Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (review)

In Pistoleros and Popular Movements, Benjamin T. Smith explores the formation of the postrevolutionary state in Mexico, focusing on the southern state of Oaxaca and the period between 1928 and 1952. Like most recent histories of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico, Smith argues that popular movements, local and regional political bosses, and state-level elites confounded the efforts of the central government to expand its reach across the national territory through ongoing efforts to contest, resist, appropriate, and reshape the center’s socioeconomic and political reforms. Smith goes further than most historians, however, in claiming that generalizations about state formation in Mexico are all but impossible. He contends that the three major efforts to characterize the relationship between state and society in postrevolutionary Mexico—pluralist, revisionist, and postrevisionist or neo-Gramscian—all fail to “describe the sheer panoply of regional arrangements enacted by the Mexican state” (p. 5). Smith suggests, therefore, “a move away from these overarching models of state formation and toward an analysis of distinct, contained moments of interaction between regional elites, popular groups, and the state” (p. 9).

The first chapter of the book provides historical background on Oaxaca between 1876 and 1928, from the beginning of the Porfiriato to that of the Maximato of Plutarco Elías Calles. The next four chapters deal with the politics and policies of the Cárdenas administration of 1934–1940; the final four, save a short concluding chapter, deal with popular movements and gubernatorial politics in the period of 1940 to 1952. Throughout, Smith looks at how governors and their circles of political supporters navigated their relationships with presidents and the federal government on the one hand, and with local and regional political bosses and popular movements on the other.

The strength of this book is its nuanced and highly-detailed description of local and state politics in the 1940s and early 1950s, a period as yet little explored by historians and poorly understood by social scientists, who have tended to overstate the coherence and reach of the central government in the post-Cárdenas era. Its main weaknesses are theoretical and conceptual in nature. Smith’s critique of the pluralist and revisionist approaches to postrevolutionary state formation in Mexico covers very familiar and welltrodden territory, and it is not clear how his own approach differs from the postrevisionist analyses he finds lacking. While postrevisionists do indeed emphasize the role of hegemony and co-optation in state formation, they hardly ignore the importance of state violence and coercion, or the ongoing resistance of popular movements and regional elites to the expansion of the central state. Apart from the introductory and concluding chapters, the book is almost entirely descriptive, and non-specialists are likely to be overwhelmed by the level of detail in the absence of any clear analytical framework. In a section on methodology in the introductory chapter, Smith refers briefly to concepts such as mobilization structures, movement trajectories, and repertoires of contention, derived from social movement theory, but these play virtually no role in the rest of the book.

Smith seems to be rejecting the possibility of generalizations at any level. If this is the case, does it make any sense at all to speak of state formation? Although Smith does not define what he means by the word state, and often seems to conflate it with the policies, personnel, and organizations of the central government, the concept must imply some degree of institutionalization if it is to be at all useful, however varied state-society relationships may be over time and across territory. If state formation can only be captured by “dynamic, supple, localized anti-models” (p. 10), then the concepts of state and of formation have most likely been emptied of all meaningful content. But surely there is some analytical terrain between the Leviathan of revisionism and a state that varies from one pueblo to...