Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

This monograph is exemplary of a series of works by Latin American historians over the past decade that uncover the nature and extent of the masses' (or, in a term more common to the time, popular classes') participation in public life. Richard A. Warren's setting is Mexico's national capital from the independence struggle through the topsy-turvy contest for power in the 1820s and 1830s, with a particular focus on elections and the changes in political regimes. He contends not only that the urban masses' involvement in politics is imperative to understanding the transition from imperial to independent republican government, but that its legacy influenced the succeeding generation of liberals and conservatives whose actions culminated in the Reform war and the French intervention.

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Critical to Warren's thesis is the role of the Spanish Cortes and constitution of 1812, which established a precedent of suffrage in Latin America more extensive (up to the mid-nineteenth century) than almost anywhere else in the Western world. In a brief portion of the conclusion, he provides a comparative summary of how several different Latin American nations responded to that standard. Although there was great variation legally and practically on all three levels of government (municipality, state, and nation), a common denominator was the trend toward restricting suffrage and office holding by mid-century. However, elections were not the sole measure of popular class participation in postindependence politics. Public rituals, sloganeering, demonstrations, and violent acts were other ways that the popular classes, especially in urban centers, could make their political influence felt. Indeed, a corollary to Warren's thesis is that as elections lost their political value to the capital's urban masses, they "walked away from the polls as much as they were driven from them" (p. 165).

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