Wars Within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 1846–1848 by Irving W. Levinson (review)

V i e Latin Americanist, Spring2007 (59). The link between time and bodily sacrifice-”Time itself issues from a dismembered body [...]” (93)-opens possibilities to an “understanding of metaphysics that lies outside the impositions of Western thought” (99). Ultimately, what this trio of Mayanists has achieved is a vibrant portrayal of the Maya body as linked to a particular worldview and time-only the beginning, as the authors themselves admit, of an invaluable enrichment to contemporary understanding. TheMemory ofBones offers exactly this precious treasure. Bruce Dean Willis Department of Languages University of Tulsa WARS WITHIN WAR: MEXICAN GUERRILLAS, DOMESTIC ELITES, AND THE UNITED STATESOF AMERICA, 2846-1848, BY IRVING W. LEVINSON. FORTWORTH: TEXAS CHRISTIAN UP, 2005, P. 173, $29.95. As a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico during 2000, Irving Levinson spent an extensive amount of time at numerous Mexican archives including Mexico’s National Defense Archive. It was through this experience that Levinson, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, discovered some highly relevant information related to two concurrent guerilla campaigns that occurred during the Mexican-American War. While most historians have glossed over these unconventional revolts, Levinson convincingly asserts in Wars Within War that these movements helped define the final outcome of the Mexican-American War. To make his argument Levinson relates primary sources to excellent texts written by preeminent scholars of Mexican history and military theorists such as Carl Von Clausewitz. In Levinson’sfirst chapter he effectively draws from numerous seminal works related to Mexico in order to frame the MexicanAmericanWar within thecontextof Mexicanhistory sincetheSpanishconquest of Mesoamerica. The final four chapters provide a critical historical narrative of the Mexican-American War from the initial U.S. invasion until well after the signing of the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848.By describing the war chronologically Levinson is able to explain how critical battles and other events impacted important social and political actors-”the Mexican state, the army, the loyal and rebellious guerilla groups, the civilian population, and US. forces” (xvii)-and how these groups, in turn, influenced each other. In the first chapter Levinson describes the history of three profound cleavages in Mexican society,each of which had a dramatic impact on the war. The first two divisions -ideological rifts between liberals and conservatives and the incongruent interests of centralists and regional caudillos-had a divisive effecton relations between Mexico’selite.The third division Levinson describes is the deep rift between the criollo elite-men of Spanish decent4 Book Reviews and the indigenous underclass. As Levinson notes, conditions worsened for the indigenous communities after Mexico gained its independence from the Spanish monarchy; the criollo elite abolished the indigenous‘ access to the courts and revoked their right to hold communal lands (12). This erosion of indigenous rights-and the many abuses that followed-led to a series of brutal intra-Mexican rebellions in the years that preceded the MexicanAmerican War (40). One of the critical themes in the next four chapters is how these social rifts impacted the Mexican army’s strategy. After the United States army bombarded the port of Veracruz and made its way to Mexico City, Mexican leaders developed a plan based on guerilla warfare. The national government exhorted regional elites to outfit a light corps in order to “wage a mobile type of warfare that would strike at one of their foe’s weakest points: the supply lines along which vital munitions, money, and reinforcements moved west to Scott’smain army” (40).These mobile units were well trained and effective. At one point, over 21 percent of General Scott’s 12,000 troops had to fend off the light corps to ensure that the U.S. supply lane from Mexico City to the port of Veracruz remained intact (118). Still, the corps did not recruit from Mexico’s large indigenous population and was further weakened by several caudillos that despised the central government and did not supply necessary troops or provisions. As such, the light corps was a lingering nuisance to the United States army, but was unable to turn the tide of the war in Mexico’s favor. The stratified nature of Mexicansociety precluded it from a popular guerilla uprising...