Mary Kay Vaughan1

Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics
in the Mexican Revolution

Mary Kay Vaughan
I n the historiography of twentieth-century Mexico, the "new cultural history"
has had its greatest impact on rural studies of the Mexican Revolution and
postrevolutionary state formation from 19IO to 1940. In this essay I examine
how this new historical perspective can assist scholars in moving beyond revi-
sionist interpretations of the revolution, which have focused on the role of
the emerging central state and its caudillo henchmen in manipulating the
masses in the interests of a bourgeois project. Cultural approaches can help
us understand both popular participation in politics and the cultural dimen-
sions of peasant/state interaction. These approaches can also shed light on
state/subject relations as these have evolved since 19IO. In this essay I address
three questions: I) the place of the new cultural history in Mexican revolu-
tionary historiography; 2) certain useful working categories it brings to this
historiography; and 3) issues of methodology and sources as they pertain to
the study of early postrevolutionary Mexico.
Revisionist history flourished in the aftermath of the Mexican student
movement of 1968 and its repression by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Insti-
tucional (PRI). The student movement was part of mobilizations of youth in
several countries that questioned the pretensions of the Cold War coalition
forged after World War II to promote democracy and material progress. In Mex-
For their helpful comments on this essay and suggestions for revision, I would like to
thank GilbertJoseph, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Florencia Mallon, Heather Fowler-
Sal amini, John Tutino, Cynthia Radding, Marion S. Miller, Marco Velazquez, Andrew
Roth, Sergio Zendejas, and participants in seminars at El Colegio de Michoadn, the Latin
American Studies Program at Yale University, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the
University of California, San Diego, the History Department of the University of
California, Irvine, as well as those present at the Mexican Studies Committee forum on
new cultural history organized by the Conference on Latin American History, New York,
January '997.
Hispanic American Historical Review 79:2
Copyright '999 by Duke University Press
HAHR / May / Vaughan
ican studies, a new generation of scholars challenged then prevailing interpreta-
tions of the Mexican Revolution as a popular rebellion that sought emancipation
hom backwardness, exploitation, and injustice, goals that were subsequently
attained through postrevolutionary state polities. From the vantage point of
intellectual youth affected by the events of 1968, a different perspective seemed
appropriate: the Revolution had produced a centralized, single-party
state that promoted capitalist growth and authoritarianism at the expense of
social welfare and democracy. Revisionist inquiry into Mexican revolutionary his-
tory saw the central state as a principal actor and effective manipulator of the
masses.! In political science and sociology, revisionist scholarship abandoned
older formulations that depicted the ruling PRI as an effective arena for articulat-
ing and bargaining over class interests. A new paradigm stressed centralized
power, broke red by a narrow set of actors and institutions operating through
patronage, co-optation, and repression) For their part, anthropologists chal-
lenged a community studies tradition that had lauded processes of
tion and modernization. New structuralist analyses stressed how the advance
of capitalism and PRI politics had impoverished and marginalized indigenous
peoples.'
Beginning in the 19805, at least four intersecting processes encouraged a
renewed historiographic interest in understanding popular participation in the
Mexican Revolution and its immediate aftermath. First, almost two decades of
energetic mapping of the revolutionary experience across regions and localities
brought into question the strength of the postrevolutionary state, the homo-
geneity of the countryside, and the manipulability of the peasantry. A wealth of
J. For discussions of revisionist historiography, see (;ilbert Ivi. Joseph and Daniel
Nugent, "Popular Culrure and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico;' in Everyday
FormJ ofSttlte Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule inlvlodem lHexico, eds.
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Cniv. Press, 1994),6-7; and Alan
Knight, "The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a 'Great Rebellion""
Bulletin of Latin Ame1'iam Research 4, no. 2 (I985), and "Interpretaciones recientes de Ia
Revoluci6n Mexicana;' in Memorias del Simposio de Historiografia ;Wexicanista (Mexico City:
Comite Mexicano de Ciencias Hist6ricas; Gobierno del Estado de Morelos; lnstiruto .Ie
Investigaciones Historicas, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, '990).
2. For a good review and critique of this literarure, see Jeffrey \v. Rubin,
"Decentering the Regime: Culrure and Regional Politics in Mexico," Latin ,4merial11
Research Review 31, no. 3 (I996).
3. This critique began with the publication of Arturo \Varman et al., De eso que llanlilrl
antropologia mexicana (lv1exico City: Ed. Nuestro Tiempo, '970). For an examination of
strucruralist anthropology, see Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Anthropological Perspectit'eJ 011
Rural Mexico (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 19R4), 96-177-
studies demonstrated the complexity and variety of revolutionary processes
and the diversity of peasant participation at the regional and locallevels.
4
Sec-
ond, historians began to apply new conceptualizations in comparative peasant
studies to their examination of the Mexican countryside, especially James
Scott's early work on the notion of a peasant moral economy and subsistence
ethic and his subsequent analysis of peasant agency and protest.5 At the same
time, anthropologists' historical ethnographies of peasant communities
attended to culture, family, and daily life, as well as to politics and economics,
and served to illuminate the complexity of peasant/state relations in the decades
following the revolutionary upheava1.
6
Third, since the 1980s there has been a
shift in paradigms in social history from one predominantly economic and
4- These studies are too numerous to list here. In addition to key edited collections
such as David A. Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980); Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural
Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988); and Thomas Benjamin
and Mark Wasserman, eds., Provinces of the Revolution: Ersays on Regional Mexican History,
19IO-I929 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1990), it is important to note how
much of the primary research has been done by scholars working in Mexican regional
institutions. See, among others, Ernesto Camou Healy, Rocio Guadarrama, and Jose
Carlos Ramirez, Historia contempordnea de Sonora, I929-l984 (Hermosillo: Gobierno del
Estado de Sonora, 1988); Jesus Marquez Carillo, "Los origenes de avilacamachismo: una
arqueologia de fuerzas en la constitucion de un poder regional: el estado de Puebla,
1920-1941" (Lie. thesis, Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, 1981); Alvaro Ochoa Serrano,
Los agrari.ftas de Atacheo (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan, 1989); and Cesar Moheno, Las
historias y los hombres de San Juan (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan, 1985).
5. For the former, see particularly James c. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant:
Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976); for the
latter, see his Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1985). For applications of Scott's work to an analysis of the Mexican peasantry,
see John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence,
l750-I940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986); Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution,
vol. 1: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986); and
Marjorie Becker, "Black and White and Color: Cardenismo and the Search for a
Campesino Ideology," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987).
6. See, for example, Arturo Warman, ... y venimos a contradecir: los campesinos de
More/os y el estado nacional (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto
Nacional de Antropologfa e Historia, 1976); Guillermo de la Peiia, Herederos de promesas:
agricultura, politim y ritual en los Altos de More/os (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones
Superiores del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1980); and Paul Friedrich
Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village: With a New Preface and Supplementary Bibliography
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), and The Princes of Naranja: An Ersay in
Anthrohistorical Method (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986).
strucUlralist, whether in the guise of modernization theol)' or l\1arxism, to one
more sensitive to issues of culUlre, dispersed power, contingency, and represen-
tation. Fourth, again beginning in the 1980s, Mexican citizens have used elec-
tions and other forms of mobilization to challenge the PRJ political monopoly
in ways more generalized and sustained than in the past. This challenge has
raised questions about how subject/state relations and citizenship formation
had been constiUlted during the revolution and the ensuing period of state for-
mation. These models of citizenship were distinct from those of the prerevo-
lutionary period and established the basis for forms and practices that evolved
in the period after 1940.
In a 1985 essay, Alan Knight cl)'stallized the argument for a postrevision-
ist inquiry into the Mexican revolutional)' process.! Drawing upon his rich and
comprehensive study of the years of armed mobilization, Knight revived the
debunked assertion that popular forces, especially the peasantry, had a dear
impact on revolutionary outcomes and state formation. In the 1920S the state
was not the Leviathan the revisionists had imagined, but a fledgling that could
be consolidated and strengthened only through processes that accommodated
potentially conflictive social groups and their interests. Knight's work here and
elsewhere has suggested that the major issue of the Mexican Revolution was
not class struggle but the collapse of the state and the necessity of building a
new one amid widespread social mobilization, dispersed political and military
power, and the reassertion of regional and local autonomy. In their collection
of essays on regional politics in Mexico in the 1920S, Thomas Benjamin and
Mark Wasserman argued that politicians built the postrevolutionary state
through popular movements. The relationship between the state and popular
classes was om: of mutual construction, not a one-way street of state imposi-
tion.
S
Florencia Mallon took this reasoning further. She argued that to consol-
idate itself, the postrevolutionary state had to reach down to the local level,
where it tapped into a reservoir of popular culUlre. It was access to this culture
that eventually hrought the Mexican state the hegemonic and cultural domin-
ion that it had been unable to attain in the nineteenth century and that 1I10st
other Latin American countries have failed to achieve in the twentieth.
9
7. Knight, "Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist?"; and Mexican Revolution,
hoth vols.
8. Benjamin and Wasserman, Provinces of the Revolution, 9.
9. Florencia E. Mallon, "Reflections on the Ruins: Everyday Forms of State
Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico;' in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms o(State
FOr1tltltion, 72, lOI.
273
In 1994, Everyday Forms of State Formation, edited by Gilbert Joseph and
Daniel Nugent, marked a further advance in postrevisionist scholarship. In
their introduction the editors stated that the intent of the essays in their vol-
ume was to explore the relationship between the dynamics of state formation
and popular political cultures; to flesh out the varied modes through which
popular movements acted upon the revolution, the state, and society; to gain a
clearer understanding of the transformation of social experience and the iden-
tity of the agents and agencies that effected these transformations; and to
examine how popular involvement in official projects created the conditions
for negotiation and the emergence of new forms of domination. to In address-
ing these issues, the contributors to Everyday Forms of State Formation exempli-
fied an ongoing shift toward culturalist perspectives in Mexican revolutionary
historiography.
This shift can be detected in the historical and anthropological studies
that inform new scholarship as well as in the locus of inquiry and theoretical
grounding that such studies entail. Poststructuralist theory (Michel Foucault,
and sometimes Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) is often directly cited or
enters through other channels, such as the studies of hegemony elaborated by
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau; cultural studies identified with such
scholars as Stuart Hall in England, and Nestor Garcia Canclini and Jesus Mar-
tin Barbero in Latin America; gender studies, especially the pathbreaking work
of]oan Scott; anthropological theories of the colonial encounter, such as those
of John and Jean Comaroff; and the Subaltern Studies Project, notably the
work of Indian scholars Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gyan
Prakash, and Partha Chaterjee.
11
Often these schools and scholars draw upon
Marxist thought-in particular that of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams,
and E. P. Thompson-that privileges culture over economically determined
structures. And while essays in Everyday Forms of State Formation addressed the
culturalist theory elaborated by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer in The Great
Arch, other scholars have invoked Emile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jiir-
IO.Joseph and Nugent, "Popular Culture and State Formation;' 4-5,12.
