Organizing, Ideology, and Moral Suasion: Political Discourse and Action in a Mexican Town

Abstract

Recent scholarship on peasant protest has shifted from the speculative analysis of large-scale historical trends to the limited testing of hypotheses to a preoccupation with micro-level analysis of peasant consciousness and decision making. That shift has been salutary, sharpening our attention to the role of people's perceptions in shaping behavior and to the subtle ways in which people act out their discontent; but we still understand too little about the origins of these perceptions and about the ways in which everyday discontent gets transformed into politically viable action. The present paper argues that, while people's perceptions are grounded in their material and social situation and in past experience, they are continuously reshaped in interaction with new experience and with the claims of others. Understanding the role of political discourse in such interactions is essential to understanding popular mobilization.