Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855-1920 (review)

An historical examination of the mutually constitutive political cultures of President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) and the indigenous Zapotec campesinos of Oaxaca, Mexico's central highlands is the focus of Patrick McNamara's carefully researched and ambitious study. Additionally, McNamara analyzes how strategically constructed memories of this long history and their place in it defined the rural political culture and perceived rights of national citizenship of those same campesinos. Sons of the Sierra recasts the familiar story of the rise and fall of Díaz and his home state—in many ways, the political center of Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century and the rule of fellow native son Benito Juárez to the end of the revolution (1910-1920)—and makes a vital contribution to Mexico's post-independence historiography.

Until recently, histories of Oaxaca have described the state as Mexico's "traditional" backwater that enables the center to define itself as the "modern." Writing in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, some scholars argued that "progress" had passed the state by and, because of its ties to the Porfirian regime, the state's population remained "passive" during the revolution. McNamara's fine study builds upon the latest research of a dedicated cadre of scholars who have opened up the examination of the politics, society, and culture of Oaxaca's past. Francie Chassen-Lopéz, the doyenne of this group, has convincingly argued the need to view Mexico's national history from its southern "periphery."

Yet Sons of the Sierra is much more than just a regional history. The work also does a fine job of examining and integrating broader comparative and theoretical questions of peasant consciousness, popular nationalism, and "regional" history. As McNamara argues, the "communal literacy" of the Sierra Zapotecs enabled them to engage in the official circuits of textual documentation, protest, and petition with all levels of government. These written records—hundreds of letters exchanged between Díaz and his fellow oaxaqueños—addressed critical issues of peasant agency and consciousness. Examining "the ways in which local power relations . . . influenced the construction and legitimation of a national regime" (p. 204), McNamara, drawing on the study of popular nationalism by Florencia Mallon, shows how rural popular classes simultaneously forged alliances with and contested (and hence helped shape) the hegemony of local, regional and national elites. Viewing geographic space as a socially constructed phenomenon, garnering meaning through a multiplicity of human practices, McNamara effectively decenters national history. Challenging the typical additive articulations of the history of Mexico's many regions, McNamara positions local communities at the center of his narrative and necessarily makes regional history commensurate with national history.

Viewed through the experiences of the rural village inhabitants of the Sierra Zapoteca, the book follows Díaz's career from his early days as district subprefect in the town of Ixtlán in 1855 to the denigration of his memory in the revolutionary years following the Porfiriato. The work can be divided into two halves. The first recounts the rise to prominence of the rural National Guard in the Ixtlán district and its members' subsequent involvement and integration into the national events surrounding the liberal reforms of mid century, battles against the French intervention in the 1860s, and Díaz's revolts at La Noria (1871) and Tuxtepec (1876), which led to his presidency. The work's second half analyzes political and economic transitions in the Sierra during Díaz's reign in three distinct periods. The years 1876-1890 witnessed how the men and women of the Sierra capitalized on the personal relationships they had established fighting alongside Díaz and his mestizo allies in the previous "generation of the Reform." These communities "expected and received compensation for their years of service in the form...