Alan Knight

The Idea of race in Latin America, 1870-1940

Preface 1. Introduction (Richard Graham) 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore) 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg) 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight) Bibliography Index

Populism and Neo-populism in Latin America, especially Mexico

‘In all matters of importance, style and not content is the important thing’: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Populism is a concept which, despite repeated critiques, refuses to disappear from Latin American studies. This article reviews some of the literature, suggesting that populism is best defined in terms of a particular political style , characteristically involving a proclaimed rapport with ‘the people’, a ‘them-and-us’ mentality, and (often, though not necessarily) a period of crisis and mobilisation; none of which makes it exceptional, abnormal, ‘unmediated’ or irrational. Mexican – among other – examples are invoked. The article questions some received opinions: that populism is typically urban, relates to particular historical stages of development, or distinctively derives from either multi-class alliances or elite manipulation. It also queries the fashionable notion of ‘economic populism’. Finally, the article notes the recent phenomenon of ‘neo-populism’, embodied by Salinas, Menem, Fujimori, etc., which a suitably loose (‘stylistic’) definition can usefully accommodate, thus suggesting the continued, if limited, utility of the concept.

Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?

Our knowledge of Mexican agrarian history has been greatly enhanced by hacienda studies, based on original hacienda archives. Inter alia, these have finished off for good the old notion of ‘feudal’ hacendados who spurned profit for prestige. But if – thanks to their reliance on hacienda accounts – these studies have shed light on hacienda marketing and profit-maximizing, they have told us less about the haciendas internal workings. The haciendas relations of exchange are, therefore, better understood than its relations of production. And, from some theoretical perspectives, it is the latter which are primary (which, in grand terms, determine whether the hacienda is to be termed ‘feudal’, ‘capitalist’ or something else again).

Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation

Esta ponencia trata el nacionalismo mexicano en la epoca poscolonial dentro de un marco comparativo. Ofrece una tipologia escueta del nacionalismo y esboza unas caracteristicas del nacionalismo--o de los nacionalismos--mexicano[s]. Sugiere que tanto la supuesta falta de conciencia nacional de los campesinos como el supuesto nacionalismo furibundo de la Revolucion han sido exagerados, o misconcebidos. Concluye que el nacionalismo tiene que verse como un fenomeno polifacetico, un objeto de disputa politica discursiva, mas que un cemento social sencillo.

The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992

This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets of lo mexicano, la mexicanidad , or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history. 1 Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons. 2 Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English. 3 Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexicos history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period. 4 Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability. 5 The achievements of the ‘stabilised development’ of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income. 6 And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexicos relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated. 7 Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.

Land and Society in Revolutionary Mexico: The Destruction of the Great Haciendas

Este ensayo trata de analizar el caracter y significado de la reforma agraria que surgio de la Revolucion Mexicana, tomando en cuenta algunos estudios recientes. Sostiene que la reforma si represento una ruptura socio-economica de gran importancia que cambio de manera radical la sociedad rural mexicana, aunque este cambio asumio formas que no siempre se demuestran en las estadisticas y, como cualquier transformacion de tal magnitud, involucro bastante violencia, ambiciones y desviaciones.

Frank Tannenbaum and the Mexican Revolution

This article examines Frank Tannenbaums engagement with Mexico in the crucial years following the Revolution of 1910–1920 and his first visit to the country in 1922. Invited—and feted—by the government and its powerful labor allies, Tannenbaum soon expanded his initial interest in organized labor and produced a stream of work dealing with trade unions, peasants, Indians, politics, and education—work that described and often justified the social program of the Revolution, and that, rather surprisingly, continued long after the Revolution had lost its radical credentials in the 1940s. Tannenbaums vision of Mexico was culturalist, even essentialist; more Veblenian than Marxist; at times downright folkloric. But he also captured important aspects of the process he witnessed: local and regional variations, the unquantifiable socio-psychological consequences of revolution, and the prevailing concern for order and stability. In sum, Tannenbaum helped establish the orthodox—agrarian, patriotic, and populist—vision of the Revolution for which he has been roundly, if sometimes excessively, criticized by recent “revisionist” historians; yet his culturalist approach, with its lapses into essentialism, oddly prefigures the “new cultural history” that many of these same historians espouse.

Export-led Growth in Mexico, c. 1900–30

All the chapters in this book concern individual countries;1 this chapter concerns Mexico. Using countries as units of analysis, however, is neither inevitable nor unproblematic, especially for the period c. 1900–30. Latin American nation-states of that period were usually weak states,2 ruling highly imperfect nations. Though states were tending to get stronger — hence the emergence of Wolf and Hansen’s order and progress dictatorships (Wolf and Hansen, 1967, pp. 168–79) — their political and (a fortiori) economic powers were quite limited; they could repress, but not represent; their burgeoning military capacity was not matched by an equivalent capacity to mould their societies or control their economies.3 This partly reflected the familiar condition of dependency, which early twentieth-century governments could do little to mitigate.

Mexican Revolution, The

The Mexican Revolution involved an armed insurrection (1910–20) and radical reform and state-building (1920–40). Its causes lie in the regime of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), which achieved political stability and economic growth at the expense of authoritarianism and peasant expropriation. Opposition to Diaz mobilized urban middle-class liberals and peasant communities who, allied to an infant working class, toppled the regime in 1911. The process of armed revolution (1910–20) comprised five episodes of extensive civil war, culminating in the triumph of a revolutionary coalition led by pragmatic, progressive northern politicos, enjoying popular support. The outcome was a nationalist regime, which undertook successful policies of labour, agrarian, anti-clerical and educational reform, culminating in the radical presidency of Cardenas (1934–40). After 1940, new leaders and more conservative policies prevailed. Interpretations of the revolution vary: the official version—of a broadly-based, popular, progressive regime—has been contested by conservative, liberal, and radical leftist critiques. Recently, revisionist historians, echoing these critiques, have stressed revolutionary authoritarianism and elitism. Valid for post-1940, such revisionism underestimates both the popular support and the historical significance of the revolution, which brought major sociopolitical changes, best understood in terms of a dialectic between ‘top-down’ state-building and ‘bottom-up’ popular mobilization.

Latin America: Political economy and geopolitics since 1945

Abstract The paper argues that, while a historical resume of Latin America since 1945 is made difficult by the sheer scope of the topic, the exercise can be useful, if only to counter short‐term “amnesiac” assumptions. It divides the analysis into three sections; the economic, political and international. The first section, noting the significance of the pivotal decade of the 1940s, outlines the policies of import‐substitution which have characterized much (not all) of Latin America since that decade, and describes their subsequent replacement by the current “neo‐liberal” model. The second section tries to discern the political correlates of these contrasting economic models, arguing that, despite the wide variation in post‐1945 political trajectories, the import substituting industrialization model tended to favour certain groups and contained the potential for durable social coalitions. While neo‐liberalism similarly rewards its friends and punishes its enemies, its capacity to generate durable coalitio...