Becoming Campesinos

If the Mexican state of Michoacán is the sort of laboratory of postrevolutionary political culture that I claimed it was in my 1988 Yale dissertation, if its dependent capitalist culture was based on the hyperexploitation of women as I claimed in the second volume of my multivolume work on revolution, democracy, and longing in Mexico — a specific question hovers. That is, if women did the vast amount of work (however unseen and unpaid), what sort of political structure would respond to this inequity? In short, what would it take to create full democracy in postrevolutionary Mexico?It is ironic that this appears to be the sort of issue that Lázaro Cárdenas, arguably Mexico’s most important modern president, considered. Or at least, his instinctive political strategy — that of specifically listening and paying attention to “ordinary” Mexicans — implies as much. Yet, his political experiences in Michoacán led to another approach — an authoritarian squander of opportunity — and it is his authoritarianism, as much as his successful and kindhearted efforts to include ordinary Mexicans in Mexico’s political culture, that constitutes his legacy.Was there another way for Michoacán, another possibility? One hopes that Chris Boyer’s Becoming Campesinos might respond to this. And in fact, to the extent that Boyer focuses on the political trajectory of Francisco J. Múgica, we learn something more about this remarkable Mexican. One of Cárdenas’s friends and teachers, Múgica was partial author of Mexico’s remarkable 1917 constitution. Yet as Boyer clearly demonstrates, though Múgica correctly understood Michoacán’s systems of landed and educational inequality as systems designed to enrich a small minority and immiserate most Micho-acanos, his own political approach failed the very men and women he so hoped to help.This, though, has been suggested before, though certainly not as fully or clearly. What, then, is new here? And what remains unanswered? Like other thoughtful scholars, Boyer has turned to local-level leadership as an efficient way to think about “ordinary people.” Focusing on a group of people he calls “village revolutionaries,” Boyer deftly demonstrates that some of these revolutionaries, quite simply, did not enter Michoaca-nos’ complex worlds deeply enough to affect change. Múgica himself accomplished too little in Michoacán because — notwithstanding his true heroism — he communicated poorly. Ideas and ideals became frozen, reified categories, seemingly more important to Múgica and to some of the village revolutionaries than the complex experiences, aspirations, and hopes of Michoacanos.Boyer perhaps hoped to do more. His book attempts to demonstrate that the concept of campesinos emerged through specific political struggles (the very ones he chose to study!) This ambitious approach to the worlds of words, meaning, and metaphysics may well be true. More importantly, Boyer wrestles with what he takes to be “cultural” approaches to history. In fact, at their best, cultural approaches manage to abolish the Cartesian split between base and superstructure and to recognize both matter and thought as coauthors (or better, simultaneous, unified authors) of experience. Boyer contends that such approaches, particularly my own, do not explain change over time. This is a bit puzzling. My approach to culture is so material and metaphysical, so copious, that if change over time is to be explained, certainly such a comprehensive approach holds out hope of such an explanation, if particular examples of my work fail to do so. But Boyer himself only attends occasionally to the dense complexity of the Michoacán population and the roles played by gender, ethnicity, class, and age, rather than fully grasping these categories and the ways they splintered, shattered, and reemerged in similar and different ways. For this reason, his work reveals problems with thinking creatively about a stratified, conflict-ridden population. He also fails to attend to the multiple time sequences, stagnations, and transformations that any person (and certainly the people he studies) themselves experienced. This is perhaps because Boyer focused on specific, sanctified activities, the sort relatively well-known men were likely to perform. The background, everyday currents, eddies, puddles, and pools, the actual repetitive activities frequently assigned to and accepted by (though often under strenuous duress) impoverished women, receive far too little intellectual attention here.Nonetheless, while Boyer maintains that his work is postrevisionist, it finds a truer place alongside earlier, more strictly political approaches. In the context of the Mexican Revolution, political historians have often asked how the revolution’s aftermath matched the inclinations and needs of the campesinos who very largely made it happen. In the case of Boyer’s portrayal of Múgica’s political failures, one remembers Gil Joseph’s path-breaking analysis of Felipe Carrillo Puerto. For in Yucatán, as in Michoacán, an entire world of political restiveness, passion, and need existed; in Michoacán, as in the Yucatán, political leaders proved unable to speak with (rather than to) impoverished campesinos. In this regard, scholars concerned with stillborn political gestures, with failed heroism, and with the political and economic difficulties that postcolonial countries like Mexico have faced should read and assign this book. But Boyer also does something more. In his conclusion, he suggests that Cárdenas’s work connects to the neo-Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Here Boyer speaks of a political longing so ripe and so real that it provides some of the raw materials for a fairer, more equitable Mexico. Moreover, he does so without theorizing, without hubris; he speaks of other people’s hopes and longings with a generosity and openness too seldom seen in scholarly discourse

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