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

La Revolución: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History. By THOMAS BENJAMIN. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Bibliography. Index. xi, 237 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $18.95.

Benjamin's book uses discourse analysis to look at how Mexico City's cultural and political elites reified the idea of La Revolución. Part 1 of the book admirably traces ideas across competing factions, shifting intellectual currents, and changing state regimes. It also shows when and how louder voices drowned out others. Part 2 examines the relationship between intellectuals and the government in the elaboration of the discourse through festivals, monuments, and written histories. Over the long-term, according to Benjamin, dominant myths and symbols contributed to an "official" history of the Mexican nation, and presented the revolution as a unitary event that transcended individuals and united factions in the past and present. Monuments, festivals and historical accounts further interpreted the revolution as the culmination of a Liberal trilogy (which included the insurgency of independence and the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma), thus endowing the Mexican nation with a teleological historical unity. In his conclusion, Benjamin discusses how historical revisionists and critics of the regime, particularly after the 1960s, inverted "official" tropes to critique the "revolución hecha gobierno."

Despite his claims to recover the revisionist position, Benjamin builds upon the research of his postrevisionist colleagues. As a corrective to some of the more cynical trends in revisionism, postrevisionists of the past 15 years have revived interest in culture and politics from below, questioned the revisionist interpretation of the state as Leviathon, and shown how the revolution changed Mexican state and society. Like postrevisionists, Benjamin argues for a distinction between the actual revolution and the revolutionary tradition; he demonstrates that the state was initially weak and in need of justification and popular support; and he shows that the nationalist aim of proselytizing and reifying the revolution was, until the late 1930s, less a project of the state than of loosely aligned public intellectuals who felt that they were part of a changed society. As the government took care of its own business, these intellectuals wrote, spoke, and physically constructed interpretations of recent events for domestic and foreign audiences. In the process, they helped fabricate and ratify an "official" history of Mexico and its revolution. Despite some early involvement, it was not until the late 1930s that the government came to dominate the discourse.

Benjamin roots his findings in the writings and speeches of middle- to upper-class members of a small circle of artists, scholars, and intellectuals in Mexico City. He admits that while there was doubtlessly great variation across regions, classes, and ethnicities, his goal is to understand this small group. While this delimitation helps focus his topic, it leads to two problems. First, contrary to his general unwillingness to make unsupported claims, in the end the author insists that these elite discourses, festivities, and monuments "reinforce[d] political reassurance, social solidarity, and quiescence among the citizenry at large" (p. 97). While such an argument is certainly suggestive, it would require more, and a different kind of, evidence than we find in this study.

The second problem is that Benjamin creates the impression that the only social or political arenas that shaped the discourses he analyzes were those originating from within the elite classes themselves. The book turns a blind eye to what has been one of the most important insights of recent political and cultural studies, namely, that one can understand neither elite culture without popular culture nor high politics without low politics. Benjamin provides only one side of such equations (the state, elites, and discourse) and leaves out the other (popular culture, low politics, and experience). As a result, his carefully crafted and documented study perhaps misreads some of the social and political significance of his findings.

These problems aside, Benjamin...