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Decentralizing Decentralization: Mexico's Invisible Fourth Level of the State 1

Jonathan Fox

in Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico

This chapter explores the relationship between democratization and decentralization. In Mexico, the government promoted deliberative citizen participation nation-wide in rural municipalities, well ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between democratization and decentralization. In Mexico, the government promoted deliberative citizen participation nation-wide in rural municipalities, well before national electoral democratization. Mexican decentralization empowered municipalities, but it turns out that municipal governance systematically excludes millions of rural people who live outside of the town centers that usually control municipal affairs. Those villages are most directly governed by sub-municipal authorities. In some states and regions these truly local authorities are chosen democratically, representing villagers to the municipality, in others they are designated from above, representing the mayor to the villagers. This chapter explores rural citizens' efforts to hold local governments accountable through three different comparative research strategies: analysis of resource allocation decision-making processes in a representative sample of local rural governments in the state of Oaxaca; comparison of changing municipal-sub-municipal power relations in four rural states (Oaxaca, Guerrero, Hidalgo, and Chiapas); and a nation-wide comparison of the state level laws that govern this invisible ‘sub-municipal regime’.Less

John Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, the U.S-Mexico War, and the United States Boundary Survey

Robert Lawrence Gunn

in Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

Chapter 5 historicizes Bartlett’s controversial tenure as Boundary Commissioner in terms of previous acts of scientific collaboration between the American Ethnological Society and the War Department ... More

Chapter 5 historicizes Bartlett’s controversial tenure as Boundary Commissioner in terms of previous acts of scientific collaboration between the American Ethnological Society and the War Department (focusing on Gallatin, Emory, and Schoolcraft), and exposes the degree to which the ethnological project participated in the larger national and imperial enterprises of the U.S.-Mexico War and international boundary creation. This chapter also shows how ethnological prerogatives, as well as persistent territorial disputes, shape Bartlett’s literary representation, particularly concerning the Apache leader Mangas Coloradas. Focusing on two dramatic episodes in which Bartlett acts on the authority of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to liberate Indian captives, examples this chapter illustrates the jurisdictional issues of intercultural negotiation on a shifting transnational borderlands, and illuminates Bartlett’s reliance on the mid-century romantic conventions of literary sentiment to represent the plight of his liberated Mexican captives.Less

The New Comic Ethos: Social and Aesthetic Premisses

Anthony Close

in Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age

This chapter examines the implications of the socio-genetic and ideological factors that brought about the evolution of Spanish attitudes towards comic fiction for three Spanish writings published ... More

This chapter examines the implications of the socio-genetic and ideological factors that brought about the evolution of Spanish attitudes towards comic fiction for three Spanish writings published between 1596 and 1624. These writings include Alonso Lopez Pinciano's Philosophia antigua poetica, Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo's Dialogos and Tirso de Molina's Cigarrales de Toledo. This chapter suggests that these works were significantly influenced by the new comic ethos in terms of style and content.Less

Conquest, Faith, and Resistance in the Southwest

Timothy Matovina

in Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States

This chapter explores the various ways Latinos drew on their Catholic faith and popular traditions to resist the discriminatory treatment they faced after the US–Mexico War and the Treaty of ... More

This chapter explores the various ways Latinos drew on their Catholic faith and popular traditions to resist the discriminatory treatment they faced after the US–Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded the Southwest to the United States. Although in theory the treaty promised Latinos the same rights and privileges as all other citizens, in practice Latinos were forced to live in segregated communities, had to attend segregated schools, and were discriminated against. This kind of shoddy treatment took place outside and inside of the Catholic Church. The chapter further explores the various struggles of indigenous (born and raised in the area) native-born priests like Antonio José Martínez, who resisted discrimination by Anglo-American public and church officials. It demonstrates the vital role that Latino clergy and popular Catholic traditions had in political, civic, and social action in the Southwest. It also shows the various ways Latinos used popular religious traditions as a resource to engage in civic and social action. This offers a valuable corrective to studies that ignore the impact of religion and popular religiosity or confine it to the “domestic sphere”.Less

