The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850

by Peter Guardino

Between 1750 and 1850 Spanish American politics underwent a dramatic cultural shift as monarchist colonies gave way to independent states based at least nominally on popular sovereignty and republican citizenship. In The Time of Liberty, Peter Guardino explores the participation of subalterns in this grand transformation. He focuses on Mexico, comparing local politics in two parts of Oaxaca: the mestizo, urban Oaxaca City and the rural villages of nearby Villa Alta, where the population was mostly indigenous. Guardino challenges traditional assumptions that poverty and isolation alienated rural peasants from the political process. He shows that peasants and other subalterns were conscious and complex actors in political and ideological struggles and that popular politics played an important role in national politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.Guardino makes extensive use of archival materials, including judicial transcripts and newspaper accounts, to illuminate the dramatic contrasts between the local politics of the city and of the countryside, describing in detail how both sets of citizens spoke and acted politically. He contends that although it was the elites who initiated the national change to republicanism, the transition took root only when engaged by subalterns. He convincingly argues that various aspects of the new political paradigms found adherents among even some of the most isolated segments of society and that any subsequent failure of electoral politics was due to an absence of pluralism rather than a lack of widespread political participation.

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mexican rebellion against Spain is perhaps the most paradoxical of any: because the Spanish crown had been usurped by Napoleon, at least portions of the liberal movement favored restoration. The insurgents ran out of energy by about 1815; it was the rebellion by Spanish liberals against the restored king that convinced the conservative General Iturbide to switch sides and clinch the outcome. Peter Guardino's book examines Oaxaca, remote even from Mexico City and highly indigenous, as it navigated the change from Bourbon autocracy to the chaos of the early Mexican republic. (Personal note: my own experience with Indians of the Oaxaca highlands is that they are so mountainous that some maintain that they cannot communicate with people who also speak Mixtec but are from a different town). The late regime of the late Bourbon monarchy was, he makes clear, interested in extracting as much revenue as possible from the colonies and viewed indigenous corporations as obstacles. At the local level, their officials were often engaged in exploitation, which the indigenous communities struggled to oppose, not without internal strife. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are how different indigenous community factions used the courts against each other, often resorting to accusations of witchcraft, violence, or immorality.
When Mexico became independent, the city factions that were exposed by the insurrection settled into political parties. The Spanish elitist group took the name oil and began to call their opponents vinagre. The oil faction aligned itself with the national conservatives, who favored a strong central power that nevertheless protected church and army. Power shuttled back and forth at both state and local levels, aided by an election system that seems even more addled that the US' Electoral College: electors were chosen who chose electors, who chose electors, and so on up the change. At one point, when Presidents were chosen by one vote per state, a seizure of power by the vinagres changed Oaxaca's vote and threw it to the liberal. No matter, he was overthrown and executed.
The book gives some context for another of the conundrums of Mexican history: Oaxaca, that distant, very indigenous state, gave Mexico its two most powerful politicians of the nineteenth century, both of them Indians. 1) Benito Juarez, inheritor of the vinagre position, who despite supporting the church as governor led the liberals to the Presidency, where they sought to pry property out of the hands of not only the church but the indigenous communities. 2) Porfirio Diaz, a juarista general against the French who rebelled against Juarez and, in power, made repression, crony capitalism and foreign investment, sometimes all at one, the keystones of power. What is oddest about this is that the two Indian Presidents, the revered Juarez and the loathed Diaz, would do so much to complete the Bourbon project of taking apart the Indian communities.