Introduction
Inequality is a radical condition of social life, omnipresent in all but the most simple archaic societies, and pervading virtually all social relations, from the most formal and public to the most private and intimate. Yet in everyday life, its manifestations are so habitual as to be virtually unregistered by most, while its place in the social sciences is relatively modest, except as an applied field. Yet inequality is no asteroid that mysteriously landed on earth from outer space, and since then has been so embedded in our planet that we can barely see it or recognize how it qualifies every one of our experiences.
This book is about ordinary people living in three ordinary Mexican villages at different times and in different circumstances, and how they have dealt with unequal life chances, real as well as perceived. It seeks to understand why they have accepted their lot for most of the time, no matter how inequitably apportioned, yet have on occasions collectively engaged in disputes over this or that limited good or service to which they felt entitled, or opposed something they perceived as injurious to their rights, or to their way of life.
Since Karl Marx identified false class consciousness as the culprit for the ready acceptance by the laboring classes of things as they are, and discredited as historically insignificant their occasional struggles for a greater voice or better living conditions, few alternative sociological answers have been offered to the age-old question of whether ordinary people can do anything about improving their lot in society.1 So perhaps to ask what it is in the organization of societies and the actions of their people that creates, nurtures, or debilitates inequality is, now as before, a timely question to ask in a world in which inequality keeps growing, despite massive South–North immigration and modest advances in the life chances of the vast underprivileged majorities trying to survive in the poorer periphery.
This question is asked here not just about the exceptional rebellion or the rarely redistributive revolution, which have concentrated most of the scholarly interest in the capacity of human societies to shape and transform themselves. Our inquiry is also about more ordinary everyday battles, which can minutely or substantially improve or worsen the life chances of those on the lower end of inequality, who engage in them in defense of what they feel they are entitled to, or in the hope of obtaining a better place in society, mostly marginally and locally, but at times beyond their immediate circumstances.
To investigate this problem, we must first cease to consider inequality as a structural given to be studied independent of the actions of those suffering, resisting, or imposing it. In that sense, most of the information so far gathered about inequality – its distribution within and between countries, its intergenerational transmission, the policy instruments limiting or exacerbating it, its social and economic consequences, and so forth – can only tell us what different varieties of inequality look like in diverse contexts (which we mostly know, if less than systematically), instead of how it is ordinarily as well as exceptionally produced and transformed.2
What forces drive inequality in societies? What social processes activate these dynamics? And, how are counterforces created resisting these trends? In answer to these questions, particularly the second and third, the present study places contention at the center of the dynamics of inequality. The basic argument is that contentious politics, the ubiquitous and daily process of social conflict confronting actors with rival distributive claims over positions of power and/or resources, is the historical process of structuration3of inequalitywhich shapes, reproduces, modifies, or destroys (from above or from below) the rules of unequal distribution of power and resources – or the pact of domination – institutionalized at any given time over a national territory.
This theory modifies, extends, and integrates previous theorizing: first, the theory of contentious politics proposed in various works by Charles Tilly and his coauthors (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly Reference Tilly2001; Tilly Reference Tilly2008; Tilly and Tarrow Reference Tilly and Tarrow2007), but more systematically in The Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001), as a generalizable form of social conflict; second, the pact of domination scheme by Brachet-Márquez (Reference Brachet-Márquez1994, Reference Brachet-Márquez2010a), which stands for the institutionalized ways in which inequality shapes social relations as overseen by the State,4 and modifiable through pressures and claims issued from above as well as from below; and third, the theory of structuration (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Giddens Reference Giddens1984; Sewell Reference Sewell1992), here formulated to specify the role of agency in processes of contentious politics, and in the generation and stabilization of pacts of domination. In this broader theoretical framework, inequality is both an organizing principle of social life and a recurring source of inter-group conflict through which the pact of domination is reproduced, partially transformed, or occasionally replaced through the general process of contention, understood as the basic dynamic principle underlying changes in the levels and intensity of inequality.
Selecting cases5
In order to explore the degree to which contention reproduces or modifies inequality, we should ideally select research contexts in which inequality between contendents varies, and the rate of contention is generally high, although also variable. In these respects, Mexico and, within Mexico, the state of Morelos, provides a favorable setting for the kind of study envisaged. On the one hand, Mexico is, and has always been, relatively high on the scale of inequality either internally or with respect to other countries (Cortés and de Oliveira Reference Cortés and de Oliviera2010), and on the other, the state of Morelos, also fairly high on inequality, has long been considered one of the most contention prone in the country (Mallon Reference Mallon, Gilbert and Nugent1994, Reference Mallon1995).6
Three periods between 1910 and 2010 were selected, representing three different historical backdrops, differences in standards of living between peasant villages and neighboring landowners or cities, and in degrees of challenge by village contendents of changes in the established order of inequality: the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1920; the mid-century period from 1953 to 1972; and the period from 1980 to 2010 spanning the end of one century and the beginning of the next. The first period, which represents the highest level of inequality, starts from a contentious episode immediately preceding the uprising against Porifirio Diaz’s government in 1910. The focus during this period is on the contention in the village of Anenecuilco that marked the starting point of the struggles for land and autonomy led by Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently prompted the collaboration of the Zapatist movement with other contentious movements bent on removing Porfirio Díaz from power. The second period corresponds to Mexico’s industrial takeoff, which marginalized the rural population in relation to the growing industrial labor force, and therefore was marked by increasing inequality between life in communal villages and rising living standards in urbanized Mexico. Yet, levels of inequality were not as acute as in the preceding period. During this second period, the study focuses on three cases of contention over land taking place in Ahuatlán,7 a village in the vicinity of Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos. This period is characterized by the emergence of various national contentious movements (teachers, railway workers, the National Liberation Movement, and the student movement) set within the context of the Cold War. These cases represent medium to high levels of contentious politics. Finally, the third period, from 1980 to 2010, is generally marked by increasing inequality between town and country, except in the case of Ocotlán, the third village selected, due to the latter’s proximity to the state capital. The four cases studied in this third village are framed by the 1992 reform of the constitutional and legal provisions for the Agrarian Reform, by the signing in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and, generally, by the decline of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party from 1946 to 2000, and by increasing political pluralism associated with a higher degree of tolerance of contention by Mexico’s governments on all levels. Despite such important structural changes, the cases studied are set in lower levels of inequality than in the previous two periods and, of the three periods, also represent the lowest intensity of contention.
In principle, there could have been alternatives to the choice of Morelos – such as Chiapas, which has the highest Gini coefficient (.557) of all the states in Mexico. But Chiapas’ history of contention is relatively recent (the second Zapatist movement, led by subcomandante Marcos, started in 1994), so it has played no part in the Mexican Revolution, revolution being the highest intensity of contention ideally to be included in the study.8 The same goes for the northern parts of the country, where Francisco Villa’s actions represented an important component of the Mexican Revolution. Yet Villa did not head a regional grassroots movement, as Emiliano Zapata did, and only the state of Morelos was the site of a contention from below that expanded to other states, and grew to be a vital component of Mexico’s national revolution.
Contentious issues in the second and third periods were selected by examining claims registered in the National Agrarian Register (RAN) since the 1940s, which, in turn, determined the choice of Ahuatlán and Ocotlán as research sites. We did not find issues other than about land in the second period, although we found variety in the resolution of the three land issues registered, among them a case of land invasion representing a high level of challenge of the status quo in inequality. But we found ample variety among the issues in the third period, ranging from that related to land (registered vs. unregistered ejido members) to outsiders’ attempts to create modern businesses in the village, and a contention within the local school that engaged the active participation of the villagers.
The primary reason for selecting these three villages was their privileged situation with respect to the process of contention, not the fact that they may have represented a window onto the contextual social trends that constrained or enabled the actions of the contendents under study. Nevertheless, some of these trends were, indeed, mirrored in the cases. For example, given that Ahuatlán and Ocotlán had never produced more than subsistence agriculture in the past, and were close to the state capital, they did not share the decline of Mexico’s most rural villages since World War II. With rising standards of living in urban Mexico, their land soon represented a gold mine for large capital to carry out land and commercial developments. Also due to their location, they became dependent very early on employment in the modern economy, but – contrary to countless villages located too far from cities – such dependence did not force their inhabitants to migrate. Additionally, we discovered, when exploring the archives of the Agrarian Reform (cited in each case) that compared to other villages in Morelos, Ahuatlán and Ocotlán had pugnaciously resisted such inroads into their autonomy, thereby deserving their reputation for being contentious.9 As for Anenecuilco, we did not choose it among possible others: it is simply the village where the ‘Revolution of the South’ started, quickly expanding to the whole state of Morelos and to neighboring states, and later to the whole country. In sum, given that the focus of the study was not on tracing general historical trends in our selected research subjects, we adopted Tilly and coauthors’ methodological decision to treat such exogenous processes as contextually rather than causally related to the processes of contention being studied.
Our intent also excluded carrying out a general survey of contentious politics in the state of Morelos, so that we made no attempt to obtain a general estimate of the propensity for contention across all towns and villages of that state, based on a probabilistic sample of this population.10 Before any research on the incidence of contention over any given territory could be undertaken, we first needed to be certain that this process, as conceptualized by Tilly and coauthors and modified in the present study, was robust enough to be unambiguously recognized in every case, so we could be reasonably certain that we were not placing apples and pears in the same basket. Consequently, the approach adopted has been to select a series of interrelated case studies – interrelated by substantive issues of contention and inequality, by geopolitical location in a state historically ranking high on both contentious politics and inequality, and by a temporal thread that joins expressions of those issues in different historical contexts. To maximize the chances of examining critically the contours and characteristics of the process of contention and assess its impact on inequality, it was therefore decided to gather a purposive sample in which all relevant dimensions – substantive issues, gradation in the level of confrontation of established rules, contextual situations, and peacetime versus revolutionary contention – would be present, together with controls for location, kinds of contendents, and region/country. The purpose behind the selection was therefore not to represent a population, but to zero in on relatively rare cases that included all the theoretical conditions that we needed in order to explore critically the fruitfulness of the model of contentious politics as related to the dynamics of inequality. As a result of these choices, the three villages selected are statistically highly unrepresentative, all three being agrarian communities, (presently a minority in rural Mexico),11 all three having participated to a varying extent in the 1910 Revolution, and one of them – Anenecuilco – being the birthplace of the so-called Revolution of the South.
