In Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Tanalís Padilla shows that the period from 1940 to 1968, generally viewed as a time of social and political stability in Mexico, actually saw numerous instances of popular discontent and widespread state repression. Padilla provides a detailed history of a mid-twentieth-century agrarian mobilization in the Mexican state of Morelos, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata. In so doing, she brings to the fore the continuities between the popular struggles surrounding the Mexican Revolution and contemporary rural uprisings such as the Zapatista rebellion. The peasants known in popular memory as Jaramillistas were led by Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962). An agrarian leader from Morelos who participated in the Mexican Revolution and fought under Zapata, Jaramillo later became an outspoken defender of the rural poor. The Jaramillistas were inspired by the legacy of the Zapatistas, the peasant army that fought for land and community autonomy with particular tenacity during the Revolution. Padilla examines the way that the Jaramillistas used the legacy of Zapatismo but also transformed, expanded, and updated it in dialogue with other national and international political movements. The Jaramillistas fought persistently through legal channels for access to land, the means to work it, and sustainable prices for their products, but the Mexican government increasingly closed its doors to rural reform. The government ultimately responded with repression, pushing the Jaramillistas into armed struggle, and transforming their calls for local reform into a broader critique of capitalism. With Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Padilla sheds new light on the decision to initiate armed struggle, women’s challenges to patriarchal norms, and the ways that campesinos framed their demands in relation to national and international political developments.

Argues that maize biodiversity in central and southern Mexico is threatened as much by rural out-migration as by the flow of genes from genetically modified to local corn varieties.

Through a pathbreaking study of the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, looks at the complexities of the political movement for Chiapas's indigenous peoples.

How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores the how civil society "thickens" by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections, local government social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. Since explanations of electoral change do not account for how people actually experience the state, this book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand "transitions to accountability." This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency and accountability. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Official Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

As oil-rich Mexico faces the 1980s, conflicts between agrarian populism and capitalist industrialization call for resolution. The internal peace and political stability that made the period between the late 1930s and the early 1970s so productive left many Mexicans—particularly the campesinos—marginal to the benefits of the economy. During this period of economic growth, agrarian reform, the trademark of the Mexican revolution, was relegated to a position of lesser importance in national politics. But with forty percent of the population still remaning in the countryside, it is clear that programs for rural development and land redistribution must again be given prominence. In this study of Sonora—a key agricultural state in northwestern Mexico—Steven E. Sanderson examines in economic and political terms the post-revolutionary rise of agrarian reform and its decline, dividing the sixty years of change (from 1917 to 1976) into three periods. Agrarian populism dominated the first, which he calls a time of post-revolutionary consolidation (1917–1940). Then, during the "miracle years" of 1940–1970, the growing strength of capital and the success of state-led import substitution plans led to a counterreform in agrarian politics. In the final period, that of President Echeverria's populist resurgence (1970–1976), ambitious but flawed agrarian reform plans clashed with the sector that favored the increasing concentration of land, income, and political influence. Sonora provides a particularly interesting view of these developments because of its political and geographical distance from metropolitan Mexico, its rich history of independence, its economic growth since the revolution, and the political sophistication of its residents. The events in this state exemplify the regional imbalances, the ideological biases, and the political manipulations contributing to the crisis in state legitimacy that dominated Mexican politics in the 1970s. Using a combination of agrarian census materials, state archives, newspapers, records from relevant ministries, and selected interviews with participants, Sanderson presents the complex history of conflict between the political base supporting agrarian reform and the economic forces advocating industrialization and economic growth. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

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.

The Mexican Heartland provides a new history of capitalism from the perspective of the landed communities surrounding Mexico City. In a sweeping analytical narrative spanning the sixteenth century to today, John Tutino challenges our basic assumptions about the forces that shaped global capitalism setting families and communities at the center of histories that transformed the world. Despite invasion, disease, and depopulation, Mexico's heartland communities held strong on the land, adapting to sustain and shape the dynamic silver capitalism so pivotal to Spain's empire and world trade for centuries after 1550. They joined in insurgencies that brought the collapse of silver and other key global trades after 1810 as Mexico became a nation, then struggled to keep land and self-rule in the face of liberal national projects. They drove Zapata's 1910 revolution a rising that rattled Mexico and the world of industrial capitalism. Although the revolt faced defeat, adamant communities forced a land reform that put them at the center of Mexico's experiment in national capitalism after 1920. Then, from the 1950s, population growth and technical innovations drove people from rural communities to a metropolis spreading across the land. The heartland urbanized, leaving people searching for new lives--dependent, often desperate, yet still pressing their needs in a globalizing world. --