I I. For historiographical essays on the Subaltern Studies Project, see Florencia E.
Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin
American History;' American Historical Review 99 (1994); Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern
Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99 (1994); and Rosalind
O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in
Colonial South Asia;' Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988). For elucidation on cultural studies
perspectives on popular culture. see Joseph and Nugent, "Popular Culture and State
Formation;' 15-18.
HAHR / May I Vaughan
gen Habermas to approach issues of culture and power.l
2
In historical and
anthropological analysis, there has been a shift away from economic explana-
tions for popular mobilizations and from macromodels of class-based, national
social structure. Ritual, symbolic action, and representations of reality and mean-
ing constructed in social context and articulated in discourse have become key
to reconstructing identity and understanding popular action. Microhistory and
daily life constitute the preferred locus of inquiry. I)
Often the very shift in the focus of inquiry from the central state and
region to the local level has prompted the use of studies that explore cul-
tural and symbolic representations. Their more nuanced and subtle cat-
egories of analysis help in the interpretation of local-level phenomena.
14
What distinguishes current cultural history from other immensely useful
local studies, such as Luis Gonzalez's Pueblo en Vilo as well as Paul Friedrich's
Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village and The Princes of Naranja, is how it uses
new categories of analysis in an effort to understand the relation of local cul-
ture and agency to regional and national processes. 15 Far from falling into the
abyss of exploring experience at the expense of structure, the new cultural his-
tory can contribute to a more complex understanding of the dynamics of oper-
ative structures in twentieth-century Mexico if those practicing it combine
culturalist approaches with continued attention to economic processes and to
layers of political power. If>
Despite the diversity of theoretical and empirical work informing their
12. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State F0rn141tion ax
Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
J 3. On the evolution of historical studies in France away from Marxism and the
Annales school's longue duree and toward representation, see Antoine Prost, "What Has
Happened to French Social History?" The Historical Journal 35 (1992). For an introduction
to the new cultural history, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History: Essays (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1989). On microhistory, see Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory: T",'o
or Three Things that I Know About It;' trans. John and Anne C Tedeschi, Critical Inquiry
1 (")93),
14. Elsie Rockwell, "Hacer escuela: transformaciones de la cultura escolar, Tlaxcala.
I91O--1940" (PhD. diss., Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas, Centro de
lnvestigacion y Estudios Avanzados del Instituo Politecnico Nacional, 1997), 7.
15. Luis Gonzalez y Gonzalez, Pueblo en vilo (Mexico City: EI Colegio de Mexico,
196H).
16. For a thought-provoking inquiry into the dangers of "experience" obscuring
"structure," see Emilia Viotti da Costa, "Experience versus Structures: New Tendencies in
the History of Labor and the Working Class in Latin America -What Do We Gain? \"v'hat
Do \Ve Lose?" International Labor and Working Class History 36 (I9H9)'
analysis, those practicing cultural history share certain things in common: I) an
emphasis on subjectivity, de-centering, and representation; 2) a sense that cul-
ture creates meaning, informs action, and is itself an object of struggle; 3) a
belief in the dispersed and multiple nature of power and a keen awareness that
power and culture are intrinsically related; and 4) a methodological emphasis
on ethnography. Although the extant scholarship is incipient and scant, it is
substantial in its suggestive quality, theoretical grounding, and empirical accom-
plishments. Here I shall draw from this emerging body of work not in a
comprehensive way but in order to discuss certain categories of analysis, par-
ticularly the diversity of their applications, how they contribute to our under-
standing of state/peasant relations and peasant political participation, and some
problems they raise.
Concepts and Categories
In his essay in Everyday Forms of State Formation, Alan Knight stresses that
new concepts are useful if they provide the tools for making sense of con-
crete examples. They should be applied as organizing concepts and working
categories. Their choice and refinement depends upon a sustained and criti-
cal dialogue with empirical evidence.l7 Here I explore the concepts and cate-
gories of space, identity, gender, discourse, ritual, and hegemony. I have sub-
sumed the category of gender under that of identity, in part because it is the
least developed in current analysis. I give less time to ritual for the opposite
reason. Although by far the most developed of these categories in the his-
toricalliterature, ritual is also the one around which there is greatest con-
sensus in analytical approach and interpretation. I focus most of my discus-
sion on the category of identity and introduce discourse as a way of detecting
identity. Discourse as a concept also enters into my discussion of ritual and
hegemony.
Space is a category familiar to Mexican historians. Almost from its incep-
tion, and perhaps because of its early close association with geography and
demography, the historiography of colonial Mexico has paid close attention
to space: to the different perceptions and occupations of space by Spanish
colonizers and native societies; to the divergent ways in which each of these
contending elements of colonial society invested space with political and
symbolic meaning; and to the social occupation of urban space by castas,
I7. Alan Knight, "Weapons and Arches," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of
State Formation, 25.
27
6
Indians, and Europeans. IX Nor has spatial analysis been absent from the his-
toriography of the Mexican Revolution. Friedrich Katz's 1<)74 essay on the
regional variations in land tenure and labor relations that produced distinct
forms of revolutionary mobilization in 1910 was a masterful spatial analysis;
it set off a series of studies that mapped the locations of estate workers, small-
holders, sharecroppers, renters, and migratory workers in different regions.: <,
1 K. On the geography of conquest, see Sherbourne E Cook and Lesley Byrd Simpson,
The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1948); Carl O. Sauer, Colima ofNe-iiJ Spain in the Sixteenth CentulY (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1948); Robert C. \Vest, The Mining Community in Northe171 New Spai1l:
The Parml iVIilling District (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1949); Lesley Byrd
Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: Un i\'. of
California Press, 1<)52); and Peter Gerhard, A Guide til the HLrtorical Geography o(Nn
Spain, rev. ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 19'13). For recent work on different
perceptions and occupations of space on the part of Spanish colonizers and native
societies, see Bernardo Garcia Martinez, l.os pueblos de faxierm: el poder y 1'1 espado entre los
indiOI del 1/orte de Puebla haxta 1700 (Mexico City: El C:olegio de ,\1exico, 1987);james
Lockhart, The Nahua., after the Conquest: A Social and Cultuml History aftbe Indianr or
Central Atexico, Sixteenth through Eif(hteenth Centzl1'ies (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press.
1992); Eric Van Young, "Dreamscapes with Figures and Fences: Cultural Contention and
Discourse in the Late Colonial Mexican Countryside," in Le Noul'eau Monde--monde.1
nouveaux: l'experience amercaine, eds. Serge Gruzinski and :\'athan \Vachtel (Paris:
Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations; Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Emdes en
Sciences Sociales, 191)6); Elinor G. K. Lvlelville, A Pll/gue of Sheep: Enviromnental
COIlJfquences of the Conquest of/Hexico (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); \'alter
D. ,\;lignolo, Tbe Darket'Side o(the Renaixsance: Literacy, TCl1'itoriality, and Colonizatioll
(Ann Arbor: Uni\'. of Michigan Press, 1'195); and Cynthia Radding, WanderiilK Peoples
Calollialixm, Ethnh Spaces, and Ecolof(ical Frontiers in Nrn'thue.rtern iHexico, ['700-- I8)c>
(Durham: Duke Uni\'. Press, 1997). For classic treatments, sec Charles Gibson, The
Azten under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of tbe Valley of MaiL-a, I)" I 9 - I 8 I ()
(Stanf()f(l: Stanford Cniv, Press, 1964); and \Villiam B. Tavlor, J)"inkil1f(, Homicide, dlld
Rebellion ill Colonial,Hexicall Villages (Stanford: Stant(ml Univ. Press, 1979). On urhan
space, see Alejandra Moreno Toscano, cd., Ciudad de ,'vtexico: emavo de (()l1Jtru((ion de unil
hi.rtoria (Mexico City: Instituto 0lacional de Antropologia e Histona. untl); Susan
Deans-Smith, BurefJztcrtlts, Plallters, {/nd WtJrkers: The Making of the Tobacco lHonopolv III
Bow'hon .'vlexico (Austin: Univ. of 'lex as Press, 11)92); and R. Douglas Cope, "fbe rimits or
Racial Domination: Plebeian Society ill Colonial Afexiw City, 1660 1720 (Madison: Uni,. of
\Nisconsin Press, 19\14).
II). Friedrich Katz, "Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some
Trends and Tendencies," HAHR 54 (1974). On spatial mapping of workers in relation to
land and production, see, for example, Tmino, From Inmrrectiol1 to Revolution; Herbert J.
NickeL /H01ji!lof(ia social de la hacienda mexiama (Mexico City: Fondo de C:ultur<l
Econ6mica, 1'1i'lH): Heather Fowler-Salamini, "Gender, \Vork, and Coffee in C6rdob,1.
Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics 277
Scholars examining peasant mobilization have emphasized how competition
for land and water between neighboring villages, divisions between villagers
and hacienda workers, and historic rivalries between towns impeded the build-
ing of autonomous, sustained peasant movements during the revolution.
2o
A cultural approach to space does not overlook these economic and political
dimensions, but it is more comprehensive. Space is understood to be socially
constituted and socially constituting. The ways we perceive, value, and occupy
physical space are themselves shaped by our spatially organized communities
(ranging from local villages to nation-states) and sites within them that social-
ize us, create symbolic meaning, and articulate unequal power relations. These
sites may be institutions (schools, churches, workplaces, town halls, jails) or
other loci of social interaction (the house, the street, the well, the kitchen, the
milpa, the market, the cemetery, the confessional, the courtroom).21
In his Exits from the Labyrinth, Claudio Lomnitz develops a spatial approach
to the production of local, regional, and national culture. He recognizes the
importance of peasant economic and political activities but situates these in a
more complex organization of local and regional space. For Lomnitz, intimate
culture is class culture spatially organized. To take an obvious example, while
peasants constitute a class in economic terms, the intimate culture of a peasant
hamlet within the confines of a hacienda will differ from that of a legally consti-
tuted pueblo on its periphery. These differences between hamlet and pueblo will
manifest themselves in the density of sites or spaces that constitute social rela-
tions (such as those of government, worship, commercial exchange and produc-
tion, and education); in the nature and intensity of relations that each maintains
Veracruz, 1850- 1910," in Women of the Mexican Countryside, [85- [990: Creating Spaces,
Shaping Transitions, eds. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan (Tucson: Univ.
of Arizona Press, 1994); and William K. Meyers, Forge of Progress, Crucible of Revolt: Origins
of the Mexican Revolution in La Comarca Lagunera, 1880- 19[ I (Albuquerque: Univ. of New
Mexico Press, 1994).
20. On these divisions, see, among others, Raymond Th. J. Buve, "Tlaxcala:
Consolidating a Cacicazgo;' in Benjamin and Wasserman, Provinces of the Revolution; Paul
Gamer, "Oaxaca: The Rise and Fall of State Sovereignty;' in ibid., 166; Allen Wells and
Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural
Insurgency in Yucatan, [876-[915 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 288-92; and
Knight, Mexican Revolution, 1:333-87, who argues that nonetheless, the cumulative effect
of campesino movements produced an agrarian revolution
2 I. See Edward W Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 118- 3 7; and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of
Practice, trans. Richard Nice, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985),89-91.
