Ayuntamientos y liberalismo gaditano en México ed. by Juan Ortiz Escamilla and José Antonio Serrano Ortega (review)

It is always good for historians in the United States to be reminded that the past matters in other countries. Mexico is a real standout when it comes to recognizing the importance of its roots, be they pre-Columbian or nineteenth century. This excellent and thought-provoking collection demonstrates once again how scholars there look to the past to find answers and precedents to the most modern questions.

This time, the problem behind the scholarship is the relationship between self-determination and democracy at the beginning of a modern nation state. Ariel Rodríguez Kuri inaugurated this train of thought in 1996 with his important book about the ayuntamiento of Mexico City in the late nineteenth century. Then Ortiz Escamilla and Serrano Ortega took up the idea, which must have been percolating throughout the republic, since so many historians were able to contribute to a conference at which Rodríguez Kuri was present, among other specialists.

The collection contains 12 essays, most of which focus on specific areas outside Mexico City. The authors particularly concentrated on looking at the fate of indios and mestizos under the sovereignty of ayuntamientos, especially once the "república de indios" disappeared after Independence. Perhaps the editors hoped to find that the various ayuntamientos, as established in Cádiz, functioned as bridges between the people and their leaders. They had to conclude, however, that each responded to its own local conditions, some of which were hardly what we would recognize as "democratic."

The volume begins with Manuel Chust's examination of Spain at the time of the Cádiz revolution. Chust asserts that in Spain, the function of justice belonged to the nation; in America, the issue was both autonomy and administration. The key question was how the federalism so desired in Mexico could handle both. In Tlaxcala, according to Raymond Buve, Cádiz led to a true political revolution, but with two faces. As in many other examples, one group wanted to control the indigenous population, while the other wanted to give it a chance for self-government. Thanks to the assertion of national power, neither fully got what it wanted.

This, of course, is just one of the dangers of doing a book of essays about parts of the country. What happened in Tlaxcala was typical of some places, but not Yucatán. According to Arturo Güémez Pineda, in that area the mechanisms of Cádiz were used as a way to assert the representational attributes of the colonial regime. Many cabildos, established there by both indios and mestizos, protected land and continued to function for many years. However, as Michael Ducey argues for Veracruz, few indios served there, although the indigenous presence was still quite powerful in the area.

According to Peter Guardino, in Oaxaca the municipios continued to collect the contribución personal even after independence. As Jaime Hernández Díaz relates, In Michoacan, the number of ayuntamientos declined in the five years following Independence from 91 to just 69; as for Puebla, Alicia Tecuanhuey Sandoval indicates ayuntamientos were restricted, lost their control over the army, and suffered serious reductions in their numbers. Worse still, in Guanajuato, ayuntamientos represented 3,000 people, but only those deemed "competentes." Soon Indian towns were protesting the ayuntamientos, and those in Indian towns were abolished because the indios were deemed lacking in "aptitude."

These essays are very helpful in explaining what independence did and did not mean for nonwhites. The lack of a conclusion, or even comments from those scholars who attended but did not present, keeps the collection from addressing the issue overall, and its concomitant concerns such as racism, rural versus urban, and income distribution remain unexplored. This omission perpetuates the feeling that the national government served only to oppress the regions, letting the regions in turn oppress...