Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor

The Caste War (1847-1901, depending on where one wants to draw the final curtain) was the greatest of Mexico's 19thcentury peasant rebellions, and it continues to invite new avenues of scholarship.The most recent foray into the Yucatecan past is Rani Alexander's attempt to bring material culture to bear on this complicated theme.Her work reconstructs the Caste War century through an archaeological reconstruction of Yaxcabá, a community located in the heart of the peninsula.The author has staked out a region of some 200 square kilometers, roughly centered on the town in question; she surveys the changes in settlement patterns and residential construction over the previous centuries and uses those evolving settlement patterns as a way of seeing how area Mayas reacted to the pressures of the late colonial and early national periods that preceded the Caste War itself.Alexander begins with a review of the now familiar literature on peasant resistance.She reconstructs what is known of the Yaxcabá region from both primary and secondary sources.The heart of the book, which is to be found in chapters 4 and 5, runs something like as follows.Following independence in 1821, the urban center of Yaxcabá became increasingly Hispanicized, as indicated by the fact that the far simpler Maya hut constructions migrated outward to surrounding smaller settlements.Commercial haciendas made their entry during this period, but Mayas were still able to deal with the pressure through forms of resistance, such as flight and diversification.The basic idea is that agrarian change followed, not preceded, the war.Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán is a commendable book.Alexander is pioneering in her use of material culture as a means of access to the 19th century.She demonstrates an enviable command of the theoretical issues surrounding classic Caste War literature.Moreover, it is greatly encouraging to see the resurrection of forgotten but important historical actors, such as Yaxcabá's corrupt, long-time political boss Claudio Padilla.The work comes as a (salutary) shock to those raised on more humanistic histories of the Caste War period, and serves as a reminder that archaeological nuts and bolts, just like petitions and court cases, can tell us much about the past.This fine-grained portrait