27
S
with dominant social classes (such as hacienda owners and other land owners,
petit bourgeois merchants, and officeholders); and in patterns of internal social
differentiation. For Lomnitz, the culture of social relations is the hierarchical
relation between intimate cultures in regional space. It is expressed through
discourse, symbols, and rituals enacted within religious, political, economic,
and social frames. These discourses and symbols articulate and confirm unequal
power relations within and between intimate culhlres.
2c
If class cultures and inequalities are spatially organized, it follows that
revolutions can provoke enormous contestations over the arrangement, pos-
session, and symbolic meaning of space. In his indiam into fo.1exieans, David
Frye describes how in the course of the nineteenth century villagers in the
municipality of Mezquitic, San Luis Potosi, lost land to the hacienda of La
Parada. For both villagers and estate owners, this process was symbolized by
the building of hacienda walls that cut through the fields, forests, and moun-
tains once owned by communities. For villagers, the walls represented not
only intrusion, hut also exclusion. The owners restricted and policed the
entry of villagers who supplied the hacienda and those who worked there.
The hacendados discriminated against the villagers, paying them less fllr
work and charging them more to use pasture than resident workers, whom
the villagers called "consentidos," brownnosers who spent their time gossip-
ing with the bosses in exchange for privileged access to land and other
goods. In 1924 the villagers of Mezquitic scaled the walls and dismantled the
heart of La Parada, taking its cattle and horses, demolishing its ({[seo (great
house) and chapel, and tearing up the private train tracks. They hauled away
bricks and boards to build their own house,. ]n part, theirs was an act of
redistributive justice. But by combining archival sources with oral history,
Frye found that villagers had additional motives. They were searching for
treasure. The hacendados had arrogantly displayed their wealth as power
and in the opinion of the villagers, where there was power there would be
treasure. By probing a peasant assault on a particular space, Frye uncovers a
component of peasant mentalite that had escaped the attention of historians.
As anthropologists have shown, the idiom of treasure looms large in Mexi-
can peasant explanations of wealth, power, and mobility that are distinctly at
odds with economist thinking.
2'
22. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exitsfrom the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the
Mexican National Space (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 29, J 12, 115,
23. David L. Frye, Indians into Mexicans: Hist01) and Identity in a Mexican 7irwn
(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996), 172-86. On treasure and politics in rural Mexico, see
279
In their efforts to promote their greater autonomy and freedom by
destroying hierarchical arrangements of rural space, Mexican peasants might
find the postrevolutionary governments to be either allies or enemies. In her
work on revolutionary schools in Tlaxcala during the 1920S, Elsie Rockwell
found that the act of constructing a schoolhouse was vitally important to
communities struggling for independence from dominating head towns and
haciendas. A school building symbolized newfound autonomy from outside
oppressors. The villagers wanted this institutional space that during the
Porfiriato had been reserved for wealthier, more powerful towns.
24
On the
other hand, in his contribution to Everyday Forms of State Formation, Jan Rus
recounts how the Tzotzil peoples of Chamula in Chiapas torched a state school
in 1933 because they perceived it as a institution that their ladino (non-Indian)
oppressors were trying to force on a hamlet that the Tzotzils were intent on
reclaiming as an exclusively indigenous space separate from the ladino head
town.
25
Agents of the postrevolutionary state understood the symbolic impor-
tance of space and its relationship to power. However, in their efforts to
conquer, eliminate, or marginalize religious spaces, they severely underesti-
mated the intensity of popular feelings. Thus when postrevolutionary govern-
ments continued the Porfirian project of removing cemeteries from the
church atrium to the outskirts of town-ostensibly for hygienic reasons, but
in fact to destroy the church as the coalescing force of village life-their tam-
pering with the village's ancestors and collective memory created tension and
James B. Greenberg, "Capital, Ritual, and Boundaries of the Closed Corporate
Community;' in Articulating Hidden Histories, Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf, eds.
Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995),67-81;
Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth, 53 - 54; and Andrew Roth Seneff, "Region y
cultura popular: notas sobre moralidad, intereses y la objetivacion de 'comunidad' en la
zona interetnica del norte central de Michoac:in;' Relaciones: Estudios de la Historia y
Sociedad 18, no. 72 (1997), who explores the concept of treasure in peasant culture
with reference to Pedro Carrasco, EI catolicismo popular de los tarascos (Mexico City:
Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1976) and George Foster (assisted by Gabriel Ospina),
Empire's Children: The People ofTzintzuntwn (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1948).
24. Elsie Rockwell, "Schools of the Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms
in Tlaxcala, 1910-193," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 188.
25. Jan Rus, "The 'Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional': The Subversion of
Native Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936-1968," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday
Forms of State Formation, 270-71.
;::.So
dramatic Even more provocative was tbe Cardenista invasion of the
church in Ario, Michoacan, where they torched the Virgin and danced at the
altar, as recounted by Marjorie Becker; or similar attacks on sacred space by
antireligionists in Sonora, as described by Adrian Bantjes.27 The evidence
from these conflicts over religious space makes it difficult to sustain revision-
ist notions of an all-powerful state imposing its will on the masses in a dyadic
struggle benveen state and people. On the one hand, popular hostility toward
the state's antireligious policy forced the government to back down. On the
other hand, government policies were more often than not carried out hv
local people.
A careful examination of these contests raises questions about leftist revi-
sionist assumptions that peasants defending religious space were manipulated
by Catholic elites. Marjorie Becker, in her 1987 essay "Black and White and
Color;' and Claudio Lomnitz, in Exits from the Labyrinth, argue that in certain
instances villagers reappropriated churches and chapels during the revolution,
severing them from their association with dominant elites while defending
them as autonomous community spaces that legitimized peasant
The fury of Mayo Indians of Sonora over the destruction of their saints, as
described by Adrian Bantjes, had little to do with Catholic elites and every-
thing to do with a defense of ethnic culture and
But neither does this recent research support the conservative revisionist
argument that peasants who joined the cristero war against the government in
I927 were the authentic defenders of peasant culture, while those assaulting
religious space were misguided victims of government manipulation. Marjorie
Becker seeks an explanation for why certain poor women of Ario, longtime
26. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cu/tuml Politics in Revolution: Teachen, Peasants, and Schools in
il1exico, [930- [940 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, HN7), 90.
17. Marjorie Becker, "Torching La Purisima, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction
of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacan, 1934-1940," in Joseph and Nugent, Evoyda,
Form." of State Formation, and Setting the Virgin on Fin' Law/'o Cardenas, 1l1ichaacan Pea.,'{mt\'.
and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1(95),
77- 10/, 129- 31; and Adrian Bantjes, "Burning Saints, Molding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic
Ritual, and the Failed Culrural Revolution;' in Rituals of Rule, Rituals afResistance: Publi,
Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexim, eds. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin,
and William E. French (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 19(4), and As If}esu,,
walked on Eanh: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Rel'olution (Wilmington, Del.:
Scholarly Resources, [9(8), 23 - 55
zR. Becker, "Black and VV'hite and Color"; and Lomnitz-Adler. E'dts ji-om tbe
Labyrinth, 12';.
29. Bantjes, As It]e.ms Walked, 31-)0.
28r
participants in a Catholic culture of social relations and beliefs, danced at the
altar in defiance of their commanding icon, La Purfsima, the Virgin Mary.
After analyzing a series of interviews that she conducted with local women,
Becker concludes that some women danced to support their husbands' quest
for land while others danced to challenge what they perceived to be an oppres-
sive hierarchy of social relations. Thus after defiling the sacred space of the
church, one woman felt liberated enough to insult and spit at a rich woman
who had long looked down upon her.l
o
In addition, attention to space as a sociocultural category qualifies the
revisionist contention that peasant/state interaction only resulted in new forms
of top-down control, for such interaction also produced new forms of subal-
tern association across geographic space. In their Summer of Discontent, Seasons
of Upheaval, Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph map the spatial organization of
plantations and villages that facilitated the henequen boom in Porfirian
Yucatan. They highlight the role of cabecillas, or brokers, who, drawn from the
smallholder, artisan, and commercial sectors of villages, secured labor and
commercial goods for estates while attempting to defend the interests of their
local peasant clienteles in an increasingly oppressive and coercive setting. In
19II the cabecillas mobilized peasants across towns and haciendas in an insur-
gency that briefly overcame the spatial and social divisions among campesinos.
The collapse of this unity facilitated the reestablishment of elite power and,
later, the emergence of the cabecillas as caciques. Wells and Joseph question the
revisionist interpretation of the cabecilla as a strong leader selling out the inter-
ests of inept, faceless followers to the bourgeois state. In regional power
domains situated between state-level political machines and local fiefdoms, the
cabecillas safeguarded local peasant interests and autonomies while negotiating
the insertion of new state-sponsored forms that encouraged cross-community
association: Ligas de Resistencia, official party clubs, youth groups, civic ritu-
als, cultural evenings, and baseball teams.
31
In my own study of revolutionary
schools in Tecamachalco in central Puebla, I noted how violent intra- and
intercommunity divisions among campesinos, as well as conflicts between vil-
lagers and resident hacienda workers, were mitigated by the activities of the
Confederaci6n Nacional Campesina (CNC) and by unifying local rituals and
basketball competitions promoted by teachers.32 These new forms of associa-
tion across regional space may have nurtured a campesino class consciousness
30. Becker, "Torching La Purisima;' 262-63.
31. Wells and Joseph, Summer of Discontent, 213, 2I7, 234-39, 287-89.
32. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 77-105.
~ 82
that existed before only in brief moments of mobilization. They generated
new forms of resistance, mobilization, and reclamation and helped peasants
obtain resources from the state vital to survival. Class identification and con
sciousness can coexist with patron-c1ientelism and practices of caciquismo.
The notion of social space is closely related to the concept of identity.
Indeed, identity is shaped at sites of socialization. Identity, as defined here,
cannot be reduced to notions of economic interest or positioning in relations
of production. It is also deeper, and more intimate and specific, than generic
notions of the moral economy built around the subsistence ethic. It is histori
cally embedded in local experience and constructed through memory and
practice. \Vhile forged in local experience, identity is not formed in isolation,
but in relation to broader social formations, information systems, events, and
interaction with the state. It is relational and grounded in differences between
the self and others. It reflects and constitutes power and unequal power rela-
tions. For instance, identity is gendered, establishing different behaviors,
expectations, and power relations for men and women. Individuals and groups
have multiple identities that shift according to time and context. Identities
may be social, cultural, or political. Here I am concerned with political iden-
tity as it draws upon and relates to social and cultural identity.ll 'IC) detect
these in the historical record, the historian must rely to a large extent on peas-
ant discourses, i.e. the languages that order reality, confer meaning and value,
create knowledge, and influence social practice. q
33. Definitions of identity vary according to author and discipline. I have tried here to
give a generic definition derived from different disciplines and theoretical positions. For a
cultural studies approach, see Stuart Hall, "The Question of Cultural Identity;' in Modernity:
An Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
595- 634; for a structuralist/spatial approach, see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice,
159-97; for an anthropological approach, seeJohn and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the
Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, H)92), 52-67; for identity and
gender, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, I988), 40-48; for identity in new social movements theory, see Jean Cohen, "Strategy
and Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements;' Social
Resea1"l:h 52 (1985); Orin Starn, "I Dream of Foxes and Hawks: Reflections on Peasant
Protest, New Social Movements, and Rondas Campe.rinas of Northern Peru;' in The Makin!!,
of Sodallillovementr in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, eds. Arturo Escobar
and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992); and Ronald Munck, "Identity
and Ambiguity in Democratic Struggles in Popular Movements and Social Change in
Mexico;' in Populm Movements and Political Change in Mexico, eds. Joe F oweraker and Ann I,.
