Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

6. Revolutionary Citizenship against Institutional Inertia: Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934–1940

172 chapter six Revolutionary Citizenship against Institutional Inertia Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934–1940 Thomas Rath In 1939, two radical printmakers from Mexico City’s Popular Graphics Workshop, Leopoldo Méndez and Alfredo Zalce, made a new flyer to be pasted on the city’s walls and street corners. In the center of one panel stands a stern, young army officer dressed in a smart but modest uniform. Standing behind him are a humble peasant couple and an industrial worker in overalls. At the officer’s feet scamper four small, grotesque figures representing Mexico City’s right-wing newspapers, whom the officer is shooing away from the others with the swing of a military boot. The reason for the officer’s disdain is clear. Aside from their obviously gaudy and decadent clothing, the figures from the press flaunt the money of foreign oil companies that had recently been expropriated by the state. Moreover, as the cartoon’s caption makes clear, they are guilty of pining for the former counterrevolutionary military dictator, General Victoriano Huerta. In short, they appear under the sway of capitalism and its characteristic militarist fantasies.1 The cartoon reveals the often-bitter debates between contending notions of the revolutionary army during the Cárdenas administration. Certainly, it shows a distinct change in how the army was represented within the leftwing , often Communist, artistic milieu in which the printmakers worked. Like many radical artists during the 1920s and early 1930s, Méndez had used the figure of the decadent “repressive military officer” as a standard part of his repertoire of political symbols to question the achievements of the postrevolutionary regime.2 In 1934, he produced a print underscoring the gaping class inequalities in the army between officers and troops.3 Cardenismo and the Mexican Army • 173 By 1939, the army’s solidarity with the masses appears to have been accomplished , the fruit of a new, younger type of class-conscious officer, keen to take center stage to defend the Mexican Revolution from capitalist elites and their military stooges. Although this representational shift was due in part to a new Communist party line after 1935 that emphasized the collaborative politics of the popular front, it also reflected changes in the policy and discourse of the postrevolutionary state. After all, just as the printmakers of the Popular Graphics Workshop supported other radical policies of the Cárdenas administration, they doubtless found much to admire in Cardenistas’ understanding of the military’s place in politics and society, which in many respects mirrored their own. The flyer itself was sponsored by Mexico City’s Workers’ University, closely tied to the state’s official labor confederation.4 Finally, although the cartoon portrayed the press in rather crude and hyperbolic fashion, it was true enough that the notion of the Mexican Army presented in the cartoon—of a class-conscious and openly political institution—faced vociferous opposition, not just within the press but also from a variety of groups within the government and the army itself. In this chapter, I tell the story of how Cardenismo tried to impose a new version of revolutionary citizenship on the military, one based on class identity and revolutionary engagement. Historians have often described the transformation of the postrevolutionary army as the result of a coherent project of professionalization and centralization implemented progressively from the top down, which prepared the ground for stable civilian rule after 1946. Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency is usually portrayed as a decisive moment in this long-term project. In contrast, I argue that Cardenista discourse and policy toward the army in significant respects broke with the past; engendered considerable political conflict, debate, and resistance; and had markedly ambivalent results. After first sketching the military reforms of the 1920s, I analyze the Cardenista project for the army and its impact, focusing on military discourse in army texts, public ritual, and speeches, alongside key policies such as the construction of schools for the children of soldiers, the arming of a reserve peasant militia, and the creation of a military sector within the ruling party. The Army and the Historiography of Cardenismo Historians have long seen Cárdenas’s tenure as a period of sweeping social reform and institutional innovation that profoundly strengthened state and ruling party. A common narrative explains the subsequent fifty-four-year 174 • Thomas Rath rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) as the...