July 15, 2009 If they hold strong political views, why do many working class Mexicans refrain from voting in national elections? Anthropologist Matthew Gutmann seeks to unravel this conundrum in El Romance de la Democracia: Rebeldía Sumisa en el México Contemporáneo (FCE, 2009), a new Spanish translation of his 2002 ethnography, The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico (University of California Press).
Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Gutmann portrays the diverse ways in which the inhabitants of Santo Domingo, Mexico, relate ideals of democracy and electoral politics to their daily lives. In doing so, he suggests that though Mexicans may be disillusioned about the power of established political institutions to effect change, they still have firm beliefs about the meaning of democracy.
