Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacan, 1920-1935 (review)

This study focuses on the politico-cultural transformation of country people in Michoacán—a state in west-central Mexico—following the violent phase of the revolution. Boyer argues that local agrarian activists (agraristas) gradually linked their community interests, especially land acquisition, with those of provincial leaders who supported their cause. In this process, villagers underwent a cultural transformation and identified themselves as campesinos (a general term meaning country dwellers) that acquired political meaning through universal application in rhetoric and programs that advocated rural reform. The incorporation of campesinos into national politics contributed to the triumph of revolutionary ideology over liberal and Catholic traditions.

Despite the promises of revolutionary leaders, country dwellers received little land in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. Local agrarian activists grew impatient and invaded neighboring haciendas and villages. Hacendados fought back and received political support from the Church and liberals, who defended private property rights and due process. In the early 1920s, Governor Francisco Múgica, an architect of the progressive 1917 constitution, authorized the creation of numerous agricultural collectives (ejidos), gave arms to agraristas, and closed several parochial schools. His heavy-handedness inflamed the province, leading to his ouster by liberal President Alvaro Obregón. Múgica's support of agraristas, however, laid the foundation for a campesino-revolutionary political alliance.

Michoacán's village-level leaders controlled local politics, established informal patronage networks, and interpreted revolutionary programs for their followers. They ranged from corrupt petty tyrants to dedicated social revolutionaries. In either case, they served as political liaisons and ideological/cultural filters between campesinos and provincial leaders.

In the mid-1920s, President Plutarco E. Calles attacked the Catholic Church and forced Michoacán's villagers to choose between Church or state. The government mobilized agraristas to fight the devout (Cristeros), who were usually landed villagers or mid-sized farmers supported by conservatives. When the fighting ended in 1929, the linkage between agrarian and state interests had been more closely forged.

Agraristas and the state became permanently linked during the governorship of General Lázaro Cárdenas. He created the Revolutionary Labor Confederation of Michoacán (crmdt) as an institutional home for campesinos and workers, and approved land grants totaling nearly 500,000 hectares. Radical school teachers and village revolutionaries assumed leadership positions within the crmdt and promoted socialist education and land reform. Confederation members subsequently joined the newly created National Revolutionary Party, merging local and national reform agendas and anticipating Cárdenas' progressive presidency (1934-1940).

Boyer's innovation is to analyze the political integration of agrarianism at the local, provincial, and national levels by focusing on peasant identity within the lexicon of postrevolutionary politics. He integrates important work by Friedrich, Meyer, Purnell, Vaughn, and others, with impressive new research on agrarista leaders and local politics.¹ Although Boyer's tendency to view all history as cultural history is trendy, his use of campesinos' language and actions to explain political change and identity formation is inventive and insightful. For Mexicanists, the book also underscores the importance of Cárdenas in deed and in memory. As Boyer witnessed, campesinos today in Michoacán pay their respects to the general during Day of the Dead ceremonies reserved for remembering deceased relatives.