La Revolución: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History

Part Two: PERFORMANCE

Part Two PERFORMANCE In the summer of 1928 the Caudillo de la Revolución was assassinated. Obregón, not unlike Porfirio Díaz decades before, was not simply the strongman. He knew also how to play politics: how to balance interests and rivalries, how to conciliate and intimidate those individuals and groups he did not dominate. His abrupt disappearance from the scene led to the sharpening of knives, as another revolutionary schism of historic proportions threatened. President Calles tried to head off disaster by uniting all revolutionaries in one common political front, a national revolutionary party. Unity became the watchword of the era: in 1928 and after, this meant the unity of all revolutionaries and the political nation. Unity also included a historical dimension, the healing of the wounds of memory of 1911, 1914, and 1920. This was the purpose, first and foremost, of the Revolutionary Tradition: la Revolución transformed into remembrances, rites, celebrations, monuments, histories, and more. La Revolución hecha tradición. The most immediate concern was presidential succession. In his last informe —the annual presidential address to Congress—in September 1928, President Calles declared the end of personalist rule in Mexico and the creation of a “nation of institutions and laws.” The Revolutionary Family, he declared, had to unite to save itself and the country.1 He stepped down at the end of his term of office in December and handed the presidency to a politician acceptable to both Obregonistas and Callistas, Emilio Portes Gil. The following year both factions agreed to the formation of a united party of all revolutionaries, the National Revolutionary Party (Partido 93 Nacional Revolucionario, PNR) and nominated Pascual Ortiz Rubio to be its candidate in the election of a president to complete the six-year term that was to have been Obregón’s. Ortiz Rubio won the contest—his opponent was the Maderista true-believer José Vasconcelos—and occupied the office, but Calles, now the Jefe Máximo de la Revolución, exercised the greater power and authority. During the period 1928 to 1934, known as the Maximato, the country saw a succession of three presidents. Mexico City residents wisecracked when they passed Chapultepec Castle, the president’s residence, that “the president lives here, but the man who gives the orders lives across the street.” Portes Gil negotiated an end to the Cristero rebellion and repressed the last serious military revolt against the national government. Ortiz Rubio got off to a bad start when he suffered a head wound as a result of an assassination attempt on the day of his inauguration. He had dif- ficulty accepting the political direction of the Jefe Máximo and resigned in 1932. His successor, Abelardo Rodríguez, served the remaining two years of Obregón’s term and knew how to take orders. In 1934 the PNR nominated a young general who had fought in the revolution , Lázaro Cárdenas, as the party’s candidate for the presidency. The official candidate searched for electoral support across the country to an extent not seen since Madero’s 1910 campaign. As president, Cárdenas broke the Maximato and sent Calles into exile in the United States, redistributed more land than all of the previous regimes together, created a national peasant organization and a national labor confederation, and nationalized the foreign-owned oil companies. He reformed the official party, transforming it from an assembly of generals to a party of workers, peasants , bureaucrats, and soldiers organized corporatively: the renamed Party of the Mexican Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, PRM). The Cárdenas administration reaffirmed the ideals of la Revolución more than any previous, or subsequent, Mexican government. At the end of his term he stepped down from power and did not seek a new Maximato. He set the pattern for the transfer of the office and the power of the presidency that is still followed today.2 From its formation, the official party and the government sought an influence broader than simply the political realm. This was not a new ambition but rather a more organized approach to cultural hegemony. Revolutionaries in the 1920s had attempted to revolutionize Mexican culture, 94 perfor mance as the conflict with the Church and militant Catholics demonstrated. The Ministry of Education under Vasconcelos sent cultural missions into the Mexican countryside to build schools, train...