This is a very important book. It provides insights that will change the way we view rural developments and agrarian conflicts in Mexico since the 1940s, and it offers an innovative exploration of the interplay of class and ethnicity. Schryer makes it clear that although agrarian conflicts have not ended in Mexico, they have changed. He demonstrates that the mode of agrarian contention now is far different from that of the revolutionary decades of 1910 to 1940. He also makes it apparent that dehates over the primacy of class or ethnicity are likely to bear little fruit. He demonstrates that both are important and that it is their complex and changing interactions that should claim our attention.
This study focuses on the Huasteca region of the state of Hidalgo, an area long on the margins of Mexican state power and economic affairs. Only recently have roads, commercial relations, and state activities penetrated and fully incorporated the Huasteca into national life. Schryer begins with a perceptive review and critique of the anthropological and historical literature on Mexican peasant communities. He sees communities that may have been corporate but were rarely closed and never egalitarian, and he argues that analysis of internal community social relations is the essential prerequisite to exploring relations between communities and the external forces of Mexican society.
Schryer then offers a long reconstruction of the histories of Huasteca communities, emphasizing developments from the later nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Here he effectively combines archival materials with information culled from interviews. He demonstrates the different histories of independent, Nahuatl-speaking communities; settlements of Spanish-speaking mestizo rancheros; and the communities of estate dependents. The history of the Huasteca was not without conflict, yet participation in the revolution of 1910 to 1930 was minimal. Schryer argues effectively that a sparse population and a weak commercial sector allowed the continuation of a “moral economy” grounded in subsistence production. The result was quiescence in the era of maximum national conflict. The “Revolution” came to the region in the 1930s, when land reform programs emerged as a favorite tool of politicians working to consolidate state powers. Yet in the Hidalgo Huasteca many ejidos remained paper constructs while communities maintained traditional, community-based structures of land control and allocation.
It was the expansion of the region’s commercial economy, especially the promotion of cattle production, that combined with population growth to undermine the moral economy and to provoke the agrarian conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. These are the subject of the second half of the book, based on extensive and effective interviews with residents of the region. These late twentieth-century agrarian struggles often led to changes in land control and political power, yet they were very different from the insurrections of the revolutionary era. In the 1970s and 1980s, agrarian revolt was organized to claim the attention and, it was hoped, the assistance of an entrenched state. Most “revolts” were land invasions by people who were often armed but rarely violent. Most violence was done by the state against the invaders or their leaders, or by elites employing small armies of private gunmen to discourage or to take revenge for land invasions.
The state used a combination of repression, mediation, and concessions to control and limit Huasteca conflicts. It finally decided to promote a system of collective, ejido-based cattle production that would incorporate peasants into the commercial economy while leaving them dependent both on the state and on provincial elites that controlled the marketing of ejido products. Meanwhile, the peasants and workers of the Huasteca remained divided between those defined as Indians and those who lived as mestizos.
This book is critical to our understanding of rural Mexico since the revolution and of both the persistence and the changing nature of agrarian conflicts.
