This text offers a new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of post-colonial Mexico and Peru, it provides an analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As a political history from the subaltern perspective, the book takes seriously the intellectual history of peasant action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonised and colonising peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. The book both draws on archival research in two countries, and enters into dialogue with the literatures of postcolonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.