Summing up, we wanted the case studies to help us answer the following questions:
Does Tilly and coauthors’ definition of contention correctly identify this phenomenon, or do our observations suggest (a) that too much variation is found between one kind of contention and the next to merit being classified under a single rubric, in which case, (b) how should the concept be modified?
This problem of identification, logically prior to that of distribution, consists in: (1) carefully identifying the contours and limits of the process of contention case after case; (2) revising and polishing, if necessary, the conceptual terms in which to express it; and (3) making alternative theoretical propositions to those offered by Tilly and coauthors. Items (1) and (2) are oriented toward verifying whether it is fruitful, in the context of the present study, to think in such terms as those offered by Tilly and coauthors in order to investigate processes of permanence and change in inequality, and if not, what substitute terms can be offered. Item (3) proposes a novel use of the theoretical model of contention.
The following research questions guided the study:
(1) Are mechanisms, the dynamic principles said to be inherent to contention, present in the case studies in the way specified by Tilly and coauthors, or should this concept be modified in the face of case evidence?
(2) Is it reasonable to argue, as Tilly and coauthors do, that contention can be assumed to span all kinds of conflicts (previously studied separately) that can be compared despite being found at different times, different levels of analysis, and in different sociopolitical contexts?
(3) What difference (if any) do different kinds of contention make to the distribution of inequality in situ, and to the rules of inequality in society? This is a question that Tilly and coauthors did not ask.
To answer these questions, it was necessary to make sure that the case studies selected were definitionally and processually incontrovertible instances of contention. In short, the goal was to establish the internal validity of the cases under study in the sense that they could all be considered instances of the unfolding of the same general process of contention, that is, of the structuring of inequality in the three different historical settings selected. Through these choices of periods, villages, and issues, the claim that contention theory can model every political conflict, from the least to the most conflictive (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001) could be tested based on these eight case studies, which purport to portray various manifestations and intensity levels of contentious politics, from a national revolution to simple local disputes. Lastly, the choice of informants was also guided by the research questions asked in the sense of seeking contacts with individuals either mentioned as active participants in the agrarian archives, our primary source, or designated by those already interviewed following this principle.12
Approaches, disciplines, and area studies
Although divisions between disciplines and subspecialties in the social sciences are somewhat artificial, they are replete with territorial claims and power struggles that often project different readings of social reality. It is therefore important to indicate the kind of nondisciplinary approach adopted in this book. First, given that it represents an effort to integrate the micro- and macrodynamics of inequality, the book cannot be circumscribed to ethnographic research of peasant communities or everyday State making (Gilbert and Nugent Reference Gilbert and Nugent1994), although it contains elements of both. Nor can it be considered a contribution to what has been called historical sociology in the classical sense in which this term has been understood. Although the period during which the events that are are analyzed runs from 1910 to 2010, the study does not aim at using the cases as reference points to characterize the changes taking place from the beginning to the end of this time stretch taken as a whole.
But if historical sociology is understood as the analysis of social reality as produced and reproduced through time, which requires narrative tools and historical data, then this book can be classified as historical sociology. The narratives constructed include conflictive occurrences concatenated along a time dimension to conform to the process of contention structured by endogenous ‘mechanisms’ that constitute the dynamic principles moving this process forward. The express purpose of extracting these internal mechanisms is to show how actors combine them in their strategies. In this way, social reality is viewed as a dynamic and changeable whole, in contrast with the kind of ‘normal sociology’13 that too often registers change by comparing snapshots taken at different times, or simply disregards change altogether, delegating its study to specialists of that phenomenon.
It was not until structuration theory established, now 25 years ago, that change is not something distinct from permanence, but that both can and must be explained using the same theoretical instruments, that sociology acquired the necessary theoretical tools to deal with change. Nevertheless, this theoretical revolution did not have the expected impact on sociological practice. Most sociological production continues to look like a medical science consisting of extremely sophisticated anatomical studies on the basis of which causal inferences are made on how human organisms function, yet with no attempts to test the processes imagined to account for these associations.
Finally, this book should not be exclusively considered as part of what is usually referred to as Latin American studies simply because the events analyzed happened to take place in Mexico. More than contributing to a geographic area study, the present work aims at answering the general question of why, and through what processes and mechanisms, people accept inequality or struggle against it, and to what extent these processes and mechanisms are constitutive and transformative of the social orders or pact of domination whose fundamental organizing principle is inequality, dealt in various proportions and with varying intensity in different parts of the globe and at different times. That is an eminently political question, so perhaps, just as Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme wrote prose unknowingly, I may have unknowingly been doing political sociology all along.
