Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810-1920 (review)

This book is "a cultural history of banditry in Mexico." It argues that "bandit narratives were integral to broader processes, involving Mexicans and foreigners in forms of national and class struggle, to define and create the Mexican nation-state" (p. 2). How Mexicans constructed stories about banditry, according to Frazer, reflected the wider discourse of what it meant to be Mexican.

The importance of banditry in the discussions of national identity and state formation was a clear indication of the profound distrust elite Mexicans had for the lower classes. Social control of these subaltern classes was hard-earned. Any semblance of a centralized state emerged only in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The disorder that in the eyes of the elite predominated during the first six decades after independence served to reinforce their profound disdain for the mostly rural-dwelling mestizos and Indians who comprised the majority of the population. Elite disregard for the lower classes grew as Mexico modernized and positivist thought further underlined the disparities in outlook between the upper and lower classes. Frazer maintains that the unmitigated disdain elites had for their fellow Mexicans served as the underpinnings for the authoritarian strain in Mexican politics, which led first to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and then to the one-party, post-revolutionary state. Throughout, Frazer is not concerned so much with the social origins or banditry or the composition of bandit gangs (there is a discussion of these on pp. 39-43) as with the stories people told about bandits. "Elite discourse on banditry intertwined with the struggle to create a durable state and national identity in postcolonial Mexico," he writes, maintaining "the elite's legal discourse on banditry was therefore a core element in state formation" (p. 21).

Frazer traces elite views of banditry and the lower classes through the various stages of nineteenth-century Mexican history. The emphasis is on the prevalent depictions of bandits, thus there are chapters on foreign travelers' views on bandits, on banditry in the Mexican novel, and on corridos, which make up the core of the monograph. Foreigners, especially Anglo-Saxons, portrayed Mexicans pejoratively. Banditry to them symbolized Mexico's backwardness. This was an image that was hard to shake and it persisted until the Díaz era, only to reappear with the Revolution in 1911. Mexican novelists in the early independence era first critiqued conservatism and its colonial roots and then joined the disparagement of the "dangerous classes." A different perspective from below emerged in Mexico's popular ballads or corridos. "The images of banditry in corridos corresponded to a complex of tensions that not only existed within lower class culture but also characterized the relationship between lower-class culture and elite cultural processes" (p. 133). "Mexicans used the figure of the bandit to argue out the rights and duties of citizenship. For this reason, interactions between masculine and feminine ideals were central to the logic of bandit narratives in Mexico" (p. 60).

The Mexican revolution, of course, brought bandits to the forefront of politico-military discourse with the emergence of guerrilla leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco "Pancho" Villa. Their opponents, often the very same elite that had so despised the lower classes during the preceding century, labeled them bandits. A century later their detractors continue to consider them to have been outlaw rabble.

The evidentiary base of Bandit Nation is rather narrow, for it relies on approximately twenty-one novels and travel memoirs, a handful of corridos, and another handful of contemporary observers for its base. The author does not pay any attention to what major political figures, such as Agustín de Iturbide, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Benito Júarez, Ignacio Comonfort, Juan Alvarez, or Porfirio Díaz, people at the very center of the discourse, had to say about bandits. Frazer does not cite Guillermo Prieto and Vicente Riva Palacio...