The forgery of nobility in literary texts

Christina H. Lee

in The Anxiety of Sameness In Early Modern Spain

The literary texts Lee examines in “Chapter Two” involve scenarios in which hidalgos are threatened by lowborn passers determined to do them harm, and ultimately arrive to the felicitous conclusion ... More

The literary texts Lee examines in “Chapter Two” involve scenarios in which hidalgos are threatened by lowborn passers determined to do them harm, and ultimately arrive to the felicitous conclusion that the established nobility prevails. These fictional narratives and dramas of lowborn passers allow the target reader or audience member to peek into the otherwise mysterious lives of these imagined impostors and proffer the false sense that s/he has an insight on the well-shielded secrets of their deceptive performances. Lee focuses on authors Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s El caballero puntual, Diego de Hermosilla’s Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, Lope de Vega’s El caballero de milagro, Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos, Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Teresa de Manzanares, and Vicente Espinel’s Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón. She ends her discussion of social anxiety with an interpretation of the hidalgo hero in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote as a figure who initially incarnates the anxiety of sameness and eventually conquers it.Less

The Mexican

Lorena Oropeza

in The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement

A fugitive from the law, Tijerina lived undercover in New Mexico for the next five years while his wife supported him and their six children. This time period amounted to a five-year sabbatical that ... More

A fugitive from the law, Tijerina lived undercover in New Mexico for the next five years while his wife supported him and their six children. This time period amounted to a five-year sabbatical that gave him the time to understand American expansion as a bitter conquest that had robbed the region’s Spanish-speakers of their lands after the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848 by violating the peace treaty that ended the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He reached this conclusion after conducting additional research in Mexico and learning from nuevomexicanos, Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, whose families had experienced widespread land dispossession. In 1963, as the statute of limitations for his arrest drew near, Tijerina publicly founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants,) whose purpose was to resurrect the 1848 treaty.Less

Unsettling Subjects: Citizenship and Squatting in Historical Romances of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela

in Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights ... More

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.Less

What Is in the Historia de Méjico?

Eric Van Young

in A Life Together: Lucas Alaman and Mexico, 1792-1853

The chapter offers an analysis of the Historia de Méjico, with an extended comparison between Alamán’s work and that of his friend Carlos María de Bustamante, who wrote a highly colored, ... More

The chapter offers an analysis of the Historia de Méjico, with an extended comparison between Alamán’s work and that of his friend Carlos María de Bustamante, who wrote a highly colored, heroic-nationalist treatment of the 1810 insurgency. Alamán expresses a positive but qualified judgement of the colonial period and a low opinion of Mexico’s indigenous people. He laments the racially-tinged violence of the Hidalgo movement, condemning the priest for setting Mexico along the path of violent internal conflict and political instability, while singling out Agustín de Iturbide’s heroic role in consummating Mexican independence through canny military statesmanship, and Father José María Morelos as the greatest leader among the insurgents. His final opinion was that Mexican independence was inevitable in any case, but that it took a wrong turn because of Hidalgo’s jacquerie-like uprising. The chapter concludes with a melancholy evocation of the materialism that modernization had brought to Mexico by mid-century.Less

Immigrant Actos: Citizenship and Performance in El Teatro Campesino

Randy J. Ontiveros

in In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement

This chapter discusses the celebrated theater collective El Teatro Campesino and its staging of a “performative citizenship” that challenged the regime of immigration restriction of U.S. immigration ... More

This chapter discusses the celebrated theater collective El Teatro Campesino and its staging of a “performative citizenship” that challenged the regime of immigration restriction of U.S. immigration law. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, racial fears led to the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924 and to the passage that same year of the Johnson-Reed Act, which created an unprecedented system of preferences that “drew a new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference.” In response, El Teatro Campesino improvised skit that enacted an alternative form of belonging based not on papers but on the power of creative labor.Less

