The Unsettled Sector

NGOs and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizenship in Rural Mexico

Analiese Richard

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804799195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

In late twentieth century Mexico, the NGO boom was hailed as an harbinger of social change and democratic transition, with NGOs poised to transform the relationship between states and civil society on a global scale. And yet, great as the expectations were for NGOs to empower the poor and disenfranchised, their work is rooted in much older civic and cultural traditions. Arguably, they are just as much an accomplice in neoliberal governance. Analiese Richard seeks to determine what the growth of NGOs means for the future of citizenship and activism in neoliberal democracies, where a widening chasm between rich and poor threatens democratic ideals and institutions.

Analyzing the growth of NGOs in Tulancingo, Hidalgo, from the 1970s to the present, The Unsettled Sector explores the NGOs' evolving network of relationships with donors, target communities, international partners, state agencies, and political actors. It reaches beyond the campesinos and farmlands of Tulancingo to make sense of the NGO as an institutional form. Richard argues that only if we see NGOs as they are—bridges between formal politics and public morality—can we understand the opportunities and limits for social solidarity and citizenship in an era of neoliberal retrenchment.

CHAPTER 1

Developing Rural Citizens

Old and New Liberalisms

The language of citizenship gained global prominence in the nineteenth century with the formation of modern nation-states. It was revived and reworked in the late twentieth century as the capacity of those nation-states to manage the collective lives of citizens was challenged from without and within. The formation of citizens has traditionally been approached from two distinct perspectives. The first emphasizes citizenship as a corollary of state-building and economic development projects, which entail the production of particular sorts of subjects capable of animating new social worlds. The other examines how “sovereignty of the people” is enacted through associational life, generating practices and strategies that enhance the capacity of citizens to generate social power within particular domains (Bellamy 2008). In Mexico, renewed attention to the citizen as subject and the practices of associational life have coincided with the reconfiguration of the rights and responsibilities of citizens during a protracted restructuring of the economy and formal political system.

Like those of many postcolonial nations, Mexico’s liberal institutions have historically been built on regimes of exclusion that rendered indigenous and rural peoples citizens in name only. Their access to the formal rights and rites of citizenship has thus been limited in practice, despite their participation in other forms of local association and governance. In order to understand the role of NGOs in producing and responding to these changes, it is first necessary to examine the political and social contexts from which they emerged. Mexico has a long history of cultural revolutions in which contested projects of rule have been negotiated after extended periods of social upheaval (Corrigan 1994). At each of these historical junctures, different approaches have been proposed for balancing individual freedoms with collective entitlements, as well as for reconciling European and US political models with indigenous forms of government and social organization (Hale 1989; Lomnitz 2001). This chapter traces the historical development of the citizenship question in post-Independence Mexico, with particular attention to the ways in which rural denizens have been conceptualized as dependent subjects incapable of full participation in public life. It focuses on the historical interplay between liberal ideas of individuated citizenship and corporatist forms of solidarity and reciprocity, a dynamic that has shaped the outcome of cyclical political, economic, and social crises over the course of modern Mexican history. Both nineteenth-century liberalism and the more recent neoliberal reforms produced deep dislocations in the Mexican countryside, changing how rural people were incorporated into the body politic.¹ These ideas shaped the worldviews and strategies of early NGO organizers in rural Hidalgo, as well as Hidalgan campesinos’ own understandings of themselves as political subjects.

Campesinos, Civic Values, and Public Morality

The campesino has long served as a symbolic anchor for public discourse around Mexican national identity and the nation’s path to modernity. This symbolic value of the campesino in national political discourse draws from other values—moral, historical, cultural—purported to inhere in actual rural denizens, as well as from the economic and political value of the countryside to the city in the quest for modern capitalist development. The moral character and citizenship capacity of campesinos repeatedly surfaces in historical debates over Mexico’s “agrarian question,” a term that first appeared in economics literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.² Byres explains: “In its broadest meaning, the agrarian question may be defined as the continuing existence in the countryside of a poor country of substantive obstacles to an unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development, both inside and outside agriculture” (1991, 9).³ During both of the fin de siècle crises under analysis here, the relations between country and city were played out in public discourse around the moral and civic character of rural people, whose supposed backwardness figured as a major impediment to the economic and political development of the nation.

In addition to the political uses of the campesino as public symbol, Joseph and Nugent (1994) point out that during each of the three major social upheavals in Mexican national history—the War of Independence, the Reforma, and the Revolution—powerful antagonists attempted to mobilize the support of rural people. Drawing on the work of Corrigan and Sayer (1985), they argue that in each of these historical moments, a complex articulation between popular cultures and projects of state formation has produced a cultural revolution—a transformation not just in how people are ruled and how goods are produced and exchanged but also in how people make sense of the world and their place in it. These cultural revolutions give birth to the idioms through which state power is organized and exercised and through which subordinated groups must struggle for emancipation. The production of meaning and the production of power relations are thus coterminous.⁴ Accordingly, the Revolution was not the starting point for building the political idioms of modern Mexico; rather, many of the symbols and tropes that would later animate public discourses about the nation, including the iconic figure of the campesino, can be traced to earlier periods.

