Writing Mexican History by Eric Van Young

Author:Eric Van Young [Van Young, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-05-23T23:03:10+00:00

REGION AND STATE IN MEXICAN HISTORY

What, finally, are the implications of such a regional structure for the society as a whole? First, it indicates a weak horizontal or spatial integration, and goes some way toward explaining the centrifugal tendencies in Mexico notable during the colonial period, and even more so after the achievement of independence in 1821. Second, the weakness of horizontal articulation would directly relate to the weakness of vertical, or sociopolitical, articulation, since it probably indicates a relatively low social division of labor. Admittedly, one is likely to find a crazy-quilt pattern here, with fields of distortion surrounding mining areas, administrative centers, and the ever-anomalous Mexico City. And third, one would expect to see such a society, in times of acute political crisis, tend to break up into its constituent parts along the preexisting lines of stress I have just been outlining. This is exactly what happened in the years following 1810, in which one can trace through the social history of rebellion the deep-running disarticulation of Mexican society all the way down to the village level.

It is not an unreasonable view that Mexico, at least until the advent of the railroad in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrated many of the characteristics of a notably regionalized, substantially disarticulated society in both the social and economic dimensions. Now, having spent a good deal of time earlier in this chapter criticizing (or, perhaps, qualifying) the central-place and regional science theory upon which this interpretation must rest, I should explain here what regionalization and disarticulation do not mean. They do not imply an aggregate of hermetically sealed, autarchic regional spaces, all centered on cities. The model here is rather more one of regions seen in terms of central gravitational pulls, with peripheries rather than boundaries. Regions’ shapes and sizes may change over time, the forces that bring them into existence giving way to different forces that sustain them and their “regionalness” even declining or disappearing altogether, as I have suggested. Nor do regionalization and disarticulation exclude the integrating effects of backward economic linkages from certain domestic sectors (mining or railroad construction, for example), forward linkages (the oiling of commercial circuits, as in the colonial period and nineteenth century, with Mexican-produced silver), long-range trade in imported products (whether luxury items, manufactured goods of wide consumption, or capital goods), or the external orientation of some regional economies producing for supra-regional or even international markets. And still less do regionalization and disarticulation preclude the differentiation of the Mexican colonial/ national space along other lines than exchange relationships and productive arrangements, such as linguistic tradition, culture, or administrative identities. The question will be asked: Compared to what other areas was colonial and early national Mexico regionalized and disarticulated? Certainly it was so in comparison to much of contemporary Europe or the Anglo-American colonies and young nation, from which its economic trajectory diverged increasingly after about 1800 (Coatsworth 1990, 32). On the other hand, compared with Peru, and despite the convincingly portrayed integrative

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