The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520235282
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520235281
- Pub. Date:
- 10/23/2002
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520235282
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520235281
- Pub. Date:
- 10/23/2002
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520235281 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2002 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Romance of Democracy
Compliant Defiance in Contemporary MexicoBy Matthew C. Gutmann
University of California
Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-23528-2
Chapter One
Compliant Defiance in Colonia Santo DomingoThey have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. Karl Marx
The Romance of Democracy is an ethnographic study of popular politics and official subjugation in the world's most populous city; a detailed, bottom-up exploration of the lives of residents of a poor working-class neighborhood of the Mexican capital; and an examination of how, when, and why they seek to change their political worlds, and how, when, and why they participate in or eschew the politics of politics. This is a book about what these men and women think about national and neighborhood democracy, about their dreams of a better society, and about their sense of themselves as cultural citizens.
During the period 1968-2000, broad socioeconomic and demographic changes were occurring within and without Mexico-changes that repeatedly revealed how the lives, loves, hopes, and fears of my neighbors on Huehuetzin Street were integrally tied to national, regional, and global events in ways both intimate and obscure. By considering contradictory political passions and practices that developed in the neighborhood of Santo Domingo in the course of a series of momentous events, this study seeks to document the antithetical processes of civil challenge, frustration, and accommodation during this period.
The group of men and women who are at the center of this inquiry lived in the 1990s in a colonia popular that was founded by land invaders in the early 1970s. Originally, I decided to live and work in Colonia Santo Domingo because I was studying changing gender relations in Mexico. Given the active participation of many women in the colonia in social movements for services like electricity, water, sewer systems, and schools, Santo Domingo seemed a good place to assess the modes and extent of changing identities and practices associated with men and women (see Gutmann 1996). In the 1990s the neighborhood was as large as many cities in Mexico. Demographic estimates are notoriously unreliable, but by the year 2000 well over a hundred thousand people called Santo Domingo home. And, despite its tumultuous origins, nearly three decades after the initial squatters arrived in September 1971, most residents characterized their colonia as considerably more tranquil and stable than it had been in the early, chaotic years of land seizures and conflicts. Still, if residents of the colonia kept alive any of the spirit of those early years, it was in their widespread belief that formal government institutions and officials could not be trusted to provide them with the necessities in life, and in a general feeling that self-reliance was both the cross and the honor they would bear in life.
I, my wife, and our infant daughter began our year of living in Colonia Santo Domingo in August 1992. As so often happens when doing ethnographic fieldwork, I gradually became an integral if irregular member of the neighborhood, or at least of one block on Huehuetzin Street. For many years afterward, once, twice, and three times a year when possible, I would return for a few weeks to touch base with my friends and acquaintances. They had become, truthfully, my family. The desires, experiences, challenges, and conflicts of the people living on Huehuetzin Street were no more exotic than those of my colleagues at Brown University in the United States. Nonetheless, when in the mid-1990s my neighbors in Santo Domingo began to insist that I pay more attention to the changes occurring in la política (the formal political arena) in Mexico, it occurred to me that for the poor people in communities like this one, the machinations of Mexico's ruling elites must have seemed completely unrelated to their daily lives.
Colonia Santo Domingo is a poor but stable bedroom community on the south side of Mexico City. In the 1990s, the sons and daughters of the original land invaders doubted that they themselves would ever own a home. Such opportunities were less possible in 2000 than they had been even a few decades earlier. Most of them had more formal education than their parents, and most limited their own families to perhaps half the number of children their parents had. Some, women as well as men, had found steadier paid employment outside the home than their fathers enjoyed. Gentrification projects in the 1990s had brought expensive condominiums to the outskirts of the neighborhood, which was located near major transportation arteries and upscale shopping districts. Rumor in Santo Domingo had it that the main reason the area was attracting wealthier residents was because the volcanic-rock base of the colonia and the surrounding Pedregales was far more seismically secure than the rock underlying the rest of Mexico City, which was largely built on mud left over from four lakes that covered much of the Valley of Mexico before the Spanish had arrived five hundred years earlier. Japanese investors, neighbors in Santo Domingo informed me in the mid-1990s, were especially aggressive in buying up condominiums in the area. After all, the Japanese knew a thing or two about these temblores (tremors), people sometimes commented with a smirk.
So Santo Domingo was home to janitors, taxi drivers, maids, amas de casa (housewives), factory assembly workers, curtain makers, tiny workshop owners and employees, furniture makers and restorers, secretaries, clerks, radiator and muffler repairers, day-care workers, street peddlers, long-haul and local-route truck drivers, albañiles (construction laborers), bookkeepers, welders, schoolteachers, car mechanics, and a few middle-class professionals in need of inexpensive housing. Except for the condominium dwellers, generally in the 1990s one did not live in Santo Domingo if one could afford something nicer than homes made of cinderblock walls and tin-and-asbestos roofing, which were the most affordable construction materials in the colonia. So it was that one neighbor, an employee at the nearby National University (UNAM-the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), could be seen twice a week in the morning shuffling through the dusty streets with his bucket filled with two plastic bags of government-subsidized milk. Although he had no children of his own, he claimed as a dependent the child of a neighbor, who was in fact breast-feeding, and in this way he was able to supplement his own nutritional needs.
People in Santo Domingo often measured their own standard of living by that of their children. They gauged their ability to satisfy the needs of their children at different ages, and then compared the lives of their offspring with their own childhoods. Neighbors would sometimes mark levels of poverty in households by noting whether infants slept in hammocks or if parents had enough spare cash to buy a new crib or settled for a hand-me-down that was not being used by other relatives. One of the poorest grandmothers in the colonia explained to me, a bit defensively, that children who sleep in hamacas from an early age are more intelligent later in life.
