Jochen Meissner fills a gap in Mexican historiography for the otherwise well-researched independence period by looking at issues that confronted the viceroy, the audiencia, and the cabildo in New Spain’s capital city over the last 40 years of colonial rule. His analysis does not start or end with Hidalgo and Morelos. It is essentially a study geared to understanding how the cabildo built an increasingly radical political discourse, based on its changing composition and responding to the viceroy, the audiencia, and events in Spain.
Meissner takes up a debate with research published by well-known independence scholars (especially John Tutino, Jaime Rodríguez, Doris Ladd, and Reinhard Liehr) on the issues of who the cabildo members were, what the cabildo stood for, and what kind of political program it developed. In Meissner’s opinion, the absence of systematic research on these issues has led to a misunderstanding and an oversimplification of the cabildos political role during this period. Resorting to prosopography and microhistory approaches and the position-analytical theoretical contributions of elite research in Germany, essentially represented by the works of Rolf Dahrendorf and Wolfgang Zapf (see especially pp. 9-12), he sets out to illustrate the relationships between selected cabildo members (Funktionsträger) and other members of society, especially the elite. He also looks at cabildo members’ provincial economic assets. To determine the cabildos realm of action, he analyzes its administrative praxis (including many city governance issues) and its varying and conflicting relationships with other colonial institutions.
While some authors (especially Ladd and Liehr) underscore the continuities in the composition of the cabildo, Meissner accentuates its growing internal differentiation and recomposition (p. 197). Not all its mem6bers were rich at the time they were elected; some had actually lost most of their belongings, although they still maintained their social connections. Since 1725, a majority of large ultramarine merchants had been propertied members, a newly emerging group. The Bourbon Reforms reinforced the cabildo.
To document the cabildos political options and thereby evaluate its growing self-awareness, Meissner addresses the creole participation in the implementation of the tobacco monopoly and the desamortization decree. He scrutinizes the cabildos options to detect a political will for “independence,” “sovereignty,” or “autonomy.” This is, I think, the strongest chapter in the book. Meissner provides a detailed account of an almost daily exchange of letters and ideas between the cabildo and the audiencia after news reached Mexico of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. The last chapter further elaborates these ideas in exploring the cabildos reactions to the Hidalgo and Morelos revolt, the Cádiz Constitution, and the reinstallment of Ferdinand VII.
In spite of cabildo members’ growing awareness of their role in political matters, their negotiations with the audiencia and viceroy show them as driven more by the rapidly changing situation in Spain; in other words, the cabildo reacted to what happened in Spain rather than taking a political initiative. Cabildo members, calling themselves representatives of the whole viceroyalty, wanted to be treated as equal partners with Spain but to remain within Spain (gesamtspanisher Nationalismus versus mexikanischer or amerikanischer Nationalismus). Sovereignty, not autonomy, was their central agenda. In the years after 1808, popular and regional awareness of the conflicting interests of audiencia and cabildo became widespread. Cabildo members became increasingly aware of the trappings of their colonial status, and radicalized their discourse. A completely new cabildo was elected in the wake of the implementation of the Cádiz Constitution, but it had no time to propose and even less to enact reforms. In 1814 the former cabildo members regained their seats.
In contrast to the prevailing opinion—based on the historiographical importance given to the popularly based Hidalgo revolt—that the cabildo and the elites were conservative, Meissner suggests that a political consensus among colonial elites was missing as early as 1808. Cabildo members voiced rights of self-determination that later continued to grow and were finally victorious in 1821. Thus the Plan de Iguala in 1821 was not a programmatic conservative agenda but the natural outcome of ideas already formulated in 1808. In short, it represented changes in personnel and continuity in the political agenda that, in contrast to other regions in Latin America, made it possible for Mexico to survive as a unified space throughout the turmoils of political independence.
