Mexicos Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934

However, less is known about the legal and judicial systems that drove those social experiments.

Journal of Latin American Geography

In this work, historian Timothy M. James seeks to understand why the Mexican Constitution did not immediately trigger labor and agrarian reform. The topic is unusual because Mexico is not particularly known for its constitutional jurisprudence. Although the Porfiriato era regularly ignored the protection of constitutional rights, little research has addressed why there was nearly a three-decade lag in implementing the full guarantees of the Mexican Revolution.

Jurisprudential sources include the writings of jurists, legal professionals, and federal tribunal writings. In turn, they frame and grant protection to constitutional rights. James argues that constitutional social rights have been unduly focused on legislative versus judicial matters. In other words, to reduce the study of law anywhere to only legislation produces glaring oversight in the literature about the Mexican Revolution, and that means understanding how the Supreme Court foot-dragged in implementing socioeconomic rights.

Supreme Court under Justice Roberts will note similarities. Four brief chapters and a conclusion frame this book. James approaches this period by sub-dividing them into four time frames and outlining key judicial acts that molded the use of amparo.

Despite the Revolution, little substantive social and economic reform takes root in years immediately thereafter. Chapter Three hones in on a particular labor provisions Article and describes how the more unionized northern states were more successful in implementing labor reforms. Elsewhere, though, new labor provisions were thwarted by court rulings. Lozada slaughtered people in one instance. Though to be sure, his fiercest opponent Liberal Antonio Rojas conducted a harsh campaign in response.

Much is missing from the story as Brittsan tells it. First, as mentioned above, we do not learn much about the Lozada rank and file. Though the majority of the people of the canton were indigenous, were his supporters mostly indios or mestizos?

Were they victims of the Liberal reforms? Did they lose their collective lands? Brittsan discovered that there were many land disputes, to be sure, and that Lozada set up commissions to arbitrate, but it is not clear that these conflicts were the result of the Liberal reforms. Did Lozada have support among local leadership at the village level?

Did he have to negotiate constantly with these local leaders? Brittsan found that Lozada held annual gatherings of the villages and presumably their leaders attended. How did he raise his army? Were soldiers volunteers or conscripts? How big was the army? Was his army always this large?

Did his followers pillage, plunder, and rape, like so many other rebels?

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The Zapatistas did later on, for example. Did they wear out their welcome in the pueblos, like so many other insurgent groups, when their demands for supplies and their rough treatment of the villagers grew oppressive? What role did intervillage rivalries have in the revolt? These were the main beneficiaries of the confiscation of church lands and privatization of collective holdings elsewhere. Did they back Lozada? Did he terrorize them? Because he was on the losing side of the civil wars at midcentury, and the victorious Liberals wrote the history that ensued, Lozada was consigned to the ash heap of history until very recently.

The Liberal agenda—consisting of a brutal campaign against the Roman Catholic Church, advocacy of free trade and secular education, and the privatization of indigenous collectively held lands—was in his estimate a failure, because the overwhelming majority of Yucatecans opposed it. On the other hand, Richmond maintains that Yucatecan elites, though far from unified, favored Liberal policies and attempted to force them on the peninsula. Richmond unabashedly makes the Liberals the villains of the story.

The Maya, who made up most of the population of the peninsula, never surrendered to either the Spaniards or their successors, the Mexicans. Particularly in the eastern regions of the state, the Maya operated their own independent entities, consistently fighting the Yucatecan and federal governments to a standstill.

The most notable manifestation of this resistance was the Caste War. The conflict with the Maya, which was not over until after if then , was a particular problem; successive state governments failed to put down the rebellion because they did not have sufficient funding to prosecute the campaign against the Maya. Second, from the beginning of the Mexican nation, non-Mayan Yucatecans exhibited an ornery streak of independence, on multiple occasions proclaiming their autonomy from Mexico and in some instances looking for another country to join through annexation.

The two decades of Yucatecan politics under study are confusing.

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There were multiple groups in conflict. First, the Caste War cast a shadow over all aspects of peninsular society, economy, and politics for over half a century, from to Fourth, though Richmond does not explain these, there were varied economic interests, such as those of the planters who grew henequen, those who grew sugar cane, and cattle ranchers. It is quite difficult to keep track of all the intrigues, shifting alliances, overthrows, and revolts.

One charlatan followed another into the governorship. Most important, we do not know who made up the various factions. He presents a list of governors, sometimes with short biographies. But we do not know who supported them, other than the generic Liberals. While we know pretty clearly why the Maya were discontented, it is not evident why anyone else, the people of Campeche, for example, were willing to rebel with armed force. Was the conflict all about local autonomy? Both Brittsan and Richmond write within the bounds of regional history, but unlike the most recent research they reinforce the narratives of chaos and personalism, whose shelf life expired long ago.

