In the Name of El Pueblo

The term “el pueblo” is used throughout Latin America, referring alternately to small towns, to community, or to “the people” as a political entity. In this vivid anthropological and historical analysis of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Paul K. Eiss explores the multiple meanings of el pueblo and the power of the concept to unite the diverse claims made in its name. Eiss focuses on working-class indigenous and mestizo populations, examining how those groups negotiated the meaning of el pueblo among themselves and in their interactions with outsiders, including landowners, activists, and government officials. Combining extensive archival and ethnographic research, he describes how residents of the region have laid claim to el pueblo in varied ways, as exemplified in communal narratives recorded in archival documents, in the performance of plays and religious processions, and in struggles over land, politics, and the built environment. Eiss demonstrates that while el pueblo is used throughout the hemisphere, the term is given meaning and power through the ways it is imagined and constructed in local contexts. Moreover, he reveals el pueblo to be a concept that is as historical as it is political. It is in the name of el pueblo—rather than class, race, or nation—that inhabitants of northwestern Yucatán stake their deepest claims not only to social or political rights, but over history itself.

“[A] probing history of communities and debates about community in the Hunucmá region of northwest Yucatán. In revealing episodes, the study extends from the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary times. The analysis is innovative in important ways, notably by revealing communities’ often conflictive participations in key local and regional developments and by exploring their often contested constructions of their own historical understandings.”, “In a world of multisited, global ethnographies Eiss’s book reminds us of the value of deeply historical and ethnographic framings of the present. Enriched by contemporary social theory, In the Name of El Pueblo draws on the margins of the archive and the plurality and variety of forms of archives. Its recognition of dispossession rather than possession as a ground for ‘el pueblo,’ reminds readers that the most important forces in social life may not be found only in what appears to be fully present. For readers who have worked on similar issues in Mexico, this book beautifully captures the grounded and yet ephemeral sense of el pueblo.”, “[Eiss] shows how el pueblo, and history more generally, happen as people conventionalize events in telling about them before, during, and sometimes long after the fact. That Eiss succeeds in this attests to his skills as both ethnographer and historian. . . . Historians will find here the rich makings of history, anthropologists an adroit dissolving of ethnicity, culture, and community into the flow of time.”, “This work demonstrates a keen philosophical sensibility as it scrutinizes the complex undercurrents below the various struggles that indigenous Maya, non-indigenous townspeople, landowners, merchants, rebels, and government officials have each undertaken in the name of el pueblo. . . . Eiss’s work self-consciously seeks to avoid the mistake that many political philosophers make by turning el pueblo into an abstraction.", "Eiss combines historical and anthropological data, methods, and approaches (microhistory, ethnography, and the history of the present) to explore the concept [of el pueblo] as realized in the Hunucmá region located in the northwest of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. . . Following Michel Foucault, he does not consider communal identifications as stable but holds that present and previous modes of communal and collective identification may be radically different."

Paul K. Eiss is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History and the Director of the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University.