Craig (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990).
H. For a succinct definition of discourse, see Hall et al., Modernity, 205.
Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics 28
3
Ana Maria Alonso and Daniel Nugent reconstruct sociopolitical identity
in the presidial soldier community of Namiquipa, Chihuahua. To do so they
analyze discourse as peasants speak through the archival record and through
oral testimonies. They argue that male peasants in Namiquipa found their
identity in the service they provided the state in fighting "savage" Indians
beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. The honor of these men became
invested in their dominion over Indians and women and their possession and
cultivation of land received in state compensation for services rendered. In the
nineteenth century, they could relate to the postindependence elite ideology of
liberalism because they could evoke it in the name of their communal and
individual autonomy. However, Porfirian development and autocratic rule
threatened their masculine sense of honor derived from their soldiering activ-
ities as well as their control over land and labor, women and children, and local
political institutions. The government they had respected as a "good father"
who had recognized their rights, became a cruel, tyrannical "stepfather." Their
honor profoundly violated, these men joined the revolution and, afterwards,
sparred with the postrevolutionary state and subverted official notions ofland
reform by recreating their ancestral notions of landownership and use within
their ejido.3
5
Alonso and Nugent suggest little change in the dominant identity and
discourse ofNamiquipans through the revolution. By contrast, William French
has looked at peasants who were forced by Porfirian development projects
from their presidial domains into wage-labor in the mines of Parral, Chi-
huahua. In the face of management, police, and middle-class efforts to change
and regulate their behavior, the peasant workers pressed claims to dignity
and justice by deploying a set of overlapping discourses: that of presidial
male honor linked to physical and sexual prowess and competition among
"equals"; a subsistence ethic that legitimized the pocketing of ore that com-
panies claimed; and a discourse of individual rights drawn from the liberal
Mexican Constitution of 1857.16 Over time, some peasant workers began to
35. Ana Marfa Alonso and Daniel Nugent, "Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian
Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of
Namiquipa, Chihuahua;' in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation; Ana
Marfa Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico s Northern
Frontier (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995), 176- 2 I I; and Daniel Nugent, Spent
Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropolop;ical History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1993), 41 - I 2 I.
36. William E. French, A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class
Formation in Northern Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, I 996), I09- 39.
develop new identities in response to their altered work and social contexts
and the dominant discourses that permeated these contexts. They began to
articulate claims based on the monetary value of their labor while adopting
certain standards of middle-class "decency." During the revolution, how-
ever, scores of mineworkers joined contingents of Namiquipans to reassen
a historical peasant soldier identity. As disorder deepened, many entered the
mines on their own account, pocketing and selling ore, while others joined
revolutionary army officers in sacking mining towns and seizing bullion and
supply shipments. By 1920 some belonged to organized gangs of thieves
working in cahoots with merchants and officials. Others experimented with
political identities forged in interaction with the fledgling state. Popular
upheaval forced politicians to adopt new discourses that would reverberate
with the demands and interests of mobilized and mobilizable groups. Thus,
the Chihuahua state government passed a new lahor law guaranteeing work-
ers' rights, and political parties organized around new identities-the "clase
trabajadora" or "clase laborante"-with new antagonists-the "gringo" mine-
owners who were cast as enemies of the "pueblo mexicano" and its gov
ernn1ent. ,,'
French highlights the resurgence of male peasant violence as a compo-
nent of revolutionary identity. Alan Knight has written insightfully on the
legacy of violence bequeathed by the years of civil war; the problem also needs
to be looked at in the context of post- 1920 state formation.
lR
In reconstituting
the state, politicians may have wished to domesticate and pacify armed men,
but they also promoted new masculine identities linked to violence-not only
in the form of organized theft and coercion, but through the promotion of
social conflict. Male violence was promoted by a state fashioned by generals
and soldiers, one that staked its formation on an alteration of relations of
property and power, a necessarily violent proposition.
In a recent article, Christopher Boyer argues that in the 19205 young
peasant men from not only found new identities and power in the
state government's discourse of peasant rights to land and its attack on "reac-
tionary" hacendados and priests, but they also found empowerment in the
peasant militias that the government had authorized to combat armed hacen-
dado opposition to land reform.J9 Among these young men were those whose
37 Ibid., 141-72, J73-
Ho
.
3R. Knight, ;1,1exical1 Revolution, 2:520-22.
39. Christopher R. Boyer, "Old Loves, New Loyalties: Agrarismo in Michoacan,
1920- [928," HAHR 78 (1998).
careers Paul Friedrich traces in The Princes of Naranja. Friedrich shows the
young agraristas of Michoac:in's Zacapu Valley grown old and tyrannical
through prolonged rule that had been sustained by killing, state patronage,
social terrorism in the name of ideological purity, and ruthless disregard for
democratic procedure. Friedrich interprets the violence of the "princes" as a
response to opportunity in the context of local material and cultural condi-
tions. The princes began their political careers as fatherless, semidelinquent,
underemployed youth raised by women in a community impoverished and
disaggregated by hacienda expansion. At the same time, they brought their
male peasant competitiveness and bravado, as well as their sense of kinship
solidarity and rivalry, to new state institutions, such as agrarian militias, and
discourses, such as those of land reform and anticlericalism.
4o
To what extent
was this behavior replicated in different parts of Mexico and how enduring
did it become? Can it be periodized? What forms of gendered citizenship did
it encourage? What impact did it have on the citizenship of women? We need
to look at gendered violence as part of Mexican political culture as it was con-
stituted across time and space.
In her recent study of popular movements and the cristero war (1927-29)
in Michoac:in, Jennie Purnell examines identity in Naranja and the Zacapu
Valley from another perspective. She is interested in understanding the factors
that led communities to forge alliances with one or another of the broad, con-
tending sociopolitical military networks that traversed the region: that of the
emerging state or militant Catholicism. A political scientist probing the rela-
tionship between identity and social movements, Purnell relies upon a wealth
of local histories, ethnographies, and collections of oral testimony and folk
tales, supplemented by her own considerable archival work.
41
She argues that
political identities are forged through strategic action when local interests
meet a particular conjuncture of opportunities and threats, of potential allies
and available discourses.
42
Local interests are not only material and economic;
40. Friedrich, Princes of Naranja, 1 -74.
41. Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The
Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacan (Durham: Duke U niv. Press, forthcoming). Purnell
acknowledges her debt to the following works: Gonzalez, Pueblo en vilo; Friedrich, Agrarian
Revolt, and Princes of Naranja; Jaime Espin Diaz, Tierra fria, tierra de conflictos en Michoacan
(Zamora: El Colegio de Michoac:in, 1986); Moheno, Las historias y los hombres; Rosa Pia,
"Leyendas y tradici6n oral en Sanjuan Parangaricutiro: pueblo nuevo;' in Estudios
Michoacanos, vol. 3, ed. Sergio Zendejas (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoac:in, 1989); and
Carrasco, Catolicismo popular de los tarascos.
42. Purnell, Popular Movements, 17.
they are defined by historically forged understandings of authority, resource
management, justice, legitimacy, and religious practice that operate within local
power structures. Thus the mestizo ranchero community of San Jose de Gracia
and the Purepecha town of San Juan Parangarillltiro in the Tarascan
turned their social religiosity into political Catholicism because a majority of
villagers saw state programs of agrarianism and anticlericalism as threats to
their control over resources, governmental institutions, and religious life. By
contrast, Purepecha communities in the Zacapu Valley, such as Naranja, had
had their intimate cultures battered and disaggregated by Porfirian economic
growth and expansion. In these villages, significant factions (led by the young
men described by Boyer and Friedrich) saw in state programs a chance to reCll-
perate and alter local control over material, political, and symbolic life.
For Purnell, peasant partisanship in the cristero rebellion may be explained
in terms of the interaction of historical legacies of local cultural meanings,
conflict, and transformation with the political and strategic context of
formation.
43
Like other scholars, she finds the conservative revisionist asser-
tion that the Cristiada represented a defense of peasant culture a generaliza-
tion too broad to be useful. She also makes a distinction between political
and sociocultural identity. CululraIly, "cristero" SanJuan and "agrarista" r-..iaranja
had much in common: they were both participants in a regional Purepecha
peasant culture based upon a shared language; similar land use patterns,
political and religious institutions, and aesthetics; and integrated econ-
omies. San Juan had much less in common with the cristero ranchero town
of San Jose de Gracia, where people proudly proclaimed the whiteness of
their skin, despised the "Indians" of neighboring lv1azamitla and the "peones
de abajo," milked cows more than they worked milpas, and lived under the
governance of parish priests. "Partisanship ill the cristero rebellion;' she
writes, "was very much a local affair, rooted in specific histories and cultures
that do not correspond well to categories of class, ethnicity, or degrees of
religiosity!'H
Purnell's work, along with that of others on M.ichoacan, raises questions
about ethnicity as a category of identity in the revolutionary process and in tbe
historiography of the revolution.
45
"While the Pure pecha of Michoacan shared
a regional culture, they did not identify as Pure pecha during the revolution.
43. Ibid., IHI.
44. Ibid., 9- 10.
45. See, for example, Becker, Setting the Virgin on Hre; Moheno, Las historiasy ios
hombres; Roth Seneff, "Region y cultura popular"; and Espin Diaz, "Tierra fda;'
Despite attempts by early Pun!pecha agraristas to form a Federaci6n de la
Raza Indfgena, villages resumed historic disputes over boundaries and juris-
dictional hierarchies while intracommunity factions mobilized around new
inequalities promoted by Porfirian economic expansion. In these disputes,
each faction took up a banner, whether agrarista or cristero. Both Purnell and
Becker show that at least through the 1930S, the "Indian" identity that the
Cardenistas wished to establish in Michoacan as a political force eluded them.
Similarly, in Yucatan, as described by Ben Fallaw, Cardenista attempts to cre-
ate a political movement based on Mayan identity foundered on the shoals of
long-standing divisions among Maya speakers and new competing political
allegiances created in the revolutionary process.
