La Revolución: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History

Conclusion: Affirming and Subverting the Revolution

C O N C L U S I O N Affirming and Subverting the Revolution If Carranza would only marry Villa, And Zapata marry Obregón, If Adelita would only marry me, Revolution would be dead as a stone. “Adelita”1 during the late 1940s some of Mexico’s most prominent intellectuals pronounced la Revolución dead. No revolution, they argued, is immortal , and Mexico’s more conservative turn under President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52) certainly marked the end of an era in modern Mexican history. These critics did not repudiate the historic revolution but rather the continuing revolution: la Revolución hecha gobierno. Their evidence was found in words as well as deeds. “In recent years,” José Iturriaga wrote in 1947, “one could observe that the phraseology used by the Revolution has lost its seductive power, the enchantment-like force, which it previously possessed.” Two years later Jesús Silva Herzog noted that “Revolutionary language gradually lost its meaning and efficacy. Spent and empty words ceased to have a galvanizing effect.”2 This criticism (some said self-criticism) from the liberal-left, from “within the Revolution,” marked the first significant challenge to the mature Revolutionary Tradition. It was not left unanswered, of course, by the true believers, the new voceros de la Revolución. In his study of Mexican intellectuals in 1956, Charles Haightfoundthat“theMexicanRevolution was still, after forty-five years of unfoldment, the topic of topics in its native land.”3 Partisans of la Revolución as alive and well were numerous and vociferous . Some conceded that perhaps governments made errors and politicians were unfaithful but these were the failures of individuals and not of la Revolución. Manuel Germán Parra, a government economist, spoke for many when he stated: the Mexican Revolution has neither died nor failed. It cannot die so long as its two great historical objectives have not been consummated: the economic independence of the nation and the development of capi157 talism in the country. And a social movement cannot have failed if in almost half a century it has established the bases for national liberation, destroyed feudalism and slavery, and is constructing, by means of industrialization, a modern society that should be capable of providing the people with better living conditions.4 “It would seem useless to deny that there is a popular Revolutionary ‘mystique ’ abroad in the land, however vague its nature,” Charles Haight noted in 1956.5 Ten years later Stanley R. Ross borrowed Mark Twain’s phrase and wrote that “the reports of the death of the Mexican Revolution have been greatly exaggerated.”6 This mystique, the Revolutionary Tradition, was taught in schools, reaffirmed during every national holiday, given special attention during anniversaries, glorified in murals in the seats of power, and even reinforced in the movies and on television. Curiously, subsequent dissent and protest against the direction and policies of particular regimes often affirmed the Revolutionary Tradition, indeed used it symbolically against successive governments. Monuments and rituals became places and occasions for emphasizing the discrepancy between the revolutionary ideal and the unhappy reality of contemporary Mexico. La Revolución—and the Revolutionary Tradition—was affirmed, while its original purpose, the legitimization of power and the unification of revolutionaries, was subverted. It had outgrown the state. Beginning in the 1960s historical revisionism subverted nearly every tenet of the Revolutionary Tradition. La Revolución in official symbolism, history, and ritual became increasingly divorced from Mexico’s intellectual and academic culture. Not only was the permanent revolution, la Revoluci ón hecha gobierno, pronounced dead, but the historic revolution, la Revolución itself, was declared a fraud. Its unequivocal triumph, popular nature, continuity to past struggles (as its discontinuity with the Porfiriato ), permanence through reform, and essential unity were all illusory. Official history, although still produced today, is almost completely discredited . histor y During the 1960s, in contrast to the Cuban experience, the Mexican pattern of transformation was the “preferred revolution” in the eyes of Mexican and North American conservatives (and many liberals). To a new gen158 la revolución eration of Mexican students and historians, however, the Cuban revolution was a real revolution while the Mexican one was “frozen.”7 Official pronouncements about “revolutionary progress” were contradicted by the poverty of millions of Mexicans and quantified by a respected social scientist . Pablo González...