BiblioVault - Books about Fallaw, Ben

Cárdenas Compromised

The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán

Ben Fallaw

Duke University Press, 2001

Cárdenas Compromised is a political and institutional history of Mexico’s urban and rural labor in the Yucatán region during the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934 to 1940. Drawing on archival materials, both official and popular, Fallaw combines narrative, individual case studies, and focused political analysis to reexamine and dispel long-cherished beliefs about the Cardenista era.
For historical, geographical, and ethnic reasons, Yucatán was the center of large-scale land reform after the Mexican Revolution. A long-standing revolutionary tradition, combined with a harsh division between a powerful white minority and a poor, Maya-speaking majority, made the region the perfect site for Cárdenas to experiment by launching an ambitious top-down project to mobilize the rural poor along ethnic and class lines. The regime encouraged rural peasants to form collectives, hacienda workers to unionize, and urban laborers to strike. It also attempted to mobilize young people and women, to challenge Yucatán’s traditional, patriarchal social structure, to reach out to Mayan communities, and to democratize the political process. Although the project ultimately failed, political dialogue over Cárdenas’s efforts continues. Rejecting both revisionist (anti-Cárdenas) and neopopulist (pro-Cárdenas) interpretations, Fallaw overturns the notion that the state allowed no room for the agency of local actors. By focusing on historical connections across class, political, and regional lines, Fallaw transforms ideas on Cardenismo that have long been accepted not only in Yucatán but throughout Mexico.
This book will appeal to scholars of Mexican history and of Latin American state formation, as well as to sociologists and political scientists interested in modern Mexico.

[more]

Forced Marches

Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

Edited by Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Forced Marches is a collection of innovative essays that analyze how the military experience molded Mexican citizens in the years between the initial war for independence in 1810 and the consolidation of the revolutionary order in the 1940s. The contributors—well-regarded scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom—offer fresh interpretations of the Mexican military, caciquismo, and the enduring pervasiveness of violence in Mexican society. Employing the approaches of the new military history, which emphasizes the relationships between the state, society, and the “official” militaries and “unofficial” militias, these provocative essays engage (and occasionally do battle with) recent scholarship on the early national period, the Reform, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution.

When Mexico first became a nation, its military and militias were two of the country’s few major institutions besides the Catholic Church. The army and local provincial militias functioned both as political pillars, providing institutional stability of a crude sort, and as springboards for the ambitions of individual officers. Military service provided upward social mobility, and it taught a variety of useful skills, such as mathematics and bookkeeping.

In the postcolonial era, however, militia units devoured state budgets, spending most of the national revenue and encouraging locales to incur debts to support them. Men with rifles provided the principal means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding-ground for rowdiness and discontent. As these chapters make clear, understanding the history of state-making in Mexico requires coming to terms with its military past.

[more]

Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America

Edited by Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw

University of Texas Press, 2006

Latin American history traditionally has been defined by larger-than-life heroes such as Símon Bolívar, Emiliano Zapata, and Evita Perón. Recent scholarship, however, tends to emphasize social and cultural factors rather than great leaders. In this new collection, Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw bring heroes back to the center of the debate, arguing that heroes not only shape history, they also "tell us a great deal about the places from which they come."

The original essays in this collection examine ten modern Latin American heroes whose charisma derived from the quality of their relationships with admirers, rather than their innate personal qualities. The rise of mass media, for instance, helped pave the way for populists such as radio actress-turned-hero Evita Perón. On the other hand, heroes who become president often watch their images crumble, as policies replace personality in the eyes of citizens. In the end, the editors argue, there is no formula for Latin American heroes, who both forge, and are forged by, unique national events. The conclusion points toward Mexico, where the peasant revolutions that elevated Miguel Hidalgo and, later, Emiliano Zapata are so revered that today's would-be heroes, such as the EZLN's Subcomandante Marcos, must link themselves to peasant mythology even when their personal roots are far from native ground. The enduring (or, in some cases, fading) influence of those discussed in this volume validates the central placement of heroes in Latin American history.

[more]

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Ben Fallaw

Duke University Press, 2012

The religion question—the place of the Church in a Catholic country after an anticlerical revolution—profoundly shaped the process of state formation in Mexico. From the end of the Cristero War in 1929 until Manuel Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency in late 1940 and declared his faith, Mexico's unresolved religious conflict roiled regional politics, impeded federal schooling, undermined agrarian reform, and flared into sporadic violence, ultimately frustrating the secular vision shared by Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas.

Ben Fallaw argues that previous scholarship has not appreciated the pervasive influence of Catholics and Catholicism on postrevolutionary state formation. By delving into the history of four understudied Mexican states, he is able to show that religion swayed regional politics not just in states such as Guanajuato, in Mexico's central-west "Rosary Belt," but even in those considered much less observant, including Campeche, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico reshapes our understanding of agrarian reform, federal schooling, revolutionary anticlericalism, elections, the Segunda (a second Cristero War in the 1930s), and indigenism, the Revolution's valorization of the Mesoamerican past as the font of national identity.

[more]

State Formation in the Liberal Era

Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru

Edited by Ben Fallaw and David Nugent

University of Arizona Press, 2020

State Formation in the Liberal Era offers a nuanced exploration of the uneven nature of nation making and economic development in Peru and Mexico. Zeroing in on the period from 1850 to 1950, the book compares and contrasts the radically different paths of development pursued by these two countries.

Mexico and Peru are widely regarded as two great centers of Latin American civilization. In State Formation in the Liberal Era, a diverse group of historians and anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America compare how the two countries advanced claims of statehood from the dawning of the age of global liberal capitalism to the onset of the Cold War. Chapters cover themes ranging from foreign banks to road building and labor relations. The introductions serve as an original interpretation of Peru’s and Mexico’s modern histories from a comparative perspective.

Focusing on the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship, the volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries. It reveals how the presence (or absence) of U.S. influence shaped Latin American history and also challenges notions of Mexico’s revolutionary exceptionality. The book offers a new template for ethnographically informed comparative history of nation building in Latin America.

[more]

The Transnational Construction of Mayanness

Reading Modern Mesoamerica through US Archives

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

University Press of Colorado, 2023

The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how US academics, travelers, officials, and capitalists contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples who were the subject of generations of anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expanding discussions of the neocolonial relationship between the US and its southern neighbors and emphasizing little-studied texts virtually inaccessible to those in Mexico and Central America, this is the first and only set of comparative studies to bring in US-based documentary collections as an enriching source of evidence.

Contributors tap documentary, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological sources from North America to expand established categories of fieldwork and archival research conducted within the national spaces of Mexico and Central America. A particularly rich and diverse set of case studies interrogate the historical processes that remove sources from their place of production in the “field” to the US, challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the geography of data sources that are available for research, and reveal a range of historical relationships that enabled US actors to shape the historical experience of Maya-speaking peoples.

The Transnational Construction of Mayanness offers rich insight into transnational relations and suggests new avenues of research that incorporate an expanded corpus of materials that embody the deep-seated relationship between Maya-speaking peoples and various gringo interlocutors. The work is an important bridge between Mayanist anthropology and historiography and broader literatures in American, Atlantic, and Indigenous studies.

Contributors: David Carey, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Lydia Crafts, John Gust, Julio Cesar Hoil Gutierréz, Jennifer Mathews, Matthew Watson

[more]