Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:14:47.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Decentering the Regime: Culture and Regional Politics in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Jeffrey W. Rubin
Jeffrey W. Rubin*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

As a preeminent enduring regime in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study regarding the nature and locus of power. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that ongoing domination has resulted from centralized, relatively homogeneous power transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms. The process of transmission replicated the dynamics of the center through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even now, as researchers are emphasizing the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity and nuance of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to the terms of the 1970s analysis and view the present through this lens. But while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of hegemony. In constructing a state-centered and center-centered understanding of politics, social scientists then and now have misunderstood the nature of power and domination in Mexico and the reasons for the endurance of the Mexican regime.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1996 , pp. 85 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank John Womack, Jr., for his encouragement in pursuing the lines of argument undertaken in this essay. I also thank the participants in the Mexico research seminar at the Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the seminars on Latin America at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, for the opportunity to present this work in various stages and for thoughtful and challenging criticism. In addition, I am indebted to Barbara Corbett, Wayne Cornelius, Ann Craig, Jonathan Fox, Gil Joseph, David Myhre, Mary Roldán, Leslie Salzinger, and Lynn Stephen for many insightful comments on this project and discussions on Mexico generally. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous LARR reviewers for their helpful comments.

References

AITKEN, ROB 1994 “Political Culture and Local Identities in Michoacán.” Paper presented at the conference “Political Culture in Mexico,” University of Utrecht, 28–29 April.Google Scholar
ALLARDT, E., AND ROKKAN, S., EDS. 1970 Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
ALMOND, GABRIEL A., AND FLANAGAN, SCOTT C., EDS. 1973 Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
ALONSO, ANA MARIA 1988a “‘Progress’ as Disorder and Dishonor: Discourses of Serrano Resistance.” Critique of Anthropology 8, no. 1:13–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ALONSO, ANA MARIA 1988b “U.S. Military Intervention, Revolutionary Mobilization, and Popular Ideology in the Chihuahuan Sierra, 1916–17.” In Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention, edited by Nugent, Daniel, 199–228. La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
ALONSO, ANA MARIA 1992 “Work and Gusto: Gender and Re-creation in a North Mexican Pueblo.” In CALAGIONE, FRANCIS, AND NUGENT 1992, 164–85.Google Scholar
ALVARADO, ARTURO, ED. 1987 Electoral Patterns and Perspectives in Mexico. La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
AZIZ NASSIF, ALBERTO 1989 “Regional Dimensions of Democratization.” In CORNELIUS, GENTLEMAN, AND SMITH 1989, 87–108.Google Scholar
BARTRA, ARMANDO n.d. “La ardua construcción del ciudadano: Movimiento cívico y lucha gremial en la Costa Grande de Guerrero.” Manuscript.Google Scholar
BARTRA, ROGER 1992 The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
BECKER, MARJORIE 1993 “Black and White and Color: Cardenismo and the Search for a Campesino Ideology.” In Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America, edited by Levine, Daniel H. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
BECKER, MARJORIE 1994 “Torching La Purísima, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacán, 1934–1940.” In JOSEPH AND NUGENT 1994, 247–64.Google Scholar
BEEZLEY, WILLIAM H., MARTIN, CHERYL ENGLISH, AND FRENCH, WILLIAM E. 1994 Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources.Google Scholar
BOURDIEU, PIERRE 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BOURDIEU, PIERRE, AND WACQUANT, LOIC J. D. 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
