Writing Mexican History by Eric Van Young (review)

This book consists of a series of essays, most of which were first published between 1993 and 2010. An analytical introduction and the fourth chapter represent the only essays that have not appeared elsewhere. As one might expect from Van Young, the essays generally focus on rural economy and independence during the "Bourbon Century," 1750-1850. Written with flair and a distinctive mix of playfulness and pure intellect, the collection is quite pleasurable to read. Exhaustive archival research undergirds the arguments presented, but the essays also draw attention, usefully, to theory and methodology. Curiously, the title is somewhat misleading—it appears to promise a collection of much broader scope. Readers will not find an exhaustive treatment of Mexican themes; the essays generally treat matters historiographical in nature. Furthermore, there is the unusual inclusion of an essay on Latin American rural history that treats Mexico only peripherally, and in a way better covered in other essays in the volume.

The four sections of the book treat in order the historiography of land tenure and usage, the historiography of Mexican independence, and theory and methodology, and offer a concluding essay on the so-called New Cultural History. In his opening essay (chapter 2), Van Young focuses exclusively and narrowly on the trends in historical writing about Mexican rural economy and the hacienda system that have emerged since the publication of his book Hacienda and Market (1981). The third chapter places Mexican rural history in the context of broader work on Latin America, pointing out incongruencies rooted in the different labor systems and market orientations of other parts of Latin America. The two historiographical essays on Mexican independence elaborate (chapter 3) on English-language scholarship alone (anglophone, as Van Young styles it) and (chapter 4) on a comprehensive treatment that begins with Bustamante and Alamán (both of whom wrote in the near-immediate aftermath of Independence) through current writing in what he calls the era of postmodernism. The section on theory and methodology begins with a useful essay on the importance and persistence of regionalism in Mexico, and concludes with an insightful chapter that elucidates common pitfalls of historical research. The final essay is Van Young's, on New Cultural History, in which he argues that this approach is best and most innovative when authors interpret cultural evidence in combination with other modalities.

Of most interest in this collection is how the essays cohere as a whole. The intent is clearly to explore the methodological tensions that Van Young finds between cultural and material frameworks of causation. Van Young illustrates and documents his own transformation from a materialist who explained change in terms of economic class and the pains of deprivation to a culturalist, for whom causation is rooted in conditions of local tradition and identity. Van Young's attention to metacognition provides a substantive and credible historiographical discussion, framed by essays that illustrate his own changes, from a historian who has clearly puzzled over how to analyze cultural evidence that does not fit neatly into a materialist paradigm. Van Young's concluding essay on the New Cultural History sums up well the evolutions that the book represents. He asserts the necessary connection between cultural and economic history, writing, "I want to suggest, therefore, that cultural history should actively colonize economic relations, as it has done political systems, on the imperialist assumption that all history is cultural" (p. 225). It appears that Van Young's main point is to suggest that singular approaches, whether political, economic, social, or materialist are incomplete without the referential material that culture provides. Who better to articulate this vision than Van Young who has been for the past 30 years one of the great masters of teasing meaning out of colonial judicial records?