Review of Mexico in Transition by Byron Crites

Book Reviews
the support for rural caciquismo in post-independence Mexico was rooted in the articulation
and preservation of peace, security, local autonomy and cultural ‘ identity ’ ,
always in dialogue or interaction with external authority, rather than as atavistic refl
ections of ‘ structural ’ or ‘ timeless ’ features of a rigid or infl exible rural peasant society.
Rural communities were never static, nor entirely powerless; but the freedom of
action available to regional caciques and the communities they represented was always
circumscribed by the relative power of the state, in either its colonial, liberal or post-
Revolutionary manifestations. As a result, Barrios emerges during the Revolution as a
power broker between local interests, the regional authorities (in the city of Puebla),
and the central state – like his nineteenth-century predecessors, such as Juan Francisco
Lucas – and comes to prominence precisely at a time when the brittle and embattled
liberal state/nation-building project, which enjoyed one of its infrequent bouts of invigoration
during the Porfi riato (1876 – 1911), broke down progressively after 1911.
Barrios was only able to exert a degree of power over serrano affairs in the 1920s,
which was, as Brewster is at pains to emphasise, never absolute, since the exercise of
power always involved compromise as well as coercion because neither the state nor
central governments were able to assert their authority in the region, and thus were
prepared to support any individual or faction which could maintain a semblance of
order. Once the state was in a position to re-establish its authority and the callista
government able to impose its strategy of demilitarisation after 1928, the cacicazgo
rapidly collapsed. This allows Brewster to conclude, convincingly, that the key to
understanding Barrios, like myriad other regional caciques in pre- or post-Revolutionary
Mexico, was neither solely as a defender of local community interests, nor exclusively
an agent of rapacious external forces, but an untidy mixture of the two.
Paul Garner
University of Leeds
Ducey, Michael T. (2004) A Nation of Villages: Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican
Huasteca, 1750 – 1850 , University of Arizona Press (Tucson), xii + 230 pp. $39.95 hbk.
In this insightful, if brief (174 pages of text), study of the Mexican Huasteca, Michael
Ducey adds to the growing corpus of scholarship on popular political culture, peasants
and state formation in the nineteenth century. Ducey examines riots in the waning
decades of Spanish rule, insurrection during the Mexican insurgency between 1810
and 1821, and the politics of rebellion in this region in republican Mexico with particular
focus on the 1836 Papantla rebellion and the Caste War of the Huasteca (1845 –
1850). He traces the shifts which occurred in objectives, tactics, ideologies and
political identities between 1750 and 1850 and poses the central questions of how the
villagers ’ ‘ discontent fi t into the political drama of early national Mexico ’ and whether
or not they possessed a national vision.
Ducey emphasises the diversity of the peasants of the Huasteca and their ability to
manipulate and adapt both colonial and republican political ideologies and institutions
to further their own needs. During the century under study, peasant tactics and discourse
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Society for Latin American Studies
138 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 26, No. 1