The Collective and the Public in Latin America: Cultural Identities and Political Order (review)

The editors frame this volume as a sequel to the 1998 Constructing Collective Identities and Shaping Public Spheres, edited by Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder, and with good reason. The current volume presents a broad cross section of work that fills out themes broached in the earlier book, investigating the practices, discourses, and social networks that shape social identities at regional and national levels. The book is arranged in three thematic sections based roughly on the spatial, sociological, and discursive elements of power relations and collective identity formation. The essays themselves, originally presented as papers at the 1997 Congress of Americanists held in Quito, cover much of continental Hispanic America from early colonial times to the recent past and include contributions from both senior analysts and younger scholars. Indeed, the sheer range of topics and approaches limits the ability of contributors to engage each other in historiographic or analytic terms. Nevertheless, an emphasis on the public character of identity formation provides a common point of departure, and a very fruitful one at that.

One of the book's strengths is an insistence on conceptualizing the public sphere as an arena in which power relations and sociocultural solidarities are formed and manifested. María Elena Martínez's essay on the regulation of space in colonial Puebla, Mexico, Cristina Escobar's analysis of bullfight festivities in twentieth-century Colombia as mechanisms of landowner paternalism, and Anath Ariel de Vidas's piece on Teenek (Huastec) concepts of Indianness are particularly noteworthy examples of how the authors have problematized identity formation by investigating the unfolding of power relations in the public gaze. Other essays investigate how social networks establish and reproduce social solidarities, political power, or both. In this vein, Tamar Herzog examines a social organization in the colonial Americas composed of real or imagined natives of Navarro, and Zacarias Moutoukias discusses the merchant guild of Buenos Aires at the turn of the nineteenth century. Other essays place a greater emphasis on the relationship between "the political" and the formation of national or social identities—such as Claudio Lomnitz's discussion of the presidential persona or Charles Cutter's examination of how the legal system of colonial New Mexico helped shape the social categories that its inhabitants recognized. Taken as a whole, these contributions offer tantalizing insights into the cultural logic behind identity formation over the long term and in multiple contexts.

As with most collections of essays, the degree to which individual contributions fit within the editors' scheme varies. Thematic heterodoxy is particularly apparent, for example, in the relative lack of explicit reference to the public sphere, despite the editors' having foregrounded it in the introduction. Even the essays that do turn their attention to the public sphere do not subject it to analysis in its own right à la Habermas. With a few exceptions (such as François-Xavier Guerra's treatment of Spanish American independence), most of the essays disregard the class-specific nature of the public sphere and do not investigate how public spheres may be established, modified, or undermined. Moreover, much of what goes on in a (multiclass?) public sphere goes unaddressed. Also, the book's emphasis on identity and publicness would seem to call for some consideration of religious practice or collective religiosity, or at least how these things informed identity formation. With the exception of essays by Herzog, Claudia García, and Adina Cimet, however, most contributions eschew a direct engagement with the intersection of identity and religiosity.

But these are minor quibbles. In a more substantive sense, The Collective and the Public is a welcome addition to recent scholarship that seeks to expand the analytical boundaries of "the political" and understand the interaction between the realms of politics and...