Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (review)

Historians of modern Mexico often take a sort of perverse pleasure in pointing out that between gaining its independence from Spain (1821), and the advent of the dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876), the country saw more than fifty heads-of-state, sometimes several per year. And if one looks at the long nineteenth century, from 1800, say, to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910, the waxing and waning tide of political chaos was accompanied by huge changes in the economy, institutional life, political geography, and class structure of the country. Were Mexican history less inherently fascinating, or less important to the history of the United States, the rest of Latin America, or even the world as a whole, and were it not such a compellingly paradigmatic case of the contradictions of modernization, this chaotic instability would present no particular problem for historians, since we could simply ignore it. This very complexity presents a virtually insuperable challenge to writing a synoptic history of nineteenth-century Mexico within a reasonable number of pages, a challenge the accomplished Rutgers University historian Mark Wasserman has taken up in this volume with somewhat mixed results, but in the end with a high degree of success. Whatever faults are here, they are generally those of omission rather than commission—elisions dictated by lack of space rather than by lack of knowledge or subtlety on the part of the author. The book, in fact, is highly readable, being both accessibly written and lacking the normal scholarly apparatus, except for a condensed but well chosen English-language bibliography at the end. Telling use is made throughout of comments by contemporaneous observers of Mexico, among them the oft-quoted Fanny Calderón de la Barca. The book would be ideal for an upper-level undergraduate course (for which it was apparently written), or even for an interested non-specialist readership. Replete with portraits of nineteenth-century political figures, reproductions of Mexican landscapes, and representations of the common people of country and city who occupy much of Wasserman’s expansive canvas, the book also sports several useful maps and tables.

The book’s ten chapters move briskly along a fairly traditional narrative line, hewing closely to the political history of Mexico between independence from Spain and the outbreak of the 1910 Revolution. Woven around this central axis are two interrelated thematic emphases: the experience of common people during this chaotic first century of the nation’s life, and the particular experience of women, especially of subaltern women, although this latter thread tends to become lost in the book’s last chapters, and even where it is addressed explicitly in the earlier sections seems frankly something of an add-on. Nicely drawn biographical portraits of major national political leaders—Antonio López de Santa Anna, Benito Juárez, and Porfirio Díaz—open each of the three major sections, followed by brief time lines laying out the major political milestones during that leader’s era. Aside from the pleasantly surprising attempt, in a synoptic work, to develop a thesis—in this case, that the intensely localist loyalties and political activity of country people, especially, played a large role in shaping the nation’s destiny—, a number of sections make the book well worth reading. Chapter 1, for example, offers very good baseline descriptions of “traditional” haciendas (great rural estates) and peasant villages, even if these tend somewhat toward the timeless and archetypal; Chapter 2 an astute discussion of nineteenth-century politics in general, much of it centering on the bourgeois politicians and professionals who made up the core of the political nation; Chapter 3 a reasonably complete summary of the symptoms and broad causes of Mexico’s economic backwardness up to mid-century; and Chapter 4 a quite gripping narrative of the Mexican-American War (1845–48). Chapter 7 provides a very nice account, through an evocative montage of...