Book Review: The Poverty of Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico

• Author: Stephen P. Mumme
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591297903200228
• Published date: 01 June 1979
• Date: 01 June 1979
• Subject Matter: Book Review

240

Western Political Quarterly

ment in four politics.

helpful. An extensive bibliography and an adequate index are

also

BERNARD

C.

BORNING

University

of

Irlnho

The

Poverty

of

Revolution:

The

State

and

the

Urban

Poor

in

Mexico.

By

SUSAN

ECKSTEIN. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1977.

Pp.

300.

$17.50.)

Since Oscar Lewis first focused attention on the h4exican urban

poor

con-

siderable controversy has been made of their socioeconomic and political signifi-

cance. On the one hand they have been regarded as the quiescent immobile base

of elite hegemony providing the diffuse support sustaining the long-term stability

of the

PRI.

On the other hand they have been viewed

as

the alienated and ex-

ploited mass most potentially available for revolutionary mobilization and political

change. Typically the debate has flourished on the extrapolations of the findings of

international urbanimtion and ethnological studies to the Mexican cxe, and the

findings of rather narrowly conceived, community-based analysis uninformed by

the larger national forces and institutions bearing on the condition

of

the urban

poor.

Although Susan Eckstein’s study

of

the urban

poor

in three hiexico City

localities is not likely to distill all

of

the controversy pertaining to the sociopolitical

significance of the h4esican urban

poor,

it does enlighten many

of

the important

issues

as

well as generally filling

a

gap in the literature by focusing on the linkage

between political and economic structures and the behavior

of

the lower classes in

Mexico City. Skillfully utilizing

a

range of research techniques Eckstein examines

the themes of quiescence, alienation, and immobility in a central city slum, an

established squatter site, and

a

government developed community housing project.

Her findings sugqest that neither quiescence and diffuse suport for the regime nor

alienation and frustration are incompatible features of lower class behavior, and

that both types of behavior are largely functions of the government’s paternalistic

capitalist ideology and its pervasive manipulation of po!itiral and social organiza-

tions in the urban environment.

If

the author employs

a

structural analysis to a fault, her insistence on the

structural basis of poverty group behavior permits her to examine critically some

of the conventional wisdom concerning the cultural predisposition to poverty and

cognitive inhibitions upon innovation and organizational mobilization among the

urban

poor.

Eckstein lucidly eqoses the myth

of

the incompetence of the urban

poor and delves into the institutional and organizational constraints which hinder

the mobilization of the

poor

in their class interests. Although her findings here add

little new to the general theoretical understanding of the corporate domination of

the polity

by

the govcrnment-party machine. her empirical and comparative work

at the community level add richly to the empirical understanding of those processes

and their implications for the political action of the

poor.

Especially original, her

analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the church and the party at the com-

munity level reveals the close interdependency between these two ostensibly con-

flictual organizations and the manner in which they interact to legitimize each other’s

activities. Similarly, her study of the organizational interface between govern-

ment-party and community-level social and political organizations illuminates the

dynamics

of

cooptation and coercion operating to defuse the political potential of

these groups for expressing community-level demands- vis

h

vis the Mexican

qovernment.

In addition

to

her excellent study- of organimtional dynamics in the three

communities. Eckstein devotes considerable attention to the political-economic

determinants of the behavior of the urban poor. In particular, she focuses upon the

implications of social class, observing that the political and economic structures

of

hlexican society differentially reward and seapent the urban mass

so

as to impede

the organizational potential of the

poor.

Ironically,

as

Eckstein observes, the

regime’s paternalism tends

to

encourage

a

level of petty capitalism and proprietary