The Making of Mexico: Revolution, Reform, and Transformation, Pamela K Starr, 2026, Polity Press
Mexico remains a puzzle to many US academics, but quite how much of a puzzle becomes clear in Pamela Starr’s warm embrace of political culture to explain the country to the non-initiated.
While there is huge sympathy, even affection, in Starr’s book for America’s southern neighbour, at heart it represents a weary revival of familiar behavioural arguments to explain democratic and developmental divergence.
Why democracy emerged and flourished in some parts of the world and not others, and hence whether certain preconditions were necessary, have been questions at the heart of the evolution of Latin American scholarship within US academia since the 1950s.
Attempts to answer these questions evolved out of the blunt assumptions of “modernisation” theory, a framework departing from the position that development could be understood as a series of successive stages through which all countries (must) pass.
In their heyday, the 1950–60s, such theoretical approaches often took the form of an effort to ascertain how different variables—political or economic, for example—determined the presence of democracy à l’américaine.
But as the US began to emerge as a global power, inevitably scholastic hubris meant that its academics began to turn to culture as a prominent source of explanations for the emergence of stable democratic regimes in comparable capitalist societies.
Was US exceptionalism, for example, a reflection of the presence of a civic cultureof values based upon tolerance, rationalism or even Protestantism, and hence were there cultural obstacles to democracy in regions such as Latin America, such as its corporatist heritage?
Seen in the round, modernisation perspectives emanating from the US might conveniently be reduced to the following mantra: “If only they were a bit more like us, had done what we did, then they could be rich and powerful too …”
The problem with such modernisation mythology is that it has not gone away and remains influential, if only implicit, in US scholarship across most disciplines.
In particular, it continues to colour attitudes to Latin America, believing its problems to be largely internal and not shaped by international factors—not least the elephant in the room, US imperial caprice—and hence explaining developmental obstacles according to very American yardsticks.
In short, modernisation perspectives are ethnocentric because they prescribe a formula for development from the perch of the US; they ignore history and turn a blind eye to the inescapable legacies of imperialism; and they are ultimately ideological, trapped in the cage of “common sense” determined by the very specific discourses of late US capitalism.
Starr has not ignored history: indeed, she has put it front and centre in her analysis of the politics of modern Mexico. This is a book about history, and in that respect might be let off the hook for addressing one of the main sources of criticism of modernisation perspectives. It is well-informed, articulate, and at times eloquent.
But the author has deployed history in a particular manner, dipping into the deep well of the past to discern its apparent impact on behaviour at a broad societal level in the present in highly subjective ways.
She asserts that Mexico can be distinguished by a set of key characteristics shaping behaviour that read like a list of attributes you might expect to hear from a straw poll of shoppers on Main Street.
These include “social hierarchy; poverty and inequality; paternalism and patronage; corruption and a weak rule of law; cronyism and oligopolies; authoritarian-style governance led by a powerful president with the purpose of controlling society; significant military autonomy from civilian oversight; and an abiding ideal of democracy”.
All of these so-called Mexican characteristics—without exception—could equally apply to the US right now, not least “authoritarian-style governance led by a powerful president with the purpose of controlling society”.
The risk of drawing attention to them as inherent Mexican sociopolitical norms—concealed behind the camouflage that they are historically shaped, and therefore legitimate targets—is that it perpetuates stereotypes, something the modern US already has an abundance of.
Take this casual reference to a “weak respect for the rule of law” in Mexico, which Starr advises us to consider not in terms of formal institutional structures or norms, and in doing so “miss what ultimately what makes the country tick”, but informally, in terms of public attitudes and behaviour.
She writes: “Mexico, for example, is a place where formal rules and laws are often suggestions rather than mandates. It is commonplace for foreigners to talk about the causal [sic; casual?] relationship Mexicans have with traffic laws.
“But a weak respect for the rule of law also informs Mexico’s high rate of tax evasion, Mexicans’ reliance on informal agreements rather than the law to protect their interests, and the belief among politicians that the law applies mostly to one’s opponents.”
Understanding Mexico fully, the author asserts, requires knowledge of these informal rules and norms that shape Mexicans’ behaviour.
“This includes the unwritten rules that explain the peculiar characteristics of Mexican democracy, the normal conduct that makes the Mexican economy operate differently from other market economies, the traditional practices that underlie Mexico’s security challenge, and the conventions that drive the country’s often fraught relationship with the United States …
“Knowing Mexico’s history, the shared experiences it created, the behavioural adaptations that resulted, and how these adaptations evolved over time is essential to understanding the country today.”
The Making of Mexico: Revolution, Reform, and Transformation sets out to explore the impact of historical traits upon modern Mexico in three parts: from the colonial era to 2000; “Reformist Mexico” from 2000 to 2018; and the “Fourth Transformation” since 2018 under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum.
It is the latter that is perhaps of most interest, with the author arguing that a great deal of the country’s “new” order is in fact very old, including a return to centralised authoritarianism and the persistence of patronage, paternalism, cronyism and oligopoly.
There is at times thinly veiled hostility to AMLO’s anti-capitalist heresies and the rhetorical style of this “political animal” that the author describes in terms of a “standard populist political tactic” to divide and polarise society, which echoes generations of US scholarship on populism—a term the country itself is now grappling with, but appears mostly blind to.
Starr points to the errors made—and, to be fair, to the successes as well—in economic and social policies, and to the undoubtedly difficult task of the Mexican presidency in managing relations with its northern neighbour, especially under Trump 2.0.
But it is jarring to read the casual assessment of American domination of a sovereign state in such terms as, “A new era is emerging in which Mexico will continue to cooperate on issues of US national security concern in exchange for US deference to some Mexican policy autonomy.” Some policy autonomy?
Future relations with China will offer an example of that limited autonomy, we are told, and with great relief then reassured “but there will still be room for sovereign policy autonomy”.
Ultimately, this is a book about political change in the pursuit of development, the motive of which is to identify significant limitations imposed in Mexico by “a peculiar mix of behavioural customs and norms inherited from its unique past” and, by implication, to suggest remedies presumably founded upon US norms.
There is absolutely no doubt that informal mechanisms operate in politics, often reproduced historically, and that we can argue for such a notion as “political culture”, albeit in limited terms.
In the study of Italian politics, for example, there is a concept known as sottogoverno which refers to concealed mechanisms in operation behind formal institutions, particularly with regard to the abuse of patronage.
There is also no doubt that the best way to understand cultural attributes and norms is to begin with history—but not a history of those attributes themselves, which take them as read and as largely immutable strands of collective DNA.
An accurate historical assessment of Mexico’s political culture must be grounded in power, oppression and exploitation created by specific modes of production and class conflict.
The country’s contemporary landscape is deeply influenced by a history of US interventions driven by rapacious capitalism, economic dependence on its northern neighbour, mass American exploitation of its labour, and direct US interference in security issues such as the drugs trade.
This suggests strongly that the best place to start understanding how historical legacies have shaped Mexico’s contemporaneous sociopolitical character—and disrupted its development and democracy—is in the US itself.
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Categories: Mexico, North America, United States