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Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest

and Authoritarian Political Culture during the
Long Sixties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2013), pp. xvi+339, \$65.00, hb and e-book.
KEITH BREWSTER
Journal of Latin American Studies / Volume 46 / Issue 03 / August 2014, pp 606 - 608
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X1400087X, Published online: 21 July 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022216X1400087X

How to cite this article:
KEITH BREWSTER (2014). Journal of Latin American Studies, 46, pp 606-608
doi:10.1017/S0022216X1400087X
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 Book Reviews
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().

doi:./SXX

Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political

Culture during the Long Sixties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ),
pp. xvi + , $., hb and e-book.
In this meticulously researched study, Jaime Pensado traces the rise of student
disaection in mid-twentieth-century Mexico through two relatively unexploited
perspectives: the introduction and consolidation of porrismo (student thuggery/
provocation) and charrismo estudiantil (student clientelism). In doing so he reveals
important methods by which competing external inuences (school authorities,
government ocials, political power brokers, print media) sought to direct Mexican
student politics and culture from the s onwards.
A fundamental argument of Pensados book is that the Student Movement
was much more complicated than previously portrayed in the historiography.
Specically, he questions the dominant narrative of the intellectual classes that tends
to overstate public support for the Movement and inates the singular signicance of
the Movements bloody climax on October for the development of Mexican
democracy.
The opening page of the book directly quotes from a letter written by an
appreciative citizen who congratulated President Daz Ordaz for taking appropriate
measures to counter Machiavellian manoeuvres by foreign elements bent on undermining the nations stability and corrupting its youth. As other studies have noted,
such letters of support were not the isolated utterances of right-wing fanatics, but
represented a fundamental concern within Mexicos population regarding perceived
attacks on hierarchical structures within the home and society.
Pensado argues that such views were not conned to the late s but represented
a pattern that had begun in previous decades; one in which outrageous, often public,
displays of youth non-conformity contributed to an underlying alienation of student
culture and behaviour from mainstream society. He suggests that the strike at the
Instituto Politcnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institution, IPN) and the strike
at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (National Autonomous University
of Mexico, UNAM) in were key moments in changing the ocial perception
of student activism. Prior to this, student non-conformity was more likely to have
been benignly tolerated, by diverse authorities, as boisterous pranks. Afterwards,
student unrest was viewed as subversive and a potential threat to national stability.
Importantly, Pensado identies the UNAM strike of as the birth of a modern
New Left form of student opposition in Mexico that would see students making links
with labour unions, trying to breach previous socio-economic gaps between themselves
and others, and uniting with their counterparts at the IPN in a shared struggle against
state oppression. This, he judges, was crucial in setting a pattern of allegiances that
would continue throughout the s, culminating in the Student Movement
and its brutal suppression.
The innovative aspect of such ndings, however, is Pensados analysis of the
extent to which non-student interests often sponsored public displays of student
excess as part of a process of clientelism. The awarding of false degrees, sponsorship of
lavish parties and even enjoying access to national presidents were just some of the
ways in which student leaders (charros) were able to gain and maintain the admiration
of their peers. As such, they became intermediaries through whom campus politics
could be manipulated towards the objectives of their sponsors. The other aspect of
student manipulation was the role that agents provocateurs ( porros) played within