Summing up, no attempt has been made to provide, through the case studies selected, a general portrait of twentieth-century Mexico, or a general panorama of that country’s agrarian communities as they have evolved since the 1910 Revolution.14 The aim of these case studies is to capture contentious interactions between specific groups in peasant communities and interests external to these communities during specific periods, that tend either to reproduce or challenge the patterns of domination that determine the respective positions occupied by contendents in the unequal distribution of power and resources, as set against a changing background of local/regional development and political reality. Each period in which the cases are set – 1910–1920 in Anenecuilco and southern Mexico in general, 1953–1970 in Ahuatlán, and 1980–2010 in Ocotlán – represents a different contextual setting in which to observe these interactions, which is held constant for the cases belonging to that period. As a result, similar repertoires of contention (land invasions, street blockades, and so forth) will be seen to have different meanings and consequences, depending on the period to which they belong, going from State inaction or mild reprimand to outright repression. So, the cases have been selected for their potential for change (given background constraints) in the degree of inequality between the actors of these villages and those against whom they contend, ranging from local change of little consequence outside of the locality to the overall revolutionary change which made modern Mexico. In each case, we see ordinary people struggling against inequality – felt and real – as, for example, against an hacienda invading peasant land, against capitalist intruders speculating on communal land, or against those attempting to bribe some individual members of the village so as to build a large shopping mall on village communal land. On the other side of the contention, we see “investors” trying to take advantage of the low price of communal land, local corruption, and, generally, the institutional backing that they normally enjoy in their endeavors. To do this, we use case analysis showing, in each instance, a variant of the unfolding of the process of contentious politics involving (a) the micro-processes of contentious interaction between local/regional actor–agents, and (b) the macro-consequences of these micro-processes for changes in the rules of inequality in Mexico.
Theoretical outline
As defined by McAdam et al. (Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001: 5), contention is “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of a claim, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.” This is the process whose components and dynamics will be critically examined in this study case after case. However, distinct from McAdam et al. (Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001), the State will not be regarded as any other claimant with its own interests, but as the key institution charged with maintaining political and social order, based on adherence to established rules within a defined territory (municipality, state, or federation), as it has developed and been institutionalized historically. The present study refers specifically to the State (with its different levels of jurisdiction and distinct territorial subunits) created by Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, the evolution of which will be briefly touched upon in each empirical chapter.
At the lowest analytic level, the villages under study are regarded as natural laboratories in which the contention process is acted out as part of everyday relations within these villages, with other social groups, and with the State. Here, the attempt is to discover if observed episodes of contention have as basic components underlying mechanisms,15 some of which are theoretically equivalent, as Tilly and coauthors argue. At a second analytic level, the task is to determine the inflection points at which subaltern subjects of contentious episodes are able to suspend or modify the execution of institutional and legal rules that are not always clear, and thus are subject to challenge and change.
At both analytic levels, persons and collectives that intervene in processes of contentious politics are considered to act as agents,16 that is, as persons and groups that collectively think and act consciously and purposefully in defense of what they consider to be their rights, and in the pursuit of their perceived interests. The idea of agency, as used here, is inseparable from the concatenation of events that structurally transform a situation previous to these events (Sewell Reference Sewell1992), and could not have occured were it not for the intervention of individuals or constituted groups (Giddens Reference Giddens1984: 9). Methodologically, this implies that structuration or agency can only be observed or historically reconstituted through the longitudinal registration of the events generated by these agents. This is the reconstruction undertaken here, where each case represents a process spanning several years, during which particular participants on both sides of the contention appear and disappear, some as mere reproducers, and others as potential transformers of their personal situations or the general rules of inequality as applied to the contendents or to the country as a whole.
The notion of agency, only implicit in Tilly and coauthors’ definition of contention, makes it possible to combine the theory they propose with the pact of domination scheme, putting forward the idea that local agents, in their interactions with State agents in the process of contention, alternatively promote or block modifications to the distributive rules that enable and constrain the actions they carry out in their daily lives.
The discrepancy between rules as State authorities attempt to impose them, and as they are effectively enforced, is theoretically represented as the discrepancy between a set of institutionalized distributive rules, or ‘pact of domination,’ and the capacity of subordinate as well as dominant actors to (re)structure inequality to fit their perceived interests and rights through a wide range of actions that challenge the pact of domination to a variable extent, up to the point at which they can sometimes durably transform (restructure) these rules. Such rules, however, are not evenhanded (although it is often claimed that they are), so that the pact of domination represents a collection of rules and practices that unequally divide power and resources among different groups and sectors of the population over a national territory, and that are, day in, day out, subject to silent violations, open questioning, or organized collective claims. In short, the rules of inequality, or the pact of domination, are a collection of practices which are questioned, fought over, and renegotiated in the ubiquitous and daily process of contentious politics.
Based on these principles, social reality emerges from the day-to-day making and remaking of power relations and resource distribution, often violently, but also peacefully. The notion of change, therefore, is two-tiered, alternately focused on relatively short-term micro-level processes of contention, and on long-term macro-level processes of changes in the pact of domination. Micro-analytically, change is understood from the perspective of participants in contention: something (some event, some undertaking or project, a new tax, and so on) has happened which is viewed as an opportunity, a threat, or simply a way of acting considered proper by those on one side of the contention but reprehensible on the other. The dynamics of change, in that framework, begin with the irruption of such an event when it is followed by the process of contention. Regardless of the outcome, something will have changed for both winners and losers. Yet that something may be relevant only to the parties to the contention, while everyday life around them continues as usual. Such micro-changes may take place against a background of relatively unchanging macro-relations of power and resource distribution, in other words, in the context of a relatively stable pact of domination; or, on the contrary, they may take place at a moment of crucial renegotiation of rules or great social turmoil, in which case some micro-contentions may find a place in a macro-process of the transformation of distributive rules.
