Contentious politics is mostly focused on inequalities and on how, depending on vested interests, to expose and lessen them or to defend and enhance them, but also to seem to aim for the one goal while working indirectly for the other. The main outcome of contention is alternately to reproduce and to reshape the existing state of inequality. This book addresses those processes of contentious politics – everyday as well as exceptional, local as well as national – as they took place in three communal villages in Mexico. The actions, narrated and analyzed as particular instances of the general process of contention, occurred during three key periods of Mexico’s history: the 1910–1920 Revolution, the Cold War period from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the time from the 1980s to the present day, during which the redistributive social reforms that the Revolution had yielded have silently been downgraded, then officially rolled back.

Eight episodes of contention form the core material of the book. The point of bringing these episodes to light is not to offer a general account of the extent of inequality in Mexico as a whole. Had that been the aim, a different selection of cases, and an altogether different study, would have been required: one that was more statistically representative but less dense theoretically and ethnographically of how the component processes unfolded in the different episodes.¹ The purpose of the present undertaking was to build and test a theory of the making and unmaking of inequality in ethnographically rich conditions, so that the dynamics of this all-pervasive facet of social organization could be observed and theorized in terms consonant with the specific conditions on the ground, yet also relevant to all societies.

One hundred years after a revolution that redistributed land – at the time, the quintessential resource for the three quarters of the population then engaged in agriculture – a high level of inequality is still with us in Mexico, now disseminated throughout a society in which 60 percent of the population lives in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants. Today, the rural population, which has doubled in size since 1910, yet represents only 23 percent of the population, remains comparatively poor, and still suffers unequal treatment in countless spheres (education, health, housing, infrastructure, and so forth) as compared with other sectors of society. Yet contention occasionally still flares up, as in Ocotlán, in defense of claims that alternately call into question or defend the status quo.

Although inscribed from within the history of Mexico, this book tells a story composed of a collection of eight narratives, the implications of which go far beyond the borders of that country. Indeed, the financial crisis of the 2000s, which drove the world into recession, has shown the deep inequalities pervading the global capitalist world, as it has left millions jobless, many homeless, and many of those still with a job and housing feeling that life has become much more precarious. The challenge set for this book was to respect the specific eventful trajectory of the people it portrays, and of a country constructing its own history, while speaking in terms of a general theory that can be tested anywhere and at any time.

In the 1950s, when sociology in the United States defined the possibility and conditions of social order as the first paramount theoretical problem to be investigated, most of the scholars who contributed to this quest assumed that social order could only exist in environments that were virtually unchanging, so that order and stability became synonymous in the minds and writings of the postwar scholars. The reaction to this first stream of sociological theorizing by the following generation was to oppose it by focusing on the conflictive aspects of social life, thereby creating a deep rift between analyses focused on stable consensual dimensions of social order and those concentrating on conflictive ones understood to undermine social order.

The theoretical propositions developed and tested in the present book would not have been possible (or even conceivable) as long as stability and change, or order and conflict, were considered separate phenomena, and as long as scholars believed that they had to make an uncompromising choice between structural/contextual and motivational/agentic explanations of human conduct. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that new theoretical currents opened the door to the kind of theorizing and associated empirical research that broke with such priorist blinkers: contention theory developed by Charles Tilly and the group of scholars who worked and copublished with him until his untimely death; agency theory, which emerged and flourished both in Britain and the United States; and a very (for me) inspiring idea – found in the writings of several Latin Americanists, but never theoretically developed (and much less tested) – of the notion that social order rests on an implicit “pact of domination” that apportions power and resources unequally.

The present book starts from the proposition that the dynamics of social order are both supportive and transformative of the status quo at any point in time. In this perspective, social order is constantly and ubiquitously challenged, as well as reinforced, by human actors in the pursuit of their interests and aspirations. It further proposes that the basic building block of social order, everywhere and at all times, except in the most primitive societies, is the unequal distribution of power and resources. Yet inequality is no rock-like reality of social life, so that pressures (from below as well as above) to change the rules by which it is dictated and culturally assimilated generate political contention, a process in which people living in their respective historical/cultural contexts participate either to resist such pressures or to be part of them. In a nutshell, this book pictures changes in various forms of inequality as produced by conscious and discursively adept people and collectives, particularly at historical junctures that can redefine these local and regional struggles as forces aiming to transform the set of rules – or pact of domination – by which various institutions and state agencies enforce and legitimize inequality. This micro/macro view allows us to address the question of whether or not all contentious politics, even short-lived contentious episodes of little apparent import outside of the local issues opposing contendents, do play a role in the dynamics of inequality, or if only widespread contentious conflagrations can alter or altogether transform inequalities inscribed in the social orders in which they are manifested.