Colección: Revista Interamericana de Bibliografía (RIB)
Número: 1-4
Título: 1997
Sección: Reseñas Informativas / Informative Reviews
Florencia E. MALLON. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico
and Peru. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. xx, 472 p.,
maps, notes, index.
In her book Peasant and Nation, Florencia Mallon presents a comparative
archaelogy of popular political cultures in Mexico and Peru and the reinsertion
of those cultures into the so- called political history.
The analysis of the author starts from a relatively simple premise: at the
beginning of Latin America’s postcolonial history, Mexico and Peru were
roughly comparable. They had the great centers of pre-Columbian indigenous
civilizations and of Spanish imperial rule.They had the richest silver mines,
the wealthiest colonial elites, and the largest indigenous populations in
all of Spanish America. Both countries entered the so-called national period
in political disarray, and each faced a good half-century of civil war before
efforts at political stabilization began to take hold. In both cases, foreign
intervention and occupation interrupted the first attempts at state formation.
But despite these broad similarities, Mexico and Peru followed different historical
paths that diverged dramatically by the first decades of the 20th century
and certainly by the 1930s. Why? This book provides a partial answer to this
simple question by analyzing popular movements and discourses during the second
half of the 19th century. Even as these movements and discourses were repressed,
defeated and submerged by elite state makers, they marked each country’s
political structures and future potential, but it must be emphasized that
the book only partially explains the differences between Mexico and Peru.
The organization of Peasant and Nation reflects the author’s theoretical,
methodological, and empirical concerns. After an initial theoretical chapter
in which Mallon lays out her new approach to nationalism and popular political
culture and provides some historical context for Mexico and Peru, the rest
is divided into three parts. The first part treats only the Sierra de Puebla
where she develops her perspective on popular nationalism, community politics
and alternative nationalist discourses. The second part includes three case
studies in order to examine the limits as well as the dynamics of popular
nationalism. The last one takes a broad comparative view of Mexico and Peru
by exploring the differences in historical and political processes in both
countries.
Florencia Mallon, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, provides
the reader with extensive information regarding comparative history in order
to rethink the relationship between the “national” and the “popular”,
and to have a better understanding of the role that peasants play in modern
state formation.
M.B.
1. Estas reseñas fueron preparadas por las sugientes funcionarias de la Secretaría
Ejecutiva para el Desarrollo Integral/These reviews were prepared by the following
staff members of the Exeuctive Secretariat for Integral Development: María
del Carmen Barreneche, María de Icaza, María Teresa Mellenkamp, y Rosario
Villanueva Popovici.