Working with cases as processes
Since the 1990s, methodological advances have redefined case studies, so that rather than being a curiosity that can at best suggest hypotheses, they have become a way of doing sociology with a distinct logic from that inherent in a large sample survey. The case study is now understood to be a selective reconstruction of some aspects of reality from narratives designed to represent phenomena that are more general, not in the sense of extrapolating empirical results to unobserved cases, but in purely theoretical ways (Ragin and Becker Reference Ragin and Becker1992; Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka, Ragin and Becker1992). From this perspective, case studies have the double character of being empirically specific yet with claims to generality in the sense that the case under study comes from a universe of instances of the same process, hypothetically exemplified in the case.
The case study, as understood here, represents an instance of a comprehensive process of actions and reactions whose dynamics we can model theoretically. This is not to say that the language of variables is unknown to this type of analysis, but as Abbot (Reference Abbot, Ragin and Becker1992) remarks, the multivariate language may be more cumbersome than useful when dealing with processes in which constellations of variables and the relations between them change over time, and the main focus is on actions and events, and what difference they make on what follows.17
The reality being observed through case studies is interpreted in the abstract terms dictated by theory that relates to observable facts and events in a hypothetical and therefore always questionable way. In a case study, however, the abstract does not substitute for the observable, but instead orients its reading so that observed facts may be understood hypothetically as concrete manifestations of the process that has been theoretically constructed.
This idea of theory is both older and newer than that supported by multivariate relations within the context of large surveys. It is older because, following in the footsteps of the founders of sociology, it conceives of social reality as a set of processes that develop over time. In that sense, it goes back to the debates about the transformation of Western societies launched by Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, to Durkheim’s thinking about the changing foundation of social cohesion, and to the conception of human interaction as a generator of social forms (today we would say structures) inherited from Georg Simmel. This approach was present in the first centers of empirical social research, for example, in the Chicago school in the 1930s, with studies such as Gold Coast and Slum, The Taxi-Dance Hall, The Gang, and The Ghetto. These aimed at showing, through the local reality of Chicago and the US Midwest in those years, not singular groups of events but general processes (Abbot Reference Abbot, Ragin and Becker1992). Later studies such as Street Corner Society (Whyte Reference Whyte1938) and Urban Villagers (Gans Reference Gans1962) also attempted to show the logic of a broad category of social processes using case studies, as did Norbert Elías (Reference Elías2006a, Reference Elías2006b, Reference Elías2007a, Reference Elías2007b), who advocated a sociology of processes in all his works.
In the so-called tradition of generative theory (Fararo Reference Fararo1989), a case study necessarily includes an endogenous mechanism that ‘moves’ the process being studied. Under this stipulation, the explanation of a social phenomenon consists in constructing an abstract model that simulates a series of events, from a beginning to an end, hypothetically propelled by the mechanisms which the process itself generates. In other words, the process should contain the elements that allow it to structure itself, so that social reality is imagined as created historically and reproduced daily from within. The empirical validation of this type of model consists in observing concatenations of events in different contexts and moments that can be interpreted as iterations of the constructed generative model, which reinforces the credibility of the hypothesized dynamic mechanisms undergirding said model.
It is also worth noting that generative theory does not depart from parametric methods, so much so that the processes under study can be ‘translated’ as specific constellations of variables changing over time and generated by the proposed mechanisms (Fararo Reference Fararo1989: 42). Such constellations are likely to be incorporated in computer simulation models, where process variables are related to one another in chains of serial dependence measured in terms of variance in time, a procedure which provides them with theoretic dimension as well as empirical substantiation (Cederman Reference Cederman2005). In this context, explanation consists in highlighting the endogenous dynamic principles that repeatedly generate one or another constellation of variables whose composition will depend on the sociohistorical context reflected in the model, and therefore will change from one context to another. Dynamic models also allow for the operation of exogenous forces which may be conceived as contextual, conditional, or causal, but in any case as motive forces or drivers external to the given process. Yet we still know so little about most phenomena that we often cannot make applications for more than fairly simple processes or mechanisms.18
The difference between modeling through generative theory and the kind of modeling proposed by Tilly and coauthors is that the former is far more demanding of precision in conceptualizations and quality of measured observations with sufficient density in time to capture ‘the action’ – that is, turning points, retrenchments, force multiplications, and so forth. The approach taken by Tilly and coauthors attempts a weak version of that – weak, because conceptual precision and, more especially, high-quality measurement are lacking. For Tilly and coauthors, a case refers to one or various mechanisms that combine to make up the process of contentious politics. In more complex cases, this process will connect with other simultaneous or consecutive episodes of contention, to the point of forming larger processes, a phenomenon known as recursion in generative theory. The researcher’s task, in such cases, is to break down the narrative encompassing one or several episodes of contention into various ‘bits’ that are conceptually identifiable as mechanisms.
