REVIEWS 445 Brittsan’s monograph is therefore welcome, as it considers “the multifaceted yet converging histories of Manuel Lozada’s life, peasant rebellion, political boundaries, contraband trade, property disputes, and religion in order to disinter the story of how residents in Jalisco’s seventh canton engaged the national political process on their own terms” (12). This is an altogether challenging task. Lozada himself was not formally educated, and his recorded statements and those of his followers are few. And although Brittsan has mined archives in Guadalajara and Mexico City, along with a few other sources, to recreate the political culture of Lozada and his peasant supporters, they remain distant to the twenty-first century reader. Once a hacienda worker, then an outlaw and bandit, by late 1855 Lozada had begun to assert a stronger and more politicized presence in his native region. He was as an opponent of Liberals and a champion of local interests, including, at times, those of Barron y Forbes (26–34). As the three-year civil war between Conservatives and Liberals broke out (La Reforma), Lozada identified with the conservative cause, even allying himself with French forces. Although he recognized the restoration of the Liberal republic in 1867, Brittsan contends that he continued to embody a political culture that was distinctively conservative, as ultimately expressed in his call for insurrection in January 1873 (the Plan Libertador). Despite popular support for Lozada’s uprising, Lerdo de Tejada’s liberal government quickly defeated the rebel, and in July 1873 he was executed. This “popular conservatism” of Lozada merits further attention. For Brittsan, it is constituted by “defense of the Catholic Church, the integrity of communal landholdings, and local political autonomy” (4). Acknowledging that this ideology was “rarely articulated,” Brittsan is able nonetheless to describe its implementation. In this connection, he traces Lozada’s advocacy for a greater Church presence in his home territory through his occasional statements of religious faith. Land conflicts between indigenous communities and haciendas, along with Lozada’s varying position towards them, are discussed at length, too. This book is thus a full account of one important, regional aspect of Mexico’s nineteenth-century politics (both formal and informal), although there is room for further research. That research might help us to better comprehend the dynamics of the commercial interests and the legal processes surrounding land disputes, which Brittsan’s study references and which have been of significance for the trajectory of the country’s political and social conflicts, from independence through the 1910 revolution. WILLIAM SUAREZ-POTTSKenyon College Gambier, Ohio At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts. By Catha Paquette. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. 130 photos. Pp. 342. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.176 https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2017.176 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/tam.2017.176&domain=pdf 446 REVIEWS Potential readers noting the title of this book might think that the world does not need yet another discussion of Diego Rivera and the mural proposed for Rockefeller Center. Has not everything about that incident already been said and written? Yet, as Paquette shows in this study, there are still more facts and insights to be explored. And those in turn lead to still more interesting ones yet to be examined. Thanks in part to Diego Rivera, but also to Jose´Clemente Orozco and others, Mexico enjoyed a vogue in the United States in the 1930s, as represented in Helen Delpar’s work, The Enormous Vogue of All Things Mexican (1995). Certainly that was true of the New York art scene, spearheaded by the newly founded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, largely a Rockefeller project. Its first three one-man shows featured Henri Matisse, followed by Diego Rivera and then Pablo Picasso. Rivera and Orozco got mural painting commissions in Detroit and Dartmouth as they became better known. Then came Rockefeller Center. Paquette situates the entire project in the history of the Great Depression, in the struggle between capitalism and communism, in the streets and in the plans of the Rockefellers, and in the role Rockefeller Center was to play in all. Central to this drama is the figure of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was the ultimate “decider” for the center and the Man at the Crossroads mural. Although Rivera was known to be a Communist, his agent in New York, Frances Flynn Payne, a noted gallery owner herself, presented the artist as a painter first and a devotee of politics secondarily. After all, was not he completing a mural for Henry Ford in Detroit? Conversely, Rockefeller’s wife Abby bought the sketchbook of May Day marches that Rivera had produced in the Soviet Union. As it happened, Rivera had been kicked out of the Mexican Communist Party for his sympathy with Leon Trotsky, leading his patrons to think he would shed his Marxist beliefs. Rivera, for his part, was intent on seeing just how far artistic expression could go. As is well known, Rivera insisted on putting a portrait of Lenin in the mural to represent Communism while denigrating the rich and powerful under capitalism as idle and degenerate. Rockefeller Jr. decided that such a display, which would include syphilis organisms near his painted face, was not suitable for a shrine of capitalism like Rockefeller Center. While Abby and his son Nelson tried to get the mural moved to MoMA, the work of art was destroyed. The New York left used that obliteration to mobilize their followers in New York. Rivera soon repainted the mural on a smaller scale at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Paquette does an excellent job in discussing the Mexico City phase of the mural and its rebirth, particularly on the ways in which the aims of the mural fit with those of Mexican politicians at the time. Yet, she does not go much farther in looking at the life and work of this important artist. For example, she does not look at how the conflictive situation in New York affected Rivera’s art and how it came to be that he would never again paint a major mural for a capitalist in the United States. We may never know if and how marriage to another Communist artist, Frida Kahlo, affected his work, and whether she pulled him even further toward the political left. REVIEWS 447 The book itself is beautiful, filled with stunning plates in color and black-and-white. However, it is oversized, and wherever there are no works of art depicted, the text can be rather slow going. Yet, Paquette has given us a significant study of cultural relations between the United States and Mexico in the 1930s. BARBARA A. TENENBAUMUS Library of Congress Washington, DC Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Sandra C. Mendiola García. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 294. $30.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.177 Clashes between popular classes and the forces of government who represented upper classes and business interests on the streets of Puebla, from the 1960s to the present day, afford us a new perspective on the Mexican Revolutionary project. Mendiola García explores the historical experience of the street vendors as they resisted corrupt politicians, vicious police, and inexorable neoliberal transformations. In this way, she represents the ways that informal economic sectors resisted state repression. Vendors formed independent unions, like the Popular Union of Street Vendors (UPVA), they built grassroots movements, and they petitioned and sued and organized. They also suffered. Inspired by international ideas and Maoist thought, they seized public spaces in demonstrations, theater, and even hijackings. Officials at street, city, state, and federal levels responded with confiscations, arrests, violence, and torture. Mendiola García aptly demonstrates the numerous methods by which the reactionary government attempted to “cleanse” the streets of Puebla. Street Democracy asserts that the role of vendors in providing services and living spaces to the poorest classes collided with the interests of the PRI and neoliberal capital, and that the vendors did not break. To chronicle the movement, Mendiola García has drawn extensively on city archives of petitions and complaints, lawsuits and newspapers, inter- views with vendors, and the files of the secret police (DFS), whose members infiltrated the UPVA. These she complements with a broad secondary literature that situates the conflict within the realm of the Dirty War, the Cold War, and the neoliberal turn. Mendiola García’s interviews with street vendors and student organizers offer rare insights into the popular classes as politically engaged agents quite aware of the larger context in which they operate. Her use of the secret police files, increasingly difficult to access in Mexico, demonstrates the violence of the state. She begins with a solid historical overview and goes on to focus on vendors’ interactions with student groups, the politics of the union, repression by the government, the neoliberal turn of 1986, and, finally, the impact of global capital as it erased old markets. Throughout, she persuasively shows the resilience and adaptability of the street vendors and their importance as actors in Mexican political spheres. https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2017.177 Hiram Bingham Clarence H. Haring Leo Rowe, Isaiah Bowman, and Edward Ross