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Book Reviews
campus politics. The hiring and planting of youthful thugs within university campuses
was a tactic often deployed to cause confusion, unrest and disunity within student
ranks. Exacerbating divisions that naturally occurred among campaigners over how to
conduct disputes, such tactics added an element of violence into student politics that
provided the excuse for authoritarian intervention. Importantly, Pensado shows that
this was not a phenomenon that suddenly arose in , but was one that had been
used from the s onwards.
Similarly, the ocial explanation that student unrest was the result of foreign
ideological corruption of the vulnerable did not begin during the Cold War, when the
threat of communist inltration reached its zenith. Pensados analysis reveals that
during the s, fascism had been similarly blamed for student non-conformity
and was used as an excuse for intervention. The authorities continued insistence
that student disaection was the result of foreign manipulation fuelled concerns
within Mexican society of a perceived assault on Mexican values. This contributed to
the extent and nature of the support expressed for Daz Ordaz by numerous
correspondents.
In recent years there have been several attempts to revisit historiographical
treatment of the Tlatelolco massacre. Eric Zolovs work places the Student
Movement within the context of a youth counterculture that had originated many
years earlier. From an entirely dierent cultural perspective, Claire Brewsters and my
own work on attempts to reposition the Olympic Games within the debate; to
see the Games as the context within which the Student Movement took place rather
than the other way round. More recently, National Security Archive Brieng Notes
suggest that the approximate gure of around deaths at Tlatelolco is an
exaggeration. It is within this recent trend that Jaime Pensados book should be
located. In tracing the long trajectory of student activism and the multiple,
increasingly violent means of repressing it, Tlatelolco becomes the latest scene in a
tragic play.
Yet Pensados analytical perspective ensures that his study is important not only
to those interested in the Mexican Student Movement. His detailed examination
of the way in which charrismo was played out within student campuses directly relates
to recent ndings on the survival of caciquismo into the twentieth century and its
transfer from rural to urban environments. The ability of state ocials to establish
such networks of intimidation and accommodation contributes to our broader understanding of twentieth-century Mexican politics and the PRIs ability to remain in
power for so long.
While Pensados portrayal of student politics during the long s is important, he
is correct to point out that much remains to be done. His emphasis on how easy it was
for patrons to nd willing participants to undermine student unity demonstrates that
it would be wrong to see the Student Movement simply as a generational
conict. I echo Pensados call for research to analyse the experiences of the majority
of students who refused to take part in the Movement. Indeed, one might go further
in seeking to understand the experiences of youths beyond the student cohort.
As Pensado suggests, the young Mexicans lling the ranks of the riot police
(granaderos) who were charged with the task of suppressing the Movement would
oer a unique perspective. Similarly, there must have been many young Mexicans for
whom the swinging sixties were anything but swinging; rather, they may have felt just
as threatened and alienated by the political and cultural activism of students as their
parents generation. True, such analysis is not without formidable challenges, but

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 Book Reviews
the results could further develop our understanding of the complexity of Mexican
political history so skilfully revealed in Pensados ne book.
Newcastle University
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().

KEITH BREWSTER

doi:./SX

Gabriel L. Negretto, Making Constitutions: Presidents, Parties, and Institutional

Choice in Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, ), pp. xii + , .; $., hb.
Are constitutional rules the product of benevolent institutional engineering or the
result of short-sighted partisan conict? Making Constitutions dees a naive conception of institutions as mere rules of the game by showing how institutional
performance and partisan majorities inuence the content of constitutional rules
endogenously. The book oers a thorough account of the design of Latin American
legal frameworks with regard to presidential powers and the rules for electing the chief
executive.
Gabriel Negretto argues that the crafting of constitutional rules is driven by
cooperative goals as well as by redistributive struggles. Prevalence of either motivation
depends on the historical context confronted by political leaders. Major crises of
institutional performance force elites to pursue cooperative goals, while political
realignments encourage leaders to pursue institutional change for selsh partisan
purposes.
The outcome of cooperative processes is hard to predict because it ultimately
depends on the shared understanding of the situation that is embraced by reformers.
The book shows, for instance, that elites have responded to serious legitimacy crises by
strengthening representative institutions (Colombia in ) and also by strengthening the executive branch (Ecuador in ).
The outcome of redistributive party struggles, by contrast, follows a predictable
logic. When a single party dominates the constituent assembly, electoral rules are
framed to reinforce its electoral advantage. The outcome typically is a constitution
with plurality rule for presidential elections and feeble constraints on re-election.
When, by contrast, multiple parties negotiate the contents of the constitution, the
result is a hybrid constitutional design that combines run-o elections and moderate
term limits in exchange for a stronger concentration of policy-making powers in the
executive branch.
In chapter of the book, Negretto tests this argument with a careful statistical
analysis of constitutional reforms constitutional replacements as well as amendments in Latin American countries between and . The analysis
develops four systematic measures to compare the content of the constitutional texts.
Constitutional rules regarding presidential elections are ranked in terms of their
inclusiveness (plurality versus run-o) and in terms of their permissiveness (term
limits versus unrestricted re-election). A series of ordered probit analyses show that the
likelihood of adopting run-o procedures increases when several parties control the
constituent assembly, while the probability of adopting more permissive re-election
rules increases when one or two parties have control of the reform process.
Presidential powers are harder to measure, and Negretto builds on a pre-existing
tradition initiated by the seminal work of Matthew Shugart and John Carey.
His measurement strategy avoids assigning arbitrary weights to specic presidential

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