Introduction

in “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose—to examine the complex process that led to Mexican independence and the formation of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico). It ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose—to examine the complex process that led to Mexican independence and the formation of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico). It challenges the view that the Hidalgo Revolt, which erupted in 1810, and the subsequent insurgencies was the revolution that achieved independence in 1821. It demonstrates that the political transformation within the composite Spanish Monarchy—which accelerated after the French invasion of Spain in 1808 and culminated in the Hispanic Constitution of 1812 enacted by the Cortes of Cádiz and the institutions of self-government it established—was the fundamental revolution. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Finite Mixture Examples; MAPIS Details

Russell Cheng

in Non-Standard Parametric Statistical Inference

Two detailed numerical examples are given in this chapter illustrating and comparing mainly the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) and the maximum a posteriori/importance sampling ... More

Two detailed numerical examples are given in this chapter illustrating and comparing mainly the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) and the maximum a posteriori/importance sampling (MAPIS) methods. The numerical examples are the well-known galaxy data set with sample size 82, and the Hidalgo stamp issues thickness data with sample size 485. A comparison is made of the estimates obtained by the RJMCMC and MAPIS methods for (i) the posterior k-distribution of the number of components, k, (ii) the predictive finite mixture distribution itself, and (iii) the posterior distributions of the component parameters and weights. The estimates obtained by MAPIS are shown to be more satisfactory and meaningful. Details are given of the practical implementation of MAPIS for five non-normal mixture models, namely: the extreme value, gamma, inverse Gaussian, lognormal, and Weibull. Mathematical details are also given of the acceptance-rejection importance sampling used in MAPIS.Less

Visible Braille, Invisible Blindness

Georgina Kleege

in More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art

The chapter analyzes the use of Braille and other tactile features in public spaces, such as elevators, and in such sites as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC, and in the work of ... More

The chapter analyzes the use of Braille and other tactile features in public spaces, such as elevators, and in such sites as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC, and in the work of such artists as Ann Hamilton and Robert Graham. The chapter also does some close readings of tactile books that are intended to explain visual art to blind children and adults. The over-determined analogy that links the eyes of the sighted to the hands of the blind makes Braille in these sites more of a signifier of blindness than a true access tool. The chapter also includes some works by blind artists that seem to comment on how Braille is typically understood.Less

An Athenian Interlude

Paul Wink

in Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas

This chapter, “An Athenian Interlude,” analyzes a major turning point in Callas’s life associated with her move, at age thirteen, from New York City to Athens. In Athens, she experienced poverty, ... More

This chapter, “An Athenian Interlude,” analyzes a major turning point in Callas’s life associated with her move, at age thirteen, from New York City to Athens. In Athens, she experienced poverty, personal humiliation, and, during the World War II years, threats to her life. But her singing benefited from the strong mentorship she received from Elvira de Hidalgo, which helped launch her operatic career. Callas’s success as a singer with the Greek National Opera fueled resentment among her older and more established colleagues who envied her talent and resented being dethroned by a mere teenager who spoke Greek with an American accent. Poverty and conflicted relations at home with her mother and sister failed to compensate Callas for hostility at work. A significant gain in weight further undermined her self-confidence. Her experiences during the seven years spent in Athens exacerbated the split between Callas, the self-assured artist, and Maria, the vulnerable young woman.Less

Hero Making in El Movimiento: Reies López Tijerina and the Chicano Nationalist Imaginary

Lee Bebout

in Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies

This chapter examines the internal diversity and the desire for unity within the Chicano movement. More specifically, it analyzes the sites of tension and influence between two competing strands of ... More