46
In regard to the revolutionary process, we are as unable to generalize
about ethnicity as we are about the peasantry. The assertion that all Indians
fared poorly in the revolution reflects the political sentiments and theoretical
approaches of revisionist scholarship. Structuralist anthropology and sociol-
ogy, like structuralist history, were fundamentally materialist. In the interests
of documenting domination, exploitation, and marginalization, these schools
of thought often ignored the nonmaterial, symbolic aspects of indigenous life.
In her 1987 essay "Black and White and Color;' Marjorie Becker argues that
cultural practices in indigenous communities were fighting issues. She describes
material life in a Pure pecha fishing village as permeated with symbolic mean-
ings enacted through sociocultural organization. Local rationality completely
eluded Cardenista educators, with their materialist understanding of social
relations. Spokespersons for this community vociferously objected to these
missionaries of "improvement:'47
Emerging scholarship has shown that indigenous engagement with the
revolution was particular and diverse. It varied according to preconquest histo-
ries, colonial experiences, and interaction with nineteenth-century processes
of state formation and economic expansion. Indigenous engagements depended
upon how these histories were constructed and articulated through power
configurations in indigenous societies. Communities, like nations, are imag-
ined constructions, and dominant power configurations within them represent
and articulate collective identities. Cultural practices are related to power con-
figurations and become objects of political struggle. Recent examinations of
the Yaquis of Sonora, the Tzotzils ofChamula, and the Zapotecs ofJuchitan in
46. Ben Fallaw, "Cardenas and the Caste War that Wasn't: State Power and
Indigenismo in Post-Revolutionary Yucatan;' The Americas 53 (I997).
47. Becker, "Black and White and Color."
the Tehuantepec Isthmus of Oaxaca demonstrate how power blocks within
ethnic communities interacted with state representatives to preserve and pro-
mote their cultural-political projects and affirm particular collective identities.
These studies also demonstrate the accommodationist nature of state politics.
Each negotiation was shaped by the realpolitik of President Cardenas in the
1930S, as he sought to consolidate central control over the three peripheral
states of Sonora, Chiapas, and Oaxaca. And each negotiation compromised
Cardenas's own program of ethnic secularization and integration. \\!hile each
resolution involved the creation of new forms of domination, it also fostered a
politics protective of local interests and cultural practices.
In the nineteenth century, the Yaquis of Sonora had valiantly but unsuc-
cessfully defended their ancestral valley lands from Mexican armies and entre-
preneurs. Most Yaquis were forced from the valley. Those who were unable to
find refuge on Sonoran haciendas and in the United States Southwest were
deported to work on Yucatecan plantations. In the hope of recuperating their
homeland, the Yaquis became one of the few indigenous groups to send strong
contingents into the revolutionary armies. \\Then in the I9205 the government
reneged on its promises, the Yaquis in the valley rebelled again, only to be
bombed by Mexican planes, pressed into army units, and sent to other parts of
the country. In the 1930S hundreds returned from their forced exile in Mexico
and the United States to the valley, where the Mexican army segregated them
on the western side of the Yaqui River.
As I pieced together information from archival records, life histories, and
the studies and field notes of anthropologists, I reasoned that in the 1930S
Yaqui history could have followed two possible trajectories. -+8 The Yaquis might
have followed the assimilationist program promoted by generals, politicians,
48. Vaughan, Cultural PoliticJ in Revolution, [37-62. These sources included the
indispensable field notes and published articles of Edward Spicer that form part of
the Edward Spicer Papers housed in the Arizona State Museum Archives, as well as his
The Yaquis: A Cultu1-al History (Tucson; Univ. of Arizona Press, 1980). Important published
sources included Alfonso Fabila, Las tribuJ Yaquis de SonOl-a: _fU cultura'y anhelada
autodeterminaci6n (Mexico City; Departamento de Asuntos Indigenas, [940); Claudio
Dabdoub, Historia de el Valle del Yaqui (Mexico City; Libreria M. Porma, 1964); and Jane
Holden Kelly, Yaqui Ui'Omen: Contemporary Life Histories (Lincoln; Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1978). Unpublished and archival material includes "Yaqui Life Histories;' a manuscript in
the William vVillard Papers of the Arizona State Museum Archives; as well as document,
found in Acervos Presidentes of the Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico; in the Archivo
de la Defensa Nacional; and in the Archivo Hist6rico de Ia Secretarfa de Educaci6n
Publica. Additional material was obtained through oral interviews that I conducted in
SemoT:l.
28
9
and entrepreneurs associated with the jefe maxlmo, Plutarco Elias Calles:
becoming modern by working for Mexican landowners in the valley. It was
a feasible option, as the Yaquis were seasoned proletarians and well-traveled
neophytes of modern consumerism. Moreover, the majority were on the pay-
roll of the Mexican army, a position that fostered dependency and compliance.
However, the Yaquis opted for an alternative project that was both religious
and autonomous. The group promoting this project controlled Yaqui military
and governing institutions. It also dominated the apparatus of collective affir-
mation: the religious organizations that bound every male and female Yaqui,
from child to elder, in ritual throughout the Lenten season. The revival of reli-
gious life in the valley in the I930S had intense meaning for people who had
partially kept alive their cultural forms through a wrenching diaspora. To be
once again able to enact them fully and freely in unprecedented numbers, in
what oral tradition assured them was their sacred homeland, constituted an
extraordinarily powerful experience. In addition, the Yaqui autonomists' strong
ethnic pride and their tales of heroic, anti-Mexican Yaqui history offered Yaquis
an antidote to the virulent racism they faced in everyday life in southern
Sonora.
At a critical point, President Cardenas empowered the religious faction-
in part to defeat his Callista rivals in the semiautonomous state of Sonora. He
recognized the authority of the Yaqui governors and religious maestros and
gave the Yaquis 425,000 hectares of land, the only land grant based on ethnic
identity in modern Mexican history. He provided them with material assis-
tance in the hope that they would become the "Indians" the central state imag-
ined: modern entrepreneurs who maintained what the government identified
as "positive" ethnic traits, such as cooperative work and artistry. Instead, the
Yaquis used the resources Cardenas gave them to recreate a precapitalist eth-
nic unity built around the fulfillment of religious obligations.
The case of the Tzotzil peoples of Chamula presents another variation
on the linkages between culture, power, and identity in state/indigenous rela-
tions during the revolution. Jan Rus recounts how the Tzotzils of Chamula
and surrounding communities had taken advantage of the revolutionary open-
ing to mark off an autonomous space from ladino society.49 During the Car-
denas presidency, they found themselves invaded by bilingual escribanos sent
by the governor's agent of indigenous affairs to create new popular organiza-
49. Rus, "'Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional,'" 271-85. Rus acknowledges
his debt to Thomas Benjamin, A Rich Land, A Pom' People: Politics and Society in Modern
Chiapas (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989)'
2')0 HAHR / May / Vaughan
tions. Linked to the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the precursor of the
PRI, these organizations pressed for land, fought to improve the abysmal
conditions of migrant Tzotzil contract workers on coffee plantations, and
protested local ladino abuses and discrimination. To gain legitimacy among
the Tzotzils, the escribanos had to accept the cultural boundaries, practices.
and institutions as defined by the dominant Tzotzil male elders. They began
to assume religious cargos and gained respect through their defense of Cham-
ula interests. For instance, Cardenista teetotalers had to come to terms with
the material and symbolic importance of liquor among the Tzotzils. in the
Posh war of the 19405, escribanos led communities in defense of local produc-
tion and distribution of aguardiente against ladino attempts to impose a state
liquor monopoly.
The Zapotecs ofJuchitan, recently studied by Howard Campbell and Jef-
frey Rubin, exemplify another case in which culture, power, and ethnic iden-
tity are linked in the revolutionary process. Owing in large part to high-level
state patronage and protection, up to the eve of revolution Juchitecos had pre-
served much more autonomy than either the Tzotzils or Yaquis, while experi-
encing a far greater degree of social differentiation tllan either. A peripheral
agrarian village on a wind-swept, arid plain, Juchitan had attracted little inter-
est among Spanish colonizers. This colonial history of neglect helped to for-
tify and sustain a postindependence posture of collective, violent resistance to
outside intruders.
50
For their participation in the wars against the French and
their support of his presidency, Porfirio Dfaz respected Juchitan's relative
independence and sponsored the higher education of its elite sons in Mexico
City. Some became high-ranking government officials who bestowed favors
50. Howard Campbell. Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in
Southern 1 .. 1exico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, I994), 32, 38-50; and
Jeffrey W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in ]uchitdll.
Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, I997), 28-34. Both authors draw upon, among
others, Victor de la Cruz, "Rebeliones indigenas en eI Istmo de Tehuantepec;' Cutlde17loJ
Politicos 38 (I983): 64; Leticia Reina, "Los pueblos indios del Istmo de Tehuantepec:
readecuacion economica y mercado regional;' in Indio, ntlcion y comunidad en e/ lVIixiaJ del
siglo XIX, ed. Arturo Escobar Ohmstede (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mexicano, v
Centroamericanos), I37-51, 140-46; and John Tutino, "Indian Rebellion at the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec: A Socio-Historical Perspective;' Proceedings of the 421ld
International Congress of Americanists 7, no. 3 (I978), and "Ethnic Resistance: Juchitan in
Mexican History;' in Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics. and Representations from
]uchitdn, Oaxaca, eds. Howard Campbell et al. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1')93).
and promoted Juchitan's economic growth)l Others became Mexico City
intellectuals who wrote about the Zapotec language and culture and partici-
pated with local intellectuals and artists in the construction of a Juchitecan his-
tory of heroic independence defended by ferocious men and sensuous, militant
women. This history was repeatedly elaborated in oral legend, poetry, and
musical compositions integral to a collective aesthetics of daily life enacted in
constant velas (fiestas), processions, life-cycle ceremonies, and marketplace and
barroom banter)2
The majority of Juchitecans joined the revolution under the leadership
of a wealthy landowner to defend local autonomy from outside meddlers
and a small clique of internal collaborators. From the early 1920S, the soci-
opolitical cohesion of Juchitan benefited from official cultural nationalism,
as Juchitecan intellectuals in Mexico City seized the moment of postrev-
olutionary artistic euphoria to elaborate further on their rich history and
aesthetics. Jose Vasconcelos visited the Isthmus with Diego Rivera. Edward
Weston photographed the handsome Isthmus women, while Sergei Eisenstein
filmed them. Frida Kahlo wore their garb and headdress and more than once
painted herself against the wild, erotic backdrop of Isthmus flora and fauna,
itself a trope created by Isthmus artists and intellectuals to signify their wild
"otherness;' Despite this star-studded cast of visitors, local political tensions
erupted in periodic rebellion until 1934, when Cardenas pacted with Juchite-
can general Heliodoro Charis, a wily cacique who championed local inde-
pendence but was prepared to cut deals with Oaxacan officials. Charis came
to dominate Juchitecan politics through a combination of strong-arm tactics,
the provision of new social services secured from the federal government,
and his affirmation and protection of local Zapotec culture.;}
The Yaquis, Tzotzils, and Juchitecans each utilized official state dis-
courses related to indigenismo, land reform, and the free municipality to foster
local collective identities. This process leads to the question of how, when, and
where interaction between state discourses and rural societies preserved peas-
ant identities, and how, when, and where it transformed them. State discourses
were multiple and became powerful through their implementation and prac-
tice. They included Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 and an ensuing body
51. Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance, 53; and Francie Chassen Lopez, "Oaxaca: del
Poctiriato a la Revolucion, 1902-19II" (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico, 1986),272.
52. Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance, 28-29, 32, 50, 55.
53 Ibid., 76-81, II9-35; and Rubin, Decentering the Regime, 38-41,45-63.
HAHR I May I Vaughan
of agrarian reform laws, as well as Article 12 -' and an evolving body of lahor
law. Critical as well was the Secretarfa de Educaci6n Publica's (SEP) promo-
tion of a popular national culture, hoth indigenous and folkloric; its rewriting
of Mexican history to endow workers and peasants with redemptive agency: its
targeting of the hody for regeneration through sports, modern medicine, and
hygiene; and its articulation of an emerging discourse of indigenismo t h'lt
sought to modernize the "Indian" while preserving specific practices that pol
icyrnakers thought useful for the modernization of Mexico. These discourses
often had legal, institutional, political, symbolic, and ritualized dimensions< <\
major focus of cultural approaches to history is to understand how local people
received, appropriated, reworked, and rejected these discourses; to sort out
their emancipatory and subjugating dimensions; and to assess their impact on
the formation of a new political culture and forms of citizenship.
Florencia Mallon has argued that certain discourses of the revolutionary
state (for example, those on land reform and the "municipio libre," or local self-
government) resonated in peasant society because they drew from a popular lib-
eral political culture forged around historic peasant interests during the civil
wars of the nineteenth century. i4 Alan Knight and others have argued that pop-
ular mobilization and interests shaped and then radicalized state \;
Between 1915 and 1937, agrarian reform laws became increasingly radical and
inclusive. And after 1930 educational policy was also radicalized in an effort to
redistribute power and resources in rural areas, in large part to counteract
Catholic disaffection with the revolutionary state. In the 1930S the SEP democ-
ratized its representation of Mexican history and national culture. Yet state dis-
courses were never simple reproductions of popular practices and
Policymakers reshaped these to conform to the state's goals in consolidating
power and advancing modernity within a framework of global competition and
particular fonns of technical knowledge. Disdain for rural, popular knowledge
and practices pervaded the formulation and implementation of state discourses.
The ejido as a form of land redistribution was designed to promote state tutelage
and particlllar forms of "modern" and "rational" association, production, and
commercialization. Similarly, when the SEP and the PNR inducted EmiJiano
Zapata into a national iconography of patriot heroes in the 19305, they sani-
tized him, cured him of his womanizing, gambling, and drinking
wrenched him from the company of his cuateI (pals), and deprived him of the
protection of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Sheered of his cultural-and political-<-
54- Ahllon, "Reflections on the Ruins;' 101.
55> See. for example, Knight, "Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois' Nationalist?" 15-" 1<
293
context, Zapata shone forth alone as an icon of the state's comminnent to the
peasantry. 56
When state packaging met local practice, serious negotiation ensued. As
Alonso and Nugent eloquently document in their description of agrarian reform
in Namiquipa, the Namiquipans resolved to practice ancestral forms of land
tenure and use. In her essay in Everyday Forms of State Formation, Elsie Rockwell
argues that in these nationalllocal encounters, the incapacity of the state facili-
tated the persistence of community practices. In the case of state-sponsored edu-
cation in Tlaxcala, the central and state governments had a program for the
schools and could provide teachers, but the building, equipping, and mainte-
nance of the schoolhouse and the feeding and housing of the teacher depended
upon villagers. The incapacity of the state allowed Tlaxcalan villagers to colo-
nize a governmental institution with their own social practices and routines-
forms of school governance, fund-raising, consensus formation, uses of school
facilities, and attendance patterns. However, the school also began to transform
local identities, practices, and routines as teachers channeled village demands for
literacy, jobs, mobility, land, and services through new state programs.57
In the region ofTecamachalco in central Puebla, the state's school project
had little resonance until teachers met agraristas through the familiar form of
collective ritual, the community fiesta. Historically, the fiesta functioned to
confirm power and identity within and between villages. It became an impor-
tant vehicle for agraristas to affirm their emergence as a social group, the more
so as the fiesta came to center on basketball, a new cultural practice at which
agraristas excelled. Teachers promoted male team sports to counter alcoholism
and foster productivist notions of bodily discipline. Villagers took to sports
because they celebrated peasant values of male physical prowess, competition,
and solidarity. 58 Thus, as Claudio Lomnitz notes, the state expanded through
its capacity to tap into local culture and politics. At the same time, local culture
and politics constrained state projects.
59
This dynamic of state expansion and local constraint rested on a politics
56. See Ilene O'Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization
of the Mexican State, [920-[940 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), passim; Vaughan,
Cultural Politics in Revolution, 42; and Samuel Brunk, "Remembering Emiliano Zapata:
Three Moments in the Posthumous Career of the Martyr of Chinameca;' HAHR 78 (1998).
57. Rockwell, "Schools of the Revolution;' 181-208.
58. Mary Kay Vaughan, "The Construction of the Patriotic Festival in Tecamachalco,
Puebla, 1900-1946;' in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule, 221-30.
59. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, "Ritual, Rumor, and Corruption in the Constitution of
Polity in Modern Mexico;' Journal of Latin American Anthropology I (1995).
2 'J-j HAHR / May / Vaughan
of popular complicity through qualified acceptance and ongoing negotia-
tion. \Nithin this context, new rural identities, interests, and practices were
forged and new political cultures took shape. Peasants seriously appropriated
and acted out agrarian law. They became agraristas, joined comite.'i agrm'ios and
comisariados ejidales, forged novel patterns of economic behavior out of old prac-
tices such as cooperativism, and marshaled new state and private resources in
new organizational forms, such as the:: CNC, the CTM (Confederaci6n de
Trabajadores de Mexico), and the Banco Ejidal. Agrarian reform law trans-
formed not only the identities and practices of land reform recipients but also
that of those around them. With the agrarian discourse emerged the concur
rent practices of claim-making based on the authority of written law and on
byzantine chicanery designed to subvert and elude it. Hacendados, along
with their urban professional sons and housewife daughters, became pequerios
propietarioJ. Railroad workers, artisans, and migrants returning from the
United States became agraristas and ejidatarios.
The incapacity of the state encouraged practices outside the bounds of
rational, bureaucratic legality. The central government articulated radical dis-
courses it could not implement. It lacked loyal, competent, technical burea1l-
cracies and resources. Within the state--as well as outside it--powerful inter-
ests opposed redistributive programs and compromised state will at every level
of government. To build its bureaucracies and to implement its programs, the
central government depended largely upon clientelism, political mobilization,
and violence. State weakness increased and shaped peasant participation, nO!
along formal democratic lines, but through practices of caciquismo, patronage,
corruption, electoral manipulation, violence, and protest. The incompleteness
of the state's programs and its privileging of personal, clientelist power fueled
peasants' ongoing use of state-promoted discourses of social justice, democ-
racy, and popular redemption to register grievances, stake claims, and bargain
for resources and inclusion.
State discourses were often introduced, taught, and practiced through sym-
bolic ritual, another working category that is receiving much attention from
scholars. Ritual performance was one of the political fonus drawn from the
deep well-spring of Mexican popular culture. In his IVlan-Gods in the Mexican
Highlands, Serge Gruzinski notes that power, knowledge, and social relations
were cemented in prehispanic central Mexican society through collective ritual
that integrated a multiplicity of aesthetic expressions, including music, color,
dance, theater, and oratory.60 The genius of the Beezley, Martin, and French
00. Serge Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial
Society. 1 )20- T Soo, trans. Eileen Corrigan (Stanford: Stant"rd Univ. Press, [989).l1 - 6,
295
collection, Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Protest, is its ability to capture the Spanish
colonizers' appropriation of ritual as a mode of rule and to trace its evolution
well into the twentieth century. A number of scholars are currently trying to
understand how the revolutionary state seized upon multimedia collective rit-
ual (most frequently performed on an escalating number of national holidays)
to secure its rule and to create a national culture; how the symbols in state-
promoted festivals were themselves appropriated from popular culture and
struggle, then sanitized and repackaged for popular consumption; and how the
state's symbols were reshaped, discarded, reworked, and used at the local level.
Once a discourse is public and empowered, it can be multiply deployed. As
various scholars have shown, the state's canonization of Zapata has facilitated
Morelense and Oaxacan peasants' persistent use of Zapatista iconography and
local memory to press demands and make claims on the government.
61
In 1994
the most challenging rural political movement to the PRI in decades took
Zapata's name and launched a rebellion from the jungles of Chiapas.
In a recent essay, Claudio Lomnitz examines ritual as a mechanism of rule
and form of protest in post-1940 Mexican politics. As a mechanism of rule, he
argues, ritual constructs a high level of integration with a minimal base of
shared culture. It patches over differences, segmentations, and hierarchies to
give the illusion of unity and inclusion in grand baroque fashion. It is a form
through which those speaking different languages appear to speak one and
participate in a shared idiom as they bargain for resources. But ritual has also
served as a form of protest. In the absence of a functioning electoral system,
political protests and grievances have often been enacted through ritualized
performances in public space: sit-ins; office and building occupations; caravans
of honking cars; road blocks; mass demonstrations; lock-outs; bus burnings;
and, with the Zapatistas, the organization of a guerrilla army that has proven
to be more effective symbolically than militarily.62
The categories of discourse and ritual tie into hegemony. Revisionist his-
torians and political scientists have used this concept to mean domination,
whether of a class or power block: its content is narrowly political. Postre-
visionist cultural history seeks a more nuanced, Gramscian understanding of
61. JoAnn Martin, "Contesting Authenticity: Battles over the Representation of
History in Morelos, Mexico;' Ethnohistory 40 (I993); Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the
Labyrinth, 29-37; Florencia E. Mallon, "Local Intellectuals, Regional Mythologies, and the
Mexican State, I850-I994;' Polygraph IO (I998); and Lynn Stephen, "Pro-Zapatista and
Pro-PRI: Resolving the Contradictions of Zapatismo in Rural Oaxaca;' Latin American
Research Review 32, no. 2 (I997).
62. Lomnitz-Adler, "Ritual, Rumor;' 20-47.
hegemony, one that involves some degree of consensus, contains a cultural
dimension, and is sensitive to issues of time and space, in the sense of geo-
graphical regions. Hegemony so understood does not obviate the usc of coer
cion nor does it imply the citizenry's acceptance of every aspect of the state's
cultural project. As Florencia Mallon notes, "the leaders of a particular mo\'(>
ment or coalition achieve hegemony as an end point only when they effec-
tively garner for themselves ongoing legitimacy and support. They are suc-
cessful in doing so if they partially incorporate the political aspirations or
discourses of the movement's supporters .... Only then can they rule through
a combination of coercion and consent." Mallon argues that the state that
emerged from the Mexican Revolution achieved hegemony because it partially
incorporated popular aspirations and discourses.";
For Mallon, hegemony is also an ongoing process: it is constantly being
negotiated at local, regional, and national levels. As these political arenas
interact, they redefine one another and the balance of forces within them.
M
In
his essay in Everyday Forms of State Formation, William Roseberry takes up the
notion of hegemony as ongoing, multilayered, geographically divergent, and
conflictive. He argues that the term should be understood as a "problematic,
contested, political process of domination and struggle" through which a lan-
guage is constructed for expressing both acceptance and discontent. It is, 1I1
other words, a "common framework for living in, discussing, and acting upon
social orders characterized by domination." Contention and struggle between
ruling and dominated groups take place within "a field of force" that connects
both groups in organic relations.!"
\,:Vhile Roseberry is hesitant to assert that such a field of force and com-
mon language emerged from the Mexican Revolution, I argue that they were
forged in the 1930S. After examining the implementation of socialist education
in four rural societIes in northern and central Mexico during that decade, I
concluded that the state's cultural revolution was not the successful imposition
of its modernization program but the local-level negotiation of this program
within the context of dynamic power relations. These negotiations were parr
of a reconstruction of local c0111111unities within a reorganization of regional
political, economic, and sociocultural relations. As the school became an arena
for intense, often violent negotiations over power, culhlre, knowledge, and
63. Nlallon, "Reflections on the Ruins," 70-71. 105.
64- Ibid., 70-7l.
65. \Villiam Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention;' in Joseph and
Nugent, Everyday j'-'ormI of State F01'11lation, 358. 361, 364-66.
297
rights, rural communities affirmed local identities and cultural practices. For
its part, the central state succeeded in nurturing an inclusive, multiethnic, pop-
ulist nationalism and in creating a legal apparatus, political associations, and
institutions (e.g. the CNC, SEP, Banco Ejidal, and CTM) that would ensure
the subordination of the peasantry while allowing it to process claims and
articulate its needs and interests.
In the four societies I examined, the following concepts were central to a
language for registering dissent and consent: I) the rights of collective groups
to social justice; 2) the rights of groups and individuals to inclusion in the
modernist project; and 3) the membership of groups and individuals in a
multicultural, multi ethnic society. Each of these was locally understood. For
example, for agrarista campesinos in central Puebla, the notion of collective
rights recalled the rights of peasant villages to subsistence in an ancient moral
economy once dominated by landlords and kings but refashioned through
the revolutionary experience to mean the rights of modern citizens. These
were engraved in the Mexican Constitution, which was understood as having
emanated from popular struggle. The Yaquis understood the Constitution of
1917 in a similar way. However, for them collective rights meant rights to eth-
nic autonomy, "ancient" rights defended through prolonged war and recu-
perated through revolutionary struggle. Both the Tecamachalquenos and the
Yaquis insisted that the government had an obligation to honor their respec-
tive rights.
66
Although their concerns are distinct, Jeffrey Rubin and Claudio Lomnitz
have also used the concept of hegemony to explain the political configuration
that emerged from the Mexican revolutionary process.
67
Lomnitz critiques
synthetic analyses that posit a single Mexican culture; Rubin challenges corpo-
ratist approaches to Mexican politics. However, their treatment of hegemony
shares common elements. They reject notions of centralized power and a
homogeneous national culture. They emphasize the importance of regional
and local political formations that took shape between 1910 and 1940 and
afterward mediated the impact of central state directives, institutions, agen-
cies, and political associations, as well as the pace of economic growth. Both
scholars emphasize the cultural aspects of politics: its discursive and symbolic
dimensions and relationship to daily life.
66. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 189-201.
67 . For definitions and applications of the concept of hegemony, see Lomnitz-Adler,
Exits from the Labyrinth, 27-32, 56-82; as well as Rubin, "Decentering the Regime;'
86-95, and Decentering the Regime, II-2 3,42-45, 238-64.
In his analysis of the state of Morelos, which underwent an agrarian rev--
olution, Lomnitz emphasizes the persistent discourse of Zapatismo through
which rural villagers, regional elites, and national political organizations
negotiated their interests. In his treaunent of the Huasteca Potosina, a region
that did not experience a transformation in property or power relations dur-
ing the revolution, Lomnitz describes a ranchero culture that takes pride in
masculine skills of horsemanship and drinking, along with the conque" of
nature, Indians, and women. This culture (manifested in the socializing sites
of markets, cockfights, horse races, fairs, weddings, and political rallies) IS the
idiom that binds the geographically dispersed ruling group of rancheros and
secures their domination over subordinate cowhands. Through this shared
discourse, rancheros and cowhands alike marginalize, disdain, and exploit Nahua
and Huasteco villagers. Lomnitz attributes the sustained success of this dis-
course in large part to the activities of General Gonzalo Santos, the cacique
who ruled the region from the 19305 to 1959, isolating it from the impact of
industrialization and agrarian reform. Lomnitz sees Santos as having melded
nineteenth-century popular liberalism, understood as a defense of individual-
ism and local autonomy, into a swaggering, gun-toting, cowboy machismo. It
was this machista image that Santos used in negotiation with the central gov--
ernment, warding off interventions and obtaining favors for his region. He
also used it and paternalism to maintain social cohesion in the Huasteca. Thus
through compadrazgo he established ritual kinship ties to practically everyone
in the Huasteca; and by providing Indian communities with some land and
services he forged a series of patron-client relations that helped ensure their
loyalty. In addition, by drawing ti-om indigenous and mestizo cultures, he
constructed his persona as a living pact with the devil. He used the pact to
explain-indeed, to revel in--his crimes. He gave his enemies three options:
"Encierro, destierro, 0 entierro" (Jail, exile, or
Rubin pins his own analysis of postrevolutionary PRIIstate hegemony on
the activities of such cacicazgos. For him the key issue was the formation of
distinct regional pacts that during the Cardenas presidency reinforced the
power of the center. Generalizing from the experience of Juchitan and compar-
ing it with those of several other regions, he argues that these regional pacts
often took the form of cacicazgos, or personal dynasties, that although pater-
nalistic and authoritarian, sheltered local cultural forms by mediating rhe
impact of federal directives and market forces. Rubin argues that the collapse
6H. On Morelos and the Huasteca Potosina, see Lomnitz-Adler, F.xitJ from the
Labyrinth, 56-Hz, [5<;--201.
299
of these pacts around 1960 combined with geographically differentiated pro-
cesses of socioeconomic change to produce regionally distinct political move-
ments that challenged PRIIstate hegemonic equilibrium.
69
Lomnitz's evidence supports Rubin's contention for San Luis Potosi, but
not for Morelos, where institutional and associational mechanisms and the
discourses that animate them have been more important than regional
caciques to politics. Neither Rubin's nor Lomnitz's studies are specifically his-
torical. Rather, they marshal historical materials to explain the present-for
Rubin, the emergence of the Coalici6n Obrera, Campesina, Estudiantil del
Istmo, an opposition political movement, in Juchitan; and for Lomnitz, cul-
tural production in regional space in the 1980s. Similarly, neither Mallon's
nor my assertions about hegemony in post- 1940 Mexico are grounded in
empirical research in the period for which we allege this hegemony func-
tioned.
Thus what we need is an ethnographic history of the post- 1940 PRI
state that is focused on the subject-the citizen-and based upon local stud-
ies in comparative perspective. We must supplement the very useful studies
of caciques, dominant classes, and political brokers that typify post-1940
regional and local history with research that documents how particular state
routines, practices, moral prescriptions, laws, and developmentalist and
infrastructural projects have impacted, and been mediated by, the cultural
behaviors of rural Mexicans. We need to assess these processes within the
context of rapid economic modernization, with its attendant impact on social
differentiation, class formation, demographic explosion and migratory move-
ments. Such an analysis would deconstruct the state as it operated at local,
regional, and national levels, within heterogeneous and often competing
agencies, ministries, and elected bodies in the context of changing policies,
personnel, and resources. It would necessarily examine the party apparatus
and popular and civic organizations. It would query how the PRI/state simul-
taneously fostered and deformed civil society; that is, how it created the con-
ditions for the emergence of civil society while at the same time attempting
to control its associations. It would ask how laws and state prescriptions have
been embraced and averted. It would inquire into the role of violence and
corruption in political life. It would consider the impact of an expanding
educational system and a proliferating mass print, electronic, and perfor-
mance media on citizen formation. It would not neglect the church as it sal-
lied forth after 1940 with yet another spiritual reconquest-this time cast in
69. Rubin, "Decentering the Regime;' 103 2 I, and Decentering the Regime, 2 3 8 ~ 7 6
lOU HAHR I May I Vaughan
the rhetoric of the Cold War-only to find itself divided by Vatican 11 in
the 1960s, then threatened by the brush fires of evangelical Protestantism
in the 1980s.
Such an analysis would be gendered. The Mexican Revolution and the
process of postrevolutionary state formation reaffirmed a male monopoly of
politics, violence, land, and other economic resources. Land reform promised
to shore up patriarchy based upon the family as a productive unit and the comi-
sariado ejidal and CNC as male reserves. In the 1920S federal and state govern-
ments made an effort to bring rural women into civic life through patriotic
domesticity. Through schools, pamphlets, lectures, and organizations, they
introduced these women to "modern" notions of health, hygiene, medicine,
household organization, and child development and attempted to engage
them in crusades for community hygiene and public works or in the forma-
tion of cooperatives for domestically produced goods. These efforts were not
particularly successful. They seemed to work only in those rare instances
when there was a convergence between state and local cultures, an abundance
of resources, and a minimum of violence. Fears about the religiosity of women
deterred the national congress from granting them the right to vote in national
elections until 1953. But a glacial shift in post-1940 society has gradually
empowered women and youth at the expense of older men. In rural areas this
shift has been linked to the economic decline of peasant agriculture and to the
diversification of economic activities in the countryside and elsewhere. It has
also been linked to the demographic explosion; to changing state policies of
education, health, and development; and to the proliferation of the mass
mediaJo But it still remains to be determined how the social empowerment of
70. On efforts to analyze these processes historically, see Heather Fowler-Salamini
and Mary Kay Vaughan, introduction to Women of the Mexican Countryside; as well as the
following articles in the same volume: Patricia Arias, "Three Microhistories of Women\
Work in Rural Mexico"; Soledad Gonzalez Montes, "Intergenerational and Gender
Relations in the Transition from a Peasant to a Diversified Economy"; Gail Mummert,
"From Metate to Despate: Rural Mexican Women's Salaried Labor and the Redefinition of
Gendered Spaces and Roles"; and Maria da Gloria Marroni de Velazquez, "Changes in
Rural Society and Domestic Labor in Atiixco, Puebla, 1940- 1990'" On women and
politics, see, among others in a rapidly expanding literature, JoAnn Martin,
"Antagonisms of Gender and Class in '\lorelos," also in Fowler-Salamini and Vaughan,
Women of the ]Vlexican Countryside, and "Motherhood and Power: The Production of
a Woman's Culture of Politics in a :\lexican Community," American Ethnologist 17 (1<)90);
Lynn Stephen, Zapotec Women (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, It)91); and Allison Greene.
