Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 1846-1848 (review)

War within War provides more value per page than any other book on the Mexican-American War. Irving Levinson brings the precision of a military historian to ground only recently examined in English, and then only touched on, by Paul Foos (A Short, Offhand Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War [University of North Carolina Press, 2002]) and Pedro Santoni (Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War [Texas Christian University Press, 1996]), drawing their implications together and providing hard evidence of cause and effect sorely lacking in Foos's book. Doing so, Levinson confirms the need for a revised interpretation of American victory and Mexican defeat, and the centrality of social class and racial-ethnic politics to both.

As Foos suggested, the war was both international and civil: as Levinson explains, "the United States altered the balance of power between the two great contending forces in Mexico" (p. 119). As Santoni's title implies, most of the scholarship on early national Mexican politics, focused around the values and actions of organized factions and parties, suggests that these were federalism (or regionalism) and centralism, but Levinson, like a growing number of Mexican scholars, recognizes that the deepest division was between white elites and Indian peasants. This chasm was the greatest constraint on Mexican national mobilization; indeed, "during the autumn of 1847, those peasants who chose to fight most often fought against their own nation's government" (p. 58).

Significant military operations did not end with the fall of Mexico City. The Mexican state launched a guerrilla campaign against U.S. lines of communications, its principal method of resistance until the peace six months later. Up to a quarter of U.S. forces were deployed to secure these lines, and convoys required escorts of 2,000 to 3,000 troops. (Scott's field force had hardly exceeded 10,000.) Yet indigenous antagonism to a government that represented elites precluded a popular uprising against the Norteamericanos, which meant that the guerrilla operations the government launched could not prevent U.S. reinforcement and resupply, and the invaders were able to wait out the Mexican government. As Santoni pointed out, U.S. leaders played on divisions among the Mexican elite, and attempted to conciliate the peasantry by respecting religion and maintaining discipline. More importantly, they could see that their Mexican counterparts had more urgent matters to turn to, as the demands of "national" mobilization and the absence of repressive government forces spurred peasant uprisings throughout Mexico. "The breadth and ferocity of the ethnically and economically based campesino uprising compelled the Mexican elite to abandon considerations of further resistance to the United States and to refocus military efforts upon restoring their own hegemony" (pp. 112–13). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo enabled Mexican elites to concentrate against these, and by the end of 1848 there were as many troops deployed against the peasantry as there had been against Scott or Taylor. In effect, the United States and Mexican elites "united against the majority" of Mexicans (p. 85).

Levinson brings the range of Foos's conceptualization together with much greater evidence from U.S. and Mexican archives to forge a logical chain of cause and effect. He provides thorough evidence of the ongoing partisan resistance that, combined with political divisions in the United States, compelled President James Polk to accept the Guadalupe Hidalgo boundary rather than the 26th parallel (from the mouth of the Rio Grande west, including Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and most of Baja California) he sought. And he concludes thoughtfully, observing that the alliance that ultimately emerged between U.S. leaders and Mexican elites has been repeated ever since, often at the expense of the Mexican people. For military historians, War within War demonstrates the primacy of politics...