Cardenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatan (review)

As president of Mexico (1934–1940) Lázaro Cárdenas attempted radical agrarian, labor and educational reforms, nationalized Mexico’s petroleum industry, and mobilized vast sectors of the population in mass political organizations. Interpretations of this period and its legacies have varied, ranging from celebrations of Cárdenas’s populism and the transformative effect of his reforms, to revisionist denunciations of boss rule, corruption, and authoritarianism. Most recently, “neopopulist” or “postrevisionist” historians credit Cárdenas with fostering the emergence of a new national political culture in which the state’s legitimacy came to depend on the incorporation and realization of popular demands. In Cárdenas Compromised, Ben Fallaw tests the theses of populists, revisionists and postrevisionists through a richly detailed political history of the Cárdenas years in the southeastern state of Yucatán, a region dominated by henequen haciendas and populated largely by indigenous Maya speakers. In the years between Cárdenas’s 1934 presidential campaign and the election of his hand-picked successor in 1940, Yucatán became the setting for a series of events of national significance, including major social, political and cultural reforms (a redemptive program entitled the “Crusade of the Mayab”), gubernatorial and national elections, and a series of general strikes and broad political mobilizations. The centerpiece of Cárdenas’s plan for Yucatán was a federally administered land reform project, in which the haciendas, which produced fiber for use in the manufacture of rope and twine, were to be collectivized, as “ejidos.”

Fallaw argues that two informal political institutions were critical to defining the interactions among diverse national, state and local actors in the Cárdenas years—“caciques” (local bosses or strongmen who controlled communities, political organizations, or unions) and “camarillas” (networks of elites linked by family, friendship or interest). While cardenismo was committed to the end of boss rule and machine politics in Yucatán, Fallaw demonstrates that the reforms in Yucatán had the opposite effect. Existing strongmen were invaluable to the cardenistas as political intermediaries between local communities and political leaders at the regional and national levels. Moreover, new caciques emerged in the wake of agrarian reform, as officials of the agrarian bank and ejidal bosses entrenched themselves locally. Their corruption and despotism, and the tendency of reform measures to deepen rather than ameliorate the poverty of some sectors of the working population, engendered popular resentment towards the cardenistas. Yucatecan hacendados were quick to exploit this by financing and co-opting anarchosyndicalist unions, local leaders, and electoral candidates who opposed the agrarian reform.

Similarly, the Yucatecan camarillas—composed of surprising coalitions of conservatives and anarchosyndicalists, hacendados and communists—continued to be critical mediators between the state government and national institutions. Despite cardenista attempts at remaking the state government and electoral politics, Yucatecan politicos maintained and consolidated their power by playing upon local social and political divisions, manipulating regionalist sentiment (notably through the hero cult of the “proletarian martyr” Felipe Carrillo Puerto), and exploiting the weakness and equivocation of the federal government. Hence, within a year after the high point of federal involvement in Yucatán during the 1937 “Crusade of the Mayab”, an “official camarilla” was able to ensconce itself in the state government, where it would remain for decades to follow. Fallaw demonstrates how that official camarilla subverted the “Open Door” program through which federal cardenistas aimed to reform electoral politics, and successfully assumed control over the ejidos and undercut federal reform efforts through the “Great Ejido” program in 1938. Based on a thorough and compelling regional examination of the caciques and camarillas of the Cárdenas years, Fallaw rejects the prevailing characterization of the period, whether by populists, revisionists or postrevisionists, as one in which state power was centralized or consolidated in the federal government. “From the point of view of the provinces,” Fallaw argues, “regional elites tended to co-opt national institutions, rather than the reverse...