GILBERT M. JOSEPH AND DANIEL NUGENT

Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico

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A central feature of the Mexican and Latin American past has been the continuing tension between emergent popular cultures and processes of state formation. Paradoxically, this relationship has for a long time been poorly understood, drawing the attention of scholars primarily when it has broken down, and particularly when it has erupted into sustained or apocalyptic episodes of mass insurrection or state-managed repression. Meanwhile, the dynamics of the state's day-to-day engagement with grassroots society have largely been ignored; indeed, Latin Americanists have rarely examined popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously, let alone in relation to each other The present volume brings together a series of studies and reflections that provide a new perspective on this complex issue.

Friedrich Katz engagingly set forth the terms of a paradox that we, as Mexicanist historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and sociologists must address in our own work. Mexico is the only country in the Americas where "every major social transformation has been inextricably linked to popular rural upheavals" (Katz 1981b). In fact, three times within a century—in 1810, in the 1850s and 1860s, and again in the 1910s—social and political movements emerged that destroyed the existing state and most of the military establishment, then set up a new state and army. Nevertheless, in every case the changes in the countryside that these popular movements ultimately wrought were rather modest. Each of the upheavals resulted in the formation of states in which campesinos (and urban workers) played a subordinate role. Armies that began as preponderantly campesino-based forces soon became the guarantors of an increasingly oppressive social order, an order which, in time, was itself challenged and ultimately toppled. Why have Mexico's embattled power-holders repeatedly called upon campesinos, and why have the latter so often followed? Perhaps more important, what were the terms of engagement between the very different social groups involved, and how were those terms negotiated? These, Katz believes, remain the most tantalizing questions with which social historians of Mexico grapple. And while they are couched within a particular national-historical context, they simultaneously raise the broader theoretical problem of the state's contested relationship with popular culture.

The original essays collected here all address this problem. They combine empirical analysis of developments in Mexico from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present with theoretical arguments that go beyond the specific case materials at hand. The volume's purposefully ironic title juxtaposes "everyday forms" from James Scott's penetrating analysis of peasant resistance in rural Southeast Asia (Scott 1985) and "state formation" from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's study of the formation of the bourgeois state in England as a cultural revolution (Corrigan and Sayer 1985). While until now the important contributions of Scott, Corrigan, and Sayer to the study of power and resistance have largely been overlooked by Mexicanists, the contributors to this volume have all found that their work helps open up new routes toward understanding longstanding, seemingly intractable problems in the history of revolutionary Mexico.

In this introductory essay, we first review—briefly and, we hope, contentiously—some centrally important themes and currents in the recent historiography of modern Mexico and its twentieth-century revolution. We then discuss theoretical controversies related to the contested meanings of popular culture, resistance, and consciousness on the one hand, and state formation on the other. Throughout, we draw on a diverse range of comparative social theorists—as well as Mexicanist and Latin Americanist scholars—in an effort to fashion an analytical framework for understanding the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

Perhaps no other event has given rise to such an abundant and methodologically sophisticated historiography among Latin Americanists as the Mexican revolution of 1910. Yet despite its strengths, this rich literature has suffered from a marked tendency to isolate and privilege the revolution as event —as the supreme moment of popular resistance in Mexican history—rather than to study it as a culturally complex, historically generated process. Ironically, if most often unintentionally, many professional scholars have joined the ruling political party in Mexico (the PRI or Revolutionary Institutional Party) in transforming the Mexican revolution into "The Revolution." That "event" is variously described as having occurred between 1910 and 1917, 1910 and 1920, or 1910 and 1940, and the debates about how to periodize the revolution not only highlight its complexity as a historical process during which popular resistance figured significantly, but also point to another process simultaneous in space and time: revolutionary and postrevolutionary state formation. How, then, might one characterize the relationship between popular mobilization and the culture(s) that inform it, and state formation in twentieth-century Mexico?

This pivotal issue was for many years ignored or elided in the early orthodox, "populist" vision of the revolution that appeared in the pioneering works of participants and observers writing in the 1920s and 1930s. That orthodoxy...