North American teachers who incorporate primary documents into their undergraduate English-language courses on modern Mexican history will find this volume useful. The book includes 546 pages of translations of 207 political texts spanning the years between 1810 and 1940. The largest number of documents are from the nineteenth century, especially the 1830s and 1840s, with less than one-fifth produced between 1906 and 1940. Approximately one-quarter are taken from original manuscripts, broadsides, or contemporary newspapers, while the rest have appeared in one or another Mexican publication. Few have appeared in English before, and their translation serves a useful pedagogical purpose by providing students an opportunity to explore for themselves a complicated period of Mexican history.
Unfortunately, the accompanying 125-page commentary by Thomas B. Davis contributes little to our understanding of the political function, rhetorical conventions, or content of these plans, a “plan” being defined here as “a public declaration issued in order to indicate principles or practices which should form the basis for a reform proposal in the national administration of the Mexican state.” Even the argument that such plans are a distinct political form is undermined by the inclusion of some political party platforms and even, according to Davis, one probably fraudulent document, the 1835 “Plan of the Amphyctionic Junta” (pp. 78-79, 91-92).
With a marked penchant for mixed metaphors, Davis also displays a surprising lack of sympathy, respect, and insight. Dismissing the “casual use of Rousseau’s vocabulary” as insignificant, he writes that “precious few political, social, or economic ideas circulated in Mexico during the nineteenth century” (pp. x, 3, 19, 68). Deriding them as “verbal effluvium,” he finds “nothing inherently interesting” in reading the plans, which (to his mind) provide “incontrovertible evidence of greed and power run amuck” in Mexico (pp. xvi, 68).
The scholarly utility of this volume is also limited by the editors’ failure to adequately explain the principle by which the documents were selected. The extent of the total universe is suggested, judging by the title at least, by Josefina Zoraida Vázquez’s Planes políticos de la nación mexicana, 1831-1853 (Mexico: Senado de la República), whose fourth volume appeared in 1987. In addition, the editors have undermined textual integrity by omitting the often extensive introductory clauses (“Considerando …”) that preceded and justified such political plans (pp. xiv, xv).
