In 1981 a Zapotec Indian movement named the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Istmo (COCEI) won municipal elections in Juchitán, Oaxaca, becoming the first leftist government in Mexico since the 1920s. Although the army removed the COCEI from power in the summer of 1983, through a combination of militancy and negotiation the movement went on to win elections and has governed the city several times since. Yet although the COCEI has promoted democratic politics, an administration responsive to a diverse citizenry, and active and innovative Zapotec cultural institutions, it has also exhibited numerous ambiguities concerning such matters as violence, internal democracy, and gender relations. As a result, it has become one of the most militant, enduring, and contradictory social movements in contemporary Mexico.
In Decentering the Regime, Jeffrey Rubin concurs with anthropologist Howard Campbell (Zapotec Renaissance: Ethnic Politics and Cultural Revivalism in Southern Mexico, Albuquerque, 1994) in his judgement that Juchitán’s history of class, gender, and ethnic relations since precolonial times is key to understanding this twentieth-century social movement. As a political scientist, Rubin’s distinctive contribution is his challenge to state- and regime-centered approaches to Mexican politics, particularly the literature on corporatism, which sees power as something that can be amassed and brokered and hegemony as synonymous with homogeneity and centralized power. Joining a number of poststructuralist academics writing social histories of Mexico, and inspired by such scholars as Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams, Rubin argues that “the presence of the state has been uneven and incomplete across both geography and political life” (pp. 12–13). Instead, he finds “enduring regional counterweights to national power in Mexico” (p. 11), one of which is Juchitán.
How have these regional autonomies been achieved and sustained through time?
Juchitecos constructed and reshaped a “regional domain of sovereignty” based on different class, ethnic, and national alliances. During the rule of political boss General Heliodoro Charis from 1934 to the 1960s, a multiclass Zapotec alliance ensured local, if not egalitarian, control of political and economic resources in the region. In the early 1970s, the reformist municipal government of Manuel Musalem Santiago (Tam) represented an elite ethnic leadership that searched for new ties within the national economy while strengthening its control over land and local government. And in the 1980s and 1990s, Zapotec workers, peasants, and students forged a multifaceted regional democracy through new and oftentimes contrasting class, ethnic, and national alliances.
Rubin maintains that resistance in Juchitán was possible, in part, because “whole domains of civil society remained largely outside of the state’s control” (p. 195). On the basis of points like this, Rubin suggests that there is a greater heuristic value in making cultural and subregional comparisons across nations than in limiting the study of Mexican politics or regimes to this one country (p. 263). Even so, Rubin’s study is at root a history of the engagement of the COCEI with national political processes. We learn, for example, that the entrenched Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) was indeed present in Juchitán, both in formal settings like the Communal Land Commission and the Livestock Association, and in everyday life within family networks. Indeed, in part the COCEI derived its strength by opposing the PRI’s corruption and failed economic projects, as well as from splits between reformists and hard-liners within the official party. Moreover, COCEI leaders continually negotiated with government officials, negotiations made possible by a common language shared by a generation of leaders who had personally experienced the 1968 student movement. Thus, one of the strengths of this book is that in “decentering the regime,” Rubin challenges reified notions of the state by describing and focusing on a wide array of state actors; struggles between federal, state, and local government agencies; and contradictory state policies.
