Poder Y Gobierno Local En México, 1808–1857

Abstract

Poder y gobierno local en México, 1808–1857 is a study concerning local and regional political transformation during Mexico's transition from a colony to a republic. María del Carmen Salinas Sandoval, Diana Birrichaga Gardida, and Antonio Escobar Ohmstede contextualize their historiographical argument regarding Mexico's political culture by scrutinizing the debate initiated by several scholars in the 1950s. In the editors' opinion, the study of political culture has been dominated by a focus on the connection between culture and politics. Such scholarship believes that the political culture influences the political system. With this book, the editors intend to forsake the vision of the fifties and to offer a new proposal for studying the problem. Their approach consists of three dimensions, taken from the work of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba: the cognitive (knowledge), the affective (feelings), and the evaluative (opinions). A fourth dimension, inspired by Esteban Krotz, consists of rebuilding the internal dynamics of the political universe in which Mexico became a republic, concentrating on the relationship between ideology and utopia, on the fact that power and political culture have broad ideological components. Power must be seen through social relationships, through “the action of diverse social actors as well as their historical paths toward the formation of the national states” (p. 11). In other words, it must be seen through the participation of the social actors in hegemony, which is understood as a social process in which meanings and dominant values are expressed through social practices. In the formation of hegemony, the actors may disagree or collaborate. It is in this sense that hegemony is related to the political culture and “the distribution of power, locally, regionally, or nationally speaking” (p. 12).Therefore, political culture must be understood within the framework of the interaction firstly between local and regional power, and secondly between these and national power. Such culture is not necessarily homogeneous in all localities and regions, since it is social actors who make their spaces of power comprehensible and who give the complexity of social and everyday power relationships sense. It is this framework that undergirds the book's 13 chapters, divided into three sections, along with the conclusion.The four chapters of the first section explain the relationships between the local government and central government, whether a monarchy or a republic. Sergio Miranda Pacheco, for example, analyzes the conflicts between the local governments of the Federal District and the national government. Such conflict had its origin in the strenuous coexistence within the municipal government of Mexico City and the higher authorities — in other words, the different powers of federal government. Such conflict impeded Mexico City's federalization because members of Mexico City's government could not reach through consensus a local constitution that would shape Mexico into a federated state.Both chapters of the second section work to explain how political culture was generated by the local political actors, who articulated the definitions of neighbors and citizens along with the municipal governments and the provincial powers or the states' governments. Escobar Ohmstede explains that in the process of transitioning away from the status of neighbor, citizenship arose as a set of mechanisms (laws, decrees, and norms) that regulated both the state government and interpersonal relationships. Being a citizen also endowed rights and obligations as well as introducing the principle of juridical equality. This contrasted with the state arrangements of the old colonial society and made social relocations of former neighbors, now citizens, possible (p. 161).Finally, the third section contains seven studies dedicated to explaining the construction of modern municipal governments beginning with Gaditan liberalism. The construction of these municipal governments did not proceed smoothly. For example, in the case of Sonora, José Marcos Medina maintains that the people reacted negatively to attempts to transform the mission towns into modern municipal governments, which impeded the implementation of liberal politics within the structure of such governments. Furthermore, the protestors divided into two positions, one supported by those who “claimed to go back to the ways of representation of the Old Regime,” the other advocated by those who proposed an “end to Mexican-Hispanic domination and to constitute an indigenous monarchy that would be independent from the Mexican state” (p. 255). As a consequence, liberalism did not exist during the first decades of the nineteenth century among the indigenous people in Sonora.The book, probably written for specialists on the subject, contributes to understanding the different shapes that political culture adopted in some localities and regions in Mexico during the transition from colonial to republican government. The authors manage to successfully describe the role of the social actors, some of them dissidents, as agents of transformation in shaping or forming that politics adopted during the first half of the nineteenth century.