Contention and the Dynamics of Inequality in Mexico, 1910–2010

One of the often unrecognized strengths of Mexican social science, especially sociology and sub-disciplines like criminology, is an eclectic approach to theoretical models that might lack the analytical elegance of grand theory but more than compensates in explanatory power and empirical richness. This is certainly the case with Viviane BrachetMárquez’s Contention and Dynamics of Inequality in Mexico, 1910–2010. Indeed, theoretical eclecticism is at the core of this thoughtful, important book on the intersection of contentious politics and social inequality in Mexico since the 1910 Revolution. The book’s major theoretical contribution, carefully developed in the first and last chapters, is a convincing revision of contention theory, associated primarily with Charles Tilly and developed ‘‘as a generalizable form of social conflict’’ (McAdam et al. 2001:3). While Brachet-Márquez accepts many of the basic precepts of contention theory, including its focus on public collective actions in support of political demands, she takes issue with its claim that contention ‘‘can be expressed in terms of ‘mechanisms’ [brokerage, diffusion, coordinated action, etc.] recurring in different combinations, some of which are identical or very similar, and have the same immediate consequences. ’’ The fractal quality of this proposition, which theoretically conflates the central function of mechanisms in smalland largescale contentions, isn’t the problem. Instead, Brachet-Márquez takes issue with classic contention theory’s refusal to sufficiently account for either agency or contingency. ‘‘When we observe a contention process,’’ she argues, ‘‘we are . not testing the function of a set of known mechanisms unfolding in predictable ways, but investigating the strategies selected by contendents . [a process] inevitably fraught with unintended consequences and inappropriate resolutions induced by poor judgment or structural pressures’’ (pp. 178–179). To address what she sees as the principal weaknesses in contention theory, BrachetMárquez turns to theories of structuration and to her own previous work on the pacts of domination that sustain social inequality in Latin America and elsewhere. Anthony Giddens’s work on the role of agency in social change supports her argument about the importance of ‘‘reflexivity’’ in the responses of actors to their lived experiences. She tempers Giddens’s optimistic account of individual agency with William Sewell Jr.’s work on the ‘‘schemas’’ that enable social life, determine access to resources, and constrain individual and collective agency. Taken together, these theories of agency and structuration allow her to reconceive the concept of mechanism as ‘‘the dynamic principle that impels the turning point in a process of contention and reflects the capacity of conscious and reflexive contending agents to use or invent resources to achieve their ends’’ (p. 34). Her own work on the pact of domination—’’understood less as a formal contract than an implicit agreement, on a daily practical basis, to accept the rules that distribute power and resources unequally’’—adds a macroanalytic level to contention theory. Here, she highlights the centrality of the State—considered just another contendent by Tilly and other analysts—’’as a set of coordinating mechanisms enforcing those terms of the pact that are factually valid at any given historical juncture, generally through its legal authority and coercive power, but also through its infrastructural and ideological powers, and through its capacity to mediate conflict’’ (p. 35). Combining the insights of these three theoretical models, Brachet-Márquez develops a hybrid theory of contention and concludes that: ‘‘contentious politics, the ubiquitous and daily process of social conflict confronting actors with rival distributive claims over positions of power and/or resources, is the historical process of structuration of inequality which shapes, reproduces, modifies, or destroys (from above or Reviews 151