Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico
328
Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico
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Overview
Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Rubin shows that the Juchitecos’ ability to organize and sustain a radical political movement grew out of a century-long history of negotiation of political rule. He argues that factors outside the realm of formal politics—such as ethnicity, language, gender, and religion—play an important part in the dynamics of regional political struggles and relationships of power. While offering a detailed view of the Zapotec community and its interactions, Rubin reconceptualizes democracy by considering the question of how meaningful autonomy, self-government, cultural expression, and material well-being can be forged out of violence and repression.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378617 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/18/1997 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Lexile: | 1640L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jeffrey W. Rubin is Associate Professor of History and Research Associate at Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University.
Read an Excerpt
Decentering the Regime
Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico
By Jeffrey W. Rubin
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7861-7
CHAPTER 1
Theorizing Power and Regimes
The prevailing state-centered approach to Mexican politics attributes the rise of radical movements in the 1970s to the breakdown of a cohesive and successful form of political control, state corporatism, and explains their subsequent trajectories in terms of regime efforts at negotiation, co-optation, and repression. In contrast, my research in Juchitán revealed enduring regional counterweights to national power in Mexico, circuitous pathways of historical change, and locations of power outside of formal politics, in people's experiences of culture and daily life. Furthermore, while COCEI's strength has generally been attributed to homogeneous class and ethnic consciousness (Gutiérrez 1981; López Monjardin 1983b), my immersion in family courtyards highlighted the coexistence of ambiguous and contradictory beliefs and experiences within the radical movement.
These observations suggest an alternative understanding of power and politics in Mexico. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that the ongoing domination has resulted from centralized power that was transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms, replicating hegemony through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even as scholars emphasize the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to this state-centered analysis and to view the present through its lens. Similarly, analyses of regime change throughout Latin America have understood power as something that is amassed and brokered at the center among explicitly political actors. Such approaches, rooted in state theory and political economy, view stability (understood as regime endurance) as resulting from particular, routinized patterns of centralized control over discrete societal forces.
In contrast to state-centered and center-centered conceptions of power, theorists such as Gramsci (1971), Williams (1977), and Foucault (1990 [1976]) argue that continuing domination results from contestation and change in multiple arenas, including numerous locations outside of both center and formal politics. Williams, for example, argues that hegemony "has to be seen as more than the simple transmission of an (unchanging) dominance." Rather, "it has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own" (112). Seen in this light, what appears to be ongoing and unchanging domination—the endurance of states based on inequality and coercion in Latin America, for example—is the overall result not of an all-controlling center, or of particular structures of political bargaining and rule, but of numerous, changing forms and locations of domination and resistance. In Foucault's words, "'Power,' insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities" (93).
As one of the preeminent enduring regimes in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study of the nature and location of power. By examining one Mexican region, its political upheavals and rebellions, and its relationship with the central government, I argue that social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary regime as hegemonic and authoritarian—Mexico is indeed a site of enduring forms of inequality and domination—but wrong about what hegemony is, and thus about what upholds domination and how it may be resisted. In constructing a state-centered understanding of Mexican politics, social scientists have misunderstood both empirical evidence and the nature of power. Through an analysis of the history of Juchitán and the emergence of COCEI, I demonstrate the ways in which politics, culture, and the dynamics of historical change in this region diverge strikingly from their claims. In the final chapter, I extend this analysis to other regions of Mexico, showing that histories of northern, central, and southern parts of the country similarly challenge the state-centered approach.
In contrast to the way Mexican politics has generally been described, the presence of the state has been uneven and incomplete across both geography and political life. Hegemony has taken shape differently in different locations and thus changed or unraveled differently as well, with cultural practices of ethnicity, language, gender, religion, and civic identity playing key roles in its dynamics. Indeed, the founding event of modern Mexican hegemony, the state-building undertaken by President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s, was not a thoroughgoing and homogeneous national transformation, as it has been portrayed (Hamilton 1982). Rather, Cárdenas's political efforts resulted in the simultaneous forging of a multitude of regional arrangements—each a distinct combination of bargains, coercions, and alliances—that together reinforced the power of the center in broadly similar ways. These regional arrangements included, but were not limited to, an institutional presence of the central state. Because the sets of phenomena that were woven together and the ways they were joined varied considerably across the country, different regions experienced distinct processes of development and change. Similarly, different domains of social and cultural life proceeded according to their own dynamics, in interaction with geographically based processes. As a result, while there is an unusually strong and efficient state apparatus in Mexico, it is a mistake to view Mexican politics primarily through the lens of the breakdown and restructuring of national organizational forms. Rather, the Mexican state and regime should be seen as parts of a complex and changing center that coexists with, and is indeed constituted through and embedded in, the diversity of regional and cultural constructions that have evolved throughout Mexico since the 1930s.
