In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Illusion of Civil Society: Democratization and Community Mobilization in Low-Income Mexico
  • Arthur Schmidt
The Illusion of Civil Society: Democratization and Community Mobilization in Low-Income Mexico. By Jon Shefner. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 224. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.

Studies of civil society and the actions of social movements have gained prominence in the social sciences over the last generation. Based upon fieldwork in Cerro del Cuatro, a low-income [End Page 292] community in Guadalajara, Mexico, Jon Shefner contends that “the concept of civil society has run its course” (p. 207). It acts as an impediment to understanding contemporary conflicts, he argues, because it masks the stratification and particular differences of interest that lie within social movements. In his view, scholarship must generate a renewed attention to the specificities of social hierarchies and experience if it is to understand how people respond to what he calls the “class project” of neoliberalism.

Shefner carried out his fieldwork in Cerro del Cuatro most intensively in different stretches between 1991 and 1994, and made five follow-up visits between 1997 and 2006. The inhabitants of this informal urban settlement built their own housing and shared the primary concerns of improving their material lives, regularizing their land titles, and gaining access to municipal water, sewage, and electrical services. Locked within a web of patronclient politics, residents found themselves obliged to support the candidates of the dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in exchange for an inadequate delivery of services by local government and party officials.

The author examines the struggle against PRI clientelism undertaken by the Unión de Colonos Independientes (UCI), a civic movement founded in 1990 with the assistance of the Jesuit Servicios Educativos de Occidente (SEDOC). Born at a propitious moment, the UCI benefited on the one hand from the liberation theology movement and the organization of Christian Base Communities, and on the other from the decreasing amount of resources available to the PRI under the impact of neoliberal economics. Initially successful in mobilizing local support and wringing some greater provision of services from the government, the UCI subsequently faltered when it followed SEDOC’s campaign for promoting democracy by having UCI members run as candidates of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) for Congress and for municipal office in 1991 and 1992. The highly unsuccessful electoral campaigns diverted the UCI from the struggles that had earned community support and instead gave it a partisan political image.

Although the UCI later recovered some of its standing among local residents by nonpartisan electoral promotion and observation work in 1994, the organization never regained firm footing. The departure of SEDOC left it with diminished external support. For a time it proved able to obtain new resources for Cerro del Cuatro by exploiting divisions between the federal Solidarity Program and local PRI operatives, but its stance against clientelism ultimately could not compete with the material power of Solidarity in winning local allegiances. By 2004 the last remnants of the UCI dissolved.

Shefner uses the case of the UCI to make numerous cogent observations—too many to chronicle here—about the role of outside scholars in local movements, social movement scholarship, and the relationship between democratization and the material well-being of low-income people. He recognizes that his own bonding with the UCI facilitated his work, even as it imposed costs upon both his academic project and the very people he sought to assist. Shefner fears that academics may have overestimated the power of the community movements that they have studied, forgetting the vulnerabilities of their members who remain behind after the scholar leaves. [End Page 293]

Opposition politics gained victories at the federal, state, and local levels in Mexico during the period of Shefner’s study. He finds that the UCI contributed to the process of formal democratization, but he soberly concludes that “democratization failed to ameliorate the material hardships of the urban poor” in Cerro del Cuatro and “also left them with fewer allies and less access to formal political power” (p. 191).

Despite its somewhat one-dimensional invocations of “neoliberal globalization” as an explanatory factor, Shefner...

pdf

Share