The Paradox of the Mexican State: Rereading Sovereignty from Independence to NAFTA Book

The premise of this book is that in the Mexican cultural imagination, the campesinos generally seen as a homogeneous, unchanging, and more-or-less interchangeable mass of peasants. The author uses the context of post-revolutionary Michoacán to convincingly argue that there both were and are a variety of distinct identities, political and religious perspectives, and agenda that intersected and conflicted throughout the conflicts of the twentieth century.

To summarize the 7 chapters of this book, the author explores the back-and forth of agrarista (ejidos, secular education, anticlericalism) and anti-agrarista (traditional land arrangements, Catholics, dispossed communities, etc.) in the state of Michoacán. One of the main challenges faced by revolutionary idealogues is that many rural people objected to some aspect of the revolutionary program - hacienda workers fearful that they would lose their jobs, indigenous communities who lost their own land to another community's land grant, liberals who believed in private property, fervent Catholics, and people who simply resented being told what to do by outsiders. Throughout the book, the author highlights how practices, ideologies, and discourses of post-revolutionary rural Mexico still resonate in Mexican society today.