"Highly original work places the growth of an important state in the national and, at the same time, familial environment. Argues that the Reform must be seen in the context of a general economic upturn begun in the 1840s"--Handbook of Latin American Stud

Facing financial chaos, Porfirio Diaz’s strategy in the 1880s was to create a bank with a legal monopoly over lending to the government and to enforce elites’ property rights in order to get their support. This book shows how Mexican leaders, even after the Mexican Revolution, failed to alter these basic economic and political policies, resulting in a continuing high level of financial and industrial concentration.

Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

This is a study of the important but little-understood role of peasants in the formation of the Mexican national state--from the end of the colonial era to the beginning of La Reforma, a moment in which liberalism became dominant in Mexican political culture. The book shows how Mexico's national political system was formed through local struggles and alliances that deeply involved elements of Mexico's impoverished rural masses, notably the peasants who took part in many of the local regional, and national rebellions that characterized early nineteenth-century politics. These rebellions were not battles over whether or not there was to be a state; they were contests over what the state was to be. The author focuses on the region of Guerrero, whose peasantry were deeply involved in the two most important broadly based revolts of the early nineteenth century: the War of Independence of 1810-21, and the 1853-55 Revolution of Ayutla, the rebellion that began La Reforma. The book's central contention is that there are fundamental links between state formation, elite politics, popular protest, and the construction of Mexico's modern political culture. Various elite groups advanced different models of the state, which in turn had different implications for, and impacts on, the lives of Mexico's lower classes. Contesting elites formed alliance with segments of Mexico's peasantry as well as the urban poor and these alliances were crucial in determining national political outcomes. Thus, the participation of wide sectors of the population in politics for varying reasons--and the subsequent learning of tactics and elaborations of discourse--left an enduring mark on Mexico's political system and culture.

This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities.

Not since the early nineteenth century, when California was still part of Mexico, have there been such close ties between Mexico and its former northern territory. Today, one Californian in five is of Mexican heritage, compared with fewer than one in ten in 1970. California is Mexico's second-largest trading partner (after Texas) and Mexico is California's second-largest trading partner (after Japan). This book is the first in any language to explore the nature, scope, and effects of the California-Mexico connection. It analyses the movements of people, goods, money, politics, and culture across the California-Mexico border, and explores its implications for both parties.

This book is a radical reinterpretation of the process that led to Mexican independence in 1821—one that emphasizes Mexico's continuity with Spanish political culture. During its final decades under Spanish rule, New Spain was the most populous, richest, and most developed part of the worldwide Spanish Monarchy, and most novohispanos (people of New Spain) believed that their religious, social, economic, and political ties to the Monarchy made union preferable to separation. Neither the American nor the French Revolution convinced the novohispanos to sever ties with the Spanish Monarchy; nor did the Hidalgo Revolt of September 1810 and subsequent insurgencies cause Mexican independence. It was Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 that led to the Hispanic Constitution of 1812. When the government in Spain rejected those new constituted arrangements, Mexico declared independence. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 affirms both the new state's independence and its continuance of Spanish political culture.