It is a sign of health that Mexicanist historians and political scientists have moved in the direction of the anthropologists to write about the inarticulate lower classes. Thus this brief but excellent study by Powell joins such works as Ronfeldt’s Atencingo: The Politics of Agrarian Struggle in a Mexican Ejido and Gonzalez’s Pueblo en vilo to provide insight into how national policies have affected the small town dwellers, villagers, and rural peasantry of Mexico. More intriguingly, Powell deals with an era that contemporary historians have tended to ignore— the period of liberal domination during the Reform.
The author’s thesis is that the liberals “demonstrated little understanding of the peasantry and that, through the prosecution of a program that undid the traditional life of the Indian communities, their policies accentuated the alienation and misery of the major ethnic group of the nation” (p. 7). His chief focus lies in the area consisting of the Federal District and the states of México, Hidalgo, and Morelos. His principal concern is with the Indian peasantry in these jurisdictions.
After two introductory chapters, which survey the political situation of the decade of the 1850s and the social, economic, and cultural conditions of the Indian peasantry in central Mexico, there follow three chapters devoted to liberalism and its impact on rural Mexico, from Ayutla through the Three Years’ War; the attitudes and policies of Maximilian’s administration toward the peasantry and the response of the Indians; and the disastrous impact of triumphant liberalism upon the countryside and the Indian peasant population during the period of the Restored Republic.
The liberals were as zealous in protecting and defending the interests of the latifundists as were the conservatives. Thus the liberals were insensitive to the poverty and suffering of the peasantry; indeed they were convinced that the indigenous peasantry constituted an obstacle to progress. This explains why the liberals, in their efforts to impose western capitalism upon Mexico, cared nothing about the harmful effects of the Lerdo Law, which called for the alienation of Indian communal lands. As a result, the Indians resorted to violence to protect their way of life. The two decades of reform saw constant turmoil in rural Mexico.
It was Maximilian who attempted in a paternalistic way to bring succor to the Indians. Imperial legislation established a Comité Protector de las Clases Menestrosas, unique in nineteenth-century Mexico, to which the Indians could appeal with some hope of obtaining justice. But the emperor was too distracted by other matters, and his reign was too short-lived to provide any significant aid to the Indian cause or to effect a lasting change of attitude and policy.
Powell has based his work largely on manuscript sources and printed documents. His well-written study reveals that there were some spokesmen for the peasantry, but that these were either silenced or went unheeded. He does not give any examples of Indians who, individually or collectively, embraced the liberal program. They existed in other areas of Mexico, and conceivably they should have been present in the central region.
