Sons of the Shaking Earth

Sons of the Shaking Earth is simply one of the best summaries of the Mexican experience that I have read. It synthesizes the last fifteen hundred years of Mexican cultural and ethnological history better than any other volume of which I am aware. As a teacher with some forty years experience I have returned again and again to Eric Wolf's razor sharp insights on the Mexican experience and never, ever, been disappointed. I lived a long portion of my youth in Mexico, but it wasn't until reading Wolf's analyses of the Mexican (especially mestizo) mind that I felt as though I had come to grips with the fundamental realities of the place and of its people. I ordered this book as a gift to my daughter, an art historian and a professor specializing in things Mexican. I know better than to think I will be able to keep myself from dog earing chapters to which she must pay special attention and underlinging text that I have found particularly powerful. Eric Wolf has truly captured the essence of the rise of the Mexican pre-columbian societies, the conquest, the colonial era, the separation of Mexico and Spain, and the rise of the mestizo groups to power. No one who would know the Mexican people will want to miss this writing. Wolf goes out on an intellectual limb from time to time. Perhaps in a few cases he extrapolates more than is academically wise. But in committing these minor sins he stimulates thinking, provokes discussion, pushes back frontiers of ignorance, and makes us reconsider comfortable 'realities.' This work is dated, yes. But there is a reason it is still out there, still around, still available.

I first read the book as an introduction to the local and regional cultures of Mexico and Guatemala. Although dated in the latter chapters, the book gives one a comprehensive grounding of the region's cultures from the Formative to the recent past. I would start with this book as a baseline, then turn to the more recent and specialized ethnographies of the communities across the two countries, not to mention regional and national histories since 1959.

No one could invent a history more interesting than the actual events in Mexico and Guatemala. Wolf tells the story in a comprehensive way and with great flourish. This is one of the best single volumes I know about the precolonial era and the conquest; the later chapters are less significant. The book does require a pretty high degree of literacy, but it is worth the effort.

From the outset Wolf forces the reader to conceptualize with bold metaphors the complex socio-economic forces that have created and destroyed the first market societies in Meso-America. For example, in his account of the pre Colombian development of the area, small markets had continued to form large, "centripetal galactic systems" like the ones around Teotihuacan, Cholula and the Peten until the centers somehow failed. At that point, the "centrifugal" forces allowed the "satellite systems" to slip away, becoming basic "planetary systems," that functioned in "regional isolation." However, then inevitably the process of specialization, the division of labor and the creation of surplus began building towards yet another cycle of cohesion. "In this way, galaxies," he concludes, "... yield to solar systems, until another key area can generate power for a new metabolic cycle of integration." The metaphorical approach is a useful introduction to the problem of diverse development within the area, but the individual examples of social integration and disintegration are not analyzed in any detail. The bibliography is good but in need of up dating.