Claudio Lomnitz’s book Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico is valuable because it approaches nationalism from different angles and at multiple levels. Lomnitz focuses in one chapter on communitarian ideologies since the Aztecs, in another chapter on disjunctures between local and national public spheres and in another on changing links between privileged intellectuals and national elites. He brings to bear years of fieldwork in the county of Tepoztlán, where Redfield and Lewis had previously conducted research. However, he also draws on a corpus of mainly secondary historical materials, together with his experience of decades of intellectual and political life in Mexico City.

The book’s title hints at the direction of Lomnitz’s argument. Guillermo Bonfíl wrote in México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (University of Texas Press, 1996) that a modernizing national elite had repressed Mexico’s millenarian civilization. Lomnitz’s response is that the political culture of Mexico’s masses has been “silent” rather than simply “deep.” The silence, he argues, is less the result of repression than of the weakness of Mexico’s public sphere.

The two key elements of Lomnitz’s approach were introduced in his previous book Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the National Space (University of California Press, 1992). First, he emphasizes the diverse and fragmented nature of Mexican social space. He focuses on negotiations within and between localized interest groups, whether shantytown residents, smallholding peasants, bureaucratic officials, or transnational businessmen. Second, he looks at the ways in which the interests of each group are legitimized. Most of his previous book was focused on the hegemony established by elites in two Mexican regions. Most of this book is focused on the groups that struggle to govern in the name of the Mexican nation.

Lomnitz draws on Goffman to analyze the many ways in which budding elites have staged the Mexican nation. He emphasizes that Mexico gets staged differently by different elites and for different audiences. He also notes that such representations can conflict with each other and are often difficult to sustain. For example, elites are not always successful in their attempts to portray Mexico as modern for an audience of other governments and foreign investors. In catering to those audiences, elites also run the risk of being taunted as foreign by domestic audiences.

Lomnitz focuses on the claims of elites to represent national sentiments. His key point is that national sentiments have never been articulated through public debate. Opinion has been expressed, but only in private, because few have been in a position to risk raising their voices in public. National elites have certainly been forced to make concessions to interest groups in order to maintain a semblance of order and legitimacy. However, few groups are able to demand anything but access to services and resources. Groups have often staged public demonstrations in order to attract attention, but the subsequent negotiations have been carried out behind closed doors. The same groups have had to play their part in nationalist ritual in exchange for the benefits they receive.

So what might be the future of the transition to democracy in Mexico? This is not a book for the hopeful. Lomnitz writes that Mexican elections, particularly before 1994, were one more pageant in which groups would participate in return for benefits. But elections are now the focus of intense competition between political parties, each investing large sums of money in mass-mediated campaigns. Campaigns are financed by various bourgeois groups whose interests the political parties have come to represent. Many other groups, however, are left in a weaker position than ever. Mexico’s poorest had received something, if not a voice, in exchange for their role in the charade of revolutionary nationalism. Now they have little to offer in exchange for the services they need more than ever. At best they can also seek exposure by catching the eye of the mass media--Lomnitz’s only mention of the Zapatistas comes in this context--but they stand in greater danger than ever of being stigmatized as unruly masses.

Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico is a collection of essays, most of which have already been published. Most essays are easily accessible to non-Mexicanists. There is some overlap between the essays, and at times some of Lomnitz’s material is a little too sketchy for comfort. He does make good use of ethnographic studies, including his own, but the mix of anecdotal history and ethnographic reference is sometimes uneasy. Perhaps this is the price of boldness. Readers will no doubt find plenty to disagree with but will still find the book most rewarding.

Lomnitz remarks that foreign scholars have been content to cite a handful of Mexican intellectuals, such as Paz, Fuentes, and Rivera, as bearers of national sentiments. He complains that this not only sidelines the work of many other Mexican intellectuals but also diminishes the contribution of all Mexican intellectuals to wider theoretical debates. I myself recall being advised by a U.S. professor to regard Mexican intellectuals as informants. Lomnitz concedes, on the other hand, that Mexican intellectuals, preoccupied with Mexico’s alleged backwardness, have tended to address national problems instead of wider concerns. It is to be hoped that his work will inspire Mexican anthropologists to address wider debates and foreign anthropologists to engage with the work of Mexican anthropologists.