Power and Protest in the Countryside

Although only two of the nine chapters in this edited volume deal exclusively with Latin America, Latin Americanists interested in rural unrest and its relation to the broader economic-political context within which such unrest needs to be understood will do well to consult it. The four chapters which deal with the more general conceptual questions which confront anyone with peasant— or for that matter urban—unrest (authored respectively by the two editors, and by Skocpol, Migdal, and Mintz) are suitable introductions to the two approaches most frequently used today. One of these stresses the more strictly class-based, i. e., landlord-tenant origins of such unrest; the other the more politically oriented “growth-of-the-state” bases. Obviously, these two approaches can as easily complement as compete with each other, and both need to look beyond national boundaries to the evolution of the world economic and political system and to other interest groups within the country itself. The two Latin American cases involve all of these complexities, although necessarily skimming over them lightly because of space limitations. Robert Wasserstrom’s analysis of the Indian uprising in southern Mexico in 1712 addresses the internal complexities of Spanish colonialism and, in particular, the corruption of the church in producing this mixed spiritual-economic revolt in Chiapas, differing with an earlier interpretation by Herbert Klein (a longer version of the chapter appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, 1980). William Roseberry’s study of what was really a caudillo attempt to seize power in the Boconó District of Trujillo State in Venezuela emphasizes the integration of Venezuela as a state, and its change into an oil economy in which the Andes progressively lose importance on the national scene. The volume as a whole makes us realize, if we do not know already, that the intellectual concerns of Latin Americanists are shared by others.