Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru.

The formation of the nation-state is still an on-going process. This is certainly the case in postcolonial regions, such as Latin America, where border disputes and peasant uprisings continue to punctuate the political landscape. Florencia Mallon, in her book, makes an interesting and controversial contribution to our understanding of nation-state formation by examining through a Gramscian framework the creation of peasant political discourses in Mexico and Peru in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her aim is to unearth "political history from below," comparing four regions, two in each country, showing how peasants did or did not have the opportunity to fashion what Mallon calls "national-democratic projects." She finds that, in three cases (Sierra Norte de Puebla, Morelos in Mexico, and Junin in Peru), the peasants did come up with their own ideas about who should participate in their country whereas in one region (Cajamarca, Peru) a peasant-defined national project did not emerge.

After a brief theoretical discussion, Mallon dives into a highly detailed political narrative of political and military conflicts from about 1850 to 1867 in her first region, that of the Sierra Norte de Puebla. This was the period marked by the Reforma, when the Liberal Party government imposed wide-ranging reforms, to the end of Maximilian's ill-fated empire, supported by the Conservative Party and French and Austrian arms and finally overthrown by a Liberal military resurgence. She posits that the peasant communities of the region fought for the Liberal cause based on their own understanding of a kind of populist liberalism that emphasized egalitarianism in the treatment of all [male] citizens. While deeply sympathetic to the peasant villagers, the author does not see this egalitarian emphasis incorporating all members of these villages. In a short but vivid chapter, she shows that this "national democratic project" incorporated many hierarchical relations as well, such as those between men and women, younger men and village elders, and, to a lesser extent, among the various ethnic groups, be they Nahua speakers, Totonacs, or creoles.

After the detailed discussion of the Puebla case, Mallon moves on to find similar processes occurring in Morelos, Mexico and also in Junin, Peru for approximately the same period. In the latter case, the invasion of Chilean forces during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) brought about different responses based on class and geographic location. The invasion engendered the formation in the highlands of peasant guerrilla forces loyal to the Peruvian nationalist general Andres Caceres. In the valleys, landlords acceded to the Chileans and collaborationist Peruvian forces. In the case of Cajamarca (also Peru), Mallon shows that the peasants never developed their own discourses, because the leadership of the resistance fell to merchants and landlords who had no interest or need in creating a populist nationalism.

In the last part of the book, the author analyzes how in the case of Mexico some of the populist discourse survived (and indeed was resuscitated during the Mexican Revolution after 1910), to be incorporated partially into the hegemonic nationalist ideology. Local intellectuals played an important, though often ambiguous, role in the preservation and transformation of these discourses, molding them into new forms as national circumstances dictated. In Peru, however, local intellectuals were much less common and less successful. Moreover, landlords in the Andean highlands were able to reassert their domination to a much greater extent, bringing about the total repression (not, as in Mexico, just a partial repression) of nationalist peasant discourse of Junin. In this latter case, the communities did not remain united and thus eventually succumbed to overwhelming government force.

Although lucidly written, with the author displaying admirable skill in dissecting the complex political interactions in both Mexico and Peru in the second half of the nineteenth century, this book is a difficult read for the non-Latin Americanist. Mallon presupposes a relatively profound understanding of Mexican and Peruvian history; without this framework the reader is soon lost in the details of political maneuverings and types of discourses among the multiplicity of political factions.

There are several other problems with the book, though some of them are understandable given the ambitious scope of this comparative project. It is clear, for example, that Mallon has a much better understanding of underlying rural structures, especially land tenure patterns, for Peru. Indeed, in her chapter on internal differentiation in Puebla, Mallon largely ignores the distribution of wealth and land, instead focusing on gender and age. For Peru, while gender and age virtually disappear, differentiation in land tenure and the differences between valley and highlands come into much better focus. Likewise, the issue of ethnicity is only analyzed carefully for the very late part of the nineteenth century, when racist discourse plays an important role in both Mexico and Peru. However, there are tantalizing references to the distinctions among peasant villages internally and in respect to other villages in ethnic composition, issues which Mallon does not exploit fully.

One may also object to the discourse-centered approach of postmodernism, the application of which is still hotly debated among many Latin American social historians. However, it appears to me that Mallon has taken much of the best of this material and utilized it quite imaginatively. Fortunately, the author has also refined a bit her emphasis in earlier works on the creation of peasant nationalism, and extended it into an examination of the contributions of the peasantry to the creation of the modern nation-state in Latin America. This moves us away from the somewhat sterile debate between Mallon and other scholars over whether peasants or only the bourgeoisie have been able to create a sense of national identity. On a related note, I wish that the press had permitted the inclusion of a bibliography, for it might have been more useful than only endnotes for those wishing to delve more deeply into the many works Mallon relies upon in her exposition.

So - what have we learned from this ambitious exercise? This book shows some of the uses of postmodern theory and subaltern studies for the Latin American countryside. More importantly, Mallon has squeezed out of difficult sources evidence that shows the peasants actively engaged in politics, creating their own political projects and responding to political projects of national and regional elites in ways that have rarely been documented. The close political analysis also gives a feel for the political and social differences between various Latin American countries in ways not fully appreciated before this study. In addition, Mallon provides an excellent example of the comparative method, a rare occurrence on such level of detail for Latin America. All in all, this book will serve to promote debate among Latin Americanists over peasant ideology, postmodern methods, and the comparative approach for many years to come.

Erick D. Langer Carnegie Mellon University