Dr Benjamin Smith

Room: H338, third floor of the Humanities Building

Tel: 44 (0)24 76523422 (internal extension 23422)

Fax: 44 (0)24 76523437 (internal extension 23437)

email: B.Smith.1@warwick.ac.uk

Office hours: Monday 1pm-2pm and Tuesday 11am-12pm or by appointment.

Just email me with a time you can make.

Twitter: @benjamintsmith7

Academic Profile

Reader of Latin American History, University of Warwick (2016-present)
Associate Professor of Latin American History, University of Warwick (2013-2016)
Assistant/Associate Professor of Mexican History, Michigan State University (2005-2012)
PhD in History, Cambridge University (2006)

Teaching

AM101 Latin America: Themes and Problems (first-year undergraduate CAS core and History option module)
AM219 From the Revolution to the Drug War: Mexico’s Twentieth Century (second-year undergraduate CAS and History option module)
AM421 The Drug Trade in the Americas (final-year Advanced Option)
HI988 Narcomex: Capitalism, Violence, and the Drug Trade in Mexico (MA option module)

Research,

"Don't you know this story about two fellows who were playing cards and one had two aces and the other fellow asks him. "What do you have?". "Two aces. And You?" "Two pistols." So he says. "Ok You Win".And that's the way the PRI is here. It's got pistols and anybody who objects, well he gets run over by a car”, Jesús Sánchez in Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 498.

Since 2006 I have been working as a scholar of modern Mexican history. As a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century grassroots politics, I have done most of my research in the archives, villages, churches, and markets of the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca. My first book, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca attempted to capture the diversity of post-revolutionary politics and looked at regional bosses, female-led social movements, violence, and agrarian reform from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Building on a shared interest in Mexican state formation, Paul Gillingham and I also edited a collection of essays on the subject, entitled Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968.

My second area of research has been religion and popular conservatism. While researching Pistoleros and Popular Movements, I became increasingly interested in the relationship between local religious cultures and grassroots politics. In part, my inspiration emerged from the archives; a belief that different hierarchies, rituals, and political practices existed beyond peasants' choreographed appeals to the state. In part, my inspiration came out of my love for Luis González's classic microhistory, Pueblo en vilo, and his forgotten appeal for historians to engage with villagers' religious understandings of the world. The resulting book, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico, looked at land ownership, priest-parishioner relations, religious rituals, and politics in the Mixteca Baja from the late colonial period to the 1960s, and was published by the Univerisity of New Mexico Press in 2012. Beyond these broad research interests, I have also published a variety of articles on indigenous and grassroots responses to indigenismo, indigenous militarism, the PAN, taxation, state healthcare, and the drug trade.

Although I am continuing to work on grassroots politics, I have made the reluctant and potentially rash decision to move beyond my patria chica (Ser mexicano es un orgullo pero ser oaxaqueño es un don de Dios!) Following my previous rather scattergun approach, I am working on occasionally interlinked, projects:

1) Dictablanda, Democracy and the PRI. This project uses recently declassified Mexican Secret Service documents in order to examine the internal workings of the PRI and the Mexican state. Bringing together political science, anthropology, and revisionist histories of the one party state, the work argues that beneath choreographed demonstrations of PRI authoritarianism, local communities carved out a functioning form of political pluralism. The work not only interacts with works on Mexican democratization, but also broader re-evaluations of democracy per se. I recently published one of my articles on this in Past & Present and I am currently work on two pieces a) "The State of the Weight of the State: The Cold War and Mexico" and b) Is Civil Society Good to Think?

2) Politics, the Press, and the Reading Public in Mexico, 1940-1980. This project looks at the relationship between the PRI state and the public sphere, and examines national and local newspapers, internal PRI rags, and corridos and occasional flysheets. Michael Lettieri, Paul Gillingham, and I organized a substantial conference at the UC San Diego US-Mexico Center which brought together historians, communications scholars, political scientists and journalists to examine the development of Mexico's public sphere over the past century. In 2018, University of New Mexico Press will publish an edited volume based on this conference entitled Journalism, Satire and Censorship in Modern Mexico.