The concept of public morality is useful for deciphering the place of rural people in the citizen problematics of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it reveals the often informal ways in which political and social change has been cultivated in rural areas. Escalante Gonzalbo (1992) argues that conflicts among competing republican, liberal, and democratic traditions forged the characteristic features of Mexican political order and public morality (moral publica) during the nineteenth century. He uses the concept of public morality to call attention to the regularities of conduct in public life through which civic values are manifested. Even in situations where governments are illegitimate or ineffective, institutions are discredited, or political values are not widely shared, public morality undergirds political order by enabling actors to interpret and predict the behavior of others. Although rural people were for the most part excluded from full participation in the formal political system for much of the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, attending to the development and dynamism of public morality enables us to appreciate the ways in which they participated in the political order and were represented in public discourse during successive historical periods. This in turn sheds light on the operating assumptions of the early development NGOs that began working in rural Hidalgo in the 1970s. It also helps to explain how Hidalgan campesinos’ own understandings of their political agency changed under neoliberalism.

Pastoral Predicaments: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism and Rural Hidalgo

Several important features of Mexico’s competing great traditions of public morality emerged between 1821 and 1880, roughly the period from the end of the War of Independence until the beginning of a period of prolonged stability with the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (Escalante Gonzalbo 1992). During this era, a violent political conflict emerged between the Conservatives, who favored the maintenance of the colonial power structure with minor modifications, and the Liberals, who sought to modernize Mexico by restructuring property relations, promoting private capital, and establishing the state as the manager of economic development. The nineteenth-century liberal vision, enshrined in the Reform Laws of the 1850s and 1860s, proclaimed an end to the legacy of the colonial era and the beginning of the new nation’s first modernization project. However, governing the largely rural and indigenous population and fragmented territories that made up the new nation presented particular problems (Hale 1989). How was Mexico’s government to articulate rural to urban and make modern citizens out of isolated communities dominated by the alliance of Church and hacienda? This grand undertaking demanded the creation of new mechanisms for political representation and participation, and the outcome set the stage for future debates around agrarian questions and the nature of rural citizenship.

From the beginning, matters of civic order and morality were intimately linked. The creation of a democratic political system was framed as a civilizing mission. Creole elites were convinced that Mexico could be remade as a member of the modern community of nations if only it could cast off its colonial legacy and find the correct model for creating a new political system. They looked abroad for inspiration, primarily to France, Spain, and the United States. “Almost everyone believed in good faith that this imaginary order was possible, that it was a fact in the ‘civilized’ world. They did not know, or did not want to know, of the violence of public life in Spain, French authoritarianism, or the corruption in the US. It was due to this . . . that pragmatism would always carry the stigma of being a transaction with barbarism” (Escalante Gonzalbo 1992, 18). Different political factions advocated for the adoption of different foreign models, but all of them concurred that Mexico’s seeming inability to simultaneously foster popular sovereignty and maintain territorial supremacy stemmed from some basic moral failure on the part of the citizenry. Mexican liberals despaired of ever modernizing Mexico so long as they were forced to negotiate with large landowners, regional strongmen, and various intermediaries in order to retain effective control over the national territory.

Active Citizenship and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism

The creation of an active citizenry entailed a radically new conceptualization of the body politic. The civic model the liberals sought to institute during that formative period in Mexico’s history rested on a particular definition of the citizen as the basic unit of social life. This citizen was imagined as a rational individual, constructed in explicit contrast to hierarchical and corporate structures of the type that prevailed in colonial society. This civic model distinguished between a private sphere, where self-interest ruled, and a public sphere, where individuals behaved in a responsible, solidary manner in addressing collective problems. The key to modernizing Mexico was seen to be the production of a modern citizenry.

In the early days of the new Republic, suffrage rights formed the core of political rights as a result of their central role in political representation. The ideals and rights of liberal citizenship were predicated on a series of constitutive exclusions, which were highly racialized and gendered (Alonso 2005). While property ownership and literacy were not erected as barriers to full political citizenship, women, slaves, servants, and others classified as economically dependent were disqualified from suffrage. Liberalism promised a home for all in modernity, but some subjects would need to be converted or elevated before they could be incorporated into the nation. Hence the production of rural citizens became, in many instances, a pastoral project. And while the progressive extension of suffrage was viewed as an expansion of the modern state, extended suffrage was also seen as a problem for the maintenance of political stability. Electoral practices often failed to conform to normative expectations. Sabato notes that “the key to electoral success was the creation and mobilization of clienteles in networks . . . Actual voters were far removed from the image of the autonomous, individual citizen in full command of his political rights, who attends the polls peacefully to cast his ballot” (2001, 1301). Instead, clientelist networks were mobilized as collective forces to participate in electoral processes characterized by violent confrontation and negotiation. Even so, in the mid-1800s only a very small percentage of Mexico’s population actually participated in elections.

