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Organizing, Ideology, and Moral Suasion: Political Discourse and Action in a Mexican Town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Michael W. Foley
Michael W. Foley
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America
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Extract

Recent scholarship on peasant protest has shifted from the speculative analysis of large-scale historical trends to the limited testing of hypotheses to a preoccupation with micro-level analysis of peasant consciousness and decision making. That shift has been salutary, sharpening our attention to the role of people's perceptions in shaping behavior and to the subtle ways in which people act out their discontent; but we still understand too little about the origins of these perceptions and about the ways in which everyday discontent gets transformed into politically viable action. The present paper argues that, while people's perceptions are grounded in their material and social situation and in past experience, they are continuously reshaped in interaction with new experience and with the claims of others. Understanding the role of political discourse in such interactions is essential to understanding popular mobilization.

Type
People, Power, and Revolution
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 1990 , pp. 455 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1990

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References

1 The critical studies are Moore, Barrington, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paige, Jeffrey M., Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asía (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

2 The Mexican case has been particularly well documented. See Esteva, Gustavo, The Struggle for Rural Mexico (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1983)Google Scholar; Grindle, Merilee, Bureaucrats, Peasants, and Politicians in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Oca, Rosa Elena Montes de, “The State and the Peasants,” in Authoritarianism in Mexico, Reyna, José Luis and Weinert, Richard S., eds. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Affairs, 1977), 47–66Google Scholar; Hardy, Clarisa, El Estado y los campesinos: La Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1984).Google Scholar

3 Indeed, I take it that peasant revolt, and political violence generally, is but political action by other means and not a phenomenon suí generis that demands explanation in its own right. Cf. Gamson, William A., The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1975), 39.Google Scholar

4 Laclau, Ernesto, “Tesis acerca la forma hegemónica de la política, ”in Hegemonía y alternativas políticas en América Latina, Campo, Julio Labastida Martín del, ed. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985), 19–44.Google Scholar

5 Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

6 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, ch. 1.

7 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, especially ch. 8.

8 See Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also the stimulating, if overly schematic, review of recent social theory in Wendt, Alexander E., “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41:3 (Summer 1987), 335–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Scott recognizes the difficulty here. “There is no way,” he writes, , “in which the participants' interpretations of the impact of the green revolution in the [the region of] Kedah can be deduced from the crude economic facts” (Weapons, 180)Google Scholar. As it happens, these facts are interpreted by the inhabitants in largely personalistic terms, outcomes as the result of the personal choices of local actors. This is a strategic choice on the part of the poor, Scott argues, because local actors are the ones these poor can confront. But, he admits, , “if there were a movement or political party that supported security of tenure, land reform, or full employment in rural areas, the realm of plausible action might be appreciably widened” (Weapons, n. 87, p. 183).Google Scholar

10 But, it should be noted, in a rational response that is socially constructed. Scott is, in this respect, several steps ahead of his critics, who deny the social character of the individual's construction of his or her choices even as they attempt to explain it. See Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1979).Google Scholar

11 David Laitin has demonstrated, for instance, how even “primal” religious cleavages, with considerable resonance in ongoing patterns of economic competition and strife, have been overlooked, and sometimes actively suppressed, in Nigerian politics as a result of the dominance of other sorts of cleavages in ordinary political discourse. See Laitin, David D., Hegemony and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).Google Scholar

12 Scott, , Weapons, 204.Google Scholar

13 Ideology in practice, whatever that term might mean when used to describe a tool of analysis or a system of ideas, is first of all discourse, language in use. Analysts systematize it only at their own risk, always in danger of rigidifying what is in reality a constantly changing usage and distorting thereby the real meaning of ideology in everyday affairs. I speak by preference, therefore, of discourse rather than ideology.

14 This is not to suggest that discursive change must originate outside the village; on the contrary, we will see that peasants are active in altering the discourse organizers intouce, and some, of course, play the role of organizer in their own community.

15 I am drawing here on the distinction developed by Paul Ricoeur between language (or langue) as a self-contained system of signs, and discourse as language in use, language as attempt to make sense of the world. See Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

16 For a comprehensive inventory and anatomy of such factors, see Tilly, Charles, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978).Google Scholar

17 See Nisbett, Richard E. and Wílson, T. D., “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review, no. 84: 231–59.Google Scholar

18 See Womack, John, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Random House, 1968) for the best general account of this element of the Revolution of 1910–20.Google Scholar

19 Even the rightist National Action Party (PAN) claims Zapata, whom they represent as a peasant smallholder who rose to defend private property and who today would favor dissolution of the ejidos, the communal landholdings of the agrarian reform sector created after the revolution.

20 Town government, though formally more open to popular control, is severely restricted in scope. Despite its size, El Lago is but a satellite of the neighboring cabecera municipal (equivalent to the county seat), a smaller but richer community that has effectively controlled politics in the area under its control since time immemorial. (There is some evidence that this town was the cabecera, the head, of this region even under the Aztecs.) With plentiful irrigated land, the cabecera's inhabitants have been able to raise their standard of living, educate their children, and maintain political power. With political power at their disposal, they have been able to channel taxes into improvements in their own town while leaving other towns in the municipio to beg the state and federal governments for aid.

21 For a similar story of the depletion of natural resources and their replacement with commercial products, see Gudeman, Steven, The Demise of a Rural Economy: From Subsistence to Capitalism in a Latin American Village (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).Google Scholar

22 The easy acceptance of family planning ideas in El Lago is probably a sign of the precariousness of the economic balance. Some families find security in numbers; others have decided it makes more sense to invest heavily in a few children. The heightened prestige of education in the town supports the latter strategy; the difficulties which the educated encounter in procuring work close to home supports the former. Family size, education, and work opportunities for the children are the subjects of constant conversation.

23 See Grindle, Merilee S., State and Countryside: Development Policy and Agrarian Politics in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) on the changing ideology and politics of agricultural and agrarian policy in Mexico since 1940.Google Scholar

24 See Esteva, Struggle. Rubio, Blanca, Resistencia campesina y explotación rural en México (Mexico City: Era, 1987)Google Scholar, traces both the changing locus of protest over the last twenty years and its content to distinctive changes in the agricultural economies of the various regions of Mexico. It is worth noting that the agrarianist ideology of the Mexican state, and its shifting interpretation by successive administrations, provides both opportunities and incentives for peasant groups to mount their protests. See Foley, Michael W., “Agenda for Mobilization: The Agrarian Question and Popular Mobilization,” Latin American Research Review (forthcoming).Google Scholar

25 The so-called “base Christian community” movement, from the Spanish comunidades cristianas de base or “base ecclesial community” (CEB, comunidades eclesíales de base), grew out of attempts to create social action “cells” in the barrios and villages of Latin America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Originally under the auspices of the Catholic Church and vehemently anti-Communist in orientation, the movement's techniques and focus on organizing the poor for community action soon spread to Protestant denominations as well; and in Chile, Brazil, Central America, and elsewhere, BCC leaders drew closer and closer to parties of the left and occasionally to revolutionary movements. Today the movement is widely known as a leftist-populist challenge both to national authorities throughout Latin America and in many cases to local church hierarchies as well. For an informal introduction to the movement, see Lemoux, Penny, Cry of the People (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 389–408Google Scholar. Mutchler, David E., The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1971)Google Scholar, provides an “inside look” at the orrigins of the movement in Chile and Colombia, and Smith's, Brian H.The Church and Politics in Chile: Challenges to Modern Catholicism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982)Google Scholar is an important study of the shifting strategies of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Finally, Daniel H. Levine and Scott Mainwaring provide important insights into the different ways in which national church hierarchies have shaped the movement; see their “Religion and Popular Protest in Latin America: Contrasting Experience,” in Power and Popular Protest, Eckstein, Susan, ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar

26 See Freire, Paolo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1983) and Cultural Action for Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

27 Manual de la Communídad Eclesial de Base (Tabasco, Mexico: n.p., n.d.), 35–36.Google Scholar

28 Estatutos Cajas Populares de la Unidad Cooperativa Independiente-Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (Cuernavaca: 31 01 1984).Google Scholar

29 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from villagers are drawn from the author's interviews conducted between May 5 and June 30, 1985, which were taperecorded on site in El Lago and subsequently transcribed. Translations are my own.

30 There is widespread agreement that ejidal officials in the past have overseen the illegal sale of communal properties to landlords in neighboring towns; but when people refer to stolen lands, they also have in mind accusations that people from neighboring towns have rented land from poorer Laguennos, or taken ejidal plots as security for loans, and then held on to the land in question, claiming rightful title.

31 I would not want to suggest that the linkage between “personal” and “social” morality implied in Catholic usage blocks social action or would inevitably move it in more conservative directions. “Sririialist morality” plays a similar linking role in many secular movements of the left, lending both the appearance and the reality of moral probity to a leadership dependent on popular approbation. “Justice” conceived as Felipa conceives it, however, allows her and other members of the BCC movement in El Lago to focus their energies on largely “spiritual” and educational efforts, perhaps at the expense of their political energies.

32 Moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg has recently wrestled with the question. See Kohlberg, Lawrence and Candee, Daniel, “The Relationship of Moral Judgment to Moral Action,” in Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development, Kusiness, William M. and Gewirtz, Jacob L., eds. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984), 52–73Google Scholar. Barrington Moore observes that for people to take action, they need not just a sense that they are suffering an injustice but also the sense that they can do something about it. See Moore, Barrington, Jr. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 459.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 This was written before the dramatic shift in Mexican politics in the elections of 1988, but the emergence of a unified leftist opposition has only exacerbated the divisions among groups like those being considered here over the question of partisan alignment.

