Chiapas has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention ever since the outbreak of the Zapatista movement in 1994, much of it focused on the decade or so immediately prior to the emergence of the masked Mayan rebels from the Lacandón rain forest. Far less attention has been paid to the state’s history over the course of the twentieth century, however, in spite of the ever-expanding literature on local and regional variations in postrevolutionary state formation and its associated social impacts elsewhere in Mexico. Stephen Lewis’s Ambivalent Revolution, an analysis of “Chiapas’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary experiences through the lens of the rural schoolhouse” (p. xii), is thus a welcome contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century Mexico.
The book’s main concern is the extent to which the federal government was able to establish the institutions of the central state, carry out revolutionary reforms, and create a shared sense of national...
