The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexicois First Black Indian President (review)

Vincent has several laudable objectives in this study of Vicente Guerrero. He wrote the work for a popular audience, making it one of the few histories that deal with early-nineteenth-century Mexico written in a style designed to appeal to the nonspecialist. He aspires to address some of the issues that current historiography has underemphasized, particularly race and the role of the coast in the creation of an independent nation. The book is often engaging, and Vincent enjoys relating the anecdotes of Guerrero's life and the cultural milieu of his followers and descendants. The volume is at its best when it describes Guerrero's vision of egalitarianism in the context of the racial reality of the Mexican lowlands, contrasting the radical politics of the 1820s with midcentury liberalism.

Unfortunately, the volume also displays some of the worst sins of "popular history." Many of his surprising assertions are not well supported, and his citations are often vague, antiquated, or ignore essential archives. He resurrects the old stereotypes of a feudal Mexico with Indian serfs controlled by all-powerful lords and debt peonage in the mines (pp. 20, 128). Vincent also exhibits an unsophisticated view of race and a lack of familiarity with the literature. Worse, he tends to incorporate concepts from contemporary U.S. understandings of race into his discussion of Mexico. His concept of black identity is one that has its origins in twentieth-century U.S. society, not colonial New Spain. As a result, the book is riddled with jarring anachronisms.

In this study, race is a deterministic factor that explains all politics, to the point that it almost becomes caricature. The heroes are dark-skinned and the villains are white. Santa Anna could not relate to the "real Mexico" because he is a creole. Lerdo de Tejeda's administration was bad because he was white. Such characterizations make it easy to produce simplified causal factors. A good example is his formula for understanding who supported the insurgency and who remained loyal during independence: "The equation too dark for an invitation to the mansion + too removed from the indigenous village to fit there = pro Mexico" (his emphasis, p. 116). The excerpt also points to his unsophisticated view of nationalism: Mexico was a nation waiting to happen. The work also tends to attribute all social and political change to the influence of the Great Man. For example, Vincent argues that it was Guerrero who created popularly elected town councils, and not the pueblos themselves; of course, the Constitution of Cádiz had nothing to do with it, being a "white" document. He also mistakenly credits the proliferation of such councils to the Plan de Iguala (p. 128).

Finally, the work is riddled with mistakes, some serious and others minor. At times, they seem to have begun as exaggerations—such as when he claims that Guerrero led the "People's Party." This is perhaps a justifiable characterization of his movement, but his language implies the existence of an actual political party. More serious is his tendency to rely on hostile contemporary observers to determine the race of individual politicians, voters, or mobs, without taking into account that observers such as Lucas Alamán used racial labels as slurs and not as objective descriptions of physical characteristics. Finally, he includes verbatim dialogue between his characters in the style of historical novelists.

The frequent errors of fact call into doubt his interpretations, overwhelming any positive contributions he may have made in recuperating the history of Afro-mestizo costeños. As a book that aspires to a popular audience, these problems make it more of a threat to the general understanding of Mexico's history than a benefit.