I am also using a British `Academy grant to write a monograph on the press and civil society in Mexico during the twentieth century. The book brings together extensive research in Mexico and the U.S. and examines the growth in the reading public, censorship, satire, Mario Menendez and the radical press, José García Valseca and the gangster press, and newspapers and social movements in Oaxaca and and Chihuahua. The book, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street, will be released in 2018 by University of North Carolina Press.

I teach an introductory course on Latin American history, a 200-level course on Mexican history, and an interdisciplinary 400-level course on the drugs industry in Latin America.

Finally, I provide expert witness reports for refugees from Mexico in the United Kingdom and the United States. For details please see Rights in Exile.

Publications

The following articles have been handed in to publishers. Please contact me if you wish to see a version.

"Communal work, forced labour, and road building in Mexico, 1920-1958"

"Of Saints and Demons: The Santa Muerte in Historical Perspective"

Books

Benjamin T. Smith, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Sories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2018)

Paul Gillingham, Michael Lettieri, and Benjamin T. Smith (eds), Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018)

WIl Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith, Peter Watt, Beyond the Drug War in Mexico: Human rights, the public sphere and justice (London, Routledge, 2017)

Stefan Ruiz and Benjamin T. Smith, Mexican Crime Photographs from the Archive of Stefan Ruiz (London: Gost Books, 2015)

Benjamin T. Smith and Paul Gillingham (eds.), Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

Benjamin T. Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012)

Benjamin T. Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)

Articles and Special Issues

2019

Benjamin T. Smith "Prefacio" in Juan Antonio Fernández Velázquez and Pedro Cazares Aboytes (coords), Actores, Prácticas y Discursos en la Construcción del Estado Mexicano: Siglo XIX y XX (Isumismo Latinoamericanos, 2019), pp. 9-14.

2018

Benjamin T. Smith (with Wil G. Pansters), "U.S. Moral Panics, Mexican Politics, and the Borderlands Origins of the War on Drugs, 1950–62", Journal of Contemporary History, (forthcoming)

Benjamin T. Smith, "The Paradoxes of the Public Sphere: Journalism, Gender, and Corruption in Mexico, 1940-1970," Journal of Social History (forthcoming)

Benjamin T. Smith, "Tres textos religiosos de la Mixteca Baja: A un entendimiento de conservadurismo popular", Tlalocan, forthcoming 2018

Benjamin T. Smith, "The Year Mexico Stopped Laughing: The Crowd, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico City" in Paul Gillingham, Michael Lettieri, Benjamin T. Smith, (eds.), Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming 2018)

Paul Gillingham, Michael Lettieri, Benjamin T. Smith, "Introduction: Journalism, Satire and Censorship in Mexico" in Paul Gillingham, Michael Lettieri, Benjamin T. Smith, (eds.), Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming 2018)

2017

Benjamin T. Smith, “El espíritu de Dios… en los corazones de todos”: La resurgimiento de Catolicismo en la Mixteca Baja, 1867-1910" in Marta Eugenia Ugarte García and Matthew Butler, Pablo Serrano Alvarez (eds), México católico. Proyectos y trayectorias eclesiales, siglos XIX y XX (Pachuca: Collegio de Hidalgo, 2017), 201-35.

2014

Benjamin T. Smith, "Building a state on the cheap: Taxation, Social Movements, and Politics" in Benjamin T. Smith and Paul Gillingham (eds.), Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

Benjamin T. Smith and Paul Gillingham, "Introduction: The Paradoxes of Revolution" in in Benjamin T. Smith and Paul Gillingham (eds.), Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

Benjamin T. Smith, "Who Governed? Grassroots Politics in 1960s Mexico", Past & Present, (November 2014)

Benjamin T. Smith, "Rumbo a una cartografia de Cardenismo" in Tanalis Padilla (ed.), El campesinado y su persistencia en la actualidad mexicana (Mexico City: Conacultura, 2014)

