The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940 (review)

Scholars who teach Mexican history have awaited a short book analyzing the origins, course, and consequences of the Mexican revolution. The scholarship is immense; debates persist; massive histories, regional studies, topical monographs, and political biographies abound; cultural and gender studies provide essential new perspectives. Yet we struggle to introduce students to the revolution that set the course of twentieth-century Mexican history.

Michael Gonzalez aims to fill the void. He has mastered most English-language scholarship and consulted key Mexican works. He begins in the 1870s with Porfirio Díaz' authoritarian developmental regime and traces political economy, social conflicts, and cultural contests through decades of violence to the reforms and political consolidation led by Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s. The chapters are biographies of power, focused on Díaz, revolutionary contenders, and the Constitutionalist Presidents who built the new regime.

Extensive scholarship on the Diaz era and on the origins of revolutionary conflicts enables González to analyze politics and development policies in the context of regional economic and social trajectories. He integrates agrarian, mining, and industrial conflicts with politics to explain regime breakdown and the emergence of socially grounded factions ready to fight for land, justice, and a new regime. González' own innovative research on mining, mine labor, and revolutionary politics strengthens his portrayal of the origins and course of revolutionary conflicts to 1915.

Unfortunately, studies of Mexico after 1915 too often emphasize politics and culture, nationally and regionally, with little reference to socioeconomic change. Such historiography leaves González to portray a revolutionary consolidation based on personalities and politics, programs and cultural visions—with few links to production, work, social relations and the conflicts they still generated.

The shift from integrated analysis to political personalities is striking when González addresses the turning point of the Mexican revolution. In the fall of 1914, Villistas and Zapatistas, emerging from popular communities and demanding social transformations, dominated Mexico from the borderlands to Mexico City and beyond. By the summer of 1915, Constitutionalist armies led by Alvaro Obregón had crushed Villa's forces in the Bajío, leaving Venustiano Carranza free to organize a new regime. Power shifted from the popular coalition to the Constitutionalists in less than a year. Gonzalez' explanation emphasizes Obregón's military skills and Carranza's political vision. Villa appears a violent force without military skill, bereft of social or political base and vision—despite Friedrich Katz' deeply researched portrayal of a far more complex revolutionary. Elsewhere in the analysis Gonzalez reports the Constitutionalists' acquisition of arms left by U.S. troops at Veracruz in the fall of 1914, their adoption of Zapata's agrarian program in January 1915, their conquest of Yucatán and its henequen revenues and of Tampico with its oil wealth during the months that followed. He also recognizes that regionally grounded social and cultural divisions distanced Villistas from Zapatistas. All this and more contributed to Constitutionalist victory. Yet the text emphasizes Obregón's tactics and Villa's blustering violence.

Structural contradictions and popular mobilizations—the essence of Gonzalez' analysis of the coming of the revolution—all but disappear from the discussion of politics and programs after 1915. Even the Cristero revolt of the 1920s—a mass insurgency of deeply religious popular communities opposed to an interventionist revolutionary regime—appears mostly a conflict between politicians and bishops.

Gonzalez' analysis of Mexico's conflicts from 1870 to 1915 is thus more satisfying than his portrayal of transformations from 1915 to 1940. Integrated analysis is best sustained when politics are understood in socioeconomic contexts and linked to cultural contests (as in Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph's recent analysis of Yucatán). Where politics and culture appear without socioeconomic foundations, analysis remains too focused on elites, activists, and intellectuals to understand continuing conflicts and contested outcomes. The result is a text suggesting that...