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Decentering the Regime: Culture and Regional Politics in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Jeffrey W. Rubin
Jeffrey W. Rubin*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
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As a preeminent enduring regime in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study regarding the nature and locus of power. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that ongoing domination has resulted from centralized, relatively homogeneous power transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms. The process of transmission replicated the dynamics of the center through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even now, as researchers are emphasizing the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity and nuance of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to the terms of the 1970s analysis and view the present through this lens. But while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of hegemony. In constructing a state-centered and center-centered understanding of politics, social scientists then and now have misunderstood the nature of power and domination in Mexico and the reasons for the endurance of the Mexican regime.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1996 , pp. 85 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank John Womack, Jr., for his encouragement in pursuing the lines of argument undertaken in this essay. I also thank the participants in the Mexico research seminar at the Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the seminars on Latin America at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, for the opportunity to present this work in various stages and for thoughtful and challenging criticism. In addition, I am indebted to Barbara Corbett, Wayne Cornelius, Ann Craig, Jonathan Fox, Gil Joseph, David Myhre, Mary Roldán, Leslie Salzinger, and Lynn Stephen for many insightful comments on this project and discussions on Mexico generally. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous LARR reviewers for their helpful comments.

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