Wars Within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America (review)

This book sets Mexico's war with the United States in the broader context of agrarian based insurgency and internal conflict that stretched from the colonial period to the 1910 Revolution. Levinson argues that the war represented a key chapter in the struggle between Mexican elites and their rural, popular-class counterparts.

The war between Mexico and the United States, Levinson contends, profoundly changed both Mexico's geographical and political landscapes. The U.S. invasion, along with frequent incidents of bad behavior on behalf of U.S. forces, successfully (albeit temporarily) united rural insurgents, Mexican partisans, and federal forces against a common foe. The result constituted a serious threat to U.S. operations and reflected an all too brief and rare moment of Mexican national unity. Levinson does a particularly nice job of demonstrating that, as a result, American military success was no sure thing. Quoting General Zachary Taylor, he notes the growing fear among the U.S. military leadership that the guerrilla insurgents' growing threat might necessitate the withdrawal of U.S. forces to Veracruz and the Rio Grande. By late 1847, though, the political landscape would shift again, this time in the Americans' favor.

With U.S. forces occupying Mexico City, the short-lived alliance of insurgents, partisans, and federal troops slowly sputtered to a halt. General Winfield Scott, Levinson notes, shrewdly began to play one faction against another. His support for the Church, for example, when the acting Gómez-Farías government demanded money of the venerable institution, drove a wedge further between the urban elite who ran the country and the Church's legion of supporters. In other instances, he provided moral, and even tactical, support to those same elites, who now found a common foe in the form of agrarian based insurgencies in the countryside.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended hostilities with the United States, represented the tacit acknowledgement on behalf of Mexico's creole leadership that bands of rural insurgents within the nation's borders, and not the U.S. occupational force, constituted the greatest threat to the political status quo. The treaty, in short, enabled Mexican elites to focus their full attention on the wave of agrarian insurgencies stretching from Southern Mexico to the Yucatán peninsula. Equally important, the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Mexico reflected the Polk administration's conclusion that ongoing creole rule would best serve U.S. interests.

Recasting Mexico's war with the United States as a complex series of internal political and military gambits, involving a wide spectrum of players, is a risky venture but Levinson pulls it off with aplomb. Efficient prose and an almost uncanny knack for determining precisely the right amount of exposition ensure that both scholarly and general audiences will find the work insightful and accessible. To be sure, a little more explanation of the role that Mexico's puros and moderados played prior to the war, or a slight expansion of the section dealing with the Polkos rebellion, would make Levinson's book even more accessible to the general audience. Still, these are minor quibbles indeed and, given the inclusion in his bibliography of the latest scholarship on the two topics, one wonders if earlier versions of the manuscript did not, in fact, include more exposition. Levinson packs an impressive amount of research (including a veritable treasure trove of material from Mexico's Archivo de la Defensa Nacional) into just 121 pages of text and the end result is a product equally deserving of space on scholars' bookshelves and those of their students.