In this excellent and well-written book, Colby Ristow demonstrates that both the short-lived Chegomista rebellion in Juchitán, Oaxaca in 1911 and elite reactions to it are critically important for understanding much longer-term political phenomena in Mexico, from the colonial era into the twentieth century, with some important arguments about the nineteenth century made along the way.
The greatest strength of this work is Ristow's intertwining of the history of Juchitán with that of Mexico as a whole. Throughout, he weaves together local, state, and national histories to give the broader context for Juchitán's particular historical experience and its national significance. This is the greatest challenge of writing regional history, and Ristow achieves it both effectively and elegantly. Indeed, he has a great deal to say about Mexico as a whole in the much longer term. This includes, most importantly, his explanations of the simmering crisis of Liberalism in Mexico that boiled over with Francisco I. Madero's rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, which sparked the Mexican Revolution. It also unleashed popular revolts, including those of indigenous people in Oaxaca. Ristow shows that while they were inspired by Liberals’ assertions of popular sovereignty, popular revolutionary movements, like that of local mestizo politician Che Gómez, were not satisfied by Liberal elites’ proffer of individual electoral rights as the sole remedy for longstanding exclusion and inequalities.
Ristow gives us a compelling local case study of why the Mexican Revolution was so heterogeneous from the outset, why Liberalism meant so many different things to so many revolutionary factions, and why inequalities and ethnic segregation survived the Revolution intact: because elites maintained Porfirian social and spatial structures in the interest of “order.” This is an exceptionally clear explanation of how and why Liberals often came to be pitted against revolutionary factions representing workers and the rural poor. This explanation sheds fresh light on the course of the Revolution and Mexico's postrevolutionary politics across its regions.
Ristow also does the field a real service with his compelling account of the possibly insurmountable political challenges Madero faced in the earliest days of his ill-fated presidency. This includes elucidations of why Madero's fragile coalition was so unstable, and why the Chegomista uprising became such a defining challenge for Madero to manage, contributing to the well-known complaints by his critics on both left and right: that he was an ineffectual leader who capitulated to his antagonists, that he perpetuated pre-revolutionary tyranny and inequities, and that he turned against popular social revolutionaries, most famously Emiliano Zapata. Yet, Ristow convincingly argues that Madero's handling of the less well-known Chegomista affair was just as defining to his presidency. Even without Zapatista-style redistributionist demands, Gómez's very claims to authority as a representative of a long- disenfranchised indigenous majority were frightening enough to Liberals for them to justify his movement's violent suppression. To do so, anxious Liberal elites used much older prerevolutionary racist tropes to dismiss Gómez as a simple cacique and his indigenous supporters as his ignorant, apolitical dupes.
Ristow thus gives us fresh insight into how and why pre-revolutionary prejudices undermined postrevolutionary social reconciliation and political reconstruction, demonstrating that this was not just a matter of poor leadership or naiveté by the first revolutionary generation. He gives historians of later periods much to consider about how those same challenges confounded generations of postrevolutionary politicians and contributed to undermining the implementation of revolutionary ideals even when and where the political will to sustain them existed.
Ristow writes that “nowhere in Mexico cut a more somber image of the faded hope of revolution than Juchitán” (147). In detailing the course of the Chegomista rebellion and its aftermath, Ristow gives us an insightful, early example of how and why arguments about the meanings of Mexican citizenship that predated the Revolution remained unresolved, with consequences that in the long term included the continuing and sometimes violent suppression, marginalization, and exploitation of many traditionally disenfranchised elements of the nation.
