Mexico's Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century
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ISBN-13: 9780822355328
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 09-04-2013
Pages: 264
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Gilbert M. Joseph is the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies at Yale University. His many books include A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War (with Greg Grandin), The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (with Timothy J. Henderson), Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (with Anne Rubenstein and Eric Zolov), and Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924, all also published by Duke University Press.Jürgen Buchenau is Professor of History and Latin American Studies at UNC Charlotte. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican Revolution, Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico, and Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution.
Introduction REVOLUTION AND THE NEGOTIATION OF RULE IN MODERN MEXICO The Mexican Revolution is the defining event of modern Mexican history. The long, bloody, chaotic struggle began on November 20, 1910, as a rebellion against President Porfirio Díaz, the nation's authoritarian ruler since 1876, who was then eighty years old. Trouble had been brewing for several years. In 1908, Díaz had declared that, owing to his tutelage, Mexico was at last ready for democracy and that, accordingly, he would not seek a sixth presidential term. But when Francisco I. Madero, the scion of a wealthy northeastern Mexican family, took the dictator at his word and launched an energetic campaign that threatened to land him in the presidential palace, Don Porfirio ordered his arrest and prepared for a standard round of election fixing. This time, however, Díaz had badly miscalculated. Radical activists had been stirring up opposition to his faltering project of modernization for years. At the time of the elections, in mid-1910, an economic downturn and the dictator's increasing repression prepared Mexicans across the social spectrum to repudiate the regime. Thus, when Madero called for a national rebellion in November 1910, his call was seconded by a broad cross section of Mexican society, including members of the nation's burgeoning middle sectors and disaffected regional elites, as well as long-suffering workers and peasants. By mid-1911 Don Porfirio's federal army had been defeated in a far-flung guerrilla struggle with local Maderista bands. But Madero, proclaimed by many as Mexico's "Apostle of Democracy," quickly lost control of the diverse, hastily assembled revolutionary coalition. A decade of violence ensued as a bewildering array of interests clashed. This tumultuous process—dubbed a "fiesta of bullets" by one of its participants—finally spent its fury, at a demographic cost that some have estimated as high as two million of the nation's more than fifteen million inhabitants. The revolutionary winners eventually institutionalized a new political regime, whose aptly named official party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ruled Mexico for the next seven decades, a remarkable stretch by Latin American and global standards. This volume attempts to make sense of what it all meant. Luis Cabrera, perhaps the greatest intellectual of the Mexican Revolution, declared, "La revoluciónes la revolución," contending that the fundamental purpose of revolutions is "transcendent," for they "seek to change the laws, customs, and the existing social structure in order to establish a more just order." As we shall see, the revolution certainly brought change, but the question of whether the postrevolutionary arrangement was more "just" continues to be hotly debated. Even the appropriate case of the initial letter in revolution is a matter of some dispute. We have chosen lowercase to distinguish what began as a multifaceted, distinctly local process from the institutional regime's subsequent appropriation, simplification, and mythification of that process—after which the PRI always rendered revolution in the uppercase—la Revolución—or "the Revolution." But as we will also see, this official political-cultural construct did not go unchallenged; indeed, a multitude of actors and interests within and outside the government continued to claim and negotiate the meaning of Mexico's social upheaval and its legacy. Thus the revolution has always served both regime projects and counterhegemonic impulses. We contend that it is precisely the durability and flexibility of "revolutionary" traditions and symbols, through which both the state and its opponents have sought to legitimate themselves, that differentiates the Mexican Revolution from other twentieth-century social movements. Mexico's Once and Future Revolution traces the coming, process, consolidation, and consequences of the Mexican Revolution from an array of perspectives, including those of politicians, artists, and students; ideologues on the Left and the Right; rural campesinos and urban workers; the well-heeled, the dispossessed, and a multitude of people in between; and women as well as men. At the same time, we seek to contextualize these perspectives over a long duration, that of Mexico's "long twentieth century," from the origins of Porfirio Díaz's liberal oligarchic regime in 1876 through the neoliberalism of the present day. To study the history of the revolution and its legacies, therefore, is to reckon with the complex forces that contested and represented the processes that shaped modern Mexico and to glimpse Mexico's modernization as a nation and polity. The timing of this volume could not be better, given the fanfare generated by the centennial celebrations of the epic revolution of 1910. Throughout Mexico and internationally, the centennial triggered a veritable cottage industry of commemorative events and has begun to generate a harvest of scholarly production in a field of study that was already quite robust. Long before the huge digital clocks strategically placed in the nation's major town squares began their dramatic countdown to the revolution's centenario—November 20, 2010—few branches of Latin American historiography had developed with such a degree of methodological sophistication and thematic richness as the study of the Mexican Revolution. Certainly no branch of Mexican historiography has more effectively utilized a regional and local approach and an array of analytic and hermeneutic techniques to probe central questions and test conventional national-level interpretations. Over the past several decades, historians have debated a host of "big questions" about the nation's revolution: Did its causation owe more to endogamous