Agrarian Reform and Populist Politics

Abstract

Stephen Sanderson's Agrarian Populism and Mexican State (198 1) begins with premise that the salvation or destruction of present Mexican regime may well rest with that roughly 40 percent of Mexican populace who now fill countryside with their hard work and their poverty ( 198 1: xi). Although he does not enter debate as to whether urban or rural popular movements will be driving force of possible future radical social change in Mexico, his assumption is correct. The peasantry has been a central pillar of support (albeit passive) for regime. To shake that pillar would indeed shake regime to its foundations. Sanderson grapples with form and content of contradictions inherent in institutionalized Mexican Revolution's populist pact. The capitalist economic development process combined with regime's historic social obligations necessarily generate conflicts between private accumulation and public equity. Sanderson's political economy approach explores changing nature of these conflicts over time, leaving reader with a clear sense of loosening and tightening of structural limits to reform in Mexico. The historical background extends to a full discussion of liberal legacy, nineteenth-century roots of dispossession of rural majority (chap. 2). Agrarian Populism is particularly good at imparting a sense of texture of politics of land in Mexico, tracing contours of struggle over role of property in society from genocide of independent native peoples in last century (chap. 3) to crescendo of militant campesino land invasions in 1975 and 1976 (chap. 7).