Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern PoliticsClose Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American RelationsThe Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945

Abstract

The three books under review belong to a series entitled American Encounters/Global Interactions, published by Duke University Press. Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg, the series “aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretative frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States.” Books in this series seek also to strengthen dialogue across disciplines—international relations and area studies, history and anthropology—and to promote critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. By building on the scholarship already established, combining traditional historical approaches with more contemporary methods from a wide array of disciplines, and changing the angles and modes of observation, these works make significant contributions to our understanding of how Latin American nations, cultures, and political economies have changed over time.Of the three books, Rural Revolt in Mexico is the least experimental; Close Encounters is, perhaps, the most exploratory of new themes, sources, and theoretical connections. In The Dictator Next Door, Eric Paul Roorda adopts a cultural perspective to analyze bilateral relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic, a topic that has pertained traditionally to the realm of diplomatic history.Edited by the late Daniel Nugent, Rural Revolt in Mexico is an expanded version of a book originally published in 1988. Since then, Nugent’s thinking about peasant lives and politics has been influenced by subaltern studies. Interestingly, since 1988 Mexican agrarian politics has been radically altered, especially after the constitutional changes of 1992 that put an end to the “revolutionary” agrarian reform. This reform was at the root of the Mexican Revolution, providing the ground for subsequent struggles and negotiations between the state and peasant societies. This option was, however, foreclosed in 1992. Mexico’s unresolved internal and external contradictions surfaced in January 1994, when the indigenous peasant population of Chiapas rose in arms against the government’s efforts to integrate Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Their first demand was the resignation of then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari because he was incapable of securing dignified living conditions for the poor. The evident connection between the peasants’ subaltern condition and resistance to their economic and political subjection prompted Nugent to bring the previously edited volume up to date by including Adolfo Gilly’s insightful essay on Chiapas.Despite long-standing setbacks and political defeats experienced by the Mexican peasantry, Nugent found “reasons to be cheerful” during the 1990s. Peasants in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico were demonstrating their capacity to challenge the political and economic forces that have undermined their survival strategies. The empirical studies in Rural Revolt in Mexico provide clear evidence and understanding of the historical roots and trajectories of peasants’ resistance despite the homogenizing effects of the current globalization process.Nugent sets a new agenda for the study of rural revolt and the formation of the Mexican state by viewing them as interactive processes and by examining peasant lives and politics in the context of the U.S. government’s relations with the Mexican state. In Rural Revolt in Mexico readers will encounter well-known historians of regional and revolutionary Mexico who restate their position on the overarching and unifying theme of the book. Thus, Alan Knight pursues his denial of Mexican peasants’ (and workers’) xenophobia, nationalism, and anti-imperialism as a result of foreign, chiefly U.S., economic domination, whereas John Mason Hart reaffirms it. Alan Knight, María Teresa Koreck, Ana María Alonso, and Friedrich Katz give evidence of instances of peasants’ collaboration with the United States when such an action served the peasants’ political or economic self-interests.Gilly’s article, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” traces both the resistance and the persistence of Mexico’s peasantry. The essay places the local and the here and now within the global economic, political, and ideological environment of the 1990s and within the long trajectory of the peasants’ rebelliousness. The essay is also one of the finest pieces written on the ongoing Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. The connection to subaltern studies that Nugent makes at the theoretical level, Gilly develops from a historical perspective. This approach allows him to draw parallels between the rebellion in Chiapas and the political character of peasant rebellions in colonial India. By highlighting such parallels, Gilly substantiates the assumption that rational peasants take up arms only as a last resort, when all other methods of resistance fail; in doing so, Gilly suggests that there are no fundamental differences between peasant politics in Khandesh and Ocosingo.Consciousness among peasants of their condition of subalternity in relation to the local and the national elites and the state includes, of course, their awareness of the role external powers have traditionally exerted on Mexico. The Zapatistas expressed it best by rising in arms on the day that Mexico signed NAFTA. Gilly’s essay thus mediates between Nugent’s reveling in the peasants’ capacity to survive against all odds, and the structural constraints of globalization—“a faceless process against which there is no legal recourse, no constitutional protection, and no acquirable rights” (p. 331). There is no concrete subject against which to struggle, and this changes the terms of resistance: the Maya of Chiapas rose in arms not against modernity but in favor of their inclusion in the world it had created and to enjoy the fruits it had borne. The other essays included in Rural Revolt in Mexico that explore different patterns of U.S.