The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (review)

This is a landmark book, the result of years of both assiduous research and—what is not always the case—serious thinking. It addresses 'the other rebellion'—a somewhat elliptical description of the popular protest that accompanied the Mexican insurgency against Spain and led to independence in 1821. A vast array of incidents and individuals is presented: from dissolute priests to bizarre messiahs, from psychopathic bandits to anonymous bystanders, like the "deaf checker-player from Oaxaca" who was hauled in by the authorities for consorting with a seditious priest in Mexico City's Parián district (p. 343). The reader encounters salacious stories, scatological insults, nasty deaths and nervous breakdowns. Amid the teeming detail, a great deal of valuable generic information is also conveyed (as the author seeks to "rehydrate 'local knowledge' where it lies freeze-dried in the documentary sources", p. 20), concerning rumor, literacy, repression, clerical activism, and popular religion. While Mexicanists will relish the rich and original archival data, comparativists—those interested in, say, nationalism, revolution, or messianism—will benefit from the intelligent deployment of theory and contrasting cases (the French and American revolutions; the Mexican Revolution of 1910). Chapter 2, bucking the hermeneutical house style, offers a straightforward statistical survey of rebel prisoners (age, status, place of origin, spatial mobility, etc.); there is even something here for the most positivistic Cliometrician.

The book is distinctive in two senses. First, Van Young almost entirely omits the "grand narrative" of the insurgency (p. 30, 32-4). Readers who are ignorant of the main events may be flummoxed. His concern is for the "other rebellion"—the host of decentralized ("feudalized") protests that peppered central Mexico—and his approach is relentlessly analytical rather than narrative, synchronic rather than diachronic. True, there are many fascinating mini-narratives—of individual insurgents and particular dissident communities—told in arresting detail and with sharp insight. But the organization is thematic: Indian notables, cabecillas, priests, rumors, riots, and messiahs (the same individuals and communities often crop up recurrently, under different headings). It is as if one wrote the history of the Second World War without regard to outbreak, course and outcome, but under thematic heading: NCOS, tanks, submarines, partisans, propaganda, etc. Whether this matters depends on whether one thinks there is a grand narrative without which the mini-narratives lose meaning: Van Young's view of a host of discrete, "feudalized," "other" protests, disarticulated from the national story, justifies his thematic approach; but to the extent that this view is exaggerated, the approach may be questioned.

Second, Van Young exploits the English language (and a few others) for all it is worth. Fair enough: this is a specialist monograph, not a textbook. Hence the style is dense—at times crisply evocative, at others heavily Latinate and abstract. Villages "explode like insurrectionary buboes . . . to contaminate the countryside" (p. 503); but villagers (and historians) "metabolize"—rather than, say, "digest"—ideas or, even "circumstances" (pp. 273, 307, 452); and there is a lot of "over-determination" (which seems to mean the opposite of what the old structural Marxists meant: pp. 8, 21-2, 102, 152, 402, 498, 547). Quasi-scientific jargon proliferates: "parallax," "disequilibrating vectors," "dimorphism," "proxemics," "isomorphic"and "isotropic" (as in: "New Spain was not socially isotropic," i.e., New Spain was socially diverse) (pp.252, 490; 12; 194; 407; 487; 492). More specifically, psychological and psycho-analytical terms abound (cathexis, stressors, reabsorption fantasy, superego lacunae: pp. 468, 333 and 360, 125, 492). These serve not just as throwaway labels but as central organizing concepts: for example, "hyperesthesia" (pp. 76, 441, 499), which rather superfluously links material pressures and popular protest; or "splitting" (pp. 380-1, 471-5, 637), which is advanced as an explanation for the supposed paradox of rebels killing gachupines to the cry of...