The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780–1824 Available to Purchase

This book contains very useful studies by well-known scholars of the period stretching from the Bourbon reforms to the establishment of Mexico’s first Federal Republic, on topics ranging from rural popular culture to the social and economic strategies of an elite family. Eric Van Young’s article on popular culture and insurgency elegantly condenses many of the main ideas of the author’s recent book. He argues that there was a vast gulf between elite political culture and popular political culture in the period. The project to construct a national state, he offers, was an elite effort that proceeded from the European great tradition and, presumably, the Enlightenment. In contrast, popular political culture was communalist and its imagery largely religious. Van Young’s insights into popular culture are very creative and stimulating, but he does not really probe elite political culture. This presents a problem, because several other essays suggest that elite political...