Los actores locales de la nación en la América Latina: Análisis estratégicos

Abstract

This noteworthy volume gathers papers given at workshops held at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Colegio de Tlaxcala. Moving away from structuralist analyses, scholars have recovered an actor-centric view now honing in on all social and ethnic groups. Editor Evelyne Sanchez emphasizes in her careful introduction that methods such as microhistory have shed light on “actors who negotiate and do not submit absolutely to a normative system” (p. 7). Network analysis has usually explained boundaries and causes of group actions, argues French historian Michel Bertrand in an interesting twist, but it also elucidates the margins of autonomy of historical actors within or beyond these restrictions. He warns, however, of the pitfalls in recent works that have reverted to pure genealogy or misinterpreted mere contacts between actors for solidarity. This methodological thread loosely stitches together the following chapters.Frédérique Langue maintains that the Venezuelan creole elite largely forestalled the access of pardos (people of mixed African, European, or Indian descent) to the university and the militias. The pardos attained papers from the crown to legitimize their standing (gracias al sacar), which the creoles countered with the discourse of inferiority. Langue argues that the nonwhite groups or those of lower socioeconomic status were excluded from politics “because of or despite their activism” (p. 95). She counters some US scholars who currently emphasize the relative success of these groups. Meanwhile, Edgar Iván Mondragón Aguilera traces the tactics of a Portuguese soap maker in an early seventeenth-century Inquisition trial. While the Holy Office in New Spain withheld the names of accusers and the extent of their claims to probe the soap maker’s faith, the suspect pleaded his insufficient command of the Castilian tongue, for example, to ward off consequences.Lidia Gómez García, in a tightly researched piece, holds that the Bourbon Reforms undermined the authority of the altepetl governors of San Juan de los Llanos, Puebla, because of growing fiscal pressure, forced labor in tobacco cultivation, and militia recruitment. The community nonetheless supported the royalists during the independence period, because it opposed the dissolution of the local “reciprocity and the political economy of revolving power” (p. 128). After independence, political strongmen or caciques assumed the mediating role of the district officials (alcaldes mayores). Mariano Torres Bautista maintains this basso continuo while focusing on the Mexican Revolution. He argues that the indigenous communities did not seek to end poverty but to impose the redistribution of land, because they had been excluded from the nineteenth-century state-building project. Future research may build on these insights to explore the opportunities that individuals saw in these changes.Evelyne Sanchez analyzes the rational actors contending over the freedom of religion in the drafting of the 1857 Constitution. Since majority opinion was not with them, the liberals maintained the privileged position of the church, provided it did not collide with state authority. María de Lourdes Herrera Feria discusses collective and individual actors in the Mexican contributions to World’s Fairs. She shows that the Pueblan rural contributors showed greater cohesion than the urban ones, contrary to what one might expect from an industrialized city. Enrique Guillermo Muñoz demonstrates that President Ávila Camacho’s cronies ran the Puebla municipal water services until losing their influence. During the Miguel de la Madrid presidency, the state of Puebla occupied these posts. The author argues that the Ávila Camacho cacicazgo followed traditional politics as clientelism trumped the law, but embraced modern economics. Finally, the last piece again departs from the book’s focus on New Spain/Mexico. Gabriela Dalla Corte draws on a wide range of archives to show that Paraguay sold large swaths of the Chaco Boreal to foreign investors to pay down its debt. The rise of great landowners such as the Spaniard Carlos Casado del Alisal was generally seen as a favorable foreign influence modernizing the country.This collection of fine essays drawing on substantive archival research will interest all colonial and modern historians, especially since the rhythm of research pulses differently in France and Mexico than in the United States. The editor has credibly discussed the concept of local actors in the transition from the ancien régime to modernity. Another framework holding this book together, however, is the collaboration of the historians in Puebla and Tlaxcala in addition to the two French scholars with whom the editor most likely worked while obtaining her PhD in Toulouse. These contributions thus cover extensive ground both topically, temporally, and regionally. One could ask if a seventeenth-century Portuguese in the jaws of the Inquisition or a successful Spanish investor in the early twentieth-century Chaco were truly local actors of the nation. This scholarly cooperation has nonetheless produced solid essays whose quality more than offsets the volume’s loose internal structure.