Citizenship, Ethnicity, Gender, and Mobilization

The recent expansion of scholarship on women's mobilization in Mexico and Latin America has revealed a neglected history of female activism, as it has incorporated a gender perspective and new ways of thinking about politics, social movements, social and political change, citizenship, feminism, ethnicity, the rise and fall of the Corporatist State, and how neoliberal policies and globalization have been challenged and resisted. The four works under review tackle complex relations among class, gender, identity, ethnicity, generation, and state policies in the history of Latin American politics.

Studies of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the postrevolutionary process of state formation (1917–1940) have shown that popular sectors gained political voice and space through the process and influenced the policies and forms of the new state, while at the same time being integrated into it within new frameworks of domination. Analyzing mainly the roles of peasants and workers, this literature has not truly examined women's politics in the Mexican Revolution, a topic that new scholarship addresses. Jocelyn Olcott's Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico exemplifies this growing historiography. Olcott examines women's political involvement after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 by combining rich detailed archival information with sophisticated theoretical discussion about citizenship, politics, power, negotiation, and everyday life. Olcott gives especial attention to what happened with organized progressive and radical women during the rise and development of Cardenismo (1928–1940) in three different regions—La Comarca Lagunera, Michoacán, and Yucatán—where the Communist Party organized peasant and labor women's leagues. Olcott refers to Cardenismo as a "revolutionary" regime, with traditional and paternalist political and gender policies that promoted socialist education, land redistribution, and labor reform by recognizing the collective rights of disenfranchised groups—peasants, workers, and women. The national Cardenista project flourished during the pinnacle of Mexico's Popular Front. Olcott contextualizes and contrasts these cases with the expansion of women's movements and the campaigns for female suffrage in Mexico during the 1910s and 1930s. She contends that progressive and radical women became central actors in the mobilizations of the 1930s and in the consolidation of postrevolutionary Mexico because they sought "to make the revolution meaningful for ordinary Mexicans" by claiming revolutionary citizenship (3).

Olcott particularly opens up scholarly debates on the meaning and significance of citizenship by reconstructing local cases and contrasting this data with theoretical discussions. She points out that between 1917 and 1934, the characteristics of revolutionary citizenship experienced important transformations and setbacks and two questions dominated the meanings and qualifications for citizenship: "what is the proper balance between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, and to what extent is citizenship a status versus a practice" (4). This book argues that men and women "experienced revolutionary citizenship as contingent, inhabited, and gendered" in accordance with local, regional, and national processes and transformations (6). Olcott argues that Mexican activists used three contrasting forms of citizenship—a liberal rhetoric of suffrage, traditional practices of patronage, and revolutionary promises of popular mobilization—to obtain certain benefits.

Olcott affirms that Mexican women's mobilization followed patterns similar to the regional processes of revolutionary state formation. Incipient feminist associations and congresses also debated how to define citizenship from a gender perspective: "Should they strive to create a place for the citizen-mother, or should they highlight women's...