CALAGIONE, JOHN, FRANCIS, DORIS, AND NUGENT, DANIEL, EDS. 1992 Workers' Expressions: Beyond Accommodation and Resistance. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
CALDEIRA, TERESA 1994 “Violence, the Unbounded Body, and the Disregard for Rights: Limits of Democratization in Brazilian Society” Paper presented to the Latin American Studies Association, 10–12 Mar., Atlanta, Georgia.Google Scholar
CAMPBELL, HOWARD 1990 “Zapotec Ethnic Politics and the Politics of Culture in Juchitán, Oaxaca (1350–1990).” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar
CAMPBELL, HOWARD 1994 Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in Southern Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
CAMPBELL, HOWARD, BINFORD, LEIGH, BARTOLOME, MIGUEL, AND BARABAS, ALICIA, EDS. 1993 Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representations from Juchitán, Oaxaca. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
CAMPBELL, HOWARD, AND GREEN, SUSANNE 1993 “A History of Representations of Isthmus Zapotec Women.” Paper presented to the Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Mexico City, 3 August.Google Scholar
CENTENO, MIGUEL ANGEL 1994 Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
CLENDINNEN, INGA 1987 Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
CLINE, HOWARD F. 1963 Mexico: Revolution to Evolution, 1940–1960. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
COLLIER, DAVID, ED. 1979 The New Authoritarianism in Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
COLLIER, RUTH BERINS 1982 “Popular-Sector Incorporation and Political Supremacy: Regime Evolution in Brazil and Mexico.” In HEWLETT AND WEINERT 1982, 57–109.Google Scholar
COLLIER, RUTH BERINS, AND COLLIER, DAVID 1979 “Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregating ‘Corporatism.‘” American Political Science Review 73, no. 4:967–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
COLLIER, RUTH BERINS, AND COLLIER, DAVID 1991 Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
CONTRERAS, OSCAR F., AND BENNETT, VIVIENNE 1994 “National Solidarity in the Northern Borderlands: Social Participation and Community Leadership.” In CORNELIUS, CRAIG, AND FOX 1994, 281–305.Google Scholar
COMAROFF, JEAN 1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A. 1973 “Nation-Building, Participation, and Distribution: The Politics of Social Reform under Cárdenas.” In ALMOND AND FLANAGAN 1973, 392–498.Google Scholar
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A. 1975 Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A. 1995 “Designing Social Policy for Mexico's Liberalized Economy: From Social Services Infrastructure to Job Creation.” In The Challenge of Institutional Reform in Mexico, edited by Roett, Riordan. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A., CRAIG, ANN, AND FOX, JONATHAN, EDS. 1994 Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy. La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican StudiesGoogle Scholar
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A., GENTLEMAN, JUDITH, AND SMITH, PETER H., EDS. 1989 Mexico's Alternative Political Futures. La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
CUMBERLAND, CHARLES 1968 Mexico: The Struggle for Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
DAVIS, DIANE E. 1989 “Divided over Democracy: The Embeddedness of State and Class Conflicts in Contemporary Mexico.” Politics and Society 17, no. 3:247–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DAVIS, DIANE E. 1992 “Mexico's New Politics: Changing Perspectives on Free Trade.” World Policy Journal 9, no. 4:655–71.Google Scholar
ECKSTEIN, SUSAN 1977 “The State and the Urban Poor.” In REYNA AND WEINERT 1977, 23–46.Google Scholar
ERICKSON, KENNETH P. 1977 The Brazilian Corporative State and Working-Class Politics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
FAGEN, RICHARD, AND TUOHY, WILLIAM 1972 Politics and Privilege in a Mexican City. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
FOUCAULT, MICHEL 1990 The History of Sexuality, Volume I. New York: Vintage (originally published in French in 1976).Google Scholar
FOWERAKER, JOE 1990 “Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico.” In FOWERAKER AND CRAIG 1990, 3–20.Google Scholar
FOWERAKER, JOE 1993 Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers' Movement, 1977–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FOWERAKER, JOE, AND CRAIG, ANN L., EDS. 1990 Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