For the parents in Colonia Santo Domingo, the difficulties of raising their children did not simply repeat those of earlier generations of poor mothers and fathers who had migrated to Mexico City from the countryside. Parents in the 1990s had to deal with two contradictory elements that had not existed in the 1970s. On the one hand, real income was lower in the metropolitan centers than it had been two decades earlier, and as a consequence, financial expectations for the future were far lower. On the other hand, with the advent of more formal education, television, the Internet, and other global networks of communications, this generation of parents was generally more aware of the consumer goods and opportunities that were enjoyed by the middle and upper classes but were missing from their own lives.
For someone interested in questions of politics, of power relations at a general societal level as well as in the more intimate quarters of families and households, Colonia Santo Domingo and Mexico City as a whole could seem incoherent and bizarre. On the question of who might wield power in particular situations, all my friends and neighbors in the Mexican capital held firm opinions, usually based on their own sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, and sometimes confusing experiences. Clearly, there were some people (individuals and groups) who made more decisions, and more important ones, than others. Sifting through the conflicting opinions and experiences of a group such as the residents of Colonia Santo Domingo does not simply represent the busywork of ethnography; indeed, such work represents the heart and soul of ethnographic work. It helps us to achieve greater clarity about the who's, what's, where's, when's, and how's of classical sociological categories such as class, patriarchy, and racism, as well as more amorphous practical questions involving such issues as parenting, sexuality, and violence.
In this ethnographic field study, I focus on the intimate spaces and fantasies of popular politics in one part of one community over a period of several years in the 1990s. I am concerned more with the experiences of citizens, with the mundane details of everyday political life, than with formal institutional politics. Indeed, I have tried to chronicle rather than presuppose my subjects' views about what should be considered politically relevant in the first place. For example, some of the people I knew and lived with in Mexico City thought it was a bit absurd to even talk of democracy when there were so many poor people. They were far more concerned about poverty than they were about whether someone had voted or not in the last election, or whether one's ballot was or was not secret, as important as these latter considerations might be. The types of questions that ground this book politically have to do with what my friends and neighbors thought about voting-whether voting was considered the epitome of democratic participation, and whether, given a choice, they would have preferred to have as little to do with the Mexican government and state as possible. Considerations of self-government here are unavoidably practical as well as philosophical.
It might seem odd for an ethnographer to engage the sacred terrain of formal politics in a large-scale society such as Mexico's. Usually, questions about the politics of voting and abstention are considered the bailiwick of political scientists and others well versed in survey research. I examine these questions qualitatively, however, without resorting to questionnaires aimed at teasing out broad tendencies and trends. Neither is the study of such a large-scale society the customary domain of political anthropology, a field that has historically been more concerned with power relations in small-scale, tribal societies. Only fairly recently have scholars in the field begun to examine politics at the direct, face-to-face level of the village, the neighborhood, and the local community in societies of tens of millions of inhabitants.
The Romance of Democracy is a book about the political lives of the men and women of Huehuetzin Street during a specific juncture in their personal and social histories. In particular, I ask in this study what the people of Colonia Santo Domingo themselves think they can change about their personal and social histories-that is, what impact they think they might have in the narrower and perhaps superficially more circumscribed world of children, marriages, families, and households, as well as in the broader and sometimes seemingly limitless world of international geopolitics and affairs of state.
One aim is to expose the links between the apparently routine interactions and conversations of daily life in the colonia and developments in the world of national and international politics. I do not pretend to comprehensively capture the cognitive connections made by my friends and neighbors in Santo Domingo, that is, to fully and definitively represent their ideas and motivations when it comes to political questions. Yet neither do I conform with the conclusions of behavioralist scientists and others who insist that such things as motives are wholly unknowable. Similar to the conclusions of certain interpretivist anthropologists, this kind of thinking tends to arrogantly render the comments of the people themselves as worthless, or at least thoroughly suspect. Instead, I prefer to acknowledge the limits of discourse-for instance, the extent to which people's words may obscure some truths-by placing high value on what people say about themselves and others, and by repeatedly returning to similar topics with the same people (it is simply astounding how people may say different things to the same person, depending on how their relationship develops), and always insisting on comparing different comments by different people, always asking people to compare words to deeds.
Bluntly put, and for better or for worse, most of what ethnographers "do" is talk to people. We talk to people about what they think, what others think, and about what they and others say they and others do. We also "observe," and these observations may be important, but I think on the whole many of us rely far more on words about deeds than on the deeds themselves.
The examination of political parties, administrative apparatuses, interest groups, polling, and electoral systems are crucial modes of study. Yet, in this study, like the people of Santo Domingo themselves, I have other political concerns and focuses that are different from, though I hope complementary to, such approaches. Here, my focus is to describe and understand the political perceptions and participation of los de abajo, those social underdogs who are compliant in the face of social controls seemingly beyond their ability to resist, and who at the same time remain defiantly enraged at having to accept this very situation.
Contemporary Mexican History
One way to understand popular politics in Mexico City and contemporary Mexico in general is to note certain key junctures in recent Mexican history, events which for those old enough to have social memories mark turning points in their personal and historical lives. Commemorating unforgettable events and experiences can, of course, obscure processual changes that may lack such narrow temporal referents.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Romance of Democracy by Matthew C. Gutmann Copyright © 2002 by Regents of the University of California . Excerpted by permission.
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