| Abstract | Abstract The paper engages several of the issues raised by Cohn and Dirks’ statement on The Nation State, Colonialism and the Technologies of Power’ (“Beyond the Fringe’1988). It presents an account of the relationship between a community of armed peasants and the state in northern Mexico. The argument is that despite cyclic periods of coincidence and antagonism between the politico-ideological projects of state and community, an historical analysis of the experience of the people and town of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, reveals certain continuities in the forging of an alternative political-cultural space, regardless of the character of the community's relationship to the state at any time.In Mexico - as everywhere - the function of the State is the maintenance of the existing order, i.e. the maintenance of social inequality. A task for the social scientist is to document and analyse the regional strategies of the State, through the study of both the federal government and the actors who receive delegated power from it…. [T]he State apparatus is also in charge of distributing differential benefits among the population. The logic of this distribution transcends rural aspects and regional boundaries and refers to the historical dynamics of the Mexican nation, which manifests itself in the configuration of the State at different periods of time and is conditioned by the existing correlation among international forces. But from such macro-political panorama one must descend to its implications for regional development (Guillermo de la Pefia 1981: 259–260).Neither the peasants nor the State is an autonomous entity. Both are associated with other complex dependencies, with other forces and pressures. Both are stratified within and divided by interests that often contradict each other. The contradiction between the peasants and the State is not the only one in the country, and thanks to a coalition of many interests, it is not even the most apparent. However, it is the essential one in the sense that the changes that would radically and basically affect the entire situation can only be generated within it (Arturo Warman 1980:7).
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