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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.2 (2000) 371-372



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Book Review

Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico:
Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra

National Period

Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra. By Guy P.C. Thomson. With David C. Lafrance. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. xviii, 420 pp. Cloth, $65.00.

Guy Thomson's new book is distilled from his fifteen years of painstaking research into national, local, and personal archives in Mexico. Thomson is skeptical of the use of generic terms such as caudillo, cacique, and serrano to describe local leaders who have played an important role in politics in rural Mexico. The author suggests that this terminology is inadequate to describe and understand Juan Francisco Lucas, a Nahua liberal, free thinker, and entrepreneur.

The bulk of this long book is devoted to an extremely detailed examination of more than sixty years of politics in the Sierra de Puebla. Although Lucas is an important player throughout, the book is less a political biography of Lucas than a political history of the region. Some of the region's Nahua villagers began participating actively in Mexico's fractious politics during the Revolution of Ayutla, and the region remained crucial to state politics during the War of the Reform, the French Intervention, and the violent resistance to the centralism of Benito Juárez that eventually helped bring Porfirio Díaz to power. Díaz managed to maintain the allegiance of local leaders such as Lucas even as he implemented policies to promote centralization. In a separate chapter, David LaFrance argues that during the Revolution, Lucas led ultimately unsuccessful efforts to maintain regional autonomy because of carefully timed shifts in allegiances. Generally, the analysis stresses political contingency over ideology to explain the allegiances of different leaders and groups in the Sierra.

The area's National Guard units played an important role in this continued political engagement mainly because they were made up of Nahua villagers who were recruited with promises of tax exemptions. Some of the most important battles were catalyzed by rivalries between villages and by tensions between indigenous villagers and local mestizo elites. Between wars, the National Guard was used to organize elections and, if necessary, to intimidate people. The importance of the villagers in military operations allowed them to embrace the egalitarian aspects of liberalism while modifying the liberal drive to break up village lands.

This useful and important book is not without faults. Although the detailed political [End Page 371] and military narrative is fascinating, the author's passion for chronicling events seems excessive. To avoid generalizations, Thomson sometimes evades interpretation altogether. For instance, in several places he mentions the importance of Nahuatl, Methodism, and Masonry in these villages, but he never explains how ethnic identity changed during the nineteenth century. The focus on military and political events leaves little space for exploring the connections between politics and everyday life. The chapters devoted to these topics are the shortest in the book. Evidently, some villagers were quite anticlerical and others deeply Catholic, but the book never provides a coherent explanation of how politics and religion were intertwined in the villages. Thomson provides important information on elections in the Restored Republic and Porfiriato, but he never explains who was allowed to vote or how the indirect system of elections functioned. In addition, the author does not explain the impact of concepts such as individual citizenship on local politics thirty years after the initial implementation of universal male suffrage and the establishment of municipal governments. Finally, although Thomson acknowledges a few differences between his views of specific events and those put forward by Florencia Mallon in her recent analysis of the same period and region, he neither incorporates nor critiques her general interpretations of politics. This failure is puzzling given the five-year gap between the publication of the two books. Despite these weaknesses, the book is an impressive achievement, and historians...

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