Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico

This book offers the first major study in English of Manuel Lozada, the larger-than-life leader of a rural rebellion in the western Mexican state of Jalisco (which at the time also encompassed present-day Nayarit) that spanned two decades and counted more than 7,000 people among its ranks. As such, the book draws on and contributes to the burgeoning historiography on popular responses to the grand political conflicts of nineteenth-century Mexico, whose major concern has been to understand how, why, and to what extent ordinary people joined the liberal or conservative sides of the ideological divide. In this respect, Zachary Brittsan's study of a prominent conservative peasant leader—only surpassed in importance by General Tomás Mejía of Querétaro—is a healthy corrective to the rather-notorious emphasis on popular federalisms and liberalisms in the historiography. As the author notes in the introduction, many rural rebellions occurred during Mexico's mid-nineteenth-century Reforma, and none of them totally represented “the lived experience of all Mexican peasants” (p. 10). This is why the book avoids presenting Lozada's rebellion as a “simple reaction” to the liberals' “modernizing reforms” and instead attempts to explain its goals, trajectory, and peculiarities in light of changing realities at the local and regional levels (p. 8).Brittsan argues that Manuel Lozada tapped into an “ideological undercurrent” of “popular conservatism,” which did not coincide with the centralizing and corporatist projects of Lucas Alamán and other well-known figures of the Conservative Party (p. 4). What was this popular conservatism about? First, the author observes that Lozada's rebels explicitly crafted themselves as defenders of the Catholic Church against anticlerical laws. More than with abstract notions of clerical autonomy or Catholic national identity, the religious dimension of Lozada's rebellion mostly had to do with preserving adequate conditions for the regular administration of religious services in their territory: Lozadistas wanted to keep their local parishes in operation and for baptisms, marriages, and burials to be provided at affordable costs, regardless of whether church or state set the corresponding prices. Although local priests fared better under Lozada's than under liberal rule, Brittsan notices that “they did not usually rally their parishioners to take up arms” (p. 22). Church and rebels thus forged a tacit alliance based on common interests, but clericalism did not define the rebellion.The second and most important aspect of Lozada's popular conservatism consisted in the protection of communal lands and especially local autonomy vis-à-vis the intrusive presence of remote liberal authorities. While tracing Lozada's trajectory from obscure bandit to the true boss of Jalisco's seventh canton, Brittsan depicts a region long affected by land disputes between haciendas and peasant communities, but one in which those disputes, for the most part, “were settled locally and usually without armed conflict” (p. 15). The region's tensions, however, went out of control between 1855 and 1857 as a result of liberal initiatives to privatize communal lands and increase taxes on goods transiting through the state, whose enactment required the imposition of new authorities unfamiliar with local realities. Lozada himself, in a rare 1857 letter addressed to the state government in Guadalajara, clearly ranked the arrival of inexperienced liberal tinterillos as the main cause of a recent uprising in the seventh canton. As Brittsan explains, these officials “blindly expanded the factionalism that had long reigned in [Lozada's] territory by linking it with the national reform agenda” (p. 56). Unrivaled in his knowledge of the region, Lozada increased his power by acting as arbiter and defender of his people against these undesired outsiders. He was not an agrarian revolutionary but the architect of an informal yet effective order that endured until the final consolidation of the liberal republic in the mid-1870s.The relevance of local autonomy for Lozada's popular conservatism allows Brittsan to emphasize what he calls the “central paradox” of liberalism in nineteenth-century Mexico: while liberal constitutions and rhetoric advocated for greater local autonomy against centralized rule, liberal practice frequently ignored “local demands of good governance” (pp. 56, 157). Though the author's indictment of the pitfalls of liberal citizenship rings true, this reader cannot help but ask again what unique peculiarity of Jalisco's seventh canton led to the development of a strong popular conservatism there, when similar structural factors—land conflicts, resentment of outsiders, and the presence of powerful local brokers—allowed for the emergence of popular liberalisms in other parts of Mexico at the same time. It seems that religious loyalties played a crucial role in this regard, but, in contrast with Benjamin Smith's book on “provincial conservatism” in the Mixteca Baja, Brittsan's study does not fully subscribe to this hypothesis. If clearly welcome as an important contribution to the historiography of Mexico's Reforma, this book should lead to new studies that, in light of the existing knowledge, finally address regional patterns of popular action in a comparative framework

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