Scholars of Mexico, particularly historians and anthropologists, are beginning to rethink politics from this perspective. The authors brought together by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent in Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994) assess the Mexican Revolution and the political arrangements and conflicts it engendered at the level of regions and cultures, arguing that the nature and function of the state itself is established, maintained, and resisted in these multiple locations. Giving concrete form to Foucault's conception of power, they show the ways in which state formation in the 1930s involved particular, localized, and changing forms of resistance and accommodation concerning not only land reform, labor legislation, and party affiliation, but such matters as religious practices (Becker 1994) and Indian identity (Rus 1994) as well. Similarly, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler "specifies and contextualizes the notion of hegemony" (1991, 196) by looking at the geographically specific intertwining of economy, politics, and culture in colonial and twentieth-century Morelos and in the postrevolutionary cacicazgo of Gonzalo Santos in San Luis Potosí (1992).
In their attention to the regionally and culturally differentiated construction of regime politics across Mexico, Joseph and Nugent and their coauthors, along with Lomnitz-Adler, illustrate Foucault's claim that power is not to be found in "a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state" (Foucault 1990 [1976], 92). Rather, the state apparatus is the "institutional crystallization" (93) of something that happens elsewhere, in multiple local sites of contestation, such as workplaces, families, associational groups, and institutions (94). The apparatuses of the state are thus decentered; they are things which the "dense web" of power relations "passes through ... without being exactly localized in them" (96).
Through analysis of Juchitán and comparison of Juchitán with other Mexican regions, I argue for broadening concepts of regime and politics, so as to decenter the regime, on the one hand, and place culture and everyday experience squarely within discussions about power, on the other. By decentering, I mean that national politics be understood as something partial and complex that coexists with, but is different from, regional and local politics, and that is only one among several locations and kinds of politics. In addition to affording greater insight than the state-centered approach into the origins and trajectories of political conflict in Mexico, such a framework can also better illuminate the strategies of resistance of leftist grassroots movements. In examining the origins and internal dynamics of COCEI, I show that the movement embodies ongoing ambiguity and contradiction in numerous arenas of its internal functioning and that its successes stem from its ability to manipulate the multiple forms of culture and power in regional politics. Like notions of state and regime as the predominant loci of domination, views of popular movements as instances of coherent and homogeneous class or ethnic consciousness misrepresent the nature of social phenomena and the dynamics of successful resistance and opposition.COCEI derives its identity and strength not from a unified Zapotec or peasant-worker consciousness, but from the coexistence within the movement of ambiguous forms of discourse and practice, as well as contradictory representations of the experiences of leaders and supporters and of men and women.
There is, indeed, a strikingly coherent state and regime in Mexico, compared to other countries, and, in Juchitán, an unusually unified and mobilized popular movement, COCEI, like the Mexican regime and state, can easily be accommodated to theorizing based on a clear divide between state and civil society, on regime as the organizing mechanism of political control, and on discrete, predominantly economic interests. Similarly, both COCEI and the Mexican regime engage in prominent public politics, so that it is tempting to understand power as a public and formally political phenomenon. However, COCEI has successfully transformed relations of power because its internal dynamics and political strategies respond to experiences more varied and subtle than those recognized by the state-centered explanations for Mexican politics. It is not centralized power, in movement or nation, that accounts for the power and endurance of both COCEI and the Mexican regime. Rather, it is the forms of power described by Williams and Foucault—combinations of power amassed and power dispersed, of coherence and ambiguity, and of contestation in "political" and "nonpolitical" locations—that shape domination and resistance in Mexico.
The State-Centered Model and Its Origins
In what has become the customary telling of the postrevolutionary past, President Calles maneuvered revolutionary generals into partial subservience to a centralized state and incipient national party in the 1920s. President Cárdenas then thoroughly restructured and institutionalized that state and party between 1934 and 1940, rewarding cooperative generals and ousting others, and creating and fortifying centralized mass organizations. Extensive and unprecedented land reform and labor legislation facilitated this incorporation. The resulting system, according to this state-centered analysis, maintained stability in Mexico for the next thirty years, partly by balancing political constituencies on the left and right and then increasingly by exercising control over those opposed to or harmed by inegalitarian forms of economic development. During this period, regular elections served to ratify what was decided behind closed, centralized doors. The personalist politics of caciquismo coexisted with the new system, forming part of its inner structure.
