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Journal of Latin American Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/LAS

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Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during theLong Sixties (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 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 - 608DOI: 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 606-608doi:10.1017/S0022216X1400087X

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8/19/2019 Brewster - 2014 - Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico Student Unrest And

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ( ). doi: . /S X X 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 studentdisa ff ection 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 revealsimportant methods by which competing external inuences (school authorities,government officials, political power brokers, print media) sought to direct Mexicanstudent politics and culture from the s onwards.

A fundamental argument of Pensado’s book is that the Student Movement was much more complicated than previously portrayed in the historiography.Speci cally, he questions the dominant narrative of the intellectual classes that tendsto overstate public support for the Movement and inates the singular signicance of the Movement’s bloody climax on October for the development of Mexicandemocracy.

The opening page of the book directly quotes from a letter written by an‘appreciative citizen’ who congratulated President Díaz Ordaz for taking appropriatemeasures to counter Machiavellian manoeuvres by foreign elements bent on under-mining the nation’s stability and corrupting its youth. As other studies have noted,such letters of support were not the isolated utterances of right-wing fanatics, butrepresented a fundamental concern within Mexico’s 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 representeda pattern that had begun in previous decades; one in which outrageous, often public,displays of youth non-conformity contributed to an underlying alienation of studentculture and behaviour from mainstream society. He suggests that the strike at theInstituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institution, IPN) and the strikeat the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM) in were key moments in changing the official perceptionof student activism. Prior to this, student non-conformity was more likely to havebeen 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 themselvesand others, and uniting with their counterparts at the IPN in a shared struggle againststate oppression. This, he judges, was crucial in setting a pattern of allegiances that would continue throughout the s, culminating in the Student Movementand its brutal suppression.

The innovative aspect of such ndings, however, is Pensado’s analysis of theextent to which non-student interests often sponsored public displays of studentexcess 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 admirationof their peers. As such, they became intermediaries through whom campus politicscould 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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the results could further develop our understanding of the complexity of Mexican political history so skilfully revealed in Pensado’s ne book.

K E I T H B R E W S T E R Newcastle University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ( ). doi: . /S X 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 theresult of short-sighted partisan conict? Making Constitutions de es a naive con-ception 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 off ers a thorough account of the design of Latin Americanlegal 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 motivationdepends on the historical context confronted by political leaders. Major crises of institutional performance force elites to pursue cooperative goals, while politicalrealignments 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 strengthen-ing the executive branch (Ecuador in ).

The outcome of redistributive party struggles, by contrast, follows a predictablelogic. When a single party dominates the constituent assembly, electoral rules areframed 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, theresult is a hybrid constitutional design that combines run-off elections and moderateterm limits in exchange for a stronger concentration of policy-making powers in theexecutive branch.

In chapter of the book, Negretto tests this argument with a careful statisticalanalysis of constitutional reforms – constitutional replacements as well as amend-ments – in Latin American countries between and . The analysisdevelops four systematic measures to compare the content of the constitutional texts.

Constitutional rules regarding presidential elections are ranked in terms of theirinclusiveness (plurality versus run-off ) and in terms of their permissiveness (termlimits versus unrestricted re-election). A series of ordered probit analyses show that thelikelihood of adopting run-off procedures increases when several parties control theconstituent assembly, while the probability of adopting more permissive re-electionrules 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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