Mexico's Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century - Softcover

Joseph, Gilbert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355329 ISBN 13: 9780822355328

Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In this concise historical analysis of the Mexican Revolution, Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau explore the revolution's causes, dynamics, consequences, and legacies. They do so from varied perspectives, including those of campesinos and workers; politicians, artists, intellectuals, and students; women and men; the well-heeled, the dispossessed, and the multitude in the middle. In the process, they engage major questions about the revolution. How did the revolutionary process and its aftermath modernize the nation's economy and political system and transform the lives of ordinary Mexicans? Rather than conceiving the revolution as either the culminating popular struggle of Mexico's history or the triumph of a new (not so revolutionary) state over the people, Joseph and Buchenau examine the textured process through which state and society shaped each other. The result is a lively history of Mexico's "long twentieth century," from Porfirio Díaz's modernizing dictatorship to the neoliberalism of the present day.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5532-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
ix
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

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

REVOLUTION AND THE NEGOTIATIONOF 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 authoritarianruler since 1876, who was then eighty years old. Trouble hadbeen brewing for several years. In 1908, Díaz had declared that, owing tohis 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 hisword and launched an energetic campaign that threatened to land him inthe presidential palace, Don Porfirio ordered his arrest and prepared for astandard round of election fixing. This time, however, Díaz had badly miscalculated.Radical activists had been stirring up opposition to his falteringproject of modernization for years. At the time of the elections, in mid-1910,an economic downturn and the dictator's increasing repression preparedMexicans across the social spectrum to repudiate the regime. Thus,when Madero called for a national rebellion in November 1910, his call wasseconded by a broad cross section of Mexican society, including membersof the nation's burgeoning middle sectors and disaffected regional elites,as well as long-suffering workers and peasants. By mid-1911 Don Porfirio'sfederal army had been defeated in a far-flung guerrilla struggle with localMaderista bands. But Madero, proclaimed by many as Mexico's "Apostleof Democracy," quickly lost control of the diverse, hastily assembled revolutionarycoalition. A decade of violence ensued as a bewildering array ofinterests clashed. This tumultuous process—dubbed a "fiesta of bullets"by one of its participants—finally spent its fury, at a demographic costthat some have estimated as high as two million of the nation's more thanfifteen million inhabitants. The revolutionary winners eventually institutionalizeda new political regime, whose aptly named official party, theInstitutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ruled Mexico for the next sevendecades, 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, "Larevoluciónes la revolución," contending that the fundamental purpose ofrevolutions 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 questionof whether the postrevolutionary arrangement was more "just" continuesto be hotly debated. Even the appropriate case of the initial letter in revolutionis a matter of some dispute. We have chosen lowercase to distinguishwhat began as a multifaceted, distinctly local process from the institutionalregime's subsequent appropriation, simplification, and mythificationof that process—after which the PRI always rendered revolution in theuppercase—la Revolución—or "the Revolution." But as we will also see,this official political-cultural construct did not go unchallenged; indeed, amultitude of actors and interests within and outside the government continuedto claim and negotiate the meaning of Mexico's social upheaval andits legacy. Thus the revolution has always served both regime projects andcounterhegemonic impulses. We contend that it is precisely the durabilityand flexibility of "revolutionary" traditions and symbols, through whichboth the state and its opponents have sought to legitimate themselves,that differentiates the Mexican Revolution from other twentieth-centurysocial movements.

Mexico's Once and Future Revolution traces the coming, process, consolidation,and consequences of the Mexican Revolution from an arrayof perspectives, including those of politicians, artists, and students; ideologueson the Left and the Right; rural campesinos and urban workers; thewell-heeled, the dispossessed, and a multitude of people in between; andwomen as well as men. At the same time, we seek to contextualize theseperspectives over a long duration, that of Mexico's "long twentieth century,"from the origins of Porfirio Díaz's liberal oligarchic regime in 1876through the neoliberalism of the present day. To study the history of therevolution and its legacies, therefore, is to reckon with the complex forcesthat contested and represented the processes that shaped modern Mexicoand to glimpse Mexico's modernization as a nation and polity.

The timing of this volume could not be better, given the fanfare generatedby the centennial celebrations of the epic revolution of 1910. ThroughoutMexico and internationally, the centennial triggered a veritable cottageindustry of commemorative events and has begun to generate a harvest ofscholarly production in a field of study that was already quite robust. Longbefore the huge digital clocks strategically placed in the nation's majortown squares began their dramatic countdown to the revolution's centenario—November20, 2010—few branches of Latin American historiographyhad developed with such a degree of methodological sophisticationand thematic richness as the study of the Mexican Revolution. Certainlyno branch of Mexican historiography has more effectively utilized a regionaland local approach and an array of analytic and hermeneutic techniquesto probe central questions and test conventional national-level interpretations.Over the past several decades, historians have debated a hostof "big questions" about the nation's revolution: Did its causation owemore to endogamous or exogenous factors? Does it make sense to regardit as a xenophobic "war of national liberation," as one historian has termedit? To...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822355329
• ISBN 13: 9780822355328
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande