The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

The 11 papers brought together in this volume (with an introduction by Jaime E. Rodríguez O. and a conclusion by Aldo Flores-Quiroga) are not so much focused on Mexican constitutions as on the study of Mexican liberalism in various forms and periods throughout the nineteenth century. Besides Rodríguez, Alicia Hernández Chávez, Andrés Reséndez, Robert H. Duncan, William H. Beezley, Brian Connaughton, Christon I. Archer, Manuel Chust, José Antonio Serrano Ortega, Marcelo Carmagnani, and Sandra Kuntz Ficker contributed chapters. This is a distinguished group of authors, but the articles are of varying quality. Some are sketchy or lack cohesion, and one article is laced with jargon. Several constitute a continuation of ongoing research for which the author is known. They all employ original and archival sources as well as secondary sources, the latter sometimes highly selectively.Useful extensions of earlier work include Hernández Chávez’s discussion of the process, in the early independence period, by which native repúblicas evolved into local ayuntamientos and then developed further into a republican political community; Rodríguez’s narrative examines the rise of federalism and a locally oriented liberalism in Oaxaca, and Archer’s further discussion of the rise of the military officers as a political force in the middle years of the War of Independence specifically looks at royalist military exactions in the Bajío and the process by which royalist officers became political caudillos. Reséndez focuses on the important Masonic connection in the acquisition of property in Texas by both Mexicans and Anglo-Americans and the resulting surge in separatism. Chust considers the development, after independence, of the civic militia as the major instrument for defending the states under federalism. Duncan provides an interesting discussion of the liberal objectives of Maximilian, particularly in regard to land, labor, and the church, and his concepts of state building, which staunch conservatives perceived as treason to the cause that brought him to the throne. Beezley considers triumphant liberalism in the Porfiriato, which he terms “the second liberalism,” and its linkages with the war against the French intervention. Connaughton, based on the dioceses of Puebla and Guadalajara, argues that not until the 1850s did the Catholic Church in Mexico become unequivocally hostile to liberalism; though there was considerable tension between the church and the liberal project, many church authorities argued that religion was compatible with a great variety of political programs.Three articles on economic liberalism wrap up the collection. Serrano Ortega discusses early liberal principles in taxation policy that aimed to provide equality, uniformity, and proportionality of taxation. Carmagnani briefly recounts the late nineteenth-century transmission and development of liberal economic culture by means of chambers of commerce and commercial courts, strengthened property rights, and commercial and civil codes. Kuntz provides a clear summary of tariff legislation and economic policy up through the Porfiriato. Flores-Quiroga’s conclusion then provides an interesting but very brief comparison of the problems of implementing nineteenth-century liberal reforms and the late-twentieth-century reforms under neoliberal presidents Miguel de la Madrid, Carlos Salinas, and Ernesto Zedillo.I do wish the publisher had not entitled the map on the front cover as “The United States of Mexico, 1830”; the name of the country was and is “the United Mexican States.”What unites the volume’s disparate offerings is an implied consideration of the ways in which radical liberalism of the early decades of the century evolved into the authoritarian, private-property-oriented liberalism of the Porfiriato, although the process is not charted specifically and some of the authors appear to assume, without further discussion, the essential continuity of liberalism in the nineteenth century and liberalization in the late twentieth century. One is left to debate precisely what Mexican liberalism was — a problem inherent in the topic in general of course, but which the book does little to clarify. Whatever it was, regionalism, localism, and caudillism overshadowed it everywhere and in every phase. Of course, liberalism in Mexico was highly contradictory; as an ideology it was diffuse and variable, and as economic theory it changed through the decades. It meant so many things to so many people that it requires a great deal of qualification to use liberalism as a catchall that knits the 1810s to the 1890s. As for constitutionalism, except for the chapters dealing with the early period of independence or other specific references, the theme does not play a major role in many of the articles here.

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