Waking the Dictator: Veracruz, the Struggle for Federalism, and the Mexican Revolution, 1870-1927 (review)

Veracruz has not figured prominently in Mexican historiography of the 1910 revolution because it hosted neither major grassroots uprisings nor key military conflicts. Karl Koth's objective is to fill the void by integrating this regionally complex state—with its rich oil resources, prosperous export agriculture, and strategic ports—into Mexican national history. He takes a revisionist approach, framed within a centralist-federalism paradigm, to unravel the unfolding political struggles between the capital and the provinces during the Porfiriato and the revolution. Although he is particularly concerned with peasant and working-class resistance to centralizing tendencies, socioeconomic processes play a secondary role in his political analysis.

Three fundamental arguments underpin this monograph. Veracruzano federalism challenged the long-term centralizing processes that resulted in the construction of the modern Mexican nation-state, which culminated in the 1927 crisis. Federalism viewed the Constitution of 1857 as the guarantor of state sovereignty, and the Anti-Científicos best exemplified this perspective in their attempts to resist Díaz's draconian authoritarianism. Koth extends this bipolar paradigm (used in his previous work on governor Teodoro Dehesa, 1892-11) into the revolutionary period here. Unfortunately, by treating federalists and the Anti-Científicos as synonymous, Koth essentializes the complex and contradictory relationship between the Porfirian and revolutionary states and their various opponents. Second, continuous peasant and working-class rebellions resulting from years of exploitation led to the forging of confusing and contradictory political alliances between the local political elite and the lower classes. He uses the 1906 Acayucan revolt, the Rio Blanco strike, and the Maderista revolution as examples of these cross-class alliances. Although the author claims each of these revolts was a genuine social rebellion aimed at resisting the centralizing tendencies of the Porfirian regime, his Mexico City sources and diplomatic papers tend to steer him toward a top-down political analysis, which obscures the regional dynamics and socioeconomic factors contributing to the constantly shifting relations between local elites and the lower class. Finally, he trumpets the controversial revisionist argument that the Mexican Revolution failed to achieve its original social and democratic goals in Veracruz because its very nature required the construction of the Leviathan.

If one can move beyond its grand theory, this monograph makes three important contributions to regional Mexican history. It taps a hitherto underutilized wealth of archival sources from the state of Veracruz, the Ministry of National Defense, the Porfirio Díaz archives, CONDUMEX, and the AGN. He details the role of Teodoro Dehesa as a moderating influence during the Porfirian and early Maderista period. Not everyone will agree with Koth's glowing assessment of Dehesa's role in the final days of the Porfiriato, but he was undoubtedly one of Díaz's most valuable confidants toward the end. He considers Dehesa's vehement opposition to Díaz's policies during the Acayucan revolt to have opened up political space for Francisco Madero and his Anti-Reelectionist movement. However, he overstates Dehesa's political importance when he asserts that Dehesa could have been indispensable in saving the Porfirian regime.

The final contribution is the author's detailed treatment of the complex and contradictory Maderista uprising in Veracruz. Koth challenges the widely held view that the north was the cradle of the Maderista rebellion. He argues, quite rightly, that the Maderista rebellion successfully seized control of more than half of Veracruz's cantons before the battle of Ciudad Juárez. He fails to prove, however, that Veracruz Maderismo was a cross-class coalition fighting for a radical socioeconomic agenda. It seems more likely that revolutionaries had much more limited political objectives. Their urban and rural lower/middle-class roots steered them toward sharing power with the political and economic elite rather than empowering the masses. Koth's steadfast adherence to a bipolar paradigm forces him to treat Maderismo...