2013

Benjamin T. Smith, “Rewriting the Moral Economy: Agricultural Societies and Economic Change in Oaxaca’s Mixteca Baja, 1830-1910 “ in Matthew Butler and Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, (eds), Mexico in Transition: New Perspectives on Mexican Agrarian History, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries/ México y sus transiciones: reconsideraciones sobre la historia agraria mexicana, siglos XIX y XX, (University of Texas-CIESAS, 2013)

Benjamin T. Smith,"The Rise and Fall of Narcopopulism in Sinaloa, 1940-1980", Journal for the Study of Radicalism (Fall 2013), pp. 125-167.

Benjamin T. Smith and Gabriela Soto Laveaga, (eds,), Special issue of Endeavour on Medicine in Mexico (March 2013)

Benjamin T. Smith, “Towards a typology of popular responses to rural medicine in Mexico”, Endeavour, (March 2013)

2012

Benjamin T. Smith, “Heliodoro Charis Castro and the soldiers of Juchitán: Indigenous Militarism, Local Rule and the Mexican State” in Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (eds.), Forced Marches: Soldiers and military caciques in modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012)

2010

Benjamin T. Smith, “El Señor del Perdon y los matacristos de Oaxaca: La Revolución desde el punto de vista de los católicos”, Desacatos, 28, (2010), pp. 61-76.

Benjamin T. Smith and Keith Aaron Van Oosterhout, “The Limits of Catholic Science and the Mexican Revolution”, Endeavour, 34.2 (2010), pp. 55-60.

2009

Benjamin T. Smith, “Anticlericalism, Politics, and Freemasonry in Mexico, 1920–1940” The Americas, 65.4 (2009), pp. 559-588.

2008

Benjamin T. Smith, “Inventing Tradition at Gunpoint: Caciquismo and Culture in the Región Mixe, Oaxaca, 1930- 1959”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 27.2 (2008), pp. 215-234

Benjamin T. Smith, “”The Party of the Priest”: Local Religion in Huajuapam de León, 1920-1952” in Matthew Butler (ed.), Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico: God’s Revolution? (London: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 261-278.

2007

Benjamin T. Smith, “Defending “Our Beautiful Freedom”: State Formation and Local Autonomy in Oaxaca, 1930- 1940”, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 37.1 (2007), pp. 125-53

2005

Benjamin T. Smith, “The Politics of Anticlericalism and Resistance: The Diocese of Huajuapam 1900-1940”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 37.3 (2005), pp. 469-505

2004

Benjamin T. Smith, “New lines of inquiry into the post-revolutionary state in Oaxaca (1934-1947)” in Carlos Sanchez Silva (ed.), Historia, sociedad y literatura de Oaxaca. Nuevos enfoques, (Mexico, IIHUABJO-IEEPO, 2004), pp. 67-98.

Benjamin T. Smith, “El suicidio de un diputado: La inestablidad del régimen pos-revolucionario”, Agenda Política, Periodismo de Investigación y Análisis, 1.2 (2004), pp. 3-9.

Policy Papers

Romain Le Couer Grandmaison, Nathanial Morris, and Benjamin T. Smith,No More Opium for the Masses. From the U.S. Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis: Opportunities Amidst Violence?From the U.S. Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis: Opportunities Amidst Violence? Noria Research, Mexico Institute, Justice for Mexico Center, February 2018

Interviews

Aline Maria de Carvalho Pagotto, Interview with Benjamin T. Smith, in Historia e Cultura

Podcasts

UCL History Spot on La Dictablanda: Soft Authoritarianism in Mexico, 1938-1968, December 2014

Rethinking the Origins of the War on Drugs, LSE, February 2018

Non-academic Articles

"Arresting Mexican Kingpin "el Chapo" hardly means the drug war is over" The Guardian

Mexico on the brink. Ayotzinapa and Peña Nieto. Dissent

The end of the Drug War or the Cartel of Cartels, Dissent Magazine and Truth Out

"Qué quiere la Sección 22 del SNTE-CNTE?” Nexos