Forment (2003) and others have argued that too much emphasis has been placed on electoral politics, leading scholars to neglect the historical significance of other forms of civic action, especially the forms of association and sociability that developed in concert with these projects of political modernization. The roots of these institutions and practices can be traced to the late eighteenth century, when Western Europe witnessed the “spread of associations of a new type, based on the free will of their individual members, [which] inaugurated a whole new set of communicative practices presumably governed by the laws of reason” (Sabato 2001, 1305). The expansion of civic and voluntary associations was viewed as an ideal site for producing these new subjects and forms of collective action. In Mexico, however, membership in such groups was limited almost exclusively to elite and urban populations. Ideas about citizenship were diffused and debated in political clubs and by a growing number of newspaper readers but also circulated among members of Freemason organizations and tertulias, informal salons that met in coffeehouses and private homes.

On the whole, the Tulancingo Valley remained deeply conservative and staunchly Catholic throughout the Independence and Reform periods. In contrast, Pachuca’s role as a cradle of Hidalgan liberalism is commonly attributed to its history as a mining center. The arrival of British mining companies in the early nineteenth century propitiated the immigration of English and Welsh technicians and operators. As their numbers grew, and especially after the 1857 Constitution established freedom of religion, they established their own Methodist congregations. Members included both immigrants and lifelong Pachucans, the majority of them educated. Among them was Marcelino Duran, a doctor who helped to found Hidalgo’s first institution of higher education as well as a newspaper, La Libertad. These new congregations were later bolstered by the arrival of Methodist missionaries from the United States, who helped to expand church membership and found a series of schools in locations throughout the state (Menes Llaguno 2006, 190–191). The new civic associations they established, like the liberal paradigm of citizenship itself, were adapted from foreign models. The new forms of sociability that they fostered took root in a limited way in elite circles, while communal institutions and more traditional forms of sociability, such as religious brotherhoods or confraternities, held fast in the rural areas.

“The figure of the modern citizen proposed by the liberals—the abstract and universal individual, free and equal to the rest . . . overlapped with more traditional notions of the body politic that evoked the institutions of the colonial and even pre-colonial times: the pueblos, the communities, the subject, the vecino (neighbor or resident)” (Sabato 2001, 1292–1293). The process of cultivating citizens was a complicated one, an arena of negotiation rather than one of seamless unfolding. In rural areas, the project of political individuation often came up against entrenched forms of corporatism and intermediation, rooted in the moral economy of peasant communities as well as their protracted histories of spiritual and military conquest.

Civilizing Rural Society

To politicians and writers of the nineteenth century, the Mexican countryside was problematic terrain for cultivating Enlightenment values or democracy. Rural rebellion—rife throughout the period—presented resistance to both state authority and the rights of private capital alike. Urban elites hardly expected rural people to uphold a political order that had subjugated them for centuries, yet this also meant that the latter were suspected of lacking the will to identify with the new nation over and beyond their local and corporate loyalties, and hence to participate fully in civic life as rational individuals. The very marginalization of rural people from political life, it was thought, betrayed a lack of capacity for citizenship.⁵ This was especially true in Hidalgo, which became infamous for the prevalence of armed banditry during and after the French Intervention (1861–1867). Apart from the treacherous terrain, rendered nearly impassable by floods in the rainy season, the insecurity of Hidalgan roads was legendary. Most of the main routes between Mexico City and the coast of Veracruz were controlled by organized groups who robbed and kidnapped travelers, often with the tacit cooperation of remote indigenous and mestizo villages that sheltered them. Property owners, officials, merchants, and mine operators traveled with uniformed companies of armed guards (Herrera Cabañas 1995, 18–19). Indeed, a nineteenth-century bandit hideout on the outskirts of Tulancingo, a hillside cave called the Devil’s Hole (el Hoyo del Diablo), is still legendary among residents even though the thick forest that once hid it has long since been cut down. The national political class felt it incumbent upon them to “civilize” the rural and indigenous peoples and rid them of their relations of dependence on the owners of the great landed estates. Nonetheless, while campesinos were not regarded as potential citizens, they remained an important political resource for members of the political class and were to become a key symbol in the post-Revolutionary national pantheon.

Public Morality and Rural Society

Although campesinos were not thought to be endowed with civic virtue, they did possess their own idioms of public morality. Escalante Gonzalbo (1992) argues, following Wolf, that for rural Mexicans of the nineteenth century, the most important reference point was the community, imagined not as a straightforward demographic unit but rather as a kind of political structure. As towns and republicas de indios⁶ during the colonial period, many rural communities had retained a measure of autonomy derived from control over their lands and the persistence of traditional forms of self-government. However, Spanish authorities converted the tradition of faena into a form of tribute. In place of the traditional mutual assistance functions of the calpulli,⁷ Catholic missionaries introduced the confraternity (cofradia), a civil-religious association of laypeople devoted to the worship of a particular saint, relic, or sanctuary. Cofradias organized charitable works and provided for the observance of yearly rituals, under the close supervision of the Catholic hierarchy. Catholic missionaries also sanctioned the practice of compadrazgo, or ritual coparenthood, in asso...