or exogenous factors? Does it make sense to regard it as a xenophobic "war of national liberation," as one historian has termed it? To what extent did U.S. political and economic interests condition the contours of struggle and influence its outcomes? Should the epic revolution be singled out as the culminating moment of historical struggle in Mexican history, or did its denouement more properly signal a betrayal of revolutionary ideals and the ultimate triumph of a new (not so revolutionary) state over the people? In a related, comparatively informed discussion, the historian Alan Knight has asked whether the Mexican Revolution was "bourgeois," "nationalist," or just a "great rebellion"—that is, a nontranscendent, largely political event hijacked by the winners to shore up new or residual class interests. And do the "high politics" of the factionalized struggle (as critical as they were in establishing winners and losers and setting the terms for "the Revolution's" institutional consolidation) provide only a partial history of the first great upheaval of the twentieth century? Do they really map onto the messy local equations of the Mexican revolutionary process, what Knight refers to as the internal "logic of the revolution"? Significantly, representations in Mexican popular culture have come to refer to the factional struggle as la bola, which conjures up images of a mass of intertwined humanity or of a great boulder that rolls across the landscape, gathering force, veering in one direction, then the other. This careening bola moves arbitrarily, brings death and destruction, and turns normalcy into chaos. While the whimsy of revolution is no doubt exaggerated in this popular depiction, it usefully evokes a revolution that was far from the phased and sequential affair that master narratives suggest. In the past ten years, historians have also become increasingly preoccupied by the extent to which the Mexican Revolution was a revolution for women, both during and after the military phase. In what ways were the gender, class, and ethnic conditions of women transformed, positively and negatively, by the revolutionary process and its aftermath? To what extent did the social workers, educators, and eugenicists affiliated with the new "revolutionary state" use gender as a category in reshaping the domestic sphere and "modernizing" patriarchy? And what blend of social reform, political coercion and incorporation, and cultural hegemony accounts for the longevity—seventy-one years of rule—by the Institutional Revolutionary Party and its predecessors? Does the PRI's celebrated characterization as Latin America's "perfect dictatorship" (in the words of the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa) owe mostly to the regime's capacity to promote—at least until the Tlatelolco Massacre in October 1968—an encompassing and reassuring discourse or myth of national belonging and inclusion, amid annual growth of 6 percent fueled by import substitution industrialization (the so-called economic miracle)? Or does it more properly index the official party's shrewd articulation of local and national institutions of patronage and clientelism (the PRI's caciquismo revolucionario), which, underpinned a "soft authoritarianism" beneath a democratic façade that could alternately co-opt or repress, as circumstances dictated? Finally, is the Mexican Revolution—either as an institutional structure or as a legacy of ideas, symbols, and expectations—definitively "frozen," "dead," or "over"? To what extent does it still "have legs"—a question that problematizes both the residual strength of the PRI's elaborate twentieth-century cultural project as well as the continuing relevance of popular revolutionary symbols and social memory for diverse segments of society that were shaped by that project but took issue with the authoritarianism that underwrote it? In the wake of the demise of Mexico's institutional revolutionary state in a neoliberal moment of narco-induced political crisis that many also regard as distinctly postnational, does the revolution have any real significance? If so, what meanings can Mexicans within the country or residing across international borders recover and claim for it? This recounting of a succession of historical debates merely scratches the surface of the past and present vitality that distinguishes Mexican revolutionary studies. Mexico's Once and Future Revolution is steeped in this provocative literature and, within the parameters of a short and accessible interpretive volume, engages either explicitly or implicitly with most of these "big questions." Yet it does so as it wrestles with what we regard to be perhaps the fundamental problematique in Mexican history: the continuing tension between grassroots political processes and cultures and the ongoing (and nationally and internationally conditioned) process of nation-state formation. Thirty years ago Friedrich Katz thoughtfully captured the terms of a paradox that historians and social scientists must continue to address in their work. Mexico is the only country in the Americas where "every major social transformation has been inextricably linked to popular [mostly] rural upheavals." In fact three times within a century, in the independence insurgency of the 1810s, in the wars of Liberal reform of the 1850s and 1860s, and again in the 1910 revolution—that is, during Mexico's three much heralded "cycles of violence"—social and political movements emerged that destroyed the existing state and most of the military establishment, then set up a new state and army. Nevertheless, in each of the three cycles, the changes in the countryside and in the poorer sectors of urban society that these popular movements ultimately wrought were rather modest. Armies that began as largely campesino-based forces soon became the guarantors of an increasingly oppressive social order, which, in time, was itself challenged and eventually toppled. For example, the devastating Wars of Independence ushered in a weak central state in which powerful regional warlords held sway with the help of peasant-based armies. First and foremost among these warlords was the iconic nineteenth-century caudillo, Antonio López de Santa Anna, who governed Mexico with a combination of indifference and brutality on eleven occasions for a grand total of five years and could not stop the United States from annexing half of the national territory during his heyday (1828–53). Likewise both the Liberal Reforma and its Conservative enemies drew on campesino support and then turned to elite allies: the Liberals to the U.S. government and a growing national bourgeoisie, and the Conservatives to the Church hierarchy and Emperor Napoleon III of France. The ultimate outcome of this