Abstract
The July 1, 2018, election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) as president by a 30-point margin over his nearest rival was heralded by his enthusiasts as the “Fourth Transformation” of Mexico (following independence from Spain in 1821, the liberal reforms of Benito Juárez in the 1850s–1860s, and the 1910 Revolution). The president-elect took office on December 1, 2018, with what critics called a folklorized ceremony in which he received an indigenous ritual cleansing with incense and a wooden staff of leadership, a moment that raised both expectations and doubts about whether the future would match the hyperbole and symbolism (Carlsen, 2018; Sheridan, 2018). Leaving aside AMLO’s ego, understanding this moment requires a critical reading of Mexican history and a decolonial gaze. The three works reviewed here offer valuable insights toward that analysis.
Randal Sheppard’s A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968 focuses on the period that could be considered the beginning of the decline of the fabled “perfect dictatorship,” the 71-year hegemonic dominant-party rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI) from 1929 to 2000. The contemporary period that Sheppard considers begins with the October 2, 1968, Tlatelolco student massacre, proceeding through the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s, the electoral fraud of 1988, the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, and the administrations of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN) under Presidents Vicente Fox (2000–2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) and ending with the 2012 election of President Enrique Peña Nieto and the return of the “PRI 2.0.” This is neither an institutional history of the Mexican state nor a review of the shifting political economy of recent decades but a history of Mexican nationalism and an analysis of the mythology surrounding the revolutionary state. The focus is on the symbols, heroes, monuments, holidays, and discourse that sustained Mexico’s hegemonic nationalism throughout most of the twentieth century. The author builds on the insights of what he refers to as postrevisionist historians who examine the interplay between hegemonic state building and the pushback of local elites and popular struggles, a dynamic that suggests not a monolithic state but a “jalopy with swiss cheese hegemony” (11).
Sheppard exposes both the calculated and sustained logic of myth-making and the holes in the cheese through a series of “snapshots” of six critical junctures in recent Mexican history. This account includes nuanced discussion of how successive presidential administrations co-opted and absorbed the discourse of their opposition, tacking left or right as needed, with each PRI candidate adopting a symbolic “totemic hero” (107) from the nation’s past in order to stay a few steps ahead of the opposition in laying claim to the revolutionary legacy. Electoral fraud and coercion were always part of the hidden arsenal in periods when the façade was slipping, as in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The repression of students and subsequent Dirty War of the 1970s (Herrera Calderón and Cedillo, 2011) disturbed the institutional revolutionary myth of continual progress and social justice—even disquieting the rising middle class of that era, as portrayed in Alfonso Cuarón’s much-discussed 2018 film Roma. Delegitimation rose in the 1980s due to the political fault lines of the party-state revealed by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, rising opposition to neoliberal economic reforms, and the massive electoral fraud of 1988, marking the end of an era. A Persistent Revolution offers a vivid description of the regime’s efforts to reclaim the revolutionary mythology during the 1988 inauguration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (138–142) and the subsequent policies of social liberalism that attempted to put a reformist gloss on the devastating impact of neoliberalism (154–157).
Sheppard’s foregrounding of ideology and political culture might be usefully complemented with a parallel reading of Mexico’s evolving political economy and institutions. These dimensions are highlighted for example in Morton’s (2013) application of the Gramscian concept of passive revolution to the Mexican case, more explicitly connecting the ideological edifice to the functional needs of the capitalist state. The “snapshot” format of Sheppard’s narrative makes A Persistent Revolution an engaging read, but the chronological leaps also obscure some of the connecting threads between hegemonic ideology, institutions, and political economy. For example, the examination of the critical moment of 1994 (the year of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Zapatista rebellion) does not discuss the peso collapse, the assassination of PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, or the increasingly visible role of the military in enforcing the neoliberal order. The discussion of the recomposition of Mexican corporatism in the late 1980s (150–154) provides relatively little detail on the important emergence of independent social movement organizing as the PRI was losing its monopoly of interest representation (Hellman, 1994). Similarly, the discussion of the 2000s skips over the rising militancy of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (National Coordinator of Education Workers—CNTE) and the Oaxaca insurrection of 2006, both significant pieces of the story of declining PRI hegemony. There is also relatively little elaboration (191–198, 253) on the racial dimension of the construction of the myth of the mestizo nation and the assimilationist ideology of indigenismo.
