Guardino, Peter 1963–

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Guardino, Peter 1963–

(Peter F. Guardino)

PERSONAL:

Born 1963. Education: University of Chicago, B.A., 1985, M.A., 1986, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Indiana University, Department of History, Ballantine Hall, Rm. 742, 1020 E. Kirkwood, Bloomington, IN 47405-7103. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, historian, and educator. Loyola University of Chicago, lecturer, 1992; Indiana University, Bloomington, assistant professor, 1993-99, associate professor, 1999—, currently professor of history and director of graduate studies for the department of history. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, visiting assistant professor, 1991-92; University of Illinois at Chicago, Center for Latin American Studies, visiting assistant professor, 1992-93. California Institute for Rural Studies, Davis, research assistant, 1991; University of Chicago, research assistant, 1986, 1989-90.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Lincoln-Juarez Fellowship, Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, Government of Mexico, 1985; Century Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1985; Tinker Travel Grant, University of Chicago, Latin American Studies Center, 1986; Mellon Travel Grant, University of Chicago, Latin American Studies Center, 1987; Fulbright Fellowship, International Institute of Education, 1988; Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education, 1988; Social Sciences Research Council Fellowship, 1988; Visiting Research Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1990-91; Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University, 1994, 1998; Advanced Research Grant, Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies, 1996; Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, Indiana University, 1997; Fellowship for University Teachers, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1999.

WRITINGS:

Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1996.

The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005.

Also author of numerous works in Spanish. Contributor to books, including After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments in the Americas, edited by Mark Thurner and Andres Guerrero, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2003; and Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, edited by Sueann Caulfield, Sarah Chambers, and Laura Putnam, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005. Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Latin American Perspectives American Historical Review, associate editor, 1994-96.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter Guardino is a writer, historian, and educator at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he serves as a professor of history and as director of graduate studies in the department of history. As a researcher, Guardino "focuses on Mexico's impoverished majorities in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century," he stated on the Indiana University Department of History Web site. Guardino investigates topics such as state formation, social movements, Mexican nationalism, and popular political culture in Mexico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through research and writing, "I seek to understand how the lives, concerns, and actions of the poor, often illiterate majority of people are related to the macro political events which dominate most historical writing on the period," he remarked on the Indiana University Latin American History Web site. "I write about the impoverished majorities of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Latin America," Guardino continued. "I am interested in understanding the experiences of these people, recovering what I can of their voices, and probing what difference their activities made in the historical processes that shaped Latin America."

In his position as history professor at Indiana University, Guardino maintains a full schedule of both graduate and undergraduate history courses. He has taught undergraduate courses on the Mexican Revolution, U.S. and Mexican relations, ethnicity and race in Latin America, and modern Mexico and Latin America. His graduate-level classes have covered topics such as colonial Latin America, social movements in Latin America, and resistance and rebellion in Latin America. Part of his stated goal with his graduate teaching is to help students develop critical analysis skills that they can apply to researching problems and answering questions.

Guardino is also a dedicated advocate for the professional and career development of his graduate students. He works to "teach history graduate students three essential professional skills that are not often taught in the traditional graduate curriculum," he stated in his curriculum vitae on the Indiana University Latin American History Web site. Among these skills are the ability to write effective research proposals; the ability to function in job-seeking situations such as interviewing; and the ability to function as effective, engaged teachers.

In Guardino's professional writing, he often concentrates on political aspects of Mexican history. Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 presents an in-depth examination of the development of the Mexican state of Guerrero and the general development of the Mexican political system in the years following the Mexican War of Independence of 1810-21 and in the postcolonial period in Mexico. Based on extensive and thoroughly documented research, Guardino concludes "that peasants participated in the formation of the nation-state after independence; and that peasants influenced the national ideology" through a form of "popular federalism," noted reviewer Timothy E. Anna in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Guardino finds definite connections between complaints and grievances of the peasants and the rise of federalist leaders of national prominence, including Vincente Guerrero and Juan Alvarez. Among their grievances were complaints about "interference by abusive outside administrators, harmful economic policies, oppressive taxes, and sometimes involved pressures upon land and water resources," reported Christon L. Archer in a Canadian Journal of History review. "Guardino argues that peasants and members of regional elites shared views about politics, justice, and legitimacy that united them in favor of common goals and programmes," Archer continued.