In the present study, I follow this methodological strategy, but draw attention to its limitations, and propose important modifications aimed at strengthening the model. In the end, I hope to obtain a plausible, although always debatable, interpretation of comparable spatiotemporal sequences, so that apparently unique historical processes can be understood and theorized with a common conceptual language, showing them to have comparable dynamics despite their being neither isomorphic nor having invariable outcomes.
Contending about what?
This study analyzes eight instances of contention, divided into five types. The first and most frequent in Mexico’s rural world concerns land disputes. Each of the periods under study includes at least one contention process of this type. A second type of contention deals with public services, and has one instance, the case of conflict over corruption in a secondary school during the third period. A third type of contention centers on conflict over the introduction of outsiders’ businesses within the territorial limits of a village – in particular, disputes over the opening of a gas station and the creation of a shopping mall during the most recent period. In this case, also in dispute is village authority over land use. This claim will be seen to represent a demand for local autonomy that contrasts with the view held by some claimants and members of Cuernavaca’s City Council that Ahuatlán and Ocotlán are little more than colonias under city jurisdiction, with only minor autonomous local functions, such as the policing of local disturbances and street cleaning (the latter rather more de jure than de facto).
A fourth type of contention, found in Ocotlán, brings us into a kind of conflict that straddles all others, and most clearly shows the contrast between the factual and the legal–institutional. It deals with a dispute that has dragged on since the 1960s in Ocotlán, about who has (or has not) been included in the agrarian census as a member of the agrarian community,19 and therefore has the right, in accordance with Agrarian Law, to represent the village in the Communal Assembly, in the assistant mayor’s office (the Ayudantía), and at the Common Property Commission (Comisariado de Bienes Comunes).
Contrasting with these four categories of contention in which limited conflicts are manifested, the contention centered on the role of the Zapatist movement in the Mexican Revolution is especially distinctive for having merged with a national revolutionary contention. Its analysis starts from the first contentious episode that emerged in Anenecuilco in 1910, and gave birth to the first Zapatist movement,20 until its final resolution with the triumph in 1920 of Alvaro Obregón over Venustiano Carranza’s supporters, which was also a triumph of the land reform enshrined in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917. This case allows us to confront various theoretical issues not addressable in the other cases, principally two: the rescaling of contention from local/regional to national, and the transformation from contention that reproduces the rules of an existing pact of domination (or changes them only casuistically) to one that destroys these rules, and substitutes them for new ones. When analyzing revolution, we limit ourselves to sketching out the relationship between contention as generated and pursued by the Zapatist movement, and the principal centers of contention that fought together in the Mexican Revolution, alternately collaborating and confronting each other in the process of conforming a new pact of domination, one that would rule until the end of the twentieth century.
Summing up, the eight cases under study, distributed over the past 100 years, are treated as instances of the process of structuring and restructuring of inequality through contention over Mexico’s rules of inequality as institutionalized in a set of rules and practices called the ‘pact of domination.’ Yet, as we shall see in the coming chapters, inequality is not a claim that is directly voiced in most of these contentious processes. Nevertheless, inequality will be seen to be invariably involved in the sense that contention is over losses or gains of goods, services, or power positions in zero-sum games where village players will feel either despoiled of their rights, status, and whatever economic gains they expected or, contrariwise, vindicated in their rights and status (in addition to money or land) if their side wins. What is repeated from one case to the next is not a set of facts or their outcomes, but the process of contention as a general schema or model, each case with its own mechanisms, events, actors/agents, and case-specific developments. The backdrop shared by all eight cases is the Mexican Revolution and its heritage, in which the state of Morelos had, until the 1920s, a high-profile role as protagonist and generator of events, rules, institutions, and expectations shaping the political–cultural heritage of a country that retains a strong sense of national unity despite profound internal divisions.
From process to narrative and to theory
Working with processes requires building reliable links between: (1) empirical data (in this case, the information obtained from informants, archives, and direct observation); (2) the narrative built from these data; and (3) the abstract scheme which allows for the identification, in theoretical terms, of the sequences constructed from these observations. To achieve these links, the analyst should both resolve the difficulties of building narratives that mirror as closely as possible the significant features of the process under study, and capture significant elements in terms of the study’s key theoretical concepts. The resulting narrative will combine a conceptual narrative (Somers Reference Somers1994: 620), which reconstructs a process of contention selectively in terms of significant theoretical elements, and an ontological narrative (Somers Reference Somers1994: 619) derived from what actors describe as their respective positions in the contentious process, which mainly consists of the discourses collectively constituted on each side of the contention, and diffused in opposition to each other. The analyst’s narrative will have to select those empirical elements that identify the opponents, their interests, and perceived rights in relation to one another; the cultural schemas and resources with which they conduct mobilization and framing; and the strategies and repertoires they use. In this sense, the conceptual narrative is analytic, while the ontological narratives can be looked upon as a kind of “folk theory” which describes the arguments and positions assumed by the contendents in the dispute.
