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The Roots of Conservatism is the first attempt to ask why over the past two centuries so many Mexican peasants have opted to ally with conservative groups rather than their radical counterparts. Blending socioeconomic history, cultural analysis, and political narrative, Smith’s study begins with the late Bourbon period and moves through the early republic, the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution, when the Mixtecs rejected Zapatista offers of land distribution, ending with the armed religious uprising known as the “last Cristiada,” a desperate Cold War bid to rid the region of impious “communist” governance. In recounting this long tradition of regional conservatism, Smith emphasizes the influence of religious belief, church ritual, and lay-clerical relations both on social relations and on political affiliation. He posits that many Mexican peasants embraced provincial conservatism, a variant of elite or metropolitan conservatism, which not only comprised ideas on property, hierarchy, and the state, but also the overwhelming import of the church to maintaining this system.
What are the historical roots of the Mexican right, which has seemingly come from nowhere to play a critical role in contemporary Mexico? This lucid study of the right in the pivotal decade of the 1930s provides the answer. Traditionally, historians have viewed the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) as the apogee of a successful Institutionalized Revolution. In truth, at odds with a conservative political culture, cardenismo failed. Its demise assured the rule of a corrupt, oligarchical regime that employs revolutionary rhetoric even while vigorously suppressing popular aspirations, and placed Mexico on its sad course into the present. The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) has long been viewed as the successful apogee of Mexico's Institutionalized Revolution. Scholars have traditionally portrayed Cárdenas as a widely popular reformer: the idealist who gave peasants land and the nationalist who seized American oil company properties. Others hold him responsible for establishing Mexico's modern authoritarian state. Now these interpretations are challenged in this evocative book, which examines the vital role of the Mexican right on the eve of cardenismo and during its tenure. Even while the institutional right withered in the face of Mexico's Revolutionary leviathan, a new right emerged and undermined cardenismo in Mexico's fundamentally conservative political culture. Employing the media, literature, and spontaneous grassroots politics, the right appealed to values rooted in faith, family, and fatherland, and convinced a majority of Mexicans that Fat Lips Cárdenas vision for their country was radical and dangerous. The 1940 presidential election debacle followed, when the President imposed his moderate successor on a reluctant electorate. Despite this, the Cardenista agenda for Mexico could not endure. Cardenismo, rather than a defining point in 20th-century Mexican history, became only a noteworthy exception to a continuity of conservatism.
In the decades following independence, Mexico was transformed from a strong, stable colony into a republic suffering from economic decline and political strife. Marked by political instability--characterized by Antonio López de Santa Anna's rise to the presidency on eleven distinct occasions--this period of Mexico's history is often neglected and frequently misunderstood. Donald F. Stevens' revisionist account challenges traditional historiography to examine the nature and origins of Mexico's political instability. Turning to quantitative methods as a way of providing a framework for examining existing hypotheses concerning Mexico's instability, the author dissects the relationship between instability and economic cycles; contradicts the notion that Mexico's social elite could have increased political stability by becoming more active; and argues that the principal political fissures were not liberal vs. conservative but were among radical, moderate, and conservative. Ultimately, Stevens maintains, the origins of that country's instability are to be found in the contradictions between liberalism and Mexico's traditional class structure, and the problems of creating an independent republic from colonial, monarchical, and authoritarian traditions.
Who read what?: the rise of newspaper readership in Mexico, 1940?1976 -- How to control the press: rules of the game, the government publicity machine, and financial incentives -- The year Mexico stopped laughing: the press, satire, and censorship in Mexico City -- From Catholic schoolboy to guerrilla: Mario Méndez and the radical press -- How to control the press (badly): censorship and regional newspapers -- The real Artemio Cruz: the press baron, gangster journalism, and the regional press -- The taxi driver: civil society, journalism, and Oaxaca's El Chapulín -- The singer: civil society, radicalism, and acción in Chihuahua
In the summer of 1926, an army of Mexican Catholics launched a war against their government. Bearing aloft the banners of Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe, they equipped themselves not only with guns, but also with scapulars, rosaries, prayers, and religious visions. These soldiers were called cristeros, and the war they fought, which would continue until the mid-1930s, is known as la Cristiada, or the Cristero war. The most intense fighting occurred in Mexico's west-central states, especially Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán. For this reason, scholars have generally regarded the war as a regional event, albeit one with national implications. Yet in fact, the Cristero war crossed the border into the United States, along with thousands of Mexican emigrants, exiles, and refugees. In Mexican Exodus, Julia Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. These Cristero supporters participated in the conflict in a variety of ways: they took part in religious ceremonies and spectacles, organized political demonstrations and marches, formed associations and organizations, and collaborated with religious and political leaders on both sides of the border. Some of them even launched militant efforts that included arms smuggling, military recruitment, espionage, and armed border revolts. Ultimately, the Cristero diaspora aimed to overturn Mexico's anticlerical government and reform the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Although the group was unable to achieve its political goals, Young argues that these emigrants--and the war itself--would have a profound and enduring resonance for Mexican emigrants, impacting community formation, political affiliations, and religious devotion throughout subsequent decades and up to the present day.
"Thoughtful, fair-minded, and learned, Cadava's eye-opening book will teach experts on American politics things they didn't even know they didn't know." — Rick Perlstein, bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge “Geraldo Cadava’s history...provides a unique vantage point on US politics; on the shifting terrains of foreign policy, labor, and religion; and on the changing nature of specific states, as well as on deeper ideological fights over the soul of the country: is it to be an inclusive nation of immigrants, or, as the nativists today say, a country founded on white supremacy? An excellent, insightful study.” — Greg Grandin, professor of history at Yale University and author of The End of the Myth “Geraldo Cadava offers a fascinating examination of the socioeconomic interests and foreign policy concerns that have drawn Hispanics/Latinos into a rapidly changing Republican Party. If readers harbor the mistaken idea that Hispanics are a monolithic voting bloc, this book should dispel this idea once and for all. Though the work is written for a general audience, even experts on Hispanic politics and voting behavior will find much that is new and surprising in these chapters.” — María Cristina García, author of The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America
Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico's nineteenth-century state. Schaefer argues that after the War of Independence non-elite Mexicans - peasants, day laborers, artisans, local merchants - pioneered an egalitarian form of legal rule by serving in the town governments and civic militias that became the local faces of the state's coercive authority. These institutions were effective because they embodied patriarchal norms of labor and care for the family that were premised on the legal equality of male, adult citizens. The book also examines the emergence of new, illiberal norms that challenged and at the end of the century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, overwhelmed the egalitarianism of the early-republican period. By comparing the legal cultures of agricultural estates, mestizo towns and indigenous towns, Liberalism as Utopia also proposes a new way of understanding the social foundations of liberal and authoritarian pathways to state formation in the nineteenth-century world.