmund Burke) saw in the Revolution a dark night of folly, barbarous violence, ideological excess, and the rejection of traditional political and social working arrangements, while others (among them Goethe and the romantics) saw in the Revolution, at least in its early phase, a new dawn of human potentiality. Napoleon proved a figure of lasting ambivalence in the new world and political culture created by revolutionary events. While ambitious young Creoles in Spain’s New World colonies often modeled themselves on Napoleon and pursued the carire ouverte talente embodied by his trajectory in public life, others in the European orbit regarded him as an apocalyptic figure. Writing less than a century after the fall of the French ancien rgime and scarcely two generations after Napoleon’s death, for example, Leo Tolstoy reflected the apocalyptic view of the revolutionary era in the second sentence of his novel War and Peace (1869). Here the great Russian novelist has Ana Pavlovna Scherer (“a distinguished lady of the court, and confidential maid-of-honour to the Empress”) describing Bonaparte as “this Antichrist (upon my word, I believe he is).” From his exile in St. Petersburg, the arch-conservative French thinker Joseph de Maistre similarly viewed the Revolution as a satanic revolt, emphasizing Napoleon’s apocalyptic role in an approaching end-time scenario. Even in England, apocalyptic religion and political crisis intertwined in the popular imagination in the years after 1789. For example, a farm woman named Joanna Southcott identified herself as the woman of Revelation 12 (and thus, incidentally, a competitor of the Virgin of Guadalupe), “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” Receiving revelations not only about mundane political events such as the war in France, but also concerning the coming millennial kingdom and the destruction of Satan, the sixty-four-year-old virgin Southcott convinced many of her followers in 1814 that she was pregnant with the supernaturally conceived man-child whom Revelation 12:5 foretold was “to rule all nations with a rod of iron.” And so it went across the European world.

“CRISIS” IN THE SPANISH REALMS

Even setting aside apocalyptic religious thinking and the strong fears and opinions evoked by the French Revolution, however, much of the Spanish Atlantic world seemed to be undergoing some sort of fundamental transformation after the mid-eighteenth century, with all the stresses and resistances one might expect to attend such an experience. The caustic (and liberating) juices of the Enlightenment were certainly penetrating Spain and its American colonies, while international warfare, imperial competition, and economic change spurred in Spain itself a defensive stock-taking and reformist impulse most notable in the famous tratadista projects of Jovellanos, Campomanes, and other Spanish political figures. Not only the court-centered political elite, members of the “political nation,” or Spanish intellectuals articulated and shared a sense of urgency, however. After Napoleon Bonaparte took the Spanish monarchy hostage in 1808, triggering a political imbroglio within the empire, the liberal nationalist peninsular press unleashed a “political pedagogy” likely to have touched even the semiliterate populace, as the abundant pamphletry and newspapers of the post-1808 period did in New Spain. Whether or not it was fully and consciously perceived as such by contemporaries, and whether or not a crisis that unfolds over several decades or even a century may still be called a crisis (issues addressed hereafter in greater detail), modern scholars have identified the “Age of Revolution” (1750-1850) as a key period for the emergence of modern Spain, the ex-Iberian dominions, and the European world more generally.

Certainly from a structural perspective, the Mexican colony experienced economic, social, and political changes after the mid-eighteenth century in whose absence it is virtually impossible to imagine the advent of the movement for independence. This was indeed an “age of paradox,” its internally contradictory tendencies deeply etched in chiaroscuro. As I have noted elsewhere, while baroque architectural splendors in the Churrigueresque style were gracing the low skylines of Taxco, Tepozotln, Guanajuato, and other cities of silver and piety, travelers such as Baron von Humboldt noted the increasing numbers of beggars (the famous lperos) in the capital’s streets, while bandits thronged countryside and urban hinterlands. Colonial commerce expanded (albeit episodically because of the Atlantic wars of the French revolutionary period), but the imperial fiscal machinery cranked up to extract ever-increasing amounts of tax revenues to pay the expenses of a state intermittently engaged in warfare. Agricultural commercialization advanced in the Mexican countryside while great subsistence crises (e.g., 1785-86, 1808-10) periodically racked a population caught in a Malthusian vice between growing numbers of the working poor and increasingly concentrated landownership. While silver production boomed, great fortunes were made, and mining entrepreneurs were ennobled for their piety, wealth, and service to the Spanish crown, the real compensation of rural labor dropped by something like 25 percent over the two generations between 1775 and independence. The Bourbon reforms in many ways modernized New Spain along absolutist lines, improving the efficiency of administration and the yield of fiscal extraction, while large sectors of the Creole elite were essentially disfranchised from the control of state and church they had gained during the preceding century from the faltering hands of the declining Habsburg monarchy. While race mixture (mestizaje) effectively undermined more and more in practice what had always been a rather porous system of race-based social and legal stratification, the official rhetoric of ethnic categorization became ever more rigid, detailed, and exclusionary. Finally, even as modernizing Bourbon absolutism and European thinking in art, science, and education drew Mexico more into the orbit of the Atlantic world and the Enlightenment, forms of endogenous cultural identification (e.g., Creole patriotism and neo-Aztecism) and nationalist-tinted religious sensibility (the rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe devotion) blossomed, building an ideological platform for national autonomy and state-building projects.

