Peasant Movements and Urbanisation in Contemporary Morelos: To What Do We Owe Our Ignorance?

Abstract

take to the streets in solidarity with his memory. Newspapers report the event and, usually, add with predictable passion that Mexico has continued to fail its rural population; honouring the memory but declining to uphold the principles for which Zapata stood. At the same time, the impotence of Mexico's independent peasant federations is increasingly a subject for informed comment, especially in the light of the CNC's (Confederacion Nacional Campesino) general debilitation and lack of influence on Mexican politics. In a series of articles published between 9 and 15 April 1985 Uno Mas Uno bemoaned the absence ofa strong agrarian left in Mexican politics. The tenor of these articles was one of disenchantment and unease rather than self-righteous indignation. These indications that a malaise has struck Mexico's radical agrarian cause deserve closer attention. There are few clues to the roots of the crisis in the writing of academics and policymakers, most of whom .continue to interpret the absence of well-supported rural social movements as evidence of the PRI's success at achieving social control in rural areas. However, the continued paralysis of 'rain-fed' agriculture in Mexico, together with the recent challenge to the PRI from the PAN would suggest that this explanation requires re-examination. If rural Mexico is quiescent we need to know why. If it is not quiescent we need to be able to identify what is stirring beneath the surface. If we take a close look at one state, that of Morelos, we might be able to gain a clearer impression of what is happening in an area that, although not 'representative', was of great significance for the Mexican Revolution. In particular, it is worth asking whether the tradition of scholarly research in Mexico has not contributed to the absence of an adequate explanatory framework. Has the rich seam of 'peasant studies' led writers to ignore fundamental, structural changes in the relationship between rural and urban areas, helping to fuel debates between campesinistas and descampesinistas rather than a fuller appreciation of what is happening to the Mexican countryside? Morelos, one of the most heavily referenced areas of Mexico from an agricultural and ethnographic viewpoint, provides an interesting 'test case'.