Caplan's welcome study on how nineteenth-century liberalism was understood, appropriated, translated and applied in provincial Mexico, with the onus being on how the indigenous communities of Oaxaca and Yucatán made national political projects work for them (or not, as the case may be), follows in the tradition of fine scholars such as Guy Thomson and Peter Guardino. It provides a groundbreaking interpretation of early national politics that eloquently demonstrates the extent to which indígenas, as the author likes to refer to them, actively engaged with the political ideas and practices that became prevalent after the consummation of independence. Belonging to that genealogy of scholarship that has shown how liberalism and/or federalism found a popular voice at a local or regional level, Caplan's research allows us to appreciate the extent to which the transition to liberalism, from its earliest manifestations as expressed in the 1812 Cádiz Constitution to its eventual triumph as the defining cornerstone of the Porfirian nation-state, was one characterised by ongoing negotiation. Breaking away from the idea that gentlemanly criollos imposed their liberal project on the nation from the enlightened and honourable institutions and salons of the capital, Caplan's rural portrait is beautifully crafted around the tensions that arose with regard to the negotiated assimilation and implementation of liberal policies and practices in the remote Indian-dominated villages of Oaxaca and Yucatán. Worthy of note is that this was a period in which there was as much change as there was continuity. Making use of documents found in the state and municipal archives of Oaxaca and Yucatán, as well as national archives like the Archivo General de la Nación (for example, council minutes, indigenous representations, penal proceedings, tax records, and correspondence between local political figures such as sub-prefects, mayors and judges), while bringing into play recent historiographical findings, Caplan succeeds in developing a particularly persuasive argument that combines the local with the national, ensuring her comparative regional history of Oaxaca and Yucatán never loses sight of the broader picture.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (just considering how the Roman Catholic faith acquired a very particular indigenous flavour as part of a similarly negotiated process of evangelisation), albeit noted for the first time in Caplan's study with regards to early republican politics, Oaxacan and Yucatecan local liberalism was dynamically syncretic: a continuously changing, fluid and hybrid variant of the kind of liberalism that creole intellectuals such as José María Luis Mora, Lorenzo de Zavala, Valentín Gómez Farías and Mariano Otero advocated in the corridors of the National Palace. It was a liberalism that incorporated local indigenous customs and colonial practices, and entered into dialogue with local circumstances and needs as the independent nation experimented with several different constitutions. If one may be allowed to recall Karl Marx's dialectical materialist view, the synthetic nature of Oaxacan and, to a lesser extent, Yucatecan local liberalism was the result of the national liberal thesis combining with, rather than overpowering, its traditional indigenous village antithesis.

Having said this, Caplan's indigenous citizens were not fundamentally or intrinsically traditional. They were actively predisposed to grapple with the new ideologies and institutions, and to find ways of ensuring these aided them in their own specific attempts at resolving the political and systemic problems they faced on a daily basis at a local level. That their liberalism did not necessarily evolve into the creed which the 1857 generation of the Reforma came to espouse is one of the fascinating aspects of Caplan's book: a time would come when national liberals would take on local liberals as the quest for nation-state homogeneity became a key goal of Benito Juárez and his party. Interestingly, local liberals would resist the national reforms, believing their hybrid liberalism to be a preferable form to that advocated by the authors of the reform laws of 1855–7. In Oaxaca, the self-termed liberal state government would thus find itself mediating between Miguel Lerdo de Tejada's law of 25 June 1856, the national brand of liberalism and local indigenous interests (as well Oaxaca's own particular hybrid regional–local liberal consensus).

That Caplan has chosen to concentrate on two different regional contexts with very different indigenous and non-indigenous populations affords her study praiseworthy scope and depth. Rather than assume, from the Oaxacan experience, that all local liberalisms were syncretic and entailed a negotiated process in which villagers succeeded in reinterpreting and reorienting national liberal trends to suit their needs, the Yucatecan case study forces us to appreciate how different the early national period was from one given region to another. In Oaxaca the transition to liberalism was relatively peaceful. In Yucatán it entailed significant violence, culminating in the particularly sanguinary Caste War of 1847–55, in which between 200,000 and 300,000 Yucatecans lost their lives. Caplan gives a number of reasons for this (for example, Yucatecan villages housed both indigenous and non-indigenous people in ways that differed significantly from Oaxaca), but ultimately argues that, unlike Oaxaca, the local Yucatecan political culture of protection of indigenous practices and needs was in direct conflict with the developing free-market economic impulses of the region's entrepreneurial elite. The different regional experience of the transition to liberalism, negotiated in one state, brutally fought over in another, would result, by the second half of the century, in indigenous rights and privileges remaining part of the political culture of liberal Oaxaca, while they were completely eradicated in Yucatán. The liberal state would consequently acknowledge and accommodate, to a certain extent, indigenous customs in Oaxaca. In Yucatán, following the Caste War, the liberal state would eliminate indígena political participation, setting the indigenous communities aside and apart from it.

Indigenous Citizens is structured in such a way that, following an introductory discussion of Mexico's many liberalisms and a comparative chapter on Oaxaca and Yucatán between 1812 and 1821, it focuses on the Oaxacan and Yucatecan case studies alternatively; the book's analysis follows the chronology from independence to the pre-Mexican-American War/Caste War period in chapters 3 and 4, and then the reform period in chapters 5 and 6, with the comparative conclusion stretching into the Porfiriato. This is, undoubtedly, a major contribution to the historiography, and one, moreover, that opens up future lines of enquiry into the nature of local liberalism in other states such as Chiapas and Michoacán. Caplan deserves to be congratulated for writing such a groundbreaking piece of research.