34 It appears that women can more readily do this since the appearance (in the 1960s) of molinos de nixramal—commercial mills for the grinding of maize. A task which formerly took most women as much as four hours a day can now be accomplished by sending a youngster of ten to the mill with a bucket of maize. University of California, Davis, historian Arnold Bauer (in personal conversations, July 1988) suggests that the exigencies of tortilla production before the appearance of the mills must have shaped a great many aspects of life, including even the conduct of military affairs—one recalls Zapata's soldiers reduced to begging in the streets of Mexico City because they had been cut off from the Morelos villages which supplied them with their daily tortillas.

35 Elsa Chaney has observed that throughout Latin America such issues and solutions tend to constitute the parameters for political action by women and that even women deeply involved in politics tend to take on the role of supermadre, thus defining their “public activity as an extension of their traditional family role to the public arena,” in Chaney, Elsa M., Supremadre: Women and Politics in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 159et passim. That the reasons for this are material as well as “cultural” is apparent in the case of El Lago. Whether and how far these parameters might be breached is being tested at this moment in the town, as the silence of the men has had another, more paradoxical effect: It has driven some of the women into the streets, into politics, to occupy the place which the men have left vacant. That women turned out at all for the municipal election of 1984 was something of a revolution in local politics. The jeers of the men did not keep them away, in part because they had organized to elect their own candidate, the nephew of their leader, as ayudante, or mayor. In fact, the women carried the day, as did the “reform” candidate in the ejidal elections; and when the previous incumbents refused to release records to the new authorities, the women stormed the ejidal warehouse where the records and sacks of fertilizer illegally hoarded by their opponents were stored. One of their leaders engaged in a gun battle with one of the caciques, while her companions chased off his confederates with a rain of stones and insults.Google Scholar

For all the excitement, the capture of power has not been very satisfying; and women were talking of running one of their own in subsequent elections. It is not at all clear, however, what the women's party (which includes both movement participants and others, but none from the leadership of the BCC and cooperative movement) stands for, apart from “reform” and an end to the old factionalism and corruption. Their leader, who participates in the BCC movement, is also local president of Campesino Women, the women's organization of the PRI's National Confederation of Campesinos—from which leaders in the organizing effort have kept a studied distance. Her nephew, who was a member of the “socialist” faction in town (from the old PPS, Popular Socialist Party) switched allegiance to the PRI halfway through his term, when it became clear that state and federal aid flowed more readily through the channels of the official party. Local power, finally, is severely circumscribed, and the capture of town posts by no means ensures results even on the level of the municipio.

36 Searle, John R., Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 5; Austin, J. L., How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).Google Scholar

37 See Parkin's, David very illuminating discussion of such a case in The Cultural Definition of Political Response (London: Academic Press, 1978).Google Scholar

38 Oberschall, Anthony, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall, 1973), 28–9.Google Scholar

39 Wilson, James Q. develops the notion of “solidary incentives” in Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 33–45.Google Scholar See also Fireman, Bruce and Gamson, William A., “Utilitarian Logic in the Resource Mobilization Perspective,” in The Dynamics of Social Movements, Zald, Mayer N. and McCarthy, John D., eds. (Cambridge, M.A.: Winthrop, 1979).Google Scholar For a more extended discussion of the role of moral appeals in political mobilization, see Foley, Michael W., “The Language of Contention: Political Language, Moral Judgment and Peasant Mobilization in Contemporary Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, 1986).Google Scholar

40 Moore, , Injustice, 459.Google Scholar

41 Gun, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 33–34.Google Scholar

42 This suggests the fundamental weakness in Lawrence Kohlberg's attempted resolution of the disjunction between moral judgment and the decision to act on that judgment. In keeping with his Kantían, decidedly atomístic, conception of human behavior, Kohlberg sees the second moment as the product of a certain 'judgment of responsibility' toward oneself and one's principles; but such a judgment of responsibility may equally well be motivated by social criteria, ranging from fear of ostracism to a broader or narrower sense of obligation to others. See Kohlberg and Candee, “The Relationship of Moral Judgment to Moral Action”; the critiques by Haan, Norma, “Two Moralities in Action Contexts: Relationships to Thought, Ego Regulation, and Development,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36:3 (1978), 286–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Hechter's, Michael rational choice theory of group solidarity, Principles of Group Solidarity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), is a subtle but ultimately unsatisfactory attempt to subsume an important variant of moral choice, the sense of obligation to a larger community, under the narrow rubric of “self-interest.”Google Scholar

43 Cobb, Jonathan and Senett, Richard, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Random House, 1973).Google Scholar