Ciudadanos inesperados: Espacios de formación de la ciudadanía ayer y hoy

Abstract

Citizenship is one of those terms that means different things to different scholars. In this volume, editors Ariadna Acevedo Rodrigo and Paula López Caballero clearly frame the approach and objectives to encompass a broad definition of citizenship and a range of meanings associated with the idea. Indeed, the book's subtitle, Espacios de formación de la ciudadanía ayer y hoy (Formative spaces of citizenship yesterday and today), suggests the book's foundational premise that citizenship is not formed solely by the state and legal proscriptions but rather is created, enacted, and negotiated by people making claims to it in surprising spaces and practices of everyday life.The thoughtfully conceived and well-written introductory chapter further contextualizes the volume within past and current approaches to citizenship (including an overview of individual, collective, expansionist, and other theories of citizenship). The editors explain how this book differs from many studies of citizenship that center on the law and political rights. Rather, Ciudadanos inesperados “provides case studies that reveal the practices of unexpected citizens” from diverse disciplinary approaches, including history, anthropology, and media studies (p. 18). These case studies are rooted in a compelling, evidence-based methodology, and chapters are organized chronologically throughout the volume.All but one of the nine substantive chapters are situated in Mexico, so the volume will appeal to Mexican specialists in particular. The first six chapters squarely deal with Mexican history. The first analyzes the impact of educational norms in early nineteenth-century Mexico, and the second explores Catholic religious practices on indigenous identity formation in later nineteenth-century Oaxaca. Three of the subsequent case studies center on consumption, public persona, and appearance. One discusses the influence of clothing and dress on citizen and mestizo identity formation for Mexicans with experience in the United States. Another studies personal hygiene practices as marks of civilization in educational campaigns from the 1920s to the 1940s. The third of these consumption-focused case studies centers on the emergence of the “child consumer” in the 1950s Mexican press. The last history-centered chapter discusses the eradication of malaria through citizen-targeted campaigns in the late 1950s. The last three chapters of Ciudadanos inesperados shift to the contemporary, post-2000 period and feature a study on Chile and Argentina as well. These last chapters include a discussion of students' uses of new digital media and their notions of citizenship, an analysis of the ways that participation in school associations informs students' practice of citizenship, and a chapter on how the category of “pueblo originarios” allows spaces of citizen making in Mexico City.Such a time span may seem unwieldy, but the volume retains coherence thanks to the manner in which most chapters are situated in long-term processes of change, such as urbanization, commercialization, the expansion of digital media, or the emergence of the public (as political agents, consumers, students, etc.). All chapters also explicitly reiterate the central argument of the volume: citizenship identities are both informed and affected by various experiences. That said, each of the case study chapters orbits a distinct set of theoretical and historiographical debates in its given field or subfield. Discussions of how citizenship is lived, how people experience it, and how citizenship happens emerge in each chapter's particular framework and in the documents, interviews, and other supporting data analyzed. Scholars and students of citizenship studies from many fields will be interested in this volume. The writing (the entire text is in Spanish) is of the best kind, expressing complex ideas with clarity of thought. The book closes with an engaging epilogue by Pablo Piccato that explores the key concepts within historical debates on citizenship, including liberalism, agency, consciousness, individualism, honor, nationalism, the public sphere, and the public. Piccato sums up the volume's contributions: “Para ser inesperados, los ciudadanos de este libro han de lograr algún impacto sobre la espera pública, terreno. . . . Si fueran previsibles no tendrían historia un agencia, ni serían el objecto fascinante y multifacético que captura las páginas de este libro” (p. 328).