State Governors in the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1952: Portraits in Conflict, Courage, and Corruption (review)

Since the 1970s, regional studies of postrevolutionary Mexico have thrived amid scholarly interest in explaining the PRI’s control of the state through much of the twentieth century. But even with the recent cultural turn, which has emphasized the local and popular facets of state building, regional studies still commonly portray governors as either charismatic caudillos or bland bureaucratic cogs in the ruling party’s patronage machine. This collection, by contrast, shows us governors who were occasionally violent and sometimes heroic, though most often pragmatic. As William Beezley suggests in his introductory chapter, many governors pursued the hard-headed state building at the regional level—including mass organizing, social reform, and the modernization of infrastructure and taxation—that ultimately underpinned the consolidation of the national state. Almost all of the content chapters eschew explicit theoretical and historiographical insights, but together they make important contributions regarding state building, regional sovereignty, and the Janus-face of Revolutionary politics.

The archetypal revolutionary governor appears in Jürgen Buchenau’s analysis of Plutarco Elías Calles of Sonora. Calles viciously repressed opponents and used his later power as president (1924–1928) for personal aggrandizement. But he also drew on popular radicalism and promulgated regional legislation that ensured that reform would be enshrined in the 1917 Constitution and in postrevolutionary politics. Similarly, in his well-researched chapter on Marte R. Gómez of Tamaulipas, Michael Ervin demonstrates that governors often best understood that political stability and capitalist modernization would only come in tandem with social reform. Indeed, governors frequently initiated reform before the federal government had the capacity, vision, or will to do so. Moreover, as Andrew Grant Wood reveals in his chapter on Veracruz’s Adalberto Tejeda, governors also routinely established the corporatist arrangements that became the bedrock of ruling party power, as in Tejeda’s case with agrarian groups. As indicated by Wood and others, political alliances between regional and national officials often rested more on a shared commitment to corporatist rule than on a shared political ideology.

Francie Chassen-López’s forcefully argued chapter on Benito Juárez Maza of Oaxaca presents a governor who, at first blush, appears to be among the collection’s least revolutionary. But her chapter foregrounds a key struggle for revolutionary governors: to assert state sovereignty in the face of both federal intervention and local rebellion. Though the editors emphasize the constraints placed on governors by federal authorities, chapters such as those by Chassen-López, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, and Stephanie Smith show that popular groups could equally threaten regional sovereignty. Fernández Aceves demonstrates how Jalisco’s José Guadalupe Zuno Hernández used alliances with radical regional groups, which at first appeared to challenge his authority, to counter national intervention. Similarly, Stephanie Smith adroitly argues that while Salvador Alvarado may have brought women’s rights to Yucatán through his revolutionary tribunals, it was women themselves who defined their function and meaning. Regional sovereignty rested on the ability of governors to understand how their alliances with popular groups and federal authorities could be both limiting and empowering.

The full significance of regional sovereignty is revealed in Paul Gillingham’s chapter on Baltasar Leyva Mancilla of Guerrero. Functioning like a conclusion to the collection, Gillingham begins with a much-needed romp through commonly overlooked historiography on the relationship between Mexico’s governors and the state. He insightfully urges historians to move beyond the orthodoxy that portrays the Mexican state as already consolidated by 1940, which would enable them to more precisely measure “the autonomies of regional politicians and their constituents . . . against the expanding capabilities of central government” (p. 178). Gillingham deftly illustrates the pragmatism that often underwrote gubernatorial decisions, the unevenness of mid-twentieth century federal authority, and the frangibility of the peace that the ruling party ultimately achieved.

Many contributors...