-Mexican interaction are written by John Coatsworth, Rubén Osorio, Jane-Dale Lloyd, Michael Kearney, and Gilbert Joseph.Unlike Rural Revolt in Mexico, the previous volume of essays, Close Encounters of Empire is an ambitious attempt to go beyond the traditional binaries of hegemony/subordination, exploitation/domination, external/internal, U.S./Latin American, and so forth. In their stead, some authors of the essays craft new webs of relationships by rereading traditional sources within the paradigms suggested by new cultural history. María del Carmen Suescun Pozas chooses a visual essay as her mode of interpreting the imperial encounter. Combining the projection of symbols of empire with drawings of its defiance by Latin Americans, this approach can turn out to have an ironic and even comical effect. This essay, like the narrative ones, makes an effort to portray the imperial encounter as multidirectional: “Empire must be addressed as a practice that brings mutual transformation rather than mere obliteration of one of the parties” (p. 543). Or as Michael Schroeder’s “The Sandino Rebellion Revisited” and Lauren Derby’s “Gringo Chickens with Worms” successfully demonstrate, external ideas, personnel, and commodities undergo unexpected mutations when they interact with strong local cultural traditions and sociopolitical realities.Catherine LeGrand’s essay “Living in Macondo” qualifies the long-disputed concept of an enclave as economic, political, and social territory carved out of the national terrain by a foreign enterprise. Even though extraordinary things happened in the Magdalena banana region, life there was less apocalyptic and more complex and nuanced than described in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. True, the United Fruit Company changed the region’s human and natural landscape by connecting the region to the outside world; however, once the company left, local people forgot that it had been an imperialist outpost of the United States. According to LeGrand, the UFCO cemented a community in the region under its control, giving rise to an intricate local popular culture averse to the negative aspects of moneymaking and labor exploitation. In connecting the past to the present, LeGrand offers us vistas rich in nuances which traditional political and economic histories could never capture.The essays by Eileen Findlay (“Love in the Tropics”) and Thomas Miller Klubock (“From Welfare Capitalism to the Free Market in Chile”) are two examples of how gender analysis can be applied to the United States’s turn-of-the century subjugation of Puerto Rico and to the history of a U.S.-owned copper company in Chile, respectively. Going beyond and beneath the economic and political history of U.S.–Puerto Rican relations (Findlay) and the business history of the Braden Copper Company in Chile (Klubock), the authors show that U.S. policies could yield results contrary to those intended. Findlay’s work shows both how and why civil marriage and the legalization of divorce in Puerto Rico were used to discipline the colonial subjects and control the unruly “open sexual and social racial mingling that had produced a confusing racial mass within which blacks and whites could not be easily distinguished” (pp. 147–48). Puerto Rican women happily ended unworkable marriages but did not always remarry in large numbers as colonial strategists had hoped. But as Findlay concludes, the possibility of dissolving marital relations “may have been more important in cementing popular support for U.S. rule than the colonizers’ attempt to stabilize society through encouraging marriage” (p. 162).Klubock provides a different case of an attempt at social engineering through family and sexual politics in Chile’s El Teniente copper mine community in order to build a stable and disciplined labor force. The company set out to transform the floating population of single workers and single women in the camps into a permanent and married workforce. However, the unexpected result of making El Teniente into a stable community of married workers during the 1920s was the explosion of labor militancy during the 1930s when the social programs implemented by the Braden Copper Company failed to provide the social mobility it had promised the workers. El Teniente miners became some of the most militant and successful labor negotiators in Chile.The military coup staged in 1973 put an end to the construction of the welfare state attempted by Salvador Allende’s government. As part of Allende’s radical program, the El Teniente mines were nationalized in 1971. Klubock’s essay is mute on how the same social structure that was built over the previous decades confronted nationalization and Allende’s socialist policies. In fact, the strike of the El Teniente miners against the Allende government between April and July 1972 over a wage adjustment weakened the government considerably and demonstrated the essentially economic demands of an elite group of the working class. The subsequent dismantling of the welfare state reduced job security, wages, and benefits for most workers while labor activists were fired, arrested, and tortured. True, the hegemonic hold of the ideal of the monogamous male-headed family was instrumental in creating a community in the El Teniente mines. Perhaps it also created a community with values different from those held by other underprivileged working-class groups that helped to bring the Allende’s government to power but were unable to prevent its demise.Where the exploration of the connection between the local and the external is not entirely convincing is in Seth Fein’s essay “Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration.” This is not attributable to the cultural approach of the author but to insufficient evidence and would be the case within