The «Slippery» Mexican Democracy

Abstract

Democracy as a concept has an elusive place in Mexican history. While for the first half of the 19th century, it lurked faintly behind changes in political language and institutions, by the early 1850s it had become a fixture of liberal political discourse. Historiographically, its presence has been identified at crucial moments of national construction in which the term was in fact barely uttered. Should we read the absence of the term as the absence of the concept itself, thus concluding that we are faced with a teleological construction? Or should we consider that while usage of the term was avoided due to potentially negative connotations in certain contexts, the concept was part of the dynamic ideological framework that guided political actions? In exploring democracy as a concept in Mexican history we are unavoidably faced with this dilemma.