Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century by Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau (review)

Mexican life and politics have changed significantly in the past two decades. Yet generally, historians have held relatively fast to the idea that the revolutionary conflict of the early twentieth century constituted a critical watershed: one that overwhelmingly shaped a near-wholesale remaking of the nation and set the terms by which Mexican history would play out over the ensuing years. No doubt, the process wrought major change—seen most famously in the evolving national directorship after 1917. Still, the business of refashioning not only government but civil society would prove a daunting task. Did the revolutionary process help realize real transformation for ordinary Mexicans? Do revolutionary ideals have any currency today?

Joseph and Buchenau’s work considers such concerns in closely assessing the social and political character of the revolutionary years as well as the long twentieth century that followed. They begin their overview by sketching political and economic developments just after the mid nineteenth century Mexican-American War as Liberals under the leadership of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz set the nation on a path to land privatization, resource exploitation and infrastructural advancement. A select few (dubbed Mexico’s “creole aristocracy”) benefitted handsomely as fortunes were made in the export trade. Ultimately, however, the program proved unsustainable. Years of skewed economic development, brutal political repression and limited social mobility (even for middle class Mexicans who had benefitted financially but still remained marginalized politically) eventually took a significant toll. Combining with a series of unmet promises and outright deceptions undertaken by Díaz himself, sufficient opportunity arose for mounting a meaningful challenge to the regime in 1910.

Joseph and Buchenau consider the Revolution and its various competing factions in relatively traditional fashion. Francisco Madero, the usurper Victoriano Huerta, Venus-tiano Carranza, and Álvaro Obregón roughly constitute a middle-class constituency. Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa are rightly considered as representing a cross section of popular interests. The authors point to significant regional variation in the levels of violence across Mexico. The state of Morelos, home to Zapata and his radical agrarians, suffered under a scorched-earth policy that left nearly half the population dead. In contrast, other areas such as the Gulf Coast and Yucatán endured the conflict in relative peace and prosperity.

This book is not, however, a study of the Revolution but rather a longer view of the conflagration’s political trajectory and legacy. The rise of the Sonoran dynasty in the 1920s (de la Huerta, Obregón, and Calles), the Maximato, and the populist Cárdenas years (1934–1940), as well as the policies of presidents Ávila Camacho and Alemán are all concisely noted. As the authors discuss in the book’s middle chapters, the nation’s hotly contested church/state conflict (the Cristero War, ca. 1926–1929), and the rural educational campaigns of the Secretariat of Public Education (ca. 1920–1940), each in their own way provide indication of the limits to revolutionary hegemony.

Growing political dissatisfaction is clearly demonstrated in the tragic events of the 1968 repression of the student movement and the ensuing dirty war of the 1970s. The authors conclude by treating in relatively short order the current crisis brought on by the advent of neoliberalism, political corruption, and, to a negligible extent, the drug trade. Here, Joseph and Buchenau attempt to counterbalance Mexico’s long and unfortunate antidemocratic trajectory somewhat by pointing to mid-1990s grassroots mobilization (Chiapas, El Barzón) as examples of revolutionary fervor resurfacing. Yet despite such an endorsement of popular resistance in the face of clearly unjust state and market forces, readers are left wondering, not so much why but rather how and in what way Mexicans might engage in some kind of “future revolution...