From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca
The View from the South, Mexico 1867–1911
624 pages | 12 illustrations/5 maps | 6.125 x 9.25 | 2004
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02512-4 | paper: $34.95 sh
Winner of the 2004 Thomas McGann Prize for the Best Book on Latin America from the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies
" This is a critical, seminal work on Mexican history. . . . One of the greatest strengths of the book is its debunking of myths and poorly documented claims that permeate writing about Oaxaca."—HowardCampbell, University of Texas at El Paso
"The book represents many years of remarkable excavations in local, state, and national archives. No other regional history of any other Mexican state exhibits this thorough a survey of sources. The book is encyclopedic in its coverage."
—Mark Wasserman, Rutgers University
"Twenty years in the making, Chassen-López's new study is certain to claim an important place in the regional literature on modern Mexico. Finally we have a fine-grained social, economic, and political history of Porfirian modernization in Don Porfirio's backyard! This fine volume showcases Chassen-López's mastery of political economy, peasant, and resistance studies and regional historiography and methodology."-Gilbert M. Joseph, Yale University
"This magnificently researched work is the most comprehensive, in-depth study to date of a Mexican region in the critically important period of economic growth and nation- and state-building between 1880 and 1910. It elucidates for Mexico's 'forgotten south' the complexity, modernity, and national integration it has long been denied."-Mary Kay Vaughan, University of Maryland
From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca aims at finally setting Mexican history free of stereotypes about the southern state of Oaxaca, long portrayed as a traditional and backward society resistant to the forces of modernization and marginal to the Revolution. Chassen-López challenges this view of Oaxaca as a negative mirror image of modern Mexico, presenting in its place a much more complex reality. Her analysis of the confrontations between Mexican liberals’ modernizing projects and Oaxacan society, especially indigenous communal villages, reveals not only conflicts but also growing linkages and dependencies. She portrays them as engaging with and transforming each other in an ongoing process of contestation, negotiation, and compromise.
The book is organized in three parts. The first examines Oaxaca’s infrastructure and economy, addressing whether its native sons, Presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, neglected their own state in the drive toward Mexico’s modernization. The second part looks at the society, studying the dynamic interplay of class, ethnicity, and gender and critically examining claims that the indigenous people of Oaxaca acted as an obstacle to progress. The final part connects the economic and social transformations in Oaxaca with the state’s changing political culture and power relationships and reinserts Oaxaca into the larger dynamics of the Mexican Revolution. By linking developments at the local, state, and national levels throughout and making frequent comparisons with developments in other states, Chassen-López compels a reassessment not only of Oaxacan history but of Mexican history in general during this period.
Francie R. Chassen-López is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, where she has also served as Director of the Latin American Studies Program