Riot and Rebellion in Mexico: The Making of a Race War Paradigm by Ana Sabau (review)

This book argues that race became the central category for criminalizing poverty and justifying state violence against Mexico’s popular classes during the nineteenth century. With this thesis, Sabau contradicts the assumption that ideologies of mestizaje dominated post-independence Mexican nationalism. She instead emphasizes a reconstitution of ethnic hierarchies around a “race war paradigm,” by which she means an expanding use of state violence against subordinate ethnic groups to explain and address social tensions. Sabau studies the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Her discussions are deeply argued both academically and historically. Her exposition is exemplary. The only concerns that arise relate to the framing of her conclusions and the weight of the evidence for her historical claims. Riot and Rebellion has three sections, each containing two chapters. The first section deals with disturbances in the silver mining region north of Mexico City during the eighteenth century. Sabau draws on administrative reports to show that military suppression of the unrest was informed by a desire to regulate racial groups. She then uses sources closer to the insurgents to argue that popular actors had an awareness of systemic racial oppression. The second section presents reactions in Mexico to the Haitian Revolution. The translation of a Dessalines biography illustrates how fears of racial conflict built elite solidarity by defining whiteness in ways that stressed differences with Haiti. Sabau contrasts that perspective with the attitudes of key figures in the Latin American independence movement who saw Haiti as a positive impetus toward freedom even as they broadened race as the determining lens on politics. The final section of the book deals with the Caste War in Yucatán, often considered the most successful indigenous rebellion in the Americas. Sabau traces how liberal elites expanded the legal framework around warfare as a justification for selling Maya people into indentured servitude in Cuba. She then shifts to focusing on how the rebel-held territories on the peninsula were conceived in maps, novels, military dispatches, and travel writing. Generally understood as blank spaces or zones outside state control, the rebel areas in Yucatán gave license to migration projects aimed at bringing either new colonizers from Europe or forced laborers from Africa, Asia, or other indigenous regions in Mexico. Although the Caste War polarized Yucatecan society more than other parts of Mexico, Sabau maintains that its aftermath demonstrates how state violence was used to address “the criminalization of racialized poverty” (216). The ease with which Riot and Rebellion can be synthesized points to Sabau’s precision. This book is deeply researched and admirably written. Perhaps most importantly, Riot and Rebellion brings recent perspectives on race from other contexts to bear on Mexican national consolidation. Given the prominence of Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano in discussions about race