Anyone who has dipped into judicial archives will recall the frisson police and court records convey of the melodramas of everyday life – assault, theft, homicide, fraud, insult, scandal, public disorder and rebellion – dramatised occasionally by dusty stacks of implements – daggers, clubs, guns and bloodied clothing – kept as evidence. Yet, however compelling as glimpses of ‘real life’, such stories are hard to place within the broader narratives or grander interpretations favoured by academic historians. William Taylor's Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford University Press, 1979), which used local court records to illuminate the culture and politics of everyday village life in eighteenth-century New Spain, has not been replicated for the national period. Over the past 40 years, regional and local historians inspired by Taylor have explored how, after Independence, social and political life changed as new laws and institutions, informed by liberal principles of legal equality and individual citizenship, replaced the corporate divisions, ethnic hierarchies and absolutist institutions of colonial rule. But the preference has been for more sensational themes such as peasant rebelliousness and cacique and caudillo politics over the more prosaic practices of local justice. Apart from narrowness of geographical scale, these studies are further limited as windows into the workings of the law by their narrow time frames – concerned above all with periods of political upheaval such as provincial rebellions, and civil and patriotic wars. In addition, their concern with addressing particular theoretical paradigms – hegemony and counter-hegemony, popular federalism and popular liberalism, national or communal identity – further restricts their use for understanding wider contexts or the longue durée. Although studies have appeared recently on the workings of Mexico's higher levels of justice, such as the Supreme Court, and on legal procedures, such as the amparo (writ of immunity), the day-to-day conduct of local justice, the focus of Timo H. Schaefer's important book, has attracted little attention beyond the fields of historical anthropology and ethnohistory. Schaefer's ‘legal culture’, defined as the ‘ways Mexicans practiced, talked about, and otherwise interacted with the law’ (p. 17), resembles John M. Watanabe's ‘procedural culture’, the obsessive legalism that governed the relations between towns and the state in nineteenth-century Guatemala (‘With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest: “Procedural Culture” and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about 19th-Century Mesoamerica’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2001, 6: 2, pp. 134–74).
In meticulously documenting the evolution of Mexico's ‘legal culture’ over the course of the nineteenth century, Schaefer admits unashamedly to a ‘parsimonious’ (p. 17) theoretical approach – no ‘subalterns’, no ‘hegemony’, very few ‘populars’ or ‘moderns’. He also deliberately directs the narrative away from major watersheds – the tumultuous 1850–70 period is skipped in order to focus on people's daily struggles to achieve justice through the courts. Hence Schaefer's protagonists are not caudillos or caciques, social classes or ethnic groups, but (mainly poor) citizens seeking justice under the novel political and legal conditions brought about by the transition from absolutist to constitutional rule. He deploys the riddle in the title – Liberalism as Utopia – to trace a narrative and analytical thread running from the period of liberal-republican experimentation under the First Federal Republic (1824–37) to the atrophy of egalitarian liberalism following the accession of Porfirio Díaz in 1876. Despite its atrophy, Schaefer argues that, throughout the century, liberalism's ‘egalitarian concept of justice […] endowed the sphere of legalized social relations with a utopian orientation that might always erupt in politics’ (p. 14). By examining thousands of individual cases, he is able to demonstrate how, with Independence in 1821, the new language of equality, often fine-tuned by tinterillos (shyster lawyers), was deployed by plaintiffs in their (more often than not, unsuccessful) attempts to seek justice from the liberal state and protection from their fellow citizens.
Three core chapters, corresponding to three territorial contexts – ‘mestizo towns’, ‘Indian towns’ and ‘hacienda settlements’ (home to the vast majority of Mexican citizens) – explore how different ethnic and social groups sought access to local justice and higher levels of government in order to assert their rights. Schaefer demonstrates how egalitarian legal guarantees might coexist with, challenge, or, more often than not, succumb to historic patrimonial, corporate and communal legal practices. He examines litigation relating to a range of cases, such as domestic violence and homicide, leva (forced recruitment) into the civic militia and standing army, abuse of the privacy of the home, eviction and land expropriation, unconstitutional corporal punishment and imprisonment (private hacienda jails endured long into the constitutional period), illegal labour demands and imprisonment for debt, denial of the constitutional right to petition for new municipalities, electoral fraud and unconstitutional behaviour of unelected jefes políticos (political leaders). Special attention is paid to the language adopted by litigants, observing how the rhetoric of individual rights and freedoms gradually displaced that of paternal obligation and duty, dramatising the text with pithy quotations drawn from personal legal testimonies. Privileging manuscript sources kept in state judicial archives (Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro and Oaxaca), Schaefer might have given more attention to the press which plaintiffs deployed increasingly as the century proceeded.
The best sections of the book, drawing on the strongest archival evidence, pertain to Mexico's ‘first liberalism’, before 1850. Schaefer's decision to skip over the Reforma, European Intervention and Restored Republic (1854–76) is puzzling, given the commitment of the constituyentes to abolishing corporate legal jurisdiction and introducing a social chapter to republican law (Benito Juárez, surely Mexico's paradigmatic liberal lawgiver, receives short shrift from Schaefer, dismissed as a flouter of liberal constitutional rights and guarantees). Emperor Maximilian's efforts to rescue the declining legitimacy of the Second Empire, by easing access for the poor and indigenous populations to the courts, might also have been profitably mentioned. The final chapter, ‘Dictatorship’, is disappointingly weak; the analysis of the constitutional role of the jefe político amounting to little more than pastiche. But these caveats should not detract from this reviewer's highly positive assessment of the book. Learned, highly readable and tightly argued, Liberalism as Utopia is a major contribution to the historiography of postcolonial Mexico, which will interest advanced-level undergraduates as well as the scholarly community.
