Culturas de pobreza y resistencia

The 12 essays and the theoretical/historiographical introduction that comprise this excellent edited collection analyze popular responses to nation building in Mexico, from the beginning of the independence era until the dawn of the 1910 revolution. The essays are divided into two sections. The first contains studies of the urban poor and their resistance to vagrancy laws and other elite efforts at social control, four examining Mexico City and one dealing with Querétaro. The remaining seven contributions deal with rural communities’ struggles to retain some control over land and resources threatened by the liberal state’s efforts at desamortización, with geographic coverage of the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Mexico, Yucatán, Querétaro, and Chihuahua. All but one of the essays came out of a 2001 doctoral seminar at El Colegio de México, directed by editor Romana Falcón. The authors include three professors and ten advanced doctoral students — although some of the latter have no doubt graduated since.What might appear on the surface to be weaknesses in the collection — the inexperience of graduate student historians and the unavoidable limitations of the graduate seminar — are, in fact, some of its greatest strengths. This is due in no small part to Falcón’s disciplined approach. In a well-crafted introductory essay, “A dialogue among theories, histories, and archives,” she reviews the recent historiography on subaltern resistance and notes historians’ growing awareness of the complex, contradictory nature of that resistance — a realization that makes for a more nuanced understanding of past events, especially as regards the lower classes. “The history of the poor and the marginalized is not black and white,” she insists; “its richness is located precisely in the multiple shades of grey that emerge from daily negotiations in all aspects [of their lives]” (p. 14). And indeed, the essays that follow support Falcón’s contention that “defiance and resistance” are not the only things on which “the poor and marginalized spend their time and energy” and that “[a]aptation, negotiation, and the spread of ideas and ideals among diverse classes and social groups are also decisive in their actions, thoughts, and feelings” (p. 20).In support of this moderately revisionist agenda, the editor and most contributors acknowledge their theoretical engagement with the work of James Scott, especially Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale Univ. Press, 1990). This solid grounding in Scott’s theories about complex and “hidden” manifestations of subaltern resistance gives the collection a welcome coherence. Mexicanists will note a more than passing resemblance to Everyday Forms of State Formation (Duke Univ. Press, 1994). The editors of that collection, Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, used Scott’s work in dialogue with Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Blackwell, 1985) to pull together a volume of seminal essays on subaltern resistance and state formation during and after the 1910 revolution. Although Culturas de pobreza y resistencia is not nearly as ambitious as this pioneering predecessor (to which Falcón contributed an essay), it does extend and adapt important insights from the earlier collection to the years between independence and revolution.Given the diversity of projects, it is hardly surprising that some authors make better us of this theoretical framework. Of special note is Blanca Estela Gutiérrez Grageda’s study of a Querétaro community’s ongoing struggle with a powerful local hacendado. Gutiérrez not only examines local campesinos’ overt and covert resistance strategies but also usefully extends Scott’s framework to behind-the-scenes machinations of the powerful. “It is not only the dominated who have recourse to the hidden transcript to resist power,” she argues; “the dominant sectors, in exercising their dominion, deploy it as well when . . . they enjoy secret luxuries and privileges, . . . use clandestine paid assassins, . . . resort to bribes, the falsification of titles, of property rights, among other things” (p. 310). While it might be argued that, hidden or not, elite shenanigans are categorically distinct from the “weapons of the weak,” Gutiérrez is certainly right about the need to acknowledge that the powerful too often hid things from the state and that their secrets, like those of oppressed campesinos, can be usefully teased out the official record.While most of the essays in the collection are less theoretically engaged than Falcón’s introduction and Gutiérrez’s study, the quality of the scholarship and of the writing is consistently high. Unfortunately, the space limitations of a short book review preclude providing the other essays the careful attention that they deserve. Culturas de pobreza y resistencia will be of greatest interest to social historians of Mexico’s long nineteenth century but will also appeal to Mexicanists, Latin Americanists, and other scholars working in subaltern studies

Archaeology · Art · Elite · Historiography · Humanities · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subaltern · Vagrancy · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Politics and Society in Latin America