FOX, JONATHAN 1993 The Politics of Food in Mexico: State Power and Social Mobilization. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FOX, JONATHAN 1994a “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship: Lessons from Mexico.” World Politics 46, no. 2:151–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FOX, JONATHAN 1994b “Targeting the Poorest: The Role of the National Indigenous Institute in Mexico's Solidarity Program.” In CORNELIUS, CRAIG, AND FOX 1994, 179–216.Google Scholar
FOX, JONATHAN, AND MOGUEL, JULIO 1995 “Pluralism and Anti-Poverty Policy: Mexico's National Solidarity Program and Left Opposition Municipalities.” In RODRIGUEZ AND WARD 1995, 189–204.Google Scholar
FRIEDRICH, PAUL 1986 The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthropological Method. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
GARCIA CANCLINI, NESTOR 1989 Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico City: Grijalbo.Google Scholar
GONZALEZ, LUIS 1972 Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia. Mexico City: Colegio de México.Google Scholar
GONZALEZ CASANOVA, PABLO 1970 Democracy in Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
GRINDLE, MERILEE 1977 Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GRUENING, ERNEST 1934 Mexico and Its Heritage. New York: Appleton-Century.Google Scholar
GRUZINSKI, SERGE 1993 The Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
GUADARRAMA, ROCIO 1987 “Elections in Sonora.” In ALVARADO 1987, 43–80.Google Scholar
GUADARRAMA S., GRACIELA 1987 “Entrepreneurs and Politics: Businessmen in Electoral Contests in Sonora and Nuevo León, July, 1985.” In ALVARADO 1987, 81–110.Google Scholar
HABER, PAUL 1994 “Changing Political Fortunes in Durango: The Role of Solidaridad.” In CORNELIUS, CRAIG, AND FOX 1994, 255–79.Google Scholar
HALE, CHARLES 1968 Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
HAMILTON, NORA 1982 The Limits of State Autonomy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HANSEN, ROGER 1971 The Politics of Mexican Development. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
HARVEY, NEIL 1994 “Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural Reforms, Campesino Radicalism, and the Limits to Salinismo.” Revised and updated. In The Transformation of Rural Mexico, 1–49. La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
HELLMAN, JUDITH ADLER 1983 Mexico in Crisis. New York: Holmes and Meier (originally published in 1978).Google Scholar
HERNANDEZ, LUIS 1990 “Autonomía y liderazgo en una organización campesina regional.” Cuadernos Desarrollo de Base, no. 1 (Dec.):1–114 (published in Mexico City).Google Scholar
HERNANDEZ CHAVEZ, ALICIA 1979 La mecánica cardenista. Mexico City: Colegio de México.Google Scholar
HEWLETT, SYLVIA ANN, AND WEINERT, RICHARD S., EDS. 1982 Brazil and Mexico: Patterns in Late Development. Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.Google Scholar
HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
JOSEPH, GILBERT M., AND NUGENT, DANIEL 1994 Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
KARL, TERRY 1990 “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America.” Comparative Politics 23 (Oct.):1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
KNIGHT, ALAN 1986 The Mexican Revolution. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
LINZ, JUAN 1970 “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain.” In ALLARDT AND ROKKAN 1970, 251–83.Google Scholar
LOMNITZ-ADLER, CLAUDIO 1991 “Concepts of the Study of Regional Culture.” American Ethnologist 18, no. 2:195–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LOMNITZ-ADLER, CLAUDIO 1992 Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MALLON, FLORENCIA 1995 Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MALLOY, JAMES M. 1977 “Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America: The Modal Pattern.” In MALLOY, ED., 1977, 3–19.Google Scholar
MALLOY, JAMES M., ED. 1977 Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
MARQUEZ, ENRIQUE 1977 “Political Anachronisms: The Navista Movement and Political Processes in San Luis Potosí, 1958–1985.” In ALVARADO 1977, 111–25.Google Scholar
MAXFIELD, SYLVIA 1990 Governing Capital: International Finance and Mexican Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MIGDAL, JOEL S. 1988 Strong States and Weak Societies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