Within the general context of the crisis of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, then, and situated squarely in the center of what historians sometimes term the “Age of Revolution” (1750-1850), we may reasonably see the struggle for independence in Mexico as the resolution stage of some sort of crisis. The problem with looking at this chaotic decade or two from the perspective of a global or unitary crisis, however, is that much of the historical evidence suggests that the crisis in which the colony was embroiled meant very different things to different people. For one thing, a great ideological chasm separated the political thinking of the Creole-mestizo insurgent directorate from that of popular groups, whose Political ideas formed a double helix with quite traditional forms of religious sensibility. Moreover, the movement was highly fragmented-even feudalized-socially, spatially, and militarily, so that even if popular and elite rebel groups had wanted to impose ideological homogeneity on the many disparate groups and movements involved, they would have faced insuperable organizational, geographical, and technological obstacles to doing so. Finally, the modes of action and goals of popular groups, especially of the indigenous villagers in the countryside who made up as much as 60 percent of putative insurgent participants, demonstrated a notable continuity with preinsurgency rural political expression and protest rather than the emergence of new forms of consciousness, political culture, or behavior.

What, then, are we to make of the conventional historiographical wisdom that the Mexican independence movement pivoted on a series of cross-class, cross-ethnic alliances represented iconographically by the universal symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe? In other words, to employ the medical trope so common in discussions of acute transition situations in economies and polities, of whose disease-state was the crisis of independence the resolution? Part of the answer boils down to exploring how the late colonial crisis was experienced-lived on a day-to-day basis-in rural Mexico. The central explanandum of this essay is the degree to which elite visions of a colony- or empire-wide crisis mapped onto local visions of crisis, and vice versa. The question may well be raised: can local knowledge, local attitudes, and local and popular collective behavior be convincingly explained absent the assumption that “structural” (i.e., mostly economic) causes on a grand scale determined the many circumscribed episodes that went to make up much of the real struggle during the independence conflict? My response to this question would be not that the collective behavior was uninteresting, unreflective of larger histories, or random, but that we have been looking in the wrong place to explain it, and that the conventional logic of inference simply assumed facts about the determinative weight of structural factors either not in evidence, or only ambiguously so. Let me rephrase this in the terms central to this essay: while a structural crisis of great and sustained intensity may well have gripped New Spain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth-a crisis in which the struggle for independence was in some way the resolution phase-that crisis was lived in the countryside in an almost hyper-localist atmosphere. Where collective political violence erupted in village Mexico, it was most often driven by local historical memory, local religious sensibility, local conflict, and local actors, and was not easily reframed in a discourse of providentialism, national or protonational political aspiration, or Enlightenment philosophical thinking. Like a green wine, local political thinking might be potent, but it did not travel well.

WHAT SORT OF CONCEPT IS “CRISIS,” AND HOW USEFUL IS IT AS A CATEGORY IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY?

Let us accept as a working assumption, then, that much of the European world, and along with it the Spanish Atlantic world more specifically, found itself in a critical conjuncture beginning sometime during the last four or five decades of the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Let us further assume that this sense of having arrived at a transformative if open-ended historical moment embraced the economic, political, social, and cultural realms, as it has in many other polities. While individuals or large groups of people may well experience stress of some sort, however, this does not necessarily translate into a perception of “global” crisis itself, and still less into a propensity to effect large-scale change through a political project shaped by some sort of even implicit social consensus based on shared assumptions. Let us further suppose the empire-wide crisis of the Spanish world in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, therefore, to have been as much an artifact of representation-in other words, of seeing and communicating through an appropriate set of signifiers about what was socially and politically normal or pathological, moral or immoral, desirable, possible, or unattainable-as it was an effect of objectively verifiable structural conditions. The clearest response to the opportunity for positive change (or to the imperative of staving off disaster) on the part of the Spanish imperial regime was a political and economic “project” socially situated at the level of the state and elite power groupings, and largely secularized (surely this is the significance of Bourbon regalism, for example) and instrumentalist (e.g., the Bourbon reforms) in nature.

(Continues…)

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