On a second level of abstraction is to be found a concatenation of mechanisms inferred from the events unfolding in the contention, which move the process from beginning to end (McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001). These will never be identical from one instance of contention to the other, because each episode represents a particular combination of basic dynamic mechanisms within a wide range of possible mechanisms. However, processes of contention that appear to be unlike one another (as they have different time frames, antecedents, and results) can have common mechanisms, and so be comparable. What research must verify is whether each of the mechanisms identified as identical or similar is also followed by identical or similar immediate consequences, although situated in different combinations of mechanisms and contention contexts. What is repeated from one contention to the next is not, therefore, the totality of the sequences that represents each stream of contention, but the principal mechanisms that influence their unfolding. This way of identifying common dynamics in sequences of dissimilar events is potentially a key contribution by Tilly and coauthors, which allows for the comparison of empirically dissimilar event flows separated in space and time. The purpose of this theoretical exercise is not, therefore, to describe identical relations between explanans and explanandum, as in the nomothetic model of the social sciences, but to compare trajectories of complex processes, with their inflection points and bifurcations, all based on agency situated in an interactive context.
To summarize, the study starts from contention, understood as a basic social process through which contendents assert, question, or renegotiate the general rules of inequality specified for different social groups, or pacts of domination. Instead of explaining change as an automatic implication of large processes such as industrialization, urbanization, or more recently globalization, this study focuses on the transformative actions of subaltern participants within Mexico’s social formation. This does not imply simple voluntarism, nor does it mean that actions, although influenced by actors’ intentions, represent straight lines to expected results, as the case studies will show. Nor can it be assumed that the actors themselves are aware, when participating in their often trivial daily conflicts, that they are reproducing or questioning and transforming the rules of inequality. Some of the contentions studied, for example, remain unresolved, year after year, alternating between hot and hibernation phases without anyone being satisfied. This is because an immense number of contingent contextual factors affect the results, but also because government agencies often use inaction as a strategy when faced with contradictory pressures from the contendents.
Chapter organization
The three-pronged theoretical and methodological scheme – the foundation of this study – is presented in Chapter 1. Continuing remarks made above, I advocate an interpretation of contention that allows for both micro- and macro-analysis; the first allows for an understanding of contentious trajectories in terms of the participants’ interests and goals as these define them, while the second projects these processes unto a macro-societal level with structuration and restructuration as the basic processes arising out of multiple, overlapping, and contradictory contentions that manipulate, infringe, confront, but also abide by and thereby reproduce the rules of inequality, or the pact of domination, during a given period.
The second chapter, an overview of the political administrative history of the state of Morelos, shows the contexts in which the events in the cases took place by tracing the general evolution of villages in this state since the 1870s: what kinds of relations linked them with the external world, and how such relations entered into conflict with their environment, principally with large landowners (hacendados), and with state and national governments. The same chapter examines the history of the ejido, or communal farm system, and the specificities of villages run by customary law. The final section of the chapter reviews the changes in the villages under study that took place as agriculture ceased to be the principal activity of their inhabitants. It outlines the evolution of their internal collective organization, as it has continued to subsist after the 1992 reform of Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution that, until then, had enshrined the Agrarian Reform.
Chapter 3 gives a summary outline of state-level contention since the first conflicts opposing independent peasants and the Porfirian State (1877–1909), then narrates an episode of contention that started with a dispute regarding village communal land confiscated in 1910 by a large landowner in the southeastern cane-growing area of the state. The narrative shows how this episode gave birth to the Revolution of the South, led by Emiliano Zapata. Despite the fact that this movement joined the coalition of forces that fought the Mexican Revolution, the narrative shows that it was, at first, repressed and defeated by its own allies. But in the end, its aspirations and demands, principally the Agrarian Reform, would be glorified as one of the basic conquests of the Mexican Revolution, from the time of Obregón (1920–24) to the end of the twentieth century.
Chapters 4 and 5 present the seven case studies, grouped by village, contrasting Ocotlán, a previously indigenous communal village that has retained its system of customary self-government (known as usos y costumbres), with Ahuatlán, also a communal village, but one that has been integrated into the laws that govern the rest of the country. Their histories since the Revolution are briefly described: both villages were practically destroyed by repression under the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship (1876–1910), which was followed by similar actions under Francisco I. Madero’s rule (1911–13), and then again under Venustiano Carranza (1917–20), the last two deciding to do away with their dissatisfied Zapatist allies once they had become heads of the new State. The traditions in these villages, far from being a product of time immemorial, as often claimed by their inhabitants, are seen to result from strategic choices in episodes of contention that developed over the course of the twentieth century. For each of these cases, the corresponding chapters present first a summary history of the village since 1910, followed by the reconstructed history of each case. These narratives are then analyzed both micro- and macro-analytically in terms of the theoretical components of episodes of contention. These analyses are aimed at critically testing the assertion of McAdam et al. (Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001), that dissimilar processes of contention are comparable when they include identical or similar mechanisms, given that these will yield identical or similar immediate consequences.
The concluding chapter reviews the findings of the study, and assesses whether they strengthen the theoretical scheme built by combining the model offered by Tilly and coauthors with structuration theory (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Giddens Reference Giddens1984; Sewell Reference Sewell1992) and with the pact of domination scheme (Arteaga Pérez and Brachet-Márquez Reference Arteaga Pérez and Brachet-Márquez2011; Brachet-Márquez Reference Brachet-Márquez1994, Reference Brachet-Márquez2002, Reference Brachet-Márquez2010a), calling attention to unresolved problems in each of these components, and to the solutions applied to palliate or resolve them. I also argue that the model lends itself to the study of specific forms of inequality – racial, ethnic, and gender – that generally have been studied in terms of their manifestations and consequences, but not their productive and reproductive mechanics.
