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

Preface

Preface i h ave been reading the Mexican revolution for more than twenty- five years. During the 1980s I summarized what I was beginning to learn in historiographical essays. Historiography led me back through the few generations of historians who have narrated, researched, and interpreted Mexico’s great revolution of the twentieth century. I noticed how historians often mirrored, and influenced, the political presumptions of their time. Historians of the Mexican revolution in the post-Tlatelolco era were heirs of a vast historiography that many believed required drastic revision. Revisionists attacked official and prorevolutionary history and the “myth of the revolution” fell before their archival research and scholarship. In my wandering through revolutionary historiography, I started to think about official memory, myth, and history. Was there an Ur-revolutionary historiography and, if so, when did it arise, how and why did it appear, and what did it look like? This volume is my attempt to answer those questions. The Mexican revolution discussed in these pages exists only in words and on paper: a discourse of memory. The events created by Mexicans during the 1910s through the 1930s to transform their society and rebuild their nation are also the Mexican revolution. The Mexican revolution was not, I hasten to add, fundamentally a logomachy, merely a struggle in words. Attention to words implies no dismissal of acts. Revolutionaries made a revolution, or perhaps revolutions, by their actions; they also invented one through their words. Many hundreds of historians have studied the former. I think it is time to look more closely at the latter. I am not the first to do so, which means this book is written on the foundation of at least two others. The first is Guillermo Palacios’s thesis, “La Idea de la Revolución Mexicana,” written at El Colegio de México in 1969. I took from his work the basic idea of “the idea of the Revolution,” which I call la Revolución. The second is Ilene O’Malley’s The Myth of the Mexican Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920– ix 1940, published in 1986. This excellent book demonstrates how and why the postrevolutionary state transformed Francisco I. Madero, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and Francisco Villa into official heroes, myths, and symbols. Both of these studies helped to guide me during my research and writing. Over the past ten years I have been reading this particular Mexican revolution . Research for this book is based primarily on the kind of minor political writings historians have often ignored or disregarded (at least I did so for a long time). The Colección de Folletos de la Revolución Mexicana— the pamphlet collection—of the Biblioteca Lerdo de Tejada in Mexico City, is a treasure trove of little-known pamphlets, booklets, and articles. It is so little known that when I asked the librarians at the front desk about the Colección, they were unaware of its existence. Similarly, the Colección Basave, of the Biblioteca de México, located in the Ciudadela, also in Mexico City, was crucial to this project. The librarians of both institutions, and many others in Mexico, the United States, and Europe, found obscure written materials and put them in my hands, and I am profoundly grateful for their assistance. The other great sources of materials for this book were the second-hand booksellers on Calle Donceles at Calle Brazil in Mexico City. There I found numerous pamphlets and books that I failed to discover anywhere else. Finally, I inherited a marvelous collection of books on the Mexican revolution that was built by Charles C. Cumberland and David C. Bailey and which proved to be a crucial, not to mention very convenient, source for research. The National Endowment for the Humanities gave me the opportunity in 1988 to begin my research in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1989–90, as visiting professor at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, several libraries in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom helped me to continue this project from afar. Central Michigan University awarded me a Research Professorship for the fall semester 1990, which took me to the libraries and archives of Mexico City. I returned during several summers as well as during my sabbatical leave in the winter semester of 1993. I am very grateful for this institutional support. Conference presentations for the American Historical Association, the Latin...