With the publication of Francie Chassen-López's From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, 1867–1911 in 2005, Mark Overmeyer-Velázquez's Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian, Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006, Patrick J. McNamara's Sons of the Sierra: Júarez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 in 2007, and Benjamin T. Smith's Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca in 2009, historians now have an encyclopaedic account of the politics of this fascinating but long-ignored state from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Between them these authors have rewritten the narrative of this relatively isolated, ethnically heterogeneous and geographically fragmented region.
With Pistoleros, Smith joins the new generation of Mexicanists who have concluded, based on intensive archival research at the state and local levels, that the once-posited omnipotent power of the post-revolutionary one-party state never existed. Strong and ruthless though they may have been, neither the federal government nor its collaborator, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), wielded unchallenged power. No matter what the regime attempted, it encountered resistance, had to constantly negotiate, and was often stymied or ignored at every level. Nothing evaded the filters of local political networks and local traditions. To Smith, local power structures, which resulted from ‘a series of historical, political, cultural, and social contexts’, ‘modified, contradicted, and paralyzed’ the policies of the state.
The crucial participants were local political bosses, known as caciques, and local informal elite networks, known as camarillas. The caciques acted as intermediaries between the villages or municipalities and the outside world. Given the geographical isolation of much of Oaxaca, there were ample opportunities for such people. Smith identifies three important camarillas: the rich elites of the Central Valley (vallistocracia), the hacendados of Jamiltepec and the commercial farmers (finqueros) of Tuxtepec.
The rural caciques divided along ethnic lines into two groups. The first consisted of Indian or mestizo bosses in indigenous areas where communal lands remained. The second was made up of Hispanics in commercial agricultural areas, where the social structure from the Díaz era continued. There was contention in the cacicazgos (areas ruled by caciques) because the old ways of deference to experienced elders blocked the advancement of the younger generation returned from the wars. Smith makes a considerable contribution in his detailed illumination of how the caciques operated, examining closely four cases. This is crucial because although the local bosses ‘came to form the backbone of the regime's capacity to govern rural Mexico’, we know almost nothing about them.
In considerable detail Smith narrates the interplay of local and state politics, explaining how successive governors conflicted and cooperated with various popular organisations, bosses and camarillas. They formed ‘loose, heterogeneous and shifting’ coalitions (p. 103). Often the combination of local factionalism and the weakness of the state thwarted the incipient corporatist regime Cárdenas was constructing. In one revealing case, the author picks up the narrative begun by Patrick McNamara relating the politics of the Sierra Júarez during the Cárdenas era. According to Smith, although initially the Cárdenas reforms threatened the serranos' ‘attachment to municipal autonomy and rule’, by 1940 the inhabitants had negotiated new arrangements that were to last another decade (pp. 131–2). Thus, despite the tidal wave of agrarismo, labour reform and federalised education set off by the Cardenistas, the locals forged agreements based on their own politics and traditions. The Sierra Júarez did not submit to the new corporate caciques or the regimentation of the peasant leagues or labour unions.
Perhaps the most important of the caciques of the post-revolutionary period was Heliodoro Charis Castro in Juchitán. Charis was in his early twenties when he took over Juchitán in 1920 as a staunch ally of Alvaro Obregón. The story of how he resisted and negotiated with Cárdenas is a compelling example of the tenuousness of Cardenista rule and the important role that indigenous people, in this instance Zapotecs, played in the politics of the time. Smith presents four cases, including Charis, which clearly indicate that the national state did not have the resources to reach into the regions and that Cárdenas valued stability to an extent that he would accept local autonomy as its cost. Cynically (or realistically), Cárdenas saw these local bosses or regional strongmen as counterweights to overly ambitious governors.
While Smith persuasively contradicts the notion of the all-powerful central government/political party for the 1920s and 1930s, he is not the only researcher to discover the continuation of local and regional autonomy for these decades – and perhaps, given the exigencies of economic and political reconstruction after a long series of civil wars and uprisings, this finding is not so surprising after all. But Smith is quite at the forefront in detailing how local autonomy was sustained well into the 1940s, especially from 1946 to 1952, when President Miguel Alemán Valdés supposedly cracked the whip. Smith argues that ‘the period 1940 to 1944 was characterized by volatility, decentralized government, growing urban discontent, and unresolved tensions between the president, the state governor, and Oaxaca's multifarious regional caciques’ (p. 290).
Centralisation made some inroads in the late 1940s. From 1947 to 1950, Oaxaca Governor Eduardo Vasconcelos put together a coalition of urban artisans, vendors, workers and the elite of the Central Valley which was much more amenable to the dictates of the national regime. Nonetheless, resistance to the incursion of centralisation continued and more than a few of the rural caciques maintained their positions.
Smith also dispels the notion of any Pax PRI in the post-Second World War years. There were two notable popular movements in Oaxaca during this period. The first caused the removal of Governor Eduardo Sánchez Caro in 1946, and the second unseated Governor Manuel Mayoral Heredia in 1952. The latter is of particular interest, because female street vendors spearheaded the protests.
Although Smith's research makes it quite clear that neither the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution, PRM, later the PRI) nor the apparatus of the national government were nearly as powerful as observers once believed, and despite the fact that he insists that Oaxacans had much more to say about the governance of their everyday lives than we formerly thought, ironically his findings do not make us feel any better about the way the revolution turned out. Local autonomy certainly did not make for less corruption, and only erratically did it assure more democratic politics. Nor is it likely that Oaxacans got the kind of lives they wanted; they remained poverty-stricken and badly educated.
