Guy Thomson’s new book is distilled from his fifteen years of painstaking research into national, local, and personal archives in Mexico. Thomson is skeptical of the use of generic terms such as caudillo, cacique, and serrano to describe local leaders who have played an important role in politics in rural Mexico. The author suggests that this terminology is inadequate to describe and understand Juan Francisco Lucas, a Nahua liberal, free thinker, and entrepreneur.
The bulk of this long book is devoted to an extremely detailed examination of more than sixty years of politics in the Sierra de Puebla. Although Lucas is an important player throughout, the book is less a political biography of Lucas than a political history of the region. Some of the region’s Nahua villagers began participating actively in Mexico’s fractious politics during the Revolution of Ayutla, and the region remained crucial to state politics during the War...
