Writing Mexican History - Softcover

Van Young, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804768617 ISBN 13: 9780804768610

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This collection brings together a group of important and influential essays on Mexican history and historiography by Eric Van Young, a leading scholar in the field. The essays, several of which appear here in English for the first time, are primarily historiographical; that is, they address the ways in which separate historical literatures have developed over time. They cover a wide range of topics: the historiography of the colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American countryside; historical writing in English on the history of colonial Mexico; British, American, and Mexican historical writing on the Mexican Independence movement; the methodology of regional and cultural history; and the relationship of cultural to economic history. Some of the essays have been and will continue to be controversial, while others-for example, those on studies of the Mexican hacienda since 1980, on the theory and method of regional history, and on the "new cultural history" of Mexico-are widely considered classics of the genre.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Eric Van Young is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His works include The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford University Press, 2001; recipient of the Bolton-Johnson Prize).

Eric Van Young is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His works include The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford University Press, 2001; recipient of the Bolton-Johnson Prize).

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Writing Mexican History

By Eric Van Young

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6861-0

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................................................................11. Waves and Ripples: Studies of the Mexican Hacienda since 1980.................................................................212. Rural Latin America: The Colonial Period and Nineteenth Century...............................................................533. Two Decades of Anglophone Writing on Colonial Mexico: Continuity and Change since 1980........................................834. No Human Power to Impede the Impenetrable Order of Providence: The Historiography of Mexican Independence.....................1275. Doing Regional History: A Theoretical Discussion and Some Mexican Cases.......................................................1676. The Cuautla Lazarus: Reading Texts on Popular Collective Action...............................................................1997. The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico..................................................................................223Bibliography.....................................................................................................................265Index............................................................................................................................315

Chapter One

Waves and ripples Studies of the Mexican Hacienda since 1980

* * *

In an astute, wide-ranging analysis of Mexico's social and economic problems published on the very eve of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the jurist, writer, and agrarian reformer Andrés Molina Enríquez produced the somewhat gnomic, oft-quoted statement, "La hacienda no es negocio" (The hacienda is not a business). By this he meant that the Mexican landed estate was in general not profit oriented, probably not capitalistic, and certainly not modern, but a "feudal" legacy of the Spanish colonial past. At the very moment he wrote, however, capital-intensive Mexican- and foreign-owned agricultural interests were in some regions of the country producing tropical crops for export (fiber, coffee, bananas), as well as more traditional agropastoral products (meat, wheat, maize) primarily for domestic markets. Molina Enríquez's characterization proved more accurate in some areas of the country, among them tracts of the arid north (although some large estates in this region of Mexico produced cattle and other livestock for export and domestic consumption), the more isolated zones of the west coast, and the Indian south outside henequen-, coffee-, cacao-, vanilla-, and sugar-producing areas. In these places the insertion of the hacienda into local, regional, and international markets was much shallower, capital investment and economic rationalization were at much lower levels, and social relations of production were largely untransformed from older practices, including debt peonage. To the extent that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was an agrarian upheaval, much modern scholarship would ascribe it to the social and economic stresses generated by growing commercialization and modernization in large-scale agriculture, while other scholars would see the Mexican countryside of that era, and the hacienda within it, as feudal and backward in much the same way that Molina Enríquez did. The apparent internal contradiction in the central institution of Mexican rural life—that in some incarnations the hacienda could look feudal and in others highly commercialized, even capitalistic—did not originate in the nineteenth or twentieth century, however, but found its origin in the colonial period. It is therefore with the colonial period, and to some degree with the nineteenth century, that one must begin to construct a genealogy of land-labor regimes in Mexican history, and the ways in which these have affected virtually all spheres of life up to the present, even as the Mexico of the twenty-first century continues becoming year by year less rural and more urban, less peasant and more industrial, less "traditional" and more "modern."

The extended scholarly debate in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s over the nature of the Mexican hacienda (and large landed estates elsewhere in Latin America) and the institution's place in rural society, often still framed today in terms of a capitalist versus a feudal model, deeply influenced historical writing on Mexico in general and on the colonial period in particular. There emerged in this extensive literature a number of important questions, still to some degree unresolved today, about colonial land-labor regimes and the legacy they bequeathed to Mexico and the other nations of Latin America. As research advanced, for example, the hacienda began to look a lot less feudal as an agrosocial unit (that is, a place where rural people both lived and worked simultaneously) than previously imagined. Nor was this a purely academic debate: there were political stakes involved, especially outside Mexico, in Latin American countries that had yet to experience anything resembling an agrarian political revolution. For if the "traditional" rural estate was capitalist (or proto-, quasi-, or even cryptocapitalist) from its inception in the sixteenth century, rather than feudal, then the emergence of a bourgeois order and the ensuing social revolution that must inevitably follow in its wake were not as distant as Marxist thinkers of radical tendency might once have feared.

Empirical studies of the colonial hacienda uncovered in the institution an economic dynamism and a social polymorphism suggesting that it was in fact sensitive to changing market and labor conditions, and to the availability of capital, rather than a fly trapped in the amber of seigneurial tradition. Even the most market-oriented haciendas in the late colonial decades often relied in part on coerced labor, however, retaining a strongly paternalistic social organization and equally paternalistic labor practices, and therefore presumably a precapitalist character. This is quite apart, of course, from sugar plantations, concentrated in the Morelos lowlands to the south of Mexico City but also scattered in pockets elsewhere throughout the colony, which relied upon a core labor force of African slaves while still producing a highly commercialized commodity for the domestic market. We are thus faced with the apparent paradox of commercial economic organization and feudal/paternalist social organization, a theoretical anomaly but a manifest historical reality. It is also necessary to keep in mind that the large landed estate did not exist alone in the colonial countryside, in a moonlike landscape devoid of other population concentrations or other types of production units. Rather, it cohabited—sometimes symbiotically, often conflictually—with small towns, semidependent or independent family holdings (often called ranchos), and most importantly with landholding indigenous communities. Certainly the terms of this conflict have increasingly been studied, from informal to litigated contention over land and other resources, through everyday forms of subaltern resistance (including some forms of criminality), to small-scale riot and rebellion, and finally...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804768617
• ISBN 13: 9780804768610
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 338
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande