Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Preface

This book is about why people rebel, why they choose to break the law and take up arms for political reasons. It is concerned with individual and collective insurrectionary action, with the reasons that may explain why individuals and groups disobey the authorities , resorting to intimidation and acts of violence to improve their lot in life and to bring about change. Consequently, it is a volume that is preoccupied with contexts in which the possibilities of satisfying the needs of a section of society through established institutional channels and recognized constitutional means have been exhausted. Its twelve contributors are, therefore, interested in understanding how private and public grievances combine to create collective acts of rebellion; how local needs, regional interests , and national concerns become intermingled in meaningful extra-constitutional movements; and how an insurrectionary repertoire can become part of a national political culture. More specifically, this book is focused on why Mexicans in the nineteenth century adopted, developed, and employed one very particular form of insurrection to further their personal and communal goals: the pronunciamiento. As explored in the first of four planned volumes on the pronunciamiento of independent Mexico —Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronunciamiento in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Preface x Preface 2010)—this was a phenomenon that became common in the Hispanic world in the nineteenth century, most notoriously in Spain, Mexico, and Central America. Part petition and part rebellion, it was a practice that sought to effect political change through intimidation . Typically it involved a public act of defiance and insubordination (the grito, or cry, on the part of a garrison, community, or town council), in which a petition or plan was drafted and circulated in the hope that it would receive sufficient declarations of support and allegiance from across the nation to force the local or national government to listen to the pronunciados’ demands. Given the fact that between independence in 1821 and the rise of Porfirio Díaz to power in 1876 there were more than fifteen hundred pronunciamientos in Mexico, attempting to understand why this intriguing insurrectionary practice became so common and widespread is of critical importance. The pronunciamiento developed alongside Mexico’s constitutions and formal political institutions and was resorted to, time and again, to remove unpopular politicians from positions of power, put a stop to controversial policies, call for a change in the political system, or promote the cause of a charismatic leader or the interests of a given region, corporate body, or community. It was the way of doing politics. In this second edited volume on the nineteenth-century Mexican pronunciamiento, we provide a collection of individual yet interrelated studies that attempt to explain why this was the case. The process whereby the pronunciamiento changed from its original form as a military-led practice to a mode of action endorsed and employed by civilians, priests, indigenous communities, and politicians from all parties is traced through the study of a rich variety of pronunciamientos stretching fromTlaxcalan pueblo political activities in the late colonial period to a socialist levantamiento Preface xi (uprising) with anarchist overtones in Chalco in 1868, with the stress being on individual and collective motivation. The manner in which this practice became widespread and was adopted and employed by a wide range of actors is therefore explored through a number of case studies that hone in on the experience of a selection of serial or compulsive individual pronunciados and by focusing on the regional experience and evolution of this practice to address local, state/region-based, and/or national grievances. In other words, this book examines insurrectionary action from the perspectives of the pronunciamiento phenomenon, specific pronunciados , and regional communities or institutions. In Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados, we provide an innovative and revisionist collection of essays, written by some of the leading authorities in the field, that seek to explain the reasons individuals, corporate bodies, and regions launched, backed, and supported pronunciamientos. In so doing, the hope is that we will come closer to understanding the cultural-political frameworks that resulted in this aggressive extra-constitutional practice becoming the standard means whereby policy was informed and influenced in nineteenth-century Mexico. We hope the volume offers readers a challenging collection of interpretations of, and explanations for, why Mexicans, as individuals and members of given communities, adopted the pronunciamiento as their preferred means of effecting political change during this turbulent period. ...