1 Important exceptions to this generalization are Barrington Moore’s work on the consequences of social injustice for subaltern groups (Reference Moore1978), James Scott’s work on peasant resistance to exploitation (Scott Reference Scott1985; Scott and Tria Kerkevliet Reference Scott and Tria Kerkevliet1986), and the key contributions by Mallon (Reference Mallon, Gilbert and Nugent1994, Reference Mallon1995), Roseberry (Reference Roseberry, Gilbert and Nugent1994), Knight (Reference Knight, Gilbert and Nugent1994), and others to the debate about everyday State making (Gilbert and Nugent Reference Gilbert and Nugent1994).
2 Nevertheless, Galbraith’s (Reference Galbraith2012) recent contribution to greater precision, reliability, and breadth in the measurement of inequality within and between national units as well as worldwide is extremely useful, especially as it serves him as the starting point for asking whether economic inequality is related to economic structure, particularly phases of economic development. See also López-Calva and Lustig (Reference López-Calva and Lustig2010) and Fenstermaker (Reference Fenstermaker2002).
3 As a first definition of structuration, a concept which is explained fully in Chapter 1, we propose that people’s practices constitute and reproduce over time the established patterns in which societies function, whereby they are both structuring subjects and structured objects.
4 In this work, State with a capital “S” will refer to the State in general, whereas state uncapitalized will refer to Mexico’s territorial units (as in the state of Morelos).
5 A more detailed exposition of the methodological decisions and their criteria are given in Appendix 2.
6 Mexico’s Gini index was .48 in 2010, according to the CIA World Factbook (www.nationmaster.com), just above the United States (with .45), and midway between the most and the least unequal countries in Latin America (Bolivia with a Gini index of .59, and Nicaragua with .43, respectively). Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policies has estimated Mexico’s Gini coefficient to be .456 in 2008, based on surveys of Household Income and Expenses, and that of the state of Morelos for the same year at .478 (Coneval 2008), midway between the most and least unequal states, Chiapas (.557) and Tlaxcala (.425) respectively.
7 The names of Ocotlán and Ahuatlán are fictitious. Anenecuilco, however, is the authentic name of Emiliano Zapata’s birthplace. Throughout the book, the names of people will also be fictitious, except for the revolutionary period.
8 Needless to say, penetrating the second Zapatist uprising with the kind of detailed processual information needed would have been a huge and extremely problematic enterprise by itself, yet would not have substantially improved (and might have worsened) the chances of obtaining what I set out to achieve.
9 In particular, we conducted initial interviews to determine the presence of contentious issues not registered in the agrarian archives during the third period in two more villages in the vicinity of Cuernavaca (Chamilpa and Santa María Ahuacatitlán), but surprisingly found virtually none in either case.
10 This could have been done, for example, by recording the incidence of contentious events as reported in newspapers over the 100-year period of the study, as Tilly (Reference Tilly1995a) did for eighteenth-century Britain, but that would have been a different project, of more breadth and less depth.
11 By 2007, there were 31,518 ejidos/agrarian communities in Mexico, including 4.5 million individuals owning communal lots in them (Appendini Reference Appendini and Yunez2010: 69).
12 For more detail regarding sources of information and methods of interviewing, see Appendix 2.
13 I speak of normal sociology in the sense given by Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1962), of a general paradigm followed by the majority of the scientific community.
14 However, Chapter 2 offers an overview of the history of the Agrarian Reform and evolving practices in agrarian communities.
15 Mechanism is defined here as a dynamic principle that forms part of a complex process based on actions by agents who activate a series of events, and that explains the changes registered overall. A detailed discussion of this concept and the way it is used in this study awaits Chapter 1.
16 As put forward in Chapter 1, this term refers to a person or group with a reflexive capacity and an ability to stimulate changes in structures by reinterpreting and mobilizing resources creatively.
17 Yet the language of variables can be adapted to that of processes, as advocated in generative theory mentioned below.
18 Processes or mechanisms that are well represented in generative theory are, for example, basic Markov processes (e.g., one lag; memory is recapitulated completely from one state or cycle to the next, so that there is nothing left over for longer lag times), which represents a major advance.
19 Recognized in Mexican law since the Constitution of 1917, ejidos, or agrarian communities are an institutionalization of communalism centered on communal farmland that, following the Mexican Revolution, re-created the traditional land system of Mexico’s indigenous people.
20 Emiliano Zapata, a native of Anenecuilco, a village located in the southeastern part of the state of Morelos, led what has been called the Revolution of the South in the region south of Mexico City that includes the states of Morelos, Puebla, Guerrero, and Michoacán. It would be a later Zapatist movement, this one originated in the southeastern state of Chiapas, that would challenge President Salinas in 1994 over the constitutional rights of indigenous people and the 1992 reform of constitutional Article 27.