"Cablevision(nation) in Rural Yucatan: Performing Modernity and j'vlexicanidad,
1992-<)5," in Representing Mexico: Transnationali.l7n and the Politics o{Cultu1'e since the
3
01
women and youth has affected the exercise of citizenship and the formation of
state subjects over time.
Finally, an ethnographic history of the state must be transnational in
dimension. It must consider not only the transnational opportunities and con-
straints that shape national policies in Mexico, but the ways in which the pres-
ence or absence of transnational capital has reshaped regional sociopolitical
configurations. It should look at the ways in which transnational migrations
and media have altered cultural, political, and economic behavior in rural com-
munities and how transnational popular culture, articulated through electronic,
print, and sound media, have become part of daily life throughout Mexico.
Helpful in this respect will be the forthcoming volume edited by Eric Zolov,
Anne Rubinstein, and Gilbert Joseph on the post-I940 impact of transnational
processes on such aspects of Mexican popular culture as tourism, film, televi-
sion, comic books, and sports.7!
Methodology and Sources
In closing I want to say something about methodology. The methods and
concepts of cultural historians have been subjected to critique by social sci-
ence historians, such as Stephen Haber, who argue that their sources and
methods (and not those of cultural historians) can produce objective, scien-
tifically verifiable history-as if statistics were not contingent upon the
biases of those who construct categories of analysis, upon the diligence and
preferences of those who collect them, and upon the mathematical models of
those who manipulate them.
72
The crux of the argument against cultural his-
tory as it is being practiced by some Mexicanists seems to rest on what is
alleged to be the paucity of an evidentiary base for a meaningful examination
of the lives and activities of those who did not command and dominate the
written record. Eric Van Young, along with Allen Wells and GilbertJoseph,
have written eloquently about the issue of sources, especially in regard to the
difficulty of imputing motives to peasant action.7
3
My argument, however, is
Revolution, eds. Eric Zolov, Anne Rubenstein, and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, forthcoming).
7I. Zolov, Rubenstein, and Joseph, Representing Mexico.
72. Stephen H. Haber, "The Worst of Both Worlds: The New Cultural History of
Mexico;' Mexican StudieslEstudios Mexicanos 13 (I997)'
73. Eric Van Young, "To See Someone Not Seeing: Historical Studies of Peasants
and Politics in Mexico;' Mexican StudieslErtudios Mexicanos 6 (I990), and "The Cuautla
j02 HAHR I May I Vaughan
that one can amass a strong evidentiary base for writing about rural people
in twentieth-century Mexico, especially when the problem is approached as
local history.
Local history is both a concept and a method.7
4
As a concept, it seeks to
reconstruct local knowledge and action to reveal the limits of general pro-
cesses, or the visions and conceptions that modify, confront, and reinterpret
the external into a body of knowledge that may run counter to what is pre-
scribed or imagined at regional, national, and international levels. At the
same time, such investigation uncovers the local world as dynamic, rather
than static, that is, as historical. For purposes of elaborating an ethnographic
history of the state, local history should meticulously identify and analyze
the interplay among state forms and practices, market forces, and social
subjects. As a method, local history may be more effective than trying to
read popular consciousness and culture across regions because it contextu
alizes meaning and action. Specificity becomes the vehicle for comparison.
Carrying out a specific case study or studies in a comparative framework is
the optimal methodology for constructing an ethnographic history of the
state.
In doing local history, the historian operates differently from the cultural
anthropologist who gathers data, interprets from the ethnographic present,
and marshals historical documentation to better understand the present. As an
ethnographer, the historian works more like an archaeologist, unearthing
particularly valuable finds-sets of documents such as criminal proceedings,
judicial records, agrarian reform expedientes, and the reports of school inspec-
tors. For twentieth-century Mexican rural history, we are privileged to have
national, regional, and municipal archives where the written record is rohustly
multivocal. Campesinos took the litigious, petitionary mode of Mexican polit-
ical culture to frenzied heights, while state agents sought to impose their proj-
ects, categories, and routines through new languages and institutions at differ-
ent levels of government.
As Natalie Davis has suggested in her Fiction in the Archives, a set of archi-
val documents should be read in layers. The documents have to be read for an
understanding of vertical power relations and the language deployed in such
Lazarus: Double Subjectives in Reading 1exts on Popular Collective Action;' Colonial/,Iltin
American Revie'w 2 (I993); and Wells and Joseph, Summn' ofDiJcontent, <)-17-
74- See Ginzburg, "Microhistory."
3
0
3
encounters of unequal power, and they have to be read to uncover horizontal
relations and meanings, i.e., the moral codes and power networks among the
dominatedJ5 To read in layers, historians have to be detectives, as Carlo
Ginzburg suggests/
6
Taking an obscure clue from a first reading of a particu-
lar kind of document (e.g. agrarian reform files), they must gather a mass of
lateral evidence from other sources in order to bring sharper insight to
repeated rereadings. Lateral evidence includes other sets of archival documen-
tation from different agencies and levels of the state. For example, material in
municipal archives can help to flesh out local power relations while revealing
different uses of language and symbols. Census data, which is often not reli-
able for sophisticated statistical analysis, can be used to understand the dynam-
ics of socioeconomic relations. The partisan local press, the penny press, and
religious pamphletry can help to elucidate the language and movements of
politics and culture in critical ways. In twentieth-century Mexican rural his-
tory, we are also fortunate to have access to the studies and field notes of
anthropologists (such as Spicer, Redfield, Lewis), which although they subject
local culture to particular interpretive paradigms nonetheless provide a wealth
of information once we become sensitive to the narrative strategies of inter-
viewers and interviewees. We have oral testimony, increasingly useful as it is
subjected to layered readings through a refined methodology. We may con-
duct the interviews ourselves or draw upon an increasing number of collec-
tions of local testimony and memory; we also have collections of folk music,
tales, dance, and retablos/
7
In certain rich and rare instances, we have collec-
75. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in
Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987), 7-35. For a good example
of layered readings in current Mexican historiography, see David Frye's analysis of colonial
documents in Indians into Mexicans, 70-88.
76. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historiml Method, trans. John and Anne C.
Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992),96-125.
77. For local testimony and memory see, among the many, Pia, "Leyendas y tradici6n
oral"; Moheno, Las historias y los hombres; Salvador Sotelo Arevalo, Historia de mi vida:
autobiografia y memorias de un maestro rural en Mexico, 1904-[965, presentation by Martin
Sanchez and Adonai Sotelo (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Hist6ricos de la
Revoluci6n Mexicana, 1996); Mayo Murrieta and Maria Eugenia Graf, Por el milagro de
aferrarse: tierra y vecindad en el Valle del Yaqui (Hermosillo: EI Colegio de Sonora; Instituto
Tecnol6gico de Sonora; Instituto Sonorense de Cultura, 1992); and Soledad Gonzalez
Montes and Alejandro Patino Diaz, Memoria campesina: la historia de Xalatlaco contada por su
gente (Toluca: lnstituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 1994). For folk music, tales, dance, and
tions of proverbs, which for some historians reveal the peasantry's legal code .'Il
As we move deeper and closer to the present, we can access comic books,
newspapers, films, and radio and television programming.
Cultural historians work comparatively, reading about similar situations
and cultures across space and time. '10 complement a mass of lateral docu-
mentation, they also move backward and forward in history. Elsie Rockwell's
ethnography of schools in contemporary Tlaxcala facilitated her highly inno-
vative and insightful reading of the history of those schools in the f920S and
1930S, as did her immersion in the history of Tlaxcalan schools during the
Porfiriato. As cultural anthropologists, Ana Maria Alonso and Daniel Nugent
worked in similar ways in their analyses of Namiquipa during the revolution
-moving back to late viceregal times to understand a particular notion of
honor linked to the terms of the community's foundation and using contem-
porary discourse and oral testimony to understand the persistence of this
notion and its centrality to Namiquipans' experience of the revolution. One
of the most creative examples of such up- and down-streaming is anthropol-
ogist David Frye's Indians into Mexicans. By juxtaposing contemporary oral
histories and documents from different moments in historical time, Frve
shows how community identity in Mezquitic, San Luis PotoSI, has shifted in
interaction with changing state discourses, economic processes, and popular
mobilizations.
In my judgement, more problematic than the question of an eviden-
tiary base for doing cultural history is the current binational imbalance in
research. To do this we have relied heavily 011 the impressive production of
regional and local history done by Mexican scholars since the 1980s. \Ve
depend as well on their collections oflocal testimony and memory. We learn
from and incorporate Mexican anthropological and sociological studies that
trace historical practices of communities related to water, reproductive health,
women's work, market consumption, land use, and government, as well ,1S
retablos, see, for example, Carrasco, Catvliciwno popula,' de lo.r 7iImscos; Catherine Heau.
"Trova popular y identidad cultural en Morelos;' in Aforelos: tinco siglos de historia regional,
cd. Horacio Crespo (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Hist6ricos del Agrarismo en
Mexico, 1984); Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, /Hil'acies on tbe Border: Retablos ot
MexiClJn 11,1igrantf to tbe United States (fucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995); and Arturo
Chamorro, ed., Sabiduria popular: memorias de la primera mesa redonda de folklv're V
etnomusicologia (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoac:in, 19H3)'
78. Heron Perez Martinez, POl' el refrane1'o mexicano (Monterrey: Universidad
Aut6noma de Nuevo Le6n, 1988), and El bab/ar lapidario: ensayo de paremiologill mexi(J1lt1
(Zamora: El Colegio de lVlichoacin, 1<)96)
those that document class formation and political domination.7
9
But we have
yet to enter into dialogue with a definable group of Mexican historians who
share these cultural approaches to the rural history of the Mexican Revolu-
tion. We need to foster such a dialogue in order to enrich this historiographic
project.
79. For example, in addition to those noted in the citations, see also Patricia Avila
Garcia, Escasez de agua en una region indigena: el caso de fa meseta pure pecha (Zamora: El
Colegio de Michoacan, 1996); Guillermo de la Peria, "Poder local, poder regional:
perspectivas socioantropoI6gicas;' in Poder local, poder regional, eds. Jorge Padua and Alain
Vanneph (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, Centro de Estudios Sociol6gicos, 1986), and
"Populism, Regional Power, and Political Mediation: SouthernJalisco, 1900-1980;' in
Mexico's Regions: Comparative History and Development, ed. Eric Van Young (San Diego:
Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1992); and Marfa Teresa Sierra, Discurso, cultura y poder:
el ejercicio de la autoridad en los pueblos hiidhiius del Valle del Mezquital (Mexico City: Centro
de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologfa Social, 1992).
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Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics

in the Mexican Revolution

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