Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronunciamiento in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (review)

Once upon a time, chaos was thought to be the defining feature, or the original sin, of nineteenth-century Latin America. Caudillos, cuartelazos, and, most distinctively, pronunciamientos were in that perspective not only the evidence but also the outcome of the ingrained inability of Latin Americans to abide by the (liberal) law and—more or less explicitly—the ultimate proof of their lack of civilization as well. Such a view, of course, rested on a set of metahistorical premises that have little to do with the way the former Spanish American colonies became the modern Latin American nation-states. That is why, in a sense, reconstructing the logic behind the mess produced by the Spanish empire's collapse has been the guiding principle of the best scholarship on nineteenth-century social and political history—a field unthinkable without Michael Costeloe, Josefina Vázquez, Timothy Anna, Will Fowler, Reynaldo Sordo, and Michael Ducey.

This edited volume, a mixture of essays written by scholars like the aforementioned and a group of students from the University of St. Andrews, partakes of that tradition. Manifestly, its purpose is to advance a better understanding of that odd practice of the pronunciamiento—a mixture of armed revolt, inflammatory prose, and conventional politics that dominated Mexico between the 1820s and the 1870s. The volume's subtitle, however, is both unfortunate and misleading, for its articles do not reprise the "origins" of pronunciamientos but rather focus on the characteristics of a handful of them. At any rate, it is worth noting that a plurality of the essays (four of the 12) deal with the turbulent years following Vicente Guerrero's elevation to the presidency in 1829, including the rise and fall of Anastasio Bustamante's first government and the rise and fall of Valentín Gómez Farías first vice-presidency. For some mysterious reason, though, the book does not address the movements of 1828. The same could be said about two other important pronunciamientos: the Ayutla revolution of 1854 and the revolts that led to the establishment of the federal republic in 1824.

Although pronunciamientos were ostensibly non-constitutional ways of doing politics, they tended to be highly formalized, were less violent than the old trope has it, and, more important, soon became the method of choice for most political actors. In nineteenth-century Mexico, in effect, pronunciamientos were just politics by non-official means—in one sense by the same means as liberal politics. Overall, most contributors agree that pronunciamientos were more than military coups and that personal ambition was not the only reason military commanders and local politicians rose up in arms, drafted manifestos, and reached out for supporters so regularly—more than 1,500 times between 1821 and 1876, in Fowler's reckoning. Most of them thus believe that in order to make sense of the pervasiveness of pronunciamentos it is necessary to take the actors' political rhetoric and practice seriously; that is, one ought to think of pronunciamientos as effective means of achieving something in the realm of politics rather than as pathological devices of peoples not fit for liberal democracy.

Given the book's presentation and objective, however, its insistence on characterizing pronunciamientos as "extra-constitutional" or "meta-constitutional" seems to this reviewer somewhat contradictory and a lost opportunity to rethink the term itself—and hence the very nature of politics in nineteenth-century Mexico. The fact that pronunciamientos were so frequent, and that all political factions favored them, means they did enjoy some degree of political legitimacy. Hence, they should be considered a legitimate feature of Mexican political culture, that is, as pieces within the "real" constitutions even if they existed outside the narrowly defined versions of political life embodied in those documents.

Understanding nineteenth-century Mexico's political constitution in more functional and less formal terms has at least two additional advantages. On the one hand, it would link Mexican political...