The Mexican Nation

The Huichol (Wixarika) people claim a vast expanse of Mexico’s western Sierra Madre and northern highlands as a territory called kiekari, which includes parts of the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí. This territory forms the heart of their economic and spiritual lives. But indigenous land struggle is a central fact of Mexican history, and in this fascinating new work Paul Liffman expands our understanding of it. Drawing on contemporary anthropological theory, he explains how Huichols assert their sovereign rights to collectively own the 1,500 square miles they inhabit and to practice rituals across the 35,000 square miles where their access is challenged. Liffman places current access claims in historical perspective, tracing Huichol communities’ long-term efforts to redress the inequitable access to land and other resources that their neighbors and the state have imposed on them. Liffman writes that “the cultural grounds for territorial claims were what the people I wanted to study wanted me to work on.” Based on six years of collaboration with a land-rights organization, interviews, and participant observation in meetings, ceremonies, and extended stays on remote rancherías, Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation analyzes the sites where people define Huichol territory. The book’s innovative structure echoes Huichols’ own approach to knowledge and examines the nation and state, not just the community. Liffman’s local, regional, and national perspective informs every chapter and expands the toolkit for researchers working with indigenous communities. By describing Huichols’ ceremonially based placemaking to build a theory of “historical territoriality,” he raises provocative questions about what “place” means for native peoples worldwide.

Excerpt from The Mexican Nation: A History The profound influence exercised on Mexican political and economic life by geographical conditions makes it essential to present as a first chapter of this book some description of the physical Republic as it exists today. The country possesses such diversified climates, such multifarious prod ucts, such wide variations in hydrographic and geological conditions, that her history has been uniquely influenced by them and cannot be well understood unless they are borne in mind. Much the same line of thought explains the need of the following chapter on the ancient Mexicans. Though the Spaniards abruptly obliterated the early culture, its surviving influence in thought and tradition still gives to Mexican society the rudiments of national sentiment and cannot be neglected although events of pre-cortesian his tory are now of scant significance. Hence the Aztecs and Mayas are presented as historical background rather than as history, to show the effect of their relatively high cultures as determinant of the character of the Spanish conquest and its tradition as a present influence rather than to digress among legendary or cultural details, however worthy of attention and however intriguing to the interest such primi tive factors may be. As yet they belong 111 the field of an thropology rather than in that of history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Continuity of Mexican History is an expansive presentation of the Mexican past within a basic chronological narrative. A straight forward, jargon-free compilation the book traces the nation's history from it indigenous roots through the 21st century and provides up-to-date information on the latest scholarly trends and findings. Written within a social and cultural context, this volume addresses race, religion and ethnicity, as well as economic analysis, artistic trends, women's issues and Mexico's relations with the world. The volume covers all aspects of Mexico's history including Mexico's indigenous roots, the Spanish invasion, Hispanic foundations, independence from Spain, the early Republic, war with the United States, Civil War and French intervention, the Era of Porfirio Díaz, industrialization and political Stability, migration and social change and stagnation and revival. For historians and those interested in Mexican history.

The experiment with neoliberal market-oriented economic policy in Latin America, popularly known as the Washington Consensus, has run its course. With left-wing and populist regimes now in power in many countries, there is much debate about what direction economic policy should be taking, and there are those who believe that state-led development might be worth trying again. Susan Gauss’s study of the process by which Mexico transformed from a largely agrarian society into an urban, industrialized one in the two decades following the end of the Revolution is especially timely and may have lessons to offer to policy makers today. The image of a strong, centralized corporatist state led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from the 1940s conceals what was actually a prolonged, messy process of debate and negotiation among the postrevolutionary state, labor, and regionally based industrial elites to define the nationalist project. Made in Mexico focuses on the distinctive nature of what happened in the four regions studied in detail: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla. It shows how industrialism enabled recalcitrant elites to maintain a regionally grounded preserve of local authority outside of formal ruling-party institutions, balancing the tensions among centralization, consolidation of growth, and Mexico’s deep legacies of regional authority.

Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age : The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation, 1788-1853 clearly delineates the role of the Catholic Church in the making of Mexico as a nation. It provides a nuanced sense of clerical thought during the turbulent years leading to and following Mexico's national independence. Connaughton delves deeply into various primary sources from Guadalajara between 1788 and 1853, including printed sermons of high clergymen, contemporaneous newspapers, pamphletry, and pastoral letters. Analyzing this literature in the broader context of the Enlightenment, Connaughton looks at the Enlightenment's potentially corrosive ideas, the rise of liberalism, the complex relationship between Church and State, and the spread of secular mentality. With a balanced approach to clerical discourse, this study of the substance, contradictions, and evolution of Church thinking and political posturing in the face of Bourbon Reforms and the rise of liberalism should be required reading for any student or scholar of Mexican history.

Five freshly decapitated human heads are thrown onto a crowded dance floor in western Mexico. A Mexican drug cartel dismembers the body of a rival and then stitches his face onto a soccer ball. These are the sorts of grisly tales that dominate the media, infiltrate movies and TV shows, and ultimately shape Americans' perception of Mexico as a dangerous and scary place, overrun by brutal drug lords. Without a doubt, the drug war is real. In the last six years, over 60,000 people have been murdered in narco-related crimes. But, there is far more to Mexico's story than this gruesome narrative would suggest. While thugs have been grabbing the headlines, Mexico has undergone an unprecedented and under-publicized political, economic, and social transformation. In her groundbreaking book, Two Nations Indivisible, Shannon K. O'Neil argues that the United States is making a grave mistake by focusing on the politics of antagonism toward Mexico. Rather, we should wake up to the revolution of prosperity now unfolding there. The news that isn't being reported is that, over the last decade, Mexico has become a real democracy, providing its citizens a greater voice and opportunities to succeed on their own side of the border. Armed with higher levels of education, upwardly-mobile men and women have been working their way out of poverty, building the largest, most stable middle class in Mexico's history. This is the Mexico Americans need to get to know. Now more than ever, the two countries are indivisible. It is past time for the U.S. to forge a new relationship with its southern neighbor. Because in no uncertain terms, our future depends on it.