Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968 ed. by Paul Gillingham, Benjamin T. Smith (review)

Two decades ago, when Mexico’s remarkably durable one-party state was showing signs of imminent collapse, historians began dissecting the immediate postrevolutionary Mexican state (1920–1940) searching for clues to its longevity. They found it to be surprisingly fragile. Lacking the political muscle to impose its will, the state was forced to work through (often counterrevolutionary) regional strongmen. Cultural policy had to be negotiated with peasants, Catholics, and the parents of schoolchildren. Even the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), which expropriated the foreign-held oil fields and redistributed nearly 50 million acres of land, was, in the words of Knight, more “jalopy” than “juggernaut.”¹

Today’s scholars of modern Mexico are turning their attention to the middle decades of the twentieth century, a time of robust economic growth and political stability known as the dictablanda, or “soft” dictatorship. This timely edited volume explores how the country that launched the first social revolution of the twentieth century became one of the world’s most unequal and least democratic societies. Its regional and methodological sweep is impressive. Taken together, the eighteen chapters challenge the conventional wisdom in many ways. Graduate students in particular will mine this volume for promising leads; indeed, this book will likely inspire a wave of interdisciplinary research on the period.

How did Mexico’s one-party state manage to prevail after 1940? As Paul Gillingham argues, its success was not simply a matter of electoral alchemy. Nor was it the result of brute force. Thomas Rath notes that Mexico’s army was relatively small, and its share of the budget actually declined over the period. Nor was it through largesse. As Benjamin Smith writes, Mexico’s heavily regressive tax structure ranked last among other Latin American countries in terms of tax collected as a percentage of gdp, thus “limit[ing] the state’s capacity for authoritarianism, corporatism, or even cultural hegemony” (256). Nor was the Mexican state particularly modern. As Rogelio Hernández Rodríguez notes, it continued to operate through regional powerbrokers as late as 1958. Mexico’s criminal-justice system was arbitrary and its authorities untrustworthy. As Pablo Piccato writes, murder investigations were open to diverse voices and interpretations, and “there was a consensus in favor of bending the rule of law to achieve swift justice” (336).

The dictablanda state was also more willing to cede control over its cultural policy than it had been during the immediate postrevolutionary period. American William O. Jenkins achieved nearly monopolistic control over Mexican movie theaters, and media tycoon Emilio Azcárraga came to dominate the (privatized) television industry. “Diffusion of nationalism remained a key policy goal but not the transcendent one,” writes Andrew Paxman, “for it often jostled with the federal aims of popular containment . . . and with the economic realities of production costs and elite profiteering” (315). The Mexican state’s retreat was even clearer at its Rural Normal Schools, where Cardenista commitment to agrarian reform was infused with the legacy of the Cuban Revolution. According to Tanalís Padilla, “the very schools the revolutionary government had once designed to create a loyal citizenry were now producing its most militant foes” (356). The one-party state was even outflanked by its old nemesis, the Catholic Church. Roberto Blancarte writes that after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Church strengthened its image among the emerging middle class through its appeals for more equitable development and less corruption. It also issued “a coded call for democratization” (84).

This intriguing volume holds other surprises. Michael Snodgrass argues that Mexico’s much-maligned charros (official labor bosses) delivered the goods to industrial union workers during the period; rank-and-file workers enjoyed “greater job security and material progress than any generation of Mexican workers experienced before or since” (191). Gladys McCormick explores why most sugar workers in the restive state of Morelos—home to legendary...