NEEDLER, MARTIN C. 1971 Politics and Society in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
NUGENT, DANIEL 1989 “Are We Not [Civilized] Men? The Formation and Devolution of Community in Northern Mexico.” Journal of Historical Sociology (September).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NUGENT, DANIEL 1992 “Popular Musical Culture in Rural Chihuahua: Accommodation or Resistance?” In CALAGIONE, FRANCIS, AND NUGENT 1992, 29–47.Google Scholar
O'DONNELL, GUILLERMO A. 1977 “Corporatism and the Question of the State.” In MALLOY, ED., 1977, 47–87.Google Scholar
O'DONNELL, GUILLERMO A., AND SCHMITTER, PHILIPPE 1986 Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
PADGETT, VINCENT 1976 The Mexican Political System. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin (first published in 1966).Google Scholar
PANSTERS, WIL 1990 Politics and Power in Puebla. Amsterdam: Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA).Google Scholar
PIKE, FREDRICK B., AND STRITCH, THOMAS, EDS. 1974 The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
PURNELL, JENNY 1993 “The Politics of Identity: The Cristeros and Agraristas of Revolutionary Michoacán.” Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
REYES HEROLES, JESUS 1988 El liberalismo mexicano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica (first published in 1961).Google Scholar
REYNA, JOSE LUIS 1977 “Redefining the Authoritarian Regime.” In REYNA AND WEINERT 1977, 155–71.Google Scholar
REYNA, JOSE LUIS, AND WEINERT, RICHARD S., EDS. 1977 Authoritarianism in Mexico. Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
RODRIGUEZ, VICTORIA, AND WARD, PETER, EDS. 1995 Opposition Government in Mexico: Past Experiences and Future Opportunities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
ROLDAN, MARY 1992 “Genesis and Evolution of La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia (1900–1953).” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.Google Scholar
RUBIN, JEFFREY W. 1987 “State Policies, Leftist Oppositions, and Municipal Elections: The Case of the COCEI in Juchitán.” In ALVARADO 1987, 127–60.Google Scholar
RUBIN, JEFFREY W. 1994 “COCEI in Juchitán: Grassroots Radicalism and Regional History.” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, pt. 1:109–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
RUBIN, JEFFREY W. n.d.a “Ambiguity and Contradiction in a Radical Popular Movement.” In Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements, edited by Escobar, Arturo, Alvarez, Sonia, and Dagnino, Eveline. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, forthcoming.Google Scholar
RUBIN, JEFFREY W. n.d.b Decentering the Regime: History, Culture, and Radical Politics in Juchitán, Mexico. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
RUS, JAN 1994 “The ‘Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional’: The Subversion of Native Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936–1968.” In JOSEPH AND NUGENT 1994, 265–300.Google Scholar
SCHMITTER, PHILIPPE 1974 “Still the Century of Corporatism?” In PIKE AND STRITCH 1974, 85–131.Google Scholar
SCHMITTER, PHILIPPE, AND KARL, TERRY 1993 “What Democracy Is … and Is Not.” In The Global Resurgence of Democracy, edited by Diamond, Larry and Plattner, Marc, 39–52. Baltimore. Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
SOKOLOFF, SHOSHANA 1993 “The Proud Midwives of Juchitán.” In CAMPBELL, BINFORD, BARTOLOME, AND BARABAS 1993, 267–77.Google Scholar
STEPAN, ALFRED 1978 The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
TUTINO, JOHN 1986 From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
VANDERWOOD, PAUL 1981 Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
VAN YOUNG, ERIC 1992 “Introduction: Are Regions Good to Think?” In Mexico's Regions: Comparative History and Development, edited by Young, Eric Van, 1–36. La Jolla: Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
WASSERMAN, MARK 1984 Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
WHITEHEAD, LAURENCE 1981 “On Governability in Mexico.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 1, no. 1 (October).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WIARDA, HOWARD J. 1974 “Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World: Persistent Strains and New Variations.” In PIKE AND STRITCH 1974, 3–31.Google Scholar
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND 1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar