Book Description

When Vicente Fox was elected Mexico&’s president in 2000, the world&’s most enduring twentieth-century authoritarian regime finally came to an end. In this book Paul Haber explains how urban popular movements contributed to such a historic transition. In the 1960s Mexico&’s urban poor, effectively incorporated into institutionalized forms of clientelism and cooptation, were perceived as passive and acquiescent. Their situation changed during the 1970s, Haber shows, as popular movements&—led largely by young people inspired by the revolutionary ideals of Mexico&’s 1960s student movement&—took the first steps toward mobilizing the urban poor in what would develop into the full-scale political protests of the 1980s. When Mexico&’s economic crisis came in the early 1980s, urban popular movements were in a position to play a major role in the growing democratic opposition. Haber, using a creative blend of ethnography and policy analysis, traces this history on a national level and with detailed reference to two key organizations, the Comit&é de Defensa Popular of Durango and the Asamblea de Barrios of Mexico City. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of Mexico&’s most important social leaders saw new opportunities in electoral politics, and the transformation from social movement to party politics began. Haber&’s study closely follows the urban dimensions of this history and spells out its implications not only for the urban poor but also for Mexico&’s nascent democracy.