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

The pronunciamiento (literally, “pronouncement”), a military uprising, was, in Fowler’s words, “undoubtedly the most important political practice of nineteenth-century Mexico” (xxxvii). About 1,500 such episodes occurred during the half-century from 1821 to 1876. Essentially an extraconstitutional device staged by perennially dissatisfied military men (and occasionally their civilian allies) to gain attention for political grievances and exact change from the national government, the pronunciamiento came to be so deeply embedded in Mexican political culture that, as one of the authors in the volume observes, it constituted part of the national identity.

The dozen chapters in this useful collection for the most part cover individual episodes between the year of Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 and the eve of the liberal political ascendancy in the mid-1850s. The authors represent a mix of senior scholars with younger ones from Spain, Britain, Mexico, and the United States. Two highlights of the collection are Fowler’s introductory and concluding chapters, which deploy a sociological understanding of the pronunciamiento as a form of political behavior that grew up in the legitimacy vacuum following the demise of the colonial regime. Two others are the chapter by the late Michael Costeloe about British investment in the mining sector and its relationship to British attitudes toward the movements of the early 1830s and the chapter by Michael Ducey about local linkages and military uprisings in the Huasteca region during the tumultuous 1820s.

Most of the chapters are straightforwardly descriptive in the traditional mode of political history, but their cumulative effect is not only to map out a narrative political history of the period but also to create an anatomy of how pronunciamientos began, progressed, and ended. There is a useful chronology of the major political events of the period (xli–xlix), and reference to an online database of enormous size. The relative brevity of the chapters recommends them as readings for undergraduates, although there is much to interest more advanced scholars.

The chapters as a whole raise two major issues never resolved by the authors—one empirical, and possibly beyond the range of what such short pieces can accomplish, and one conceptual. The first is the extent to which the pronunciamiento can be considered representative of the thinking and aspirations of common people rather than simply a mechanism for disgruntled elites to leverage violence into political and economic gain. Some of the authors explicitly, and others implicitly, assert that it was a sort of parademocratic practice that functioned to incorporate the “popular masses,” absent effective electoral practices (Timothy Anna, 12). This claim is difficult to support, however, since the evidence is often lacking.

More serious is the conceptual problem—that the pronunciamiento becomes a baggy category that tends to lose some of its analytical edge in the authors’ employment of it to describe a wide range of political phenomena, including what look to be cynical careerist episodes, classic coups d’état, mini-revolutions in the Mexican provinces, and the overthrow of national political regimes through armed uprisings. Witness Agustín de Iturbide’s movement of 1822, for example, in which he toppled a proto-constitutional national regime only to install himself briefly as Emperor Agustín the First. It looks much more like a coup d’état than a pronunciamiento, since he already held the reins of political power and was disputing control of the country with a stubborn national congress rather than bargaining for advantage from the margins. Nonetheless, the questions raised by the authors are important and the empirical contribution of the volume significant.