Rural communities fighting to protect traditional forms of life are not new on the political landscape. They do, however, enrage national leaders eager to drag them into unifying schemes of modern government, leaving them with little local independence in the process. The Roots of Conservatism tells the story, covering more than 200 years, of an isolated region in Oaxaca that resisted overbearing priests, threatening colonial administrators, passionate nineteenth-century liberals and crony politicians, landowners and caciques during the twentieth century. Aggressively defending agricultural lands and trade routes since before the Spanish conquest, these villages have a long history of identifying their own interests and developing strategies to protect them. Over time a long list of opponents emerged, some of whom at first appeared to be allies, only to become the enemy when conditions changed. The role of the Catholic Church, one of the recurring themes throughout the book, is an excellent example. Extreme tyranny during the decades of evangelisation; protection from excessive Spanish demands, both from the crown and from the descendants of the conquerors; reorganisation of a society adrift after the disintegration of its pre-Hispanic foundations; incorporation into a market economy: all were activities in which the Church, in both negative and positive terms (as far as the villages were concerned), played a central role. As of the mid-nineteenth century, the Church staunchly supported indigenous efforts to avoid the Laws of Reform, such as the distribution of communal lands, many of which supported ecclesiastical institutions. Church-state opposition became the norm and continued until the end of the period chosen by Smith for his study, 1962. Soon after the Mexican Revolution, the Church was lambasting federal schools, claiming they were works of the devil. Even after the 1929 peace accords between the national government and the Catholic hierarchy, local religious leaders refused to back down. Lázaro Cárdenas softened the tone of socialist education, and his successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho, publicly confessed his Catholic faith, but there was no turning back for local priests, convinced that the government was in the hands of communists and that the total destruction of the Church was imminent. The level of rhetorical violence, followed by the innumerable murders of teachers, opposing politicians and villagers on the wrong side of any argument, created an atmosphere far from the bucolic image of a quiet countryside.

Smith poses penetrating questions in his analysis of the Mixteca Baja. Why, he asks, did the campesinos refuse to put down their arms, cooperate with the national government, accept social programmes which supposedly were for their benefit and live in peace with their neighbours, if the reasons for their discontent had been eliminated by more enlightened government policies? Why the obsession with communism? Smith answers his own questions by going back to factors rarely considered in the literature. The local priests were, to a large extent, trained in seminaries (some being branches of the one in Oaxaca City) that had been rabidly anti-government, anti-socialist and anti-modern. The bishops named to the diocese of Oaxaca often originated from and were trained in more liberal environments, thus having little sway over the priests assigned to their jurisdiction. For these priests, the word ‘liberal’ evoked all that is evil in the modern world. The rejection of liberal policies dating from the mid-nineteenth century continued strongly throughout the twentieth in continuous struggles against all the ideologies, movements, policies and innovations that tended towards an egalitarian society incompatible with the indigenous world view. The Enlightenment is a case in point. The liberalism that developed out of it, with its emphasis on the individual, had nothing to do with communal life in the villages. The ideas of individual ownership of the land, of competition instead of cooperation, of easy relocation from one community to another, were simply unacceptable. Late nineteenth-century positivism made no more sense, and the socialist policies that followed the Mexican Revolution were thought not to protect the villagers’ interests but rather to destroy their way of life.

The response to these threats divided the villagers more than it united them, provoking violent incidents which tore the social fabric apart. Those who had something to gain by adhering to government policies, such as acquiring land or political influence, tried to eliminate those villagers who did not acquiesce to their demands. Conversely, those on the traditional side of the fence excluded the others. As we know, these strategies are in force today in the southern part of Mexico. An epilogue to Smith's book might be ‘and things have only got worse’.

Smith is to be congratulated for understanding the relationships between the causes of discontent. For example, he draws a connection between federal schooling and land distribution. Many federal teachers were instrumental, for decades, in formulating the demands made by villagers wishing to expand their holding at the expense of their neighbours. Agrarian reform and socialist education were two beacons emanating from Mexico City with the expressed purpose, according to local criteria, of destroying the life of the village and the Church. The conviction that modernity and the state signified the demise of religion is, without a doubt, the reigning concern of the faithful in areas such as the Mixteca.

The Roots of Conservatism is a thoroughly researched, well-thought-out and carefully planned book. Practically every appropriate archive has been consulted in its creation. Much information is condensed in several appendices covering issues such as land disputes and the wealth of brotherhoods (cofradías). Some 56 pages of notes and 45 pages of bibliography are testimony to the enormous accumulation of facts and figures presented. The book, however, is much more than the sum of these. Its broad scope includes such a variety of subjects, situations, questions and answers that the microcosms it examines could be, in many cases, large parts of Mexico.