Calculating Pragmatism: The High Politics of the Banco Ejidal in Twentieth-century Mexico

The battles that peasants waged during the Mexican Revolution translated into a series of agrarian and agricultural institutions, and one of these was the Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal, created in 1926. Histories deeply engrained in both the popular imagination of Mexico and scholarly historiography have offered a generic classic narrative of ejidal credit, beginning with Lázaro Cárdenas. He and his cabinet sought to transform the ejido into the engine of agricultural growth for the nation and carried out a sweeping and (in qualified ways) successful land reform, thereby bringing the revolution to the fullest fruition many Mexicans would ever know. It is assumed that ejidal credit peaked during Cárdenas’s administration in two major ways: first, it was in this period that ejidal credit societies received the most loans from the Banco Nacional del Crédito Ejidal, and second, it was during the same period that the bank clearly and unanimously embraced social reform goals over orthodox banking goals.

During the administration of the next president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, the revolution is understood to have ended due to a major change in ideology and vision that translated into a major change in policies. As the members of the new presidential administration aligned themselves with bourgeois capitalists, the cardenista plans for social justice and a progressive redistribution of resources toward rural Mexico (especially the poor) sharply declined. Ejidal credit, bound up with all this, began to shrivel and with it the ejidos as well. The government decreased the proportion of money it channeled into the Banco Ejidal and offered loans only to those who it deemed likely to repay in a timely manner.¹This is the classic narrative of ejidal credit that remains with us, and it is still dissatisfying.

Considering the importance of credit to the success or failure of the ejidal system and in ejidatarios’ lives, it is striking that the historiography has brought little nuance to the study of the high politics of the bank and why they mattered. Indeed, analyses of rural Mexico have made important advances in studying virtually every aspect of the countryside but have offered scant explications of credit and debt. Some have treated it, but only superficially.² Others have characterized ejidal credit during the period before the 1960s from a bird’s-eye distance.³ Some treatments of agricultural credit have placed smallholders at the center of their financial history.⁴ Meticulous encyclopedic treatments of the economic and juridical dimensions of credit at the national level leave political, cultural, regional and local contexts out of the picture.⁵ And there are scholars of political economy who have bypassed the topic altogether.⁶

On one level, the reasons for the perpetuation of the narrative described at the beginning of this article is that it was strongly shaped by the Banco Ejidal itself during the Cárdenas administration. The bank publically emphasized its support of high-risk ejidal credit societies around Mexico to give the impression that it was a radically redistributive institution. This idea of a redistributionist ejidal bank, which circulated while Cárdenas was president, set the tone for many scholarly treatments. Another reason for the strength of the narrative is its staying power, which can be attributed to its simplicity, its apparently intuitive logic, and its historiographical flexibility. This easily digestible story has managed to intersect comfortably with the traditionalist, populist, revisionist, and neopopulist interpretations of cardenismo and of twentieth-century Mexican hegemonic nation-state formation.

It is time now to interrogate this classic narrative. By systematically analyzing the complexity of the high politics of the Banco Ejidal, this article aims to make several interrelated arguments. First, it aims to show that a major scholarly consensus about the revolution—that its Thermidor occurred in 1937–38—does not apply to one of Cárdenas’s most important agricultural programs.⁷ The article shows that in regard to ejidal credit he was moderate from the start.⁸ While it is true that the bank gave loans to high-risk ejidal credit societies in the...