David Wayne Walker (1948-2001)

On 4 July 2001, Mexican historian David Wayne Walker died in a Corpus Christi hospital, after a terrible fall while skydiving earlier that day in Beeville, Texas. David was born in 1948 in Natchitoches, Louisiana, once the last stop on the Camino Real that ran from Mexico City across Texas. He grew up in the blue-collar suburban community of Pasadena, Texas, a few miles from the San Jacinto battlefield that served as a constant reminder of Mexican history for him. His enthusiasm for pure scholarship began at San Jacinto Junior College, where his history instructor Mrs. Goss gave him inspiration. That thirst for learning continued even after he lost his deferment and found himself "neck deep in the mud of the Mekong Delta," where he served in a recon unit of the Ninth Infantry Division and saw nine months of combat duty. As David witnessed the uneven battle and carnage, he began to read intensely in order to find out why some people "choose to resist no matter what the cost." What he saw in Vietnam stayed with him the rest of his life.

In 1971 he returned to civilian life and received his B.A. cum laude at Texas A&M University in Kingsville under the tutelage of Prof. Ward Sloan Albro III. During our first meeting in Houston in 1974, the young David challenged me by stating that he believed "all of history is the history of class struggle" and asked if I could accept that. I still remember that fiery look in his eyes. David quickly proved his genius, writing exceptional papers and an outstanding master's thesis, a distilled version of which he published in The Americas as a lead article. It was obvious from the start that he was no ordinary student. He demonstrated a sensitivity to people that transcended reading and writing.

Houston did not offer a Ph.D. at that time, but Profs. Friedrich Katz and John Coatsworth of the University of Chicago agreed to accept David into their exceptional program. In 1981 he completed his doctorate at Chicago and won the Marc Perry Gallery Prize for Distinguished Social Science Dissertations. In 1986 the University of Texas Press published David's revised and enlarged dissertation under the title Kinship, Business and Politics: The Martínez del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824—1867. Five years later, the Spanish version appeared in a prestigious series published by Editorial Alianza in Mexico City. The book still stands as our best study of how oligarchic family interests grow and survive within the context of the political instability and dependent economies of modern Latin America.

In total he published eleven articles, five of them in Mexico and two with the HAHR, but his magnum opus was still in development at the time of his death. After 20 years of research at the Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango and in the state and notarial archives of Durango, conducting oral interviews, and working in the usual research sites in Mexico City, David had compiled a comprehensive overview of society in northeastern Durango and a detailed breakdown of society in and around Cuencame during the Porfirian, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary eras.

David was preparing a socioeconomic analysis of the origins, evolution, and aftermath of agrarian Villismo, with a focus on the region around Cuencame and the revolutionary movement headed by Calixto Contreras that was comprised of an alliance of local rancheros, pueblo citizenries, and agrarian workers. David had figured out how macro- and microeconomic forces had first created a large ranchero group in the initial years of privatization during the profiriato and then how macroeconomic forces helped polarize landholding in the region in the years immediately preceding the revolution. Using primarily local data, including detailed breakdowns of landownership and interviews, he was able to demonstrate increasing social compression, and the microeconomic results, and political implications of that process. His work contrasted the resulting revolutionary movement with the similarly comprised, less agrarista-oriented forces from other...