the cultural or any other methodological framework. Fein sets out to study U.S. film propaganda in Mexico during the cold war 1950s. His agenda is to examine the meeting of disparate cultures in asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination through the distribution and reception of U.S. propaganda.While we are presented with boastful expressions by U.S. functionaries of the excellent reception that anticommunist films enjoyed among labor unions and even rural audiences, in Mexico City as well as in provincial towns and indigenous communities, we are left to wonder whether the propaganda operators were not deluding themselves and their superiors in the United States. The doubt arises because the essay is short on exploring the reception side of the transnational connection, and so it is perhaps an overstretched assertion that “film propaganda led to the integration of Mexican workers into U.S. system of political persuasion and social instruction” (p. 415). The exploration of the film industry’s influence on the population begs for an examination of the full circuit of communication between the emission and the reception of the message sent by the U.S. propaganda machine of what constitutes a good citizen with clean teeth, raising soybeans.Critics of the new cultural history and postmodernism sometimes censure practitioners for neglecting to support their assertions with evidence and for using nebulous concepts. Aware of the limitations of both modernist and postmodernist approaches, Fernando Coronil, in his foreword to Close Encounters, suggests that there need not be a polarization between determinism and contingency, the systemic and the fragmentary, as long as the critique of modernity leads to a more critical engagement with history’s complexity. He contends that the virtues of the new approaches lie in helping us to understand the architecture of parts and whole. In the section dealing with such theoretical concerns, Gilbert Joseph, Steve Stern, and Ricardo Salvatore grapple thoughtfully with multiple ways to go about this task. The notions that stand out from their inquiry into U.S.–Latin American relations are connectedness, interaction, encounter, and engagement, in conflict as well as in negotiations, the result of which need not be predetermined by the overwhelming power of the United States.In the concluding essays, Emily Rosenberg and William Roseberry reflect on the results of the enterprise of redrawing the maps in Close Encounters of Empire. On the basis of the vigorous new literature on the history of U.S. external relations, including U.S.–Latin American relations, Rosenberg defends the “cultural turn” against the skeptics and more traditional diplomatic historians. She sees the writing of history as strengthened by the disruption of metanarratives, of dichotomous notions of inside and outside, national and international, past and present. Power remains the central concern in the history of international relations, but power systems are now assumed to be multiple and complex, and the borders among nations, as between disciplines, more porous than traditionally accepted. In his concluding thoughts, Roseberry reiterates what many of the essays have demonstrated, namely, that our understanding of U.S.–Latin American encounters “will remain impoverished if we see only one dimension of them—the economic, say, or the political, or ‘imperialism’” (p. 516) instead of incorporating multiple dimensions of experience. Furthermore, he suggests, the new methods should enter into a dialogue with the earlier modes of analysis rather than displace them.The final text under review is Roorda’s The Dictator Next Door, which is a well-told story of relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic during the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps the most important contribution of Roorda’s work is his convincing depiction of the buildup of Rafael Trujillo’s empire using the good neighbor policy to his advantage. In Roorda’s words, Caribbean dictators like Trujillo “were free to run their countries however they pleased, so long as they maintained common enemies with the United States: first the fascists, then the communists” (p. 1). A novel aspect of The Dictator Next Door is the study’s penetration into the intimacy of the U.S. business and government communities’ wheeling and dealing, on the island as well as in Washington. Often at loggerheads with each other, their representatives made sure to appear before the world as defenders of centuries-old principles and shared interests. It is a pity that the same inside portrayal is not provided for the Dominican side of the encounter. To his credit, Roorda deftly combines diplomatic sources with those of the military which allow him to draw a dark-hued picture of U.S.-Dominican relations as diplomats were losing power to the military when the outbreak of the Second World War was closing in. During the war Trujillo’s grip on the nation was fortified while, ironically, the United States’s long-standing domination over the Caribbean island loosened.The theoretical and methodological propositions that guide the American Encounters/Global Interactions series should not be read as a set of rules but as venues of exploration. The books under review indicate that when new questions are asked, distinct disciplines are combined, and new approaches to their examination are applied to the traditional methods of the historian, new insights are generated. The innovative approach that stands out in the new cultural history is the defiance of traditional disciplinary boundaries and conceptual binaries when they have led to a fragmented representation of the society. The new approaches seek to reconstitute the representation of the society as a whole. When evidence to support one’s argument is lacking, this is not attributable to the new cultural history but to the researcher’s uncompleted task—a fault irrespective of one’s chosen theoretical perspective.