Los buenos, los malos y los feos: Poder y resistencia en América Latina

Abstract

This collection contains 21 articles plus an introduction, divided into sections titled “To Resist in Order to Conquer,” “Memory and Discourses,” “Ethnicity and Identity,” and “Repression, Revolution, and Everyday Resistance.” Five of the articles are in English, and the remainder are in Spanish. Curiously enough, quotations from English-language works appearing in a Spanish-language article have been left in English, suggesting that the ideal audience is literate in both languages. While Los buenos, los malos y los feos provides overall broad geographical coverage — including articles on Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia — ten articles (almost half) deal with Mexico. Two-thirds of the contributors self-identify as historians, with the remainder made up of anthropologists and sociologists. Finally, the contributions cover an enormous temporal range, from the Spanish Conquest to the 1990s.An introduction to an edited collection — particularly one as large as this one — should provide a road map that will help the reader navigate and select a route to best connect the authors’ many points. Unfortunately, the introduction to Los buenos, los malos y los feos fails badly in this regard. While the editors do summarize the articles and tie them to a series of general themes concerning the forms, ambiguities, and contradictory outcomes of resistance through the ages in Latin America, they neither discuss the articles in order of their appearance nor explain the rationale for book’s four-part organization. This reviewer would have appreciated individual introductions to each of the four sections, as well as a greater effort on the part of the editors to pull the work together.That said, the weakness of the collection may also be one of its strengths. Since the development of subaltern studies and the popular work of James Scott and others, “resistance” has become an exceedingly overused term, applicable to just about any counterdiscourse or individual or collective act opposing a status quo. Through multiple case studies, Los buenos, los malos y los feos both illustrates and offers an implicit criticism of the current state of “resistance studies.” A number of articles show that what passes publicly for resistance is thoroughly penetrated by power. For instance, Miriam Lang concludes her article on the feminist movement by noting that while middle-class feminists in Mexico “are increasingly accepted as individuals and subjects with legal rights, the clients of feminist NGOs from the lower classes are trained to offer free services to their families and communities.” Neither form of “empowerment” threatens hegemonic neoliberalism (p. 54). Likewise, Marta Zapata argues that during the long period of corporativist and clientalistic politics, Mexican intellectuals sought to transform society in progressive ways by working closely with high-ranking officials of the postrevolutionary state. Only with the economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have they begun to distance themselves from officialdom. Finally, working in Brazil, Sérgio Costa interrogates the limits of both “egalitarian antiracism” — which subordinates cultural to social integration — and culturally oriented “integrationist anti-racism,” which pays scant attention to the articulation of race and class. He concludes that “antiracism needs to strive for the construction of equality of opportunities and attend to cultural particularities” (pp. 384 – 85).Other authors examine the cultural inscription of resistance in specific times and places — in, for example, Ingrid Kummels’s discussion of Ráramuri (Tarahumara) ritual peyote consumption or Stephan Scheuzger’s analysis of hybrid political discourse among the Worker, Peasant, Student Coalition of the Isthmus (COCEI) that has played an important role among peoples from Juchitán and other southern Zapotec communities. Much of the substantial literature on the COCEI is informed by ethnopopulist approaches; by contrast, Scheuzger documents the polyvalent character of COCEI politics — built on a discourse that appeals simultaneously to ethnic, local, and class interests — and the way that representations shift with changes in political power fields. He believes that “the efficacy of COCEI resistance originates less from its rootedness in a cultural soil, as from the COCEI’s ability to manage multiple hybrid forms of resistance” (p. 329).The preceding comments touch on a few of the many themes and articles contained in the volume; limits of space prohibit a more thorough discussion. I do not think that the collection breaks new ground, but overall the authors exhibit fine-grained, empirically based, and theoretically sophisticated approaches to the analysis of domination and resistance. For this reason alone, Los buenos, los malos y los feos should find a reading public. It would be particularly useful for courses in history, sociology, or anthropology.