The authors are telling the story from the margins. Political manipulations among generals and politicians take center stage. Certainly, there is good history here. The problems lie in the disjuncture between the argument and the narrative. Both Brittsan and Richmond maintain undoubtedly correctly that there was forceful resistance to the nationally victorious Liberal agenda in the countryside.

But the stories they tell are not about the substance and operation of the resistance, but rather the political and personal machinations that accompanied it. Three of the books under consideration here explore terms that, while they are very familiar to historians, are not well understood: The explanation of these terms in terms of both abstract concepts and concrete examples provides historians with some interesting insights into nineteenth-century politics in Mexico.

They nonetheless represent a return to an earlier approach to history. In the nineteenth century as related by Simpson and others, the pronunciamientos were a symbol of the constant disruptions and discontinuities of the politics of the post-independence era. They were seemingly endless in number—more than 1, from to —and their names were mostly forgettable.

The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, — , explores in depth these phenomena. Next Fowler identifies the reactive pronunciamientos pronunciamientos de adhesion. These usually incorporated additional demands to the original. These pronunciamientos often became regional start-ups in their own right. Fowler sees a third type in the pronunciamiento de rechazo , or counter-pronunciamiento, in which an entity, such as a garrison, announces its support of the government against another pronunciamiento. A fourth kind was the follow-up, which petitioners issued to clarify their demands or react to counters from the powers that were.

Interestingly, even though these proclamations were extralegal, they relatively infrequently led to violence. In the first half of the nineteenth century, only fifteen of these plans had national impact. Furthermore, Fowler maintains that these plans were important because they expressed the ideas of the factions and political parties of their era and were a means through which news was spread, politicizing the population. Finally, the preponderance of the pronunciamientos were not announced by the military.

Fowler, quite in agreement with both Brittsan and Richmond, argues that the underlying cause of discontent—which in turn resulted in the plethora of pronunciamientos—was the ongoing attacks on the Catholic Church begun by the Bourbons at the outset of the eighteenth century and continued even more vigorously by nineteenth-century Mexican Liberals.



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This persecution politicized the countryside. Fowler also reinforces the notion that politics were local and that upheavals, revolts, and movements were almost entirely local in origins. Fowler discerns, through close reading of the pronunciamientos and putting them in the broader context, the major issues that dominated the decade after independence. The roles of the military and regional authorities were paramount. Furthermore, the defense of regional autonomy and the quest for meaningful political representation were also crucial elements of the discourse.

What emerges in the decade or so that follows is that subalterns nonelites were thoroughly engaged, not only understanding the issues but in a few cases participating in the promulgation of the pronunciamientos. Fowler discovers a number of the proclamations put forth by indigenous peoples. Liberals and Conservatives alike denounced them, even though, of course, they would proclaim one, if it suited their purposes.

Fowler sees the s, too, as a turning point, for the pronunciamientos became more national, more frequent, more violent, more brutal, and concerned less with negotiating than with overthrowing the current incumbent regime. Mexicans used them as a tool to preserve the constitution whichever of the several from government abuse.

Anyone who was anyone—every major politician—at one time or another participated in a pronunciamiento. The study makes an interesting contribution with its insistence on the importance of the at times ubiquitous but little understood amparo. James points out that the revolutionary Constituent Convention of —, which formulated the Constitution of , reached consensus about the role of the federal judiciary along similar lines. The delegates were surprisingly knowledgeable about the nineteenth-century debates about the place of the judiciary and the function and scope of amparo.

The delegates pushed to strengthen judicial autonomy and supremacy. They sought, too, to protect individual rights and believed that the amparo suit was the best guarantee against despotism. The crucial argument at the convention concerned the extent to which individual rights were to be protected when they conflicted with social rights. The new social rights, in fact, were not intended to be protected by amparo; only individual rights would be protected.

However, the Mexican tradition of judicial protection of liberal rights to security, property, and liberty would, of course, be used by opponents of social reforms.

Mexico's Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934

The tool to protect those rights was amparo. Unfortunately, during the s it became the primary obstacle to the implementation of the social rights inherent in the Constitution of After thousands of amparos were issued by the court, stalling agrarian reform, constitutional amendments in , , and took away the strident independence of the court lifetime tenure for the justices in particular and removed agrarian reform from its jurisdiction. These jefes exercised legislative, judicial, and administrative functions. The oppression of the jefes is often presented as one of the primary causes of revolutionary discontent during the first decade of the twentieth century.

For much of the nineteenth century the relationship between the pueblos, municipalities, state governments, and central government were not one-sided. There was room for maneuver. In the state of Mexico, and probably everywhere else, political power depended on the balance of factions and the ability to master the informal client networks. The districts the jefes administered in the state of Mexico consisted of a considerable number of sub-entities: They fought to defend their perceived rights and privileges.

Primarily they struggled over land, forests, and water. There were ethnic and religious differences as well.