Pueblos, comunidades y municipios frente a los proyectos modernizadores en America Latina, siglo XIX (review)

The product of a 1999 conference on nation-states in Latin America, Pueblos, comunidades e municipios present five papers on Mexico and six others touching on Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Nicaragua. All are solidly rooted in primary sources and local archives, and most focus on struggles between specific communities and nineteenth-century liberal states over the form, content, and costs of change. The editors identify several points of origin for these conflicts, including the shift from a heterogenous colonial monarchy to a homogenous republican state, the definitions of which groups were, or might be, part of the new nations, and the unequal and sometimes paradoxical economic and social effects of liberal policies.

Looking at Tlaxcala before and after independence, Raymond Buve finds complex and shifting alliances among elements of several communities and agents of the state in competition for local power. This was also a characteristic, according to Antonio Ohmstede, of the efforts of Hidalgo and the Huastecas of Veracruz to deflect liberal schemes, such as land privatization, individualization, and restriction of non-Indians from access to community resources. Similarly, Brian Hamnett argues that the indigenous communities of Oaxaca resisted liberal efforts to legally homogenize the population, seen as a threat to their ethnic identity. In a theme that marks several essays, Romana Falcón uses the records of Maximilian's Junta Protectora da las Clases Menesterosasto show that rural pueblos and indigenous communities occasionally adopted liberal ideas and institutions and were able to manipulate these to their own ends—opting, for example, for condueñazo to replace traditional communal land ownership. In the Sierra de Puebla, Guy Thompson discovers that organic intellectuals created a history of nineteenth-century conflicts that holds local memories in a tension with national and nationalist elements.

Those chapters that examine areas outside Mexico continue many of the same themes. For mid-nineteenth-century Ecuador, for example, Andrés Guerrero suggests that whites and mestizos, and not just Indians, resisted legal homogenization, preferring to preserve the status of "citizen" for themselves and that of "subject" for the indigenous population. He (as do several other authors) points to the role of village scribes and tinterillos in cultural translations between the communities and the state. Among the indigenous groups of the Pampas and northern Patagonia, Martha Bechis finds various reactions to an Argentine state policy that seldom strayed from confrontation and one-way assimilation in the name of "civilization." In mid-1850 s Bogota, according to Hans-Joachim Konig, artisans (aided by elements in the army) opposed a free-trade model of social equality, protectionist economic policies, and limits on individualism. By contrast, Marianne Wiesebron finds that in nineteenth-century Pernambuco, struggles over modernization took a back seat to local electoral politics. And in an ambitious effort, Cynthia Radding compares postindependence efforts by Indians in northern Mexico and the eastern lowlands of Bolivia to reconstruct the community-state alliance that had underpinned a colonial moral economy and was now threatened by liberal innovation. Finally, in an interesting (if somewhat out-of-place) piece, Elizabeth Dore discovers among the peasant populations of Granada, Nicaragua, a late-nineteenth-century "debt peonage" based less on state coercion than on personalist and clientalistic relations.

Pueblos, comunidades e municipios would have benefited had the participants studied each others' contributions and incorporated more cross-references and comparisons. To their credit, the editors make a heroic and useful effort in their conclusion to draw together threads from these diverse pieces. They identify five main propositions emerging from the texts: (1 ) the reforms that liberals sought often contradicted existing ideas and practice, provoking violent reaction and resistance; (2 ) most of the communities examined struggled to preserve their existing ethnic and social character in the face of liberal assimilationist projects; (3 ) in the...