In sum, Randal Sheppard’s A Persistent Revolution offers an insightful analysis of the historical development of Mexico’s revolutionary national mythology and the riddle of the “perfect dictatorship.” This work provides food for thought about the decline and recomposition of Mexico’s distinctive brand of authoritarianism. It also indirectly suggests interesting questions about the construction of counterhegemonic discourse (Fraser, 1990), such as the rebel/bandit mythology surrounding such figures as Pancho Villa, Lucio Cabañas, Genaro Vásquez, and Rubén Jaramillo (Padilla, 2008), and perhaps clues to the powerful resonance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in the imagination of Mexican civil society.
Mariana Mora’s Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities is a brilliant ethnography of a movement from below that simply refused to accept the prevailing ideological, social, and political structures of oppression. The indigenous Zapatistas of the impoverished southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas have not only developed an alternative imaginary but also enacted in everyday practice their vision of a better politics of collective life (lekil kuxlejal in the Tseltal Maya language). In doing so without waiting for permission from the constituted national authorities, the Zapatistas in their self-proclaimed autonomous communities are building what Negri (1999) calls constituent power, created through everyday practices of subverting the hegemonic structures of authority and social relations. Scrutinizing the prefigurative practices (Dinerstein, 2015) of the Zapatista movement, Mora highlights the kuxlejal politics through which the historically excluded (particularly women) “govern by learning to govern” (21), “having authority by learning to be the authority” (191).
Mora’s years of socially committed participatory research and gathering of collective testimonies paint a rich picture of how this movement painstakingly emerged from the humiliation and rage experienced by mozos (laborers) on the fincas through the racialization of class domination (87–93) and their awakening to the realities of gender oppression and violence (97–101, 159–168). In the Zapatista de facto agrarian reform, achieved by “recovering” and occupying lands of the finqueros, we see a fine-grained illustration of how the movement transformed social relations by breaking with both the clientelistic agrarian patterns of postrevolutionary Mexico and the atomizing “citizen participation” logic of the neoliberal counterreform of the 1990s. Similarly, Mora transmits the powerful narratives of Zapatista community members discussing the rupture of hegemonic structures in autonomous educational practices, administration of justice, and gender roles (Baronnet, Mora Bayo, and Stahler-Sholk, 2011; Klein, 2015; Mora, 2015).
One distinctive and admirable feature of Kuxlejal Politics is Mora’s unblinking critical examination of the production of knowledge and the conventional academic research process (Rabasa, 2015). Her self-reflective approach draws on theoretical insights from feminist and postcolonial studies, and the resulting “decolonizing gaze” destabilizes the traditional hierarchical separation of researcher from “objects” of study (40–49). The focus here is not on the state or its hegemonic constructions, instead centering on the members of autonomous communities as agents of transformation.
The Zapatistas, still thriving a quarter-century after the 1994 uprising, are not waiting to be officially recognized or “helped,” and Mora concludes that their ongoing rebellious practices show how “subaltern political actors move within state cracks and fissures to advance their own transformative potentials” (226). In this sense, Mora’s Kuxlejal Politics offers a counterpoint from below to Sheppard’s analysis of the project of hegemonic construction of the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The PRI had long penetrated the crevices of civil society down to the micro level, even in the far-flung indigenous communities of Chiapas (Rus, 1994). Yet the revolutionary mythology that had historically co-opted indigenous identity and the agrarian radicalism of Zapata left a space for resignifying those roots (Stephen, 1997). In the decades leading up to the Zapatista rebellion, those spaces were occupied by a variety of new currents including peasant organizations escaping the corporatist control of the PRI, liberation theology catechists, and revolutionary survivors of the Dirty War from elsewhere in Mexico (Harvey, 1998). The confluence of those forces in the forgotten canyons of the Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas produced a new collective social subject of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals” (Gunderson, 2011) who refuse to play the dominant political game.
The Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos, edited by Nick Henck, is a full-throated cry of ¡Ya basta! (We’ve had enough!). The author of a previous biography of Marcos (Henck, 2007; reviewed in Stahler-Sholk, 2008) presents here a curated and annotated compilation of speeches from 2007–2014 by the late Subcommander Marcos, who announced his own “death” in May 2014 when he stepped back from his role as prominent Zapatista spokesperson and took on the identity of Galeano, a Zapatista support base member and teacher killed by paramilitaries. Also included are the 2009 essay “Fifth Wind: A Dignified and Feminine Rage,” by Commander Hortensia of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee–General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and a 2008 speech by then Lt. Col. (now Subcommander) Moisés, who has now assumed a more prominent spokesperson role.
The media and the outside world always had an obsessive love-hate relationship with the colorful Marcos, demanding to hear from him about the Zapatista movement and dissecting his witty epistolary messages and essays while decrying the presence of a nonindigenous man as the public face of an indigenous rebellion. In his writings, Marcos himself denounces the implicit racism and objectifying gaze directed toward indigenous people behind the assumption that the movement is Marcos (95–103). He also angrily denounces the “solidarity coyotes” and intellectual pseudo-leftists who have traded on the Zapatista brand (118–121). In a more reflective moment, he acknowledges the collective transformation of the initial band of militants who went to the jungles of Chiapas hoping to form a guerrilla foco or nucleus through the process of reeducation by the indigenous communities that led to a change in their conception of power (113–117). After 11 years of clandestine organizing and then another 20 years after the 1994 uprising, Marcos discusses the “hand off: from revolutionary vanguardism to command by obeying, from taking the Power of Above to creating the power of below, from professional politics to everyday politics, from leaders to peoples, from the marginalization of gender to the direct participation of women, from mocking the other to celebrating difference” (117), at the end of which Marcos the character, the costume, disappeared (219).
After the Mexican government reneged on the 1996 San Andrés accords they had negotiated with the Zapatistas, stripping the recognition of autonomy of all meaningful content in the 2001 Indigenous Law (Hernández, 2002) with the blessing of the so-called left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD), the movement turned inward, focusing on development of its autonomous projects and muting the showy communiqués by Marcos. That silence prompted mainstream observers to pronounce the movement dead—until December 2012, when 40,000 ski-masked Zapatistas marched wordlessly through the towns of Chiapas. Henck begins his introduction to the book with the wry observation of Marcos on that occasion: “Did you hear? It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is that of our reemerging. The day that was the day, it was night. And night will be the day that will be the day.” As Marcos/Galeano steps back into the shadows and the indigenous Zapatistas who were always there continue to speak and be ignored, perhaps the response to Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) classic question “Can the subaltern speak?” should be “Yes, but can others hear?”
In a recurring theme of Henck’s useful compilation, Marcos reserves some of his sharpest critique for AMLO, the faux left of the political classes (49, 151–152), and the systemic cancer of capitalism, which he contrasts with the Zapatista project of true autonomy from the “evil government” (124). As power in the superficial sense was transferred in 2018 from President Enrique Peña Nieto to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the outgoing president signed a raft of mining concessions; while president-elect AMLO chose a head of cabinet who vowed to make Mexico “an investors’ paradise” (Reséndiz, 2018), created a new state institution to co-opt indigenous peoples (López y Rivas, 2018), and behind the smoke of incense of his indigenous swearing-in ceremony moved forward with plans for a tourist megaproject of a “Mayan Train” to run from the Maya ruins of Yucatán to Chiapas without consulting the affected communities (Lichtinger and Aridjis, 2018). The nature of power and its contestation, from below and from above, is a unifying subject of these three complementary works.
Footnotes
Richard Stahler-Sholk is a professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University and an associate editor of Latin American Perspectives.