The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780-1824 (review)

This book contains very useful studies by well-known scholars of the period stretching from the Bourbon reforms to the establishment of Mexico's first Federal Republic, on topics ranging from rural popular culture to the social and economic strategies of an elite family. Eric Van Young's article on popular culture and insurgency elegantly condenses many of the main ideas of the author's recent book. He argues that there was a vast gulf between elite political culture and popular political culture in the period. The project to construct a national state, he offers, was an elite effort that proceeded from the European great tradition and, presumably, the Enlightenment. In contrast, popular political culture was communalist and its imagery largely religious. Van Young's insights into popular culture are very creative and stimulating, but he does not really probe elite political culture. This presents a problem, because several other essays suggest that elite political culture also had religious aspects and that apocalyptic, if not millenarian, rhetoric was also found in elite circles.

Hugh Hamill's informative essay analyzes the copious pro-Spanish propaganda published between 1808 and 1810 , ranging from impassioned descriptions of heroic Spanish resistance against Napoleon to humorous pieces ridiculing Napoleon's puppet on the throne of Spain. Hamill argues that widespread creole sentiment in favor of beleaguered Spain was a key factor in convincing proindependence creoles that only a popular rebellion could gain control of the colony. Virginia Guedea's article on the conspiracies of 1811 provides a kind of prequel to her well-known work on the Guadalupes. She provides fascinating detail on two efforts to overthrow viceregal power in its own capital; some inhabitants of the capital expanded on the normal matrix of political discussions in tertulias, wine shops, pulquerías, and private homes to organize conspiracies. The very openness of these venues impeded operational security, and both conspiracies were betrayed just before they began open action.

John Kicza discusses a very different subject in his essay on the Iturbe e Iraeta clan, an extended family of elite merchants who remained prominent in Mexico for over one hundred years. Kicza provides a kind of family biography, explaining its social, kinship, and economic relationships, as well as its responses to the events that rocked the Hispanic world beginning with France's 1795 invasion of Spain. Christon Archer provides a stimulating article on viceroy Félix Calleja, showing how the viceroy created the widespread impression that the insurgency had been largely defeated by 1816 —an impression that remains common. Instead, Calleja's efforts produced a stalemate that could not be sustained indefinitely because insurgent activity and government taxation made economic recovery impossible. Ironically, Calleja was able to convince Spain of his success, and for this very reason he never received the military reinforcements that might have consolidated the royalist cause.

Anne Staple's essay probes the fate of the mining industry that so dominated images of the Mexican economy in the eighteenth century. Staple examines how the War of Independence disrupted the industry. Worse than the physical damage were royalist counterinsurgency efforts that deprived mines of both labor and transport. Many miners struggled to continue production, only to have their expertise on local conditions pushed aside in the great influx of foreign capital that followed the war. Paul Vanderwood contributes an extended historiographic and theoretical essay on millenarianism. He stresses the importance of religious sentiment and experience in political action and discusses some recent interpretations of the independence period, concluding that there was a dynamic relationship between official doctrine and popular religion, that popular religion contained a powerful millenarian strain, and that the Bourbon attack on popular religion might have led to the expression of millenarian beliefs.

Timothy Anna reevaluates the role of Agustín de Iturbide in the independence process. The Plan de Iguala, he shows, achieved a consensus among varied actors and ended the war with surprisingly little loss of life...