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

While Lázaro Cárdenas is without doubt Mexico's most humane and most heralded twentieth-century president, the sources of his grandeur remain largely hidden. Historical documents of the period, include his own diaries, simply do not evoke well the man. Nor do they capture the sort of overarching transformation he sought to create in Mexico, a transformation that was deeply cultural.

Ben Fallaw's Cárdenas Compromised traces Cárdenas's efforts to remake the state of Yucatán during his 1934-40 presidency. Deeply political, the book reveals a great deal about political machinations in Yucatán. More than that, Fallaw's monograph demonstrates much about the basic day-to-day workings of politics in this complex state. It is also true that, despite Fallaw's claims, this is not a book that understands politics culturally, nor culture politically. The thinking of the new state formation paradigm is largely absent from this book.

Instead, Cárdenas Compromised creates a rich, if partial, portrait of the Yucatecan political world. As many have long argued, Mexican (and Latin American) politics remain richly and densely personal. (As opposed to what? U.S. political nepotism?) In the Yucatán, "connections"—the whole saga of who knows whom, and how, and finally how thick and deep and lucrative the connection—persisted throughout Cárdenas's presidency. Countering this sort of politics with his own brand of patriarchal democracy, Cárdenas was unable to implement his programs completely. Fallaw argues that, in part, Cárdenas failed to remake Yucatán because he was financially overextended by commitments to repay the oil companies and to subsidize the La Laguna ejidos. However, Fallaw demonstrates that Cárdenas and Cardenismo also failed because of Yucatán's longstanding tangle of camarilla politics, a politics in which loosely connected elites controlled much about the economic and political worlds of the state.

One of the problems with camarilla politics, Fallaw correctly suggests, was the type of leaders involved. In this regard, he discusses the political career of Gualberto Carrillo Puerto. An avowed Cardenista and a brother of martyred revolutionary hero Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Gualberto Carrillo Puerto proved to be a profiteer dedicated to trading on his brother's name. The other general problem with camarilla politics was that it both lacked transparency and limited access to power. Yet Cardenismo, despite its hope to build upon remnants of both Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto's more progressive politics, was at times itself cloaked and hierarchical. For that reason, Cárdenas could be understood as little more than a rival patrón. In fact, Cardenismo clashed with Yucatecan camarilla politics repeatedly. For example, Cárdenas's effort to redistribute henequen hacienda land to the Maya pitted the national government, the agrarian bank, and ejidatarios against state governor Palomo Valencia, a known opponent of agrarian reform. To placate Palomo, Cárdenas allowed campesinos to claim independence from federal agrarian bureaucracy, a move that would have, at least in theory, allowed campesinos to obtain credit and to market their crops more independently. Not surprisingly, officials of the federal agrarian bank protested.

The most important goal of the land redistribution, of course, was to create an agrarian structure that would free the rural poor from economic dependency on large landowners, enabling them access to economic tools that would benefit them. Though the documents reveal little about the ejidatarios' response to the Cardenista land reform in Yucatán, they do suggest some degree of unhappiness with the federal government because of its failure to provide enough credit.

As a political history of Yucatán and Cárdenas's presidency, Cárdenas Compromised is richly successful. We learn much about how specific Yucatecans imposed power over the majority