This chapter examines the internal diversity and the desire for unity within the Chicano movement. More specifically, it analyzes the sites of tension and influence between two competing strands of the movement from a mythohistorical perspective: the New Mexico land grant struggle led by Reies López Tijerina and the more broadly defined Chicano nationalism. It considers how Tijerina and his Alianza Federal de Mercedes sought reclamation of communal land rights guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and how Chicano nationalism drew upon a wide array of cultural materials to foster community uplift. A cornerstone of Chicano nationalism was the conceptualization of Aztlán as a Chicano homeland in the U.S. Southwest. The chapter also revisits the June 5, 1967, raid that propelled Tijerina and the Aliancistas to national attention at a moment when Chicano nationalism was just emerging but had not solidified the political, spiritual, or philosophical grounds for unification. It argues that the raid transformed Tijerina into a living embodiment of the revolutionary/bandido trope and that the image of Tijerina conflicted with the reformist strategies of Tijerina, the man.Less

Socially Undocumented Embodiment

Amy Reed-Sandoval

in Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice

This chapter continues to build the argument that “being socially undocumented” entails having such a real and unique social identity. It argues that “being socially undocumented” is embodied. To ... More

This chapter continues to build the argument that “being socially undocumented” entails having such a real and unique social identity. It argues that “being socially undocumented” is embodied. To make this argument, it first engages the narratives of socially undocumented people themselves as conveyed in the contexts of music, poetry, ethnographic interviews, and first-person testimonios in order to understand aspects of socially undocumented embodiment from the perspectives of those who experience it. Second, it traces the development of socially undocumented embodiment over the course of United States history, focusing on the Mexican-American war, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Johnson-Reed Act, Repatriation, and the Bracero Program. These explorations will reveal, it is argued, that socially undocumented embodiment is both racialized and class-based in nature. This means that “being socially undocumented” meets at least one of the criteria of a “visible” social identity identified in Chapter 2.Less

Covenant: Guadalupe and the Mexican Nation

Timothy Matovina

in Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Era of Conquest to Pope Francis

Father Miguel Hidalgo famously adopted the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the banner for the insurrectionary movement that led to Mexican independence. Following independence, Guadalupe’s strong ... More

Father Miguel Hidalgo famously adopted the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the banner for the insurrectionary movement that led to Mexican independence. Following independence, Guadalupe’s strong association with national identity led interpreters to emphasize that her appearance established a singular election of Mexico as her chosen nation. Guadalupan preachers addressed a variety of national concerns through allusions to biblical notions of covenant, avowing that Guadalupe had established a pact with the Mexican people in similar fashion to God’s covenants with Noah, David, and especially Moses and the people of Israel. Nineteenth-century Guadalupan preachers addressed the theme of covenant as Mexicans won their independence, struggled to establish a new nation, and mounted a successful campaign for papal authorization of an 1895 Guadalupe coronation. This chapter examines their theological claims, the growing devotion to Guadalupe as Mexico’s national symbol, and the unprecedented increase in devotion to Guadalupe among native peoples.Less

Bringing about the Republican Millennium

John C. Pinheiro

in Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

This chapter shows how the end of the war tested the American commitment to the Beecherite synthesis. During the first half of 1848 congressmen turned with renewed vigor to the malleable rhetoric of ... More

This chapter shows how the end of the war tested the American commitment to the Beecherite synthesis. During the first half of 1848 congressmen turned with renewed vigor to the malleable rhetoric of anti-Catholicism to debate how much Mexican territory should be annexed and whether the treaty signed at Guadalupe should be ratified. Historians, poets, playwrights, and novelists joined the fray, all finding in the war a new reservoir of creative material. Between 1848 and the early 1850s, they popularized a view of Mexico and the war that embodied the racial and civil-religious sentiment that had characterized American opinion throughout the war. Meanwhile, evangelicals continued to refocus their missionary efforts as they sought to take advantage of the American victory. The All Mexico movement is also explored. Remarkably, the war with Mexico led avowed nativists to eschew rational political choices in favor of anti-Catholicism. By doing so, they proved that their movement was strongly grounded in a religious ideology that was far more than just an advantageous political tool. Last, this chapter examines the meaning Americans found in their victory, in light of their civil religion and the liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848.Less