The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910-1945 (review)

After the armed uprising by indigenous peasants in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, it became apparent that the region's twentieth-century history remained relatively unknown and unwritten. This book makes an important contribution toward filling that gap by focusing on "Chiapas's revolutionary and post-revolutionary experience through the lens of the rural schoolhouse" from 1920 to 1940. According to Lewis, at this time both the modern Mexican state and nation were forged, and the Ministry of Public Education (sep), created in 1921, became the federal government's most important state and nation-building institution. Besides improving levels of education and combating religious "fanaticism" and alcoholism, the sep was to be the means through which important federal reforms—notably federal labor legislation and land reform—would be introduced throughout the republic. Its remit was thus to redeem and "modernize" the Mexican population and to construct a national identity through the celebration of "popular agency, class struggle, sobriety, patriotism, and secular thought" (xvii).

In historiographical terms, The Ambivalent Revolution is a reaction against the earlier "revisionist" historiography of the Mexican revolution, which questioned both the popular and revolutionary nature of the great social and political upheavals from 1910 to 1940. In such revisionist historigraphy, cardenismo (the period of the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas [1934–1940]) is particularly vilified, portrayed as the era during which the Leviathan state imposed itself at the local level and the corporate institutions that came to form the authoritarian party–state apparatus of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri) were consolidated. By contrast, this book "highlights the inability of the federal government to fully impose itself in Chiapas" after 1920 (xiv). As Lewis illustrates, sep teachers had to contend with "a back drop of grinding rural poverty, inadequate infrastructure, a fiercely independent rancher and planter class, and an ethnically diverse population that vacillated between indifference and open hostility" (xii). Furthermore, after 1934, when the sep moved to the left and took on "Socialist Education" as its pedagogy, and sep teachers became increasingly engaged in social reform and political activism, local opposition to the federal government's radical program intensified.

Lewis concludes that the state's partial successes left an ambivalent legacy—for example, contributing to the establishment of a system of political bossism (caciquismo) that still persists in many highland Indian communities, but also convincing many poor mestizos in rural lowland communities about the value of schooling and the promise of agrarian reform. Overall, he concludes, "Cardenismo had a positive, even transformative impact in Chiapas . . . where teachers [were] able to submit agrarian reform requests, unionize and mobilize workers and peasants, and introduce the ideology of the revolution" (xv).

Lewis' analysis, which is informed by anthropology and sociology, takes a regional and chronological approach that highlights the importance of geographical, economic, social, and ethnic differences in influencing the success of the sep's project in Chiapas from 1920 to 1940. He also ties the trajectory and outcomes of federal education policy, and its corollary indigenismo, to political struggles at the national and regional levels, and, in contrast to much scholarship on state and nation building in twentieth-century Mexico, emphasizes the significance of the sep's material goals as well as its cultural agenda.

Chapter 1, a survey of politics and public schooling in Chiapas before 1922, which is drawn largely from secondary literature, does not really address the relationship between schooling and political and economic modernization in Chiapas before the creation of the sep in 1921. But chapters 2 to 9, which illustrates the author's interpretations and arguments convincingly, and often vividly, through the travails of federal schoolteachers in Chiapas, successfully explore the messy business of state building and national consolidation in Mexico from 1920 to 1940. The most problematical aspect of the book is that it begins and ends with the state's recent political history, jumping from the armed uprising of 1994 to 1945 and back again. Although...