By the 1960s, in this narrative, the system suffered "petrification" (Pansters 1990, 101); the structures of corporatism and caciquismo on which the edifice was constructed could not respond to diverse challenges brought about by economic differentiation and demands for political participation. This rigidity, which is seen to have led directly to the growth and eventual violent repression of the 1968 student movement, became the central dilemma of Mexican politics thereafter. In the 1970s and 1980s, the regime tried unsuccessfully to recoup, reinvent, or replace corporatist success. Generally, these efforts were seen as failures; policies shifted repeatedly, and they neither revived corporatism nor transcended it. Out of this stalemate, President Carlos Salinas largely completed the process of economic liberalization between 1988 and 1994 in an atmosphere of relative social peace, until the Chiapas rebellion in the final year of his sexenio (six-year term in office). In so doing, he strictly limited political liberalization and apparently pacified impoverished Mexicans through a targeted social-welfare program.
Acceptance of the corporatist analysis of the Mexican past as a basis for political analysis abounds in recent scholarly literature. For example, in his introduction to Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico, a prominent collection that addresses multiple instances of grassroots mobilization in Mexico in the 1980s, Joe Foweraker speaks of "the construction of the corporatist state" in postrevolutionary Mexico, as well as the more recent "crisis in local forms of corporatist representation" (1990, 14-16). Alberto Aziz Nassif, in an essay that focuses on a fragmented present of "regions, zones, localities, groups, classes, ethnicities, languages, and organizations," refers to "the shared identity that once existed between the corporatized masses and the state," and to "a PRI-dominated political culture under the rule of the 'unanimous' party front" (1989, 92). These analyses acknowledge the complexity of the Mexican present and the changing nature of recent interactions between popular movements and the state. However, they suggest that the inclusion of ordinary Mexicans in government-sponsored mass organizations was the defining characteristic of postrevolutionary politics from the 1930s to the 1970s. While such state-centered explanations explicitly recognize the centrality of bargaining and exchange to the process of domination, they argue that the nature of the bargaining was circumscribed by the state and that the Mexican system as a whole remained relatively unchanged for at least three decades (Collier and Collier 1991, 574).
This same framework—that of a hegemonic state that can make and carry out policy from the center and circumvent or repress opposition—was used to explain the apparent success with which President Salinas implemented neoliberal economic reforms (Centeno 1994). While for the moment—since the economic crisis of December 1994—the state's power appears more limited, a comparable focus on the state's ability to recreate centralized control, even in the context of the breakdown of corporatism, is used to analyze the problems of governance facing President Zedillo today: "If the long entrenched corporatist structures and patron-client networks of Mexico's regime are inadequate tools for implementing such [new social] policies and actually obstruct their implementation in many parts of the country, what can replace them?" (Cornelius 1995, 139).
This approach to twentieth-century Mexican politics emphasizes the thoroughness of the transformation achieved by Cárdenas, the stability of the years between the 1930s and 1968, the effective centralization of politics, and the failures of reestablishing stability, even with increasing coercion, in subsequent decades. This model emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as the study of economic and political development took root in the social sciences, and scholars of Mexican politics sought to develop a model for the country's enduring one-party system. In so doing, they first characterized the Mexican system as pluralist and representative, and then as authoritarian and corporatist. Pluralist authors argued that despite the absence of fair elections, the diversity of interests in Mexico was represented through the PRI and its sectors and reflected in government policies, thus making the system as a whole representative. The authoritarian analysis pointed to the ways in which central authorities consistently co-opted, controlled, and repressed political pressures of peasants and workers, while at the same time promoting economic policies that favored a small elite. Corporatism, a variant of authoritarianism, provided a way of making more explicit the connection between the establishment of a state-sponsored system of peasant and labor organizations and the ability of the regime to rule with a relatively low level of overt violence. Corporatism explained how nonmilitary authoritarianism could function.
All of these approaches shared a focus on analysis of regimes, on generalizations meant to apply to politics throughout the nation and over several decades. They sought to understand the ways in which regimes, as singular entities, controlled what were seen as the relatively objective demands expressed by individuals and groups experiencing socioeconomic change. In moving from pluralism to authoritarianism, theorists brought a much-needed critical perspective to the study of Mexican politics, one that was stimulated by empirical work on economic marginalization and political exclusion. At the same time, they left behind useful observations that had been part of the pluralist analysis. What the theorists of authoritarianism lost were notions of actual on-the-ground politics—places where varied forms of contestation occurred without predetermined results—and, in the work that emerged in the late 1970s, of political culture.
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