Conservadurismo y derechas en la historia de México

This two-volume work provides a nearly encyclopedic discussion of conservatives, conservatism, and “all things of the right” in Mexico from the independence era to the recent past. Edited by Erika Pani of El Colegio de México and with contributions by a healthy blend of established and emerging scholars in Mexican intellectual and political history, Conservadurismo y derechas en la historia de México provides the reader with a useful snapshot of the state of scholarship on conservative thought and politics in Mexican history. This work helps to fill out and enrich a slowly emerging but tremendously important strain in Mexican historiography. Although some notable work has been done to provide a more detailed and balanced discussion of the conservatives (including Pani’s own notable work on the Second Empire), this field of inquiry has been woefully neglected. That such a blend of gifted scholars is again focusing on it has the potential to significantly reframe our understandings of Mexican political discourse.With a multiauthor, multivolume work that varies in subject matter from prominent politicians, legal scholars, and intellectuals to institutions such as the church, the army, and newspapers, it is difficult to isolate a central thesis. This book is most useful in terms of identifying and enhancing several themes that are important not simply for understanding “the conservative movement,” if such a thing existed. The themes addressed are important for any scholar who wishes to have a good understanding of the whole of Mexican political, social, and intellectual history — a quest that would necessarily be hindered by studying only the generally prevailing and official side of the story.Several main streams of thought run through most, if not all, of these engaging chapters. First, conservatism as developed and practiced in Europe was the product of that region’s unique history. Mexican conservatism must be defined and understood in a uniquely Mexican context and application. Attempts to pigeonhole Mexican conservatives into European terminology and context miss the importance of both place and time to historical considerations. Mexican intellectuals surely read Burke and other conservative luminaries, but this certainly did not dictate slavish imitation for Mexicans any more than familiarity with European liberal thought turned early US political and social leaders into philosophes or Jacobins.Second, as the rhetorical tenor of mainstream politics was generically that of liberalism and progress — even if the actual programs advanced neither of those — any opposition might be classified as “conservative.” This misses the point. Often, opposition to a given government or program was more the product of region, personality, or individual financial interest than it was the result of a given politician’s familiarity with European political philosophy.Third, offhanded categorizations of “liberal” and “conservative” are, at best, of limited use. Many of Mexico’s storied liberals had distinctly conservative tendencies. As just one example, those categorized as liberals promoted the strong centralized political structure of the 1857 constitution. Those who opposed them were labeled as conservatives, despite the fact that a strong argument could be made for the classic liberal nature of the more devolved, federal constitution of 1824.Finally, those who were labeled as conservatives were often motivated less by an abstract ideology than by a concern for the continuity of society via its leading institutions. Many were not simply the mouthpieces of a retrograde church or military. Indeed, they often offered spirited critiques of the institutions that they defended, hoping to renovate their structures instead of raze them.If a criticism must be offered, it would appear that some sections of the work have been translated into Spanish. As anyone who has translated scholarly writing can attest, sometimes the most felicitous turn of phrase in one language comes across as ungainly in another. These stylistic difficulties will occasionally cause the reader to pause and reread a line or two, but ultimately they do not interfere with understanding and engaging with the content of this valuable work.It is my hope that this work will become redundant within a few years, not because the contents are dated, but rather because I believe that nearly every chapter contains the promise to be further developed into a monograph. In the interval, this wide-ranging work touches upon nearly every aspect of Mexican political history from independence to the present and should be consulted by scholars who wish to paint a more nuanced and sophisticated portrait of Mexican political culture

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