A conquista do Oeste: A fronteira na obra de Sergio Buarque de Holanda (review)
areas, saw Indians as being by their very nature incapable of becoming full citizens. There are many interesting insights in this very densely written book. Irurozqui provides the reader with a wealth of details, especially in chapters 2 and 3, which give a detailed account of elections between 1880 and 1925. However, there are various problems as well. Although the author uses the letters of the Liberal leader Eliodoro Camacho well, she does not use the most ample source of this sort, the letters of Gregorio Pacheco (nor those of Aniceto Arce). She also confuses the reader between expressed political ideals and political actions; in most cases the ideals were put in service of concrete political actions, not the other way around. Most community Indians lost their lands after 1881, not in the 1860s, as Irurozqui asserts. She also does not in the end return to her opening hypothesis to show how subalterns learned concretely from the democratic rhetoric. A sense of how things change over time gets lost in the thicket of description. Most importantly, it seems to me that an emphasis on democracy on the period before 1925 really begs the question, for, as the author shows, the political maneuverings in the period under discussion can hardly be called democratic. Instead, they were highly restrictive, affected by military strongmen, and riddled with fraud. In all, this is an interesting study that will serve many a scholar, but does not provide the last word on nineteenthand early-twentieth-century politics. This is a very good start, but I hope that others will take up Irurozqui’s challenge and delve deeper into this important topic as well.