Guardino notes how resistance to the Mexican central government increased in 1831, after the murder of Vincente Guerrero. He identifies the purposes of these uprisings along with the goals of the peasants and their leaders who participated in them. Peasants had come out of reliance on subsistence agriculture and were able to attend to their political status and future. Rather than a simple misinformed rebellion against centralized Mexican authority, the later rebellions represented a "profound struggle for local autonomy, municipal self-government, democratic inclusion, and ultimately a populist form of federalism" that eventually took hold in Mexico in 1955 and thereafter, Anna commented. "When militia units could not quell these insurrections, concessions by the central government had to be made," Donald E. Chipman, writing in the Historian, reported.

Critical reaction to Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State were overwhelmingly positive. "In this outstanding revisionist study, Peter Guardino tackles many major questions and offers fresh interpretations that make the postcolonial decades much less opaque. Employing effective archival research, perceptive analytical skills, and the recent work of other historians, Guardino dismisses many confusions and provides fresh logical answers," Archer remarked. In the book, Guardino "succeeds brilliantly in tracing the political and economic connections which linked Guerrero's villages and the wider world," observed Guy P.C. Thomson in the Journal of Latin American Studies. Chipman commented that this "work will stand as a superbly written model for further research."

In The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850, Guardino addresses two ongoing complex debates from Mexican history in the late colonial and early independence periods. These debates consist of "how the dramatic transition from Spanish corporatist monarchy to republican liberalism affected popular political culture and the extent to which this radical change in dominant hegemony involved plebian or subaltern masses as opposed to the better-documented elites who had guided that transformation," noted Timothy E. Anna in another Historian review. Guardino's work assesses the impact of popular politics in the development of Mexican national politics in the one hundred-year period from 1750 to 1850. He "focuses on two arenas, comparing local politics in the mestizo, urban city of Oaxaca and the rural, mostly indigenous villages of nearby Villa Alta," noted Emmett Lombard in History: Review ofNew Books. Guardino delves into many forms of archival records, such as transcripts and newspaper reports, to define the differences in local politics between city and country and show how these differences played out in the larger political arena. "His major contention is that although elite actors initiated the national change to republicanism, the transition took root only when engaged in by subalterns" and other lower-ranking groups. In total, the book "traces how a hegemonic system of politics based on paradigms of royal sovereignty, corporatism, and ethnic difference in 1750 changed to a discourse grounded in images of popular sovereignty and republican citizenship in 1850," stated James E. Sanders in the Canadian Journal of History.

The Time of Liberty stands as an "important and valuable addition" to the debate over the role of subalterns in nineteenth-century Mexican state and nation formation, commented Sanders. "The book makes powerful arguments and contributions to the nation and state formation debates due to its expansive temporal reach, its intensive archival research in Oaxaca, its combination of social and political history, its fascinating comparison of rural and urban politics, and its provoking arguments on the nature of hegemony and political change," Sanders continued. In assessing the book, reviewer Eric Van Young, writing in the Journal of Social History, commented that "Guardino has given us a really accomplished work, deeply researched, nicely written, with a mature authorial voice and a text scattered with pithy, almost aphoristically memorable pronouncements." "At all times Guardino's conclusions are precise, careful, and judicious," Anna stated. Angela T. Thompson, writing in History: Review of New Books, called Guardino's volume "a valuable contribution to the understanding of Mexican politics during this chaotic era."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 1997, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857, p. 929; June, 2006, Francie Chassen-Lopez, review of The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850, p. 883.

Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, July, 1997, David W. Walker, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 148.

Canadian Journal of History, December, 1997, Christon I. Archer, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 492; spring-summer, 2006, James E. Sanders, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 168.

Choice, November, 1996, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 523; March, 2006, J. Rosenthal, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 1286.

Hispanic American Historical Review, November, 1997, Donald F. Stevens, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 725; November, 2007, Christon I. Archer, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 749.

Historian, fall, 1998, Donald E. Chipman, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 156; summer, 2007, Timothy E. Anna, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 330.

History: Review of New Books, spring, 2006, Angela T. Thompson, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 83; fall, 2006, Emmett Lombard, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 28.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, autumn, 1997, Timothy E. Anna, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 327.

Journal of Latin American Studies, February, 1998, Guy P.C. Thomson, review of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State, p. 190; August, 2006, Everard Meade, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 627.

Journal of Social History, fall, 2006, Eric Van Young, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 264.

Latin American Research Review, spring, 2007, Sarah C. Chambers, "Political Ideas, Political Cultures: New Works on the Middle Period in Spanish America," p. 169.

Perspectives on Political Science, fall, 2005, Emmett Lombard, review of The Time of Liberty, p. 229.