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H I S T O R Y The Work of Concord and Unification during the 1960s veterans of la Revolución gathered every August to offer their political support to the president during what came to be known as the Breakfast of Revolutionary Unity. Unity in the present was projected upon the past. The bitter factional rivalries of earlier years were downplayed or forgotten as hundreds of viejos revolucionarios—the so-called spent cartridges of the Revolution—declared by their presence satisfaction with the revolutionary character of the present regime and the permanent revolution. “Our struggle was an authentic revolution,” declared the featured speaker at the 1966 breakfast, General Baltasar R. Leyva Mancilla. “It was not a rampage of factions or political maneuverings for personal aggrandizement.”1 The veterans who organized and attended these breakfasts subscribed to an interpretation that decades earlier had been constructed as the official memory of la Revolución. We have seen that many elements of this interpretation emerged quite early in the revolutionary discourse of memory. La Revolución was a genuine social revolution, a force of history itself, a continuation and expansion of the revolutions of Independence and the Reform, and victorious against a weakened but still dangerous Reaction. During the 1920s the idea of a continuing and permanent revolution, revolution converted into government and advanced through reform, was added to the interpretation. Most would agree with Rafael Nieto, who wrote in 1925 that “la Revolución of Mexico” had been “one revolution that manifested itself for more than a decade.”2 Despite considerable consensus, the intense factionalism of the 1910s and the lingering factionalism of the 1920s and 1930s precluded the writing of a revolutionary history to which all revolutionaries could subscribe. “In the 1920s,” writes Mary Kay Vaughan, the Secretaría de Educación Pública “published no textbooks to establish an official revolutionary vision of Mexican history.”3 Rival, even hostile, revolutionary traditions emerged from the multiple revolutionary schisms. As a result, amateur historians 137 6 extolled the unimpeachable revolutionary credentials of their faction and portrayed their enemies as revolutionary impostors. The early histories of la Revolución—similar to early commemoration through festivals and monuments —were profoundly partisan, instruments in the developing cults of martyrs. “I know of no history of Mexico,” noted one amateur historian in 1927, “that is written with any objectivity.”4 Did it matter? Increasingly in the 1920s a number of voices said it did. In 1925, Juan Sánchez Azcona argued that the “schisms of la Revolución” extending from as early as 1910 and 1911 still undermined the power and solidarity of the revolutionary family. This problem, he continued, was responsible for the lack of “a suitable POLITICAL organization of the Revolutionary People.”5 This is an exaggeration, of course, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence showing how bitterness from the past affected politics in the present. One example is revealing. General Juan Barragán, Carranza’s chief of staff and one of the opinion leaders of former Carrancistas in the 1920s and after, remarked in 1928 that he was loyal and devoted to the memory of Carranza and had maintained his animus against the authors (Obregón and Calles) of the overthrow of the First Chief. His political views were still hostage to the politics of memory. In considering the two possible presidential candidates who might run for the office the following year, José Vasconcelos and Aarón Sáenz, Barragán’s position was based on an interesting logic. He rejected Vasconcelos out of hand because “he has been a bitter personal enemy of Señor Carranza, someone who has attacked him constantly .” Sáenz, on the other hand, although a member of a faction hostile to Carranza and his followers, “has never fought Señor Carranza, neither during his life nor after this death. Furthermore, Aarón Sáenz remained on the margin of events in 1920.” Barragán’s choice, then, was Sáenz, the candidate least offensive to those still loyal to Carranza.6 Certainly one cannot say that the multiple wounds of memory that persisted even in the late 1920s dominated national politics. They were, however , part of the political equation and therefore a partial obstacle to the political unification of all revolutionaries. So long as Obregón remained the Caudillo, the political unification of all revolutionaries—while desirable —was unnecessary. Obregón’s enormous prestige ensured that the divisions among...

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