Civic Gifts and Nation-Building: Power, Meaning, and National Belonging in Mexico’s 1938 Oil Expropriation

• In Event: States and Sovereignty

Abstract

How do non-elites, elites, and state actors negotiate national belonging in nation-building projects? This article develops a relational and historical approach to nation-building through analysis of the multi-sectoral movement that emerged to finance Mexico’s 1938 oil expropriation. Drawing on a corpus of over 22,000 archival records, I identified and coded 707 letters, 281 telegrams, 12 images, and 576 anonymous monetary and material contributions submitted nationwide by sectoral organizations, non-elites, and elites to compensate foreign oil companies. The article conceptualizes civic gifts—contributions of money, bonds, labor, or objects—as relational exchanges through which the state and civil society negotiate contested forms of national belonging. I demonstrate how civic contributions transformed episodic patriotic gestures into durable repertoires of national belonging that continue to organize political claims. Specifically, I show that nation-building unfolds through configurations of power and meaning organized along two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the dynamics of power shaping participation, ranging from voluntarism to coercion. The other concerns the degree of symbolic clarity attached to civic contributions, ranging from clear to blurred meanings. Together, these dimensions crystallize into four exchange regimes—coercive–clear, coercive–ambiguous, voluntary–clear, and voluntary–ambiguous—each organizing participation, meaning, and belonging in distinct ways.

Author

• Christian Javier Castro-Martinez, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor