This new collection of essays compiled by Nicolás Cárdenas García and Enrique Guerra Manzo examines the intricate relationship between national policy and regional implementation in post-revolutionary Mexico. The contributors cover substantial geographical areas, from Sonora and Tamaulipas in the north, through Hidalgo, Mexico City and Michoacán in the centre, to Chiapas in the south. They range from more traditional studies of agrarian reform, socialist education and indigenismo to less well-trodden analyses of feminism and anti-Chinese campaigns.
Like so much of the best Mexican historiography, the monograph avoids both the Scylla of totalising state-level generalisations and the Charybdis of fragmentary disaggregation. Moving from the micro to the macro and from detailed case studies to broad levels of synthesis, the volume reflects Eric Wolf's idea that society is ‘a totality of interconnected processes’ and that ‘inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality’. Given the present state of the field, which is increasingly dominated by orientalising cultural abstractions masquerading as intimate insights and thematic micro-histories dressed up as unproblematic generalisations, this humble yet edifying approach is all the more welcome.
The monograph employs two tools, one theoretical, the other empirical. On the one hand, as the title suggests, all the authors interact with Norbert Elias' division between integrated and marginalised political figures. According to the volume's compilers, the dichotomy suggests ways of thinking ‘about the distribution of opportunities of power as a game in which actors make the most of their advantages and opportunities, but also resist and negotiate the preservation of some of their essential characteristics’ (p. 15). For example, Valentina Torres Septién demonstrates how radical Catholics in Guanajuato embraced the hierarchical system of Acción Católica Mexicana but then used the organisation's institutional weight to resist both socialist and sexual education. Throughout the book this theoretical framework, often lightly worn, provides easy, comprehensible links between the differing worlds of Guanajuato's über-orthodox Catholics, Mexico City's radical feminists and Tampico's struggling servant class. The overall structure highlights how the post-revolutionary government's system of repression and reward, popularly known as pan o palo, operated to divide, regiment and exclude different groups.
On the other hand, the authors also concentrate on discovering the place of political intermediaries within this system. Following the work of Enrique Guerra Manzo on Michoacán, as well as the recent edited volume by Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, all the contributors highlight the study of ‘less visible political figures, including regional intermediaries, pueblo and municipality leaders, and unions and associations that were not integrated into the corporate edifice’ (p. 19). Discerning these liminal figures is no easy task, and all the authors have done in-depth research, often triangulating national, state, municipal, private and church documents to reach a well-rounded understanding of Cristero-era caciques, female union bosses and local Sinophobe municipal presidents. In one of the most enlightening essays, Heather Fowler-Salamini integrates copious oral testimony with information from private and municipal archives to offer a revealing picture of the ‘collective female caciquismo’ operating within Veracruz's coffee industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Shifting away from traditional studies of caciquismo, she argues that these leaders achieved substantial local influence not through violence or force of personality but by manipulating human resources and scarce finances.
Torres Septien and Fowler-Salamini's essays stand out for their originality. Margaret R. Goldsmith Connelly's research on domestic servants in Tampico is also fascinating, and is one of the most coherent works yet produced on this forgotten but key group of urban workers. The piece deserves a place beside Andrew Grant Wood's excellent monograph on female militancy in 1920s Veracruz.
If there is any criticism to be made of this volume, it is perhaps that some other essays fail to match this level of sustained innovation. Guerra Manzo's work is complex and well argued, but his conclusion that former Cristero leaders in Coalcomán, Michoacán, were absorbed into the state's party apparatus has already been amply covered by Matthew Butler. Similarly, Maria Dolores París Pombo's discussion of indigenismo in the Altos of Chiapas is coherent and perhaps revealing for the neophyte Mexicanist, but says little that is different from the works of Jan Rus, Thomas Benjamin or Stephen Lewis. Finally, Patricia San Pedro López's work on agrarian reform in Huejutla deepens but fails to overturn the conclusions of the region's foremost historian, Frans J. Schryer.
Despite these concerns, overall, the book works on three levels: as an excellent summary of the interests and approaches of Mexico's home-grown historians; as a salutary reminder of the importance of the region to the implementation of national political policy; and as a model of how to write about the integration of grassroots movements within broad structural changes.