conflict was the thirty-four-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Why have Mexico's embattled power holders repeatedly called upon campesinos and other subordinate groups, and why have the latter so often followed? Perhaps more important, what have been the political and cultural terms of engagement between dominant elites and subordinate classes, and how were they negotiated? These, Katz suggested, remain among the most enduring and tantalizing questions with which students of the Mexican past grapple—and they lie at the heart of this volume. In 1986, almost fifteen years after his amiable challenge to fellow historians to produce "microhistories" of modern Mexico, Luis González y González, the nation's most distinguished twentieth-century historian, could take satisfaction in the state of the new genre. Practitioners were legion, and the value of a regional or subnational approach to Mexican (and Latin American) studies was undisputed. Observed Don Luis, "We no longer have to prove the truth of the tongue-twisting muchos Méxicos.... It is a fundamental truth." Mexico's Once and Future Revolution builds on two generations of regional scholarship that includes our own monographic studies of the Northwest and Southeast. It analyzes the reciprocal engagement of social movements and forms of domination during particularly consequential junctures, as well as over longer periods of time—in other words, before, during, and after "the Revolution." Integrating multiple timescales, such an approach enables us to gain a clearer understanding of what actually changed over the course of Mexico's long twentieth century, as well as to identify the agents and agencies of social and political transformation. By interpreting contributions from recent scholarship that illuminate the continuities and discontinuities of power as well as the experience of popular resistance, we show the ways in which popular involvement in the arenas through which the state advanced its official projects resulted in some measure of negotiation from below. In one important respect, our volume contributes to an emerging watershed in the field: the international and transnational history of the Mexican Revolution. As Alan Knight has powerfully argued, Mexico's epic revolution was "one of those relatively rare episodes in history when the mass of the people profoundly influenced events." At the same time, "the necessary precursor of the étatiste 'revolution'" (the "high politics") that followed in the 1920s and 1930s, was never closed to external influences and participation. Indeed, the glittering notion of popular revolutionary promise—and the commitment of a new state (at some junctures more intensely than others) to social well-being and betterment—fueled the ideas and actions of many progressive international travelers. Beginning with the military struggle and gathering momentum in the 1920s and 1930s, these transnational activists, writers, and artists often played the role of "citizen diplomats," spreading the message of what they understood to be the revolution, or to live the political and personal ideals they nurtured in its name. Although the revolutionary state rather quickly moved to the center, displaying relatively little inclination to exercise a "world historical" role in the manner of the Soviets or, later, the Chinese and the Cubans, the Mexican Revolution still had profound international consequences. Not only did agrarian activists affiliated with the revolution's losing radical and populist factions fan out to other regions, there to create intriguing social laboratories of revolutionary reform (e.g., former Zapatista Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán), but observers from other nations, including internationalists like the Peruvian Víctor Haya de la Torre and the Nicaraguan Augusto César Sandino, traveled to their home countries to organize resistance against oligarchic rule. One cross-border sojourner, India's M. N. Roy, traveled to revolutionary Mexico after being exiled from the United States by President Woodrow Wilson. He helped found the Mexican Communist Party before moving on to Europe and Asia to work with the Third Communist International. Still other radical intellectuals, artists, and cultural workers extended the revolutionary impulse across borders. Best known, of course, is the muralist Diego Rivera, who pioneered expressive forms of public and plastic art that would galvanize popular mobilization beyond Mexico (including African American and left-wing artists in the United States during the New Deal and after). Read an Excerpt
MEXICO'S ONCE AND FUTURE REVOLUTION
Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century
By GILBERT M. JOSEPH, JÜRGEN BUCHENAU Duke University Press
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ISBN: 978-0-8223-5532-8
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"When and to what degree did the epic Revolution go astray? Although the authors, two of the most eminent scholars of revolutionary Mexico, are not shy in expressing their own opinions, this dossier allows readers from undergraduates to expert initiates to judge for themselves. Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau have given us a crisply written, comparatively informed survey of Mexican political history embracing nearly 150 years of both change and continuity, from Porfirian modernization to the first successful challenge to ruling party hegemony in 2000. If one were to read a single sweeping treatment of modern Mexico, this book might well be at the top of the list."—Eric Van Young, University of California, San DiegoWhat People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"This comprehensive, highly readable history of the Mexican Revolution from its nineteenth century origins to the end of its institutionalization in 2000 folds acute analysis and the cogent scholarship of several generations of scholars into a fast-clipped narrative that sacrifices neither entertaining humor nor complexity. The first narrative of one of the twentieth century's most interesting and important political experiments is delightfully accessible to students and the general public alike."—Mary Kay Vaughan, coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico 1
2. Porfirian Modernization and Its Costs 15
3. The Revolution Comes (and Goes), 1910–1913 37
4. The Violent Climax of the Revolution, 1913–1920 55
5. Forging and Contesting a New Nation, 1920–1932 87
6. Resurrecting and Incorporating the Revolution, 1932–1940 117
7. The "Perfect Dictatorship," 1940–1968 141
8. The Embers of Revolution, 1968–2000 167
9. Conclusions: A Revolution with Legs 197
Notes 217
Bibliographical Essay 227
Index 239
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