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The Americas 60.1 (2003) 136-137



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Mexico's Politics and Society in Transition. Edited by Joseph S. Tulchin and Andrew D. Selee. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. Pp. vii, 373. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $22.00 paper.

Given dramatic, recent events in Mexico, scholars are interested deeply in what a democratic transformation has wrought for that country's social and political processes. This collection, based on a conference held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in May 2000, shortly before Vicente Fox's electoral victory, gathers together an eclectic array of topics incorporated under three broad categories: politics, economics and migration. The editors provide a lively and thoughtful introduction and conclusion to the essays. Each of the twelve individual contributors attempted to add new interpretations incorporating Fox's election and presidency, but most do not address their consequences in depth.

The strength of this work, as with most collections, lies with the individual chapters. One of the strongest essays, by Mexican political scientist Carlos Elizondo, offers a detailed analysis of the difficult obstacles Fox faces, gathering together a fascinating selection of survey data identifying electoral patterns in the last decade. Among the data he presents is a table that demonstrates significant contradictions citizens share in their levels of trust expressed toward Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Voters were asked if they would believe the IFE or their candidate in an electoral dispute. Larger numbers of Fox and Cárdenas voters indicated they would believe their own candidate, whereas PRI voters indicated they would believe IFE, suggesting sharp partisan differences in institutional trust, including institutions largely responsible for competitive elections and the Fox presidential victory. The most important challenge Fox faces according to Elizondo is reforming Mexico's tax collection system, among the most inefficient and weak in Latin America.

Perhaps the most well-researched and original of the essays is Katrina Burgess's exploration of organized labor and the situation labor presently faces in Mexico. She notes that the Supreme Court, another critical actor in the country's post-2000 transformation, has eliminated the closed shop, which is encouraging independent and [End Page 136] autonomous labor representation. She makes a good case that these changes, however, in the short run, do not necessarily produce labor influence on the policy process. Burgess also explores in detail how labor arbitration boards currently operate, and the impact that recent changes have produced on that agency's functions.

In the economic section, Manuel Pastor and Carol Wise offer a number of interpretations in a well-argued essay on the long-term economic trends underlying Mexico's political transformation. The most significant trend, because of its immense social and political reverberations, is clearly that of economic inequality. The statistical data they cite through 2000 demonstrates unequivocally that inequality has increased since 1984, and the poor are worse, not better off, today. An even more surprising finding is that real per capita gross income grew a paltry four percent from 1980-1999, averaging 0.02 percent yearly.

Finally, in the category on migration, Stephen Pitti, in his analysis of Mexican immigration to the United States, raises numerous issues, among them the consequences of migrant labor on organizing, and the efforts of migrants to bring "creative new tactics" (p. 313) to such efforts in the United States, as was the case in Los Angeles in the 1990s. His chapter focuses primarily on migrants' economic characteristics, but he also includes some vivid illustrations of their cultural diaspora too.

As is the case of most edited volumes, each of the contributors, with the exception of the editors, appears to be unaware of their fellow contributors' interpretations. Consequently those ideas remain largely unincorporated into the individual chapters. Naturally, the range of topics that might be included in this volume is sizable, but several are noteworthy for their omission given the collection's overall thrust. The Catholic Church and religion, and their role in the democratic transformation, are essential to understand as critical explanatory variables in Mexican democratic politics. The impact of public opinion, and the changing values of the citizenry, also...

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