| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850. By Peter Guardino (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ix plus 405 pp. $23.95).

Peter Guardino's new book reflects some of the most interesting and innovative trends in the study of Mexican political history over the last decade or so, trends of which he himself has been one of the architects. One increasingly sees in recent published work (and in dissertations-in-progress) the 1750–1850 periodization, for example, in which independence from Spain (1821) is still taken seriously, but as a watershed, in the sense that one needs to see which way political processes flow on either side, rather than as an epochal disjunction. Guardino also delves below the notoriously chaotic and violence-wracked political life of the young republic to the sub-stratum of what he and others have called political culture: the new rules of the game of politics, in other words, rather than just the epiphenomena of public life. Finally, he concentrates on subaltern groups in city (Antequera, the old colonial capital of the province of Oaxaca) and country (Villa Alta, a heavily indigenous town and the surrounding district), although their thinking and talking about politics were necessarily mediated, as in most such studies, by the political elites and entrepreneurs who claimed to speak for them. Both towns are located in what is today the state of Oaxaca, an area traditionally beloved of anthropologists, but more and more of historians. Guardino has given us a really accomplished work, deeply researched, nicely written, with a mature authorial voice and a text scattered with pithy, almost aphoristically memorable pronouncements. He is cautious and judicious with his abundant empirical materials, but not tentative; without being obtrusive, his theoretical and historiographical discussion is acute and sustained throughout the book, not concentrated in indigestible lumps in the introduction and conclusion; and as a writer he knows the function of a topic sentence.

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