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  • From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico 1867-1911
  • Brian R. Hamnett
From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico 1867-1911. By Francie R. Chassen-López. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 608. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00 cloth.

Francie Chassen-López has given us an engrossing and engagingly written book, the result of long, personal experience of Oaxaca and a great deal of meditation on her subject. This combination of first-hand knowledge and historical research is evident throughout the work. The reader is made aware of the issues and their implications with regard to the regional economy, the structure and character of the population, and the political negotiations and compromises necessary for the governing of Oaxaca. This was a time when two of Oaxaca's most celebrated figures, Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, occupied the Mexican presidency. The author repeatedly links Oaxaca to other Mexican states by means of apt comparisons and contrasts, and takes the reader through a number of rewarding bibliographical discussions of differing points of view positioned throughout her text.

The overriding aim of the book is to demonstrate that nineteenth-century Oaxaca was not a forgotten backwater in the period of Liberal reform and Porfirian-era development. On the contrary, Chassen-López convincingly argues for the impact of various processes of later nineteenth-century "modernization" in Oaxaca, when Liberals and porfiristas championed capital, technology and railroads as their panacea. She points out that even the introduction of the railways was incomplete, since they only partially integrated Oaxaca with the rest of Mexico, let alone the world market, and did not provide sufficient economic integration within the state itself. No line, for instance, linked Oaxaca City and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which was to become a major transit route.

Chassen-López's argument stresses the differing pace and impact of modernization. In doing so, she highlights the majority, indigenous population's capacity for obliging political regimes to adjust their policies to social realities. Liberal and Porfirian authorities often found themselves obliged to undertake complex transactions [End Page 459] with pueblos determined to preserve their corporate identity and defend their material interests. In terms of land ownership, "the communal villagers of Oaxaca were quite successful in their battle to retain or reclaim their favored form of land tenure and proved themselves versatile and innovative in finding strategies to do so" (p. 81). Chassen-López shows how privatization had its greatest impact, particularly during the 1890s, in Oaxaca's geographical peripheries in response to national and international demand for tropical produce. Yet, despite considerable land transfers, Oaxaca did not share the experience of other Mexican regions, and by 1911 the pueblos still controlled a sizeable proportion of the land, although the exact proportion, the author states, is still not known. Similarly, Oaxaca's internal market system and village specialization survived alongside the newer operations.

The author rejects any view of Oaxaca's villagers as closed, static or autarkic. On the contrary, their market-orientation, clear during the colonial period, derived from the pre-Columbian era. She reminds us that by the time of the Spanish Conquest Zapotec and Mixtec society were already highly stratified. She also rejects Marcello Carmagnani's hypothesis of a "second conquest" of indigenous Oaxaca by mid-century Liberals, and points out that precisely at that time, community resistance to outside pressures reached a climax in the Isthmus. In Chassen-López's view, "it is questionable whether the liberal project of individual citizenship was ever actually consolidated in Oaxaca" (pp. 305-6). She indicates that this did not mean a "campesino" rejection of incorporation into a liberal state: "theirs was an alternative, collective citizenship, where sovereignty was lodged in the pueblos" (p. 340). Liberals and Porfirians in Oaxaca failed to displace this idea. Chassen-López aligns alongside Florencia Mallon, Cynthia Radding and Peter Guardino in arguing for a central role played by "campesinos" in state-formation and in the shaping of Mexican political culture.

In the final section of the book, Chassen-López also challenges the passive view...

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