The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (review)

The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821. By Eric Van Young (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001) 702 pp. $75.00

This is an important book—vast, deeply researched, and carefully argued. It explores popular participations in the wars for Mexican independence, profiling those who rebelled and those who led, while exploring how deep mindsets and emerging ideologies engaged to drive conflicts over power and subordination, belief and legitimacy. Most studies of Mexican independence focus on the movements led by Miguel Hidalgo in the Bajío and José María Morelos in the Pacific hot country, but Van Young emphasizes protests and insurgencies in the indigenous core regions around Mexico City, and secondarily around Guadalajara. He demonstrates that indigenous communities asserted themselves in varied mobilizations during the decade of conflict. He argues that those mobilizations are best explained through cultural analysis that takes rioters' and insurgents' statements seriously.

Van Young emphasizes the local bases and goals of most uprisings, the messianic elements in popular ideologies, and the limited roles of leadership—priestly and otherwise. He insists that socioeconomic pressures explain only the general contexts of insurgencies. Through sharply focused explorations of local political-cultural tensions and expectations, he details why certain communities rebelled while others did not, and why certain members of communities turned to violence, while others remained quiet or defended the regime. His strongest conclusion is that insurgency was locally rooted, and often brief. Goals were primarily local. This emphasis helps to explain the enduring localism that marked nineteenth-century Mexico—and the difficulty of engaging indigenous communities in the national project. While elites imagined a nation, communities concentrated on local production, politics, and cultures. Diverse local pursuits of independence—taken literally—made the pursuit of nation problematic.

Like every important work, this one raises questions that will contribute to persistent debates. Van Young argues that indigenous communities joined the wars for independence more often than is recognized. He shows that Indians comprised 55 percent of the insurgents identified in trials and other inquests, approximating their 60 percent proportion in the general colonial population. But the trial records came primarily from the rural central highlands where indigenous majorities regularly ranged from 70 to 90 percent. Van Young also emphasizes the continuity of indigenous community riots before and during insurgency, noting that rioters and officials found new emphases and intensities once insurgency began. Yet Van Young's statistics show a sharp decline in riots after 1810. Indigenous rioters and rebels were important to Mexico's war for independence, but they were underrepresented in their home regions, and less riotous than in previous decades. Van Young's emphasis on localism and deeply religious cultures should help explain why indigenous insurgency, while important, remained limited during political wars for independence.

Van Young's primary argument is that structural developments cannot explain insurgencies. He insists that cultural analysis offers greater analytical power. In case studies of Atlacomulco and other communities, however, he demonstrates that tensions grounded in structural questions of land, labor, and colonial power were inextricably linked to the cultural contests that galvanized people to conflict. Few have argued that socioeconomic changes fully and simply explain insurgencies. Like Van Young, most emphasize that landed power and the social relations of production tend to set the contexts in which uprisings develop. People in conflict inevitably engage cultural traditions, while developing and asserting contested visions. Arguing culture against structure separates and polarizes the inseparable. The most enduring result of this essential study will be to emphasize that it is time to move beyond debates of structure against culture, and to emphasize (as Van Young does in his case studies) how structural and cultural factors together orchestrate histories of conflict and nation building.