La Revolucion: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth and History (review)

Historians and others have long marveled at the unifying power of the "Revolutionary Family" in Mexico, a discourse that cleverly elided factional differences dating to the revolution itself while becoming synonymous with one-party rule. Benjamin sets out in this brief text to unravel the genealogical origins of that "master narrative" (pp. 14, 22) while invoking through case studies ways in which such a discourse was implemented, in particular during the 1920 and 1930s. Along the way, he offers a roadmap of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico that undergraduate students will especially appreciate. While La Revolución has certain shortcomings, it nonetheless serves as a useful primer--a "stepping-stone" (p. 33), as Benjamin himself suggests--to a subject of enormous importance and vast interest for students of Mexican history and of nationalism more generally.

The search for a unifying discourse after the Mexican revolution was vital for "[h]ealing the wounds of memory" (pp. 21, 93) that otherwise threatened to keep the triumphant regime from implementing its projects of reconstruction. On the one hand, this search proved to be daunting since competing "discourses of memory"-- a term repeated throughout the book, though defined only as "storytelling" (p. 47)--contested the consolidation of a official narrative from above. For example, during the 1920s different "partisan cults" kept the "counter-memories" of their respective defeated factions alive through editorials, privately sponsored commemorations, and the like. On the other hand, however, the eventual forging of a common memory of the revolution--"La Revolución"--was accomplished by locating that event as the final stage in a longer historical narrative of the struggle for Mexican independence. By the 1930s, thus, the pantheon of national heroes begins with Cuauhtémoc (the last Aztec ruler) and proceeds with Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez, and others (all male, a point of obvious importance overlooked by Benjamin), all the way up to and including the new heroes of the revolution. By demonstrating the importance of continuity, Benjamin is able to account for the relative facility with which a lasting master narrative of revolutionary belonging was ultimately established. That narrative, in fact, will surely outlive the downfall of the PRI, "just as the older Liberal Tradition survived the downfall of the Porfirian political system" (p. 23).

Following a brief, yet very insightful introduction, which situates the idea of a master narrative within a broader historical discourse of liberalism, the book is divided into two main parts: "Construction" (whose three chapters cover the events and struggles over "discourses of memory" for the period 1911-28) and "Performance." In this second part, Benjamin examines state-sponsored rituals (national holidays, sporting events), performance sites (monuments), and the evolution of an official historiography, three pillars of the master narrative. One of Benjamin's more interesting insights here is his insistence that the state often played a tangential role in these activities until the 1930s, leaving the "voceros de la revolución" (p. 31)-- the urban, literate, middle-class advocates who Benjamin mainly focuses on--to do much of the legwork.

While Benjamin insists up front that he is unable to address the broader, popular contestations of La Revolución, nonetheless his methodology and analysis left this reviewer somewhat frustrated. This frustration comes early when, in acknowledging his debt to Ilene V. O'Malley's seminal work, The Myth of the Revolution, Benjamin fails to build upon her central argument that a patriarchal discourse undergirded the ideology of a "Revolutionary Family." Another frustration is with his limited discussion of the popular reception of the "hegemonic discourse" (p. 116) he assumes triumphed. For example, when the Monument to the Revolution finally opens in 1938, Benjamin tells us that it met with "less than roaring popular approval" (p. 133), including newspaper cartoons mocking its design and purpose. Yet, oddly, Benjamin...