Caveat Mexicanists: over the next decade(s), the market will be flooded with like-title “Liberalization in Mexico” collections, which will finally replace those rigor-mortified genres, “Has the Mexican Revolution Died (Yet)?” and Mexico in Crisis, Part 4.” This particular set of political-sciency essays is not a bad starting place. Despite the perils of rush judgments and of locating “Critical Junctures, historians would ignore the emerging 1990s literature at great risk. Recent Mexican transformations, cutting away at myriad historical myths, must sooner or later alter how we ask our pivotal questions on Mexico’s past.
Like most essay collections, this one is a mixed bag in quality, range, and depth. It is virtuous, however, in truly pursuing a single line of analysis throughout: the relationships between Mexico’s now very patent economic liberalizations and the (putative) political liberalizations under way or expected to come off (sometime) by the twenty-first century. The collection is neatly structured into essays exploring relations between economic and political openings, prospects for political change, and party perspectives. Yet the essays also seem to share three analytic conundrums. First, Presidente Constitucional Carlos Salinas’ (or the PRI’s) ideas on political modernization (not to be equated, as a few contributors do, with democratization) still remain the best-kept state secret in the Americas. Related are the many paradoxes spawned by liberalisms ordered down by state managerial elites, oddly reminiscent of the nineteenth-century kind. Second, Mexico’s transitions, wherever they’re headed, are unfolding at a juncture when, for notable theoretical and world-historical reasons, social scientists have become utterly befuddled on those key relationships between economic and political change. A few of the essays fall back into naive versions of modernization theory. Third, and obvious, the essays lack historical perspective; but then again, most historians of Mexico were not probing Mexican liberalisms too deeply. Such issues could have been clarified in a genuine editor’s introduction and conclusion. It may bemuse historians to see how some of these contributors lionize Salinas, and the cryptic “neolib” discourse in the book’s closing PRI, PAN, and PRD statements.
Several chapters transcend such limits, however. All of them point to profound ferment in the nexus between state and civil society in Mexico, and at the same time the PRI’s enormous talent for holding on in new and improved ways. The 1988 elections are no longer read as a watershed; assuming a run of concerted leadership (and NAFTA), a streamlined PRI dominance seems here to stay, no longer living off revolutionary mythologies and structures. M. Delal Baer, in “Mexico’s Second Revolution, brightly illuminates the specific ways in which the dismantling of the Cárdenas-Alemán systems of economic and social corporatism spells the end of traditional PRI politics. Some of the nascent practices are even discernible here. Miguel Basáñez, on Mexico’s “Fifth Crisis,” injects a healthy dose of short-run pessimism, though he advises the PRI to take democracy seriously if economic restructuring is to hold. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, in his “Inevitability of Democracy,” attempts to fit a longer-term Skocpolian model to the shifts, which may raise the costs of presidentialism. Michael Coppedge’s smart, aptly titled political exegesis, “Mexican Democracy: You Can’t Get There from Here,” underscores how a modernizing PRI will work to stall the inevitable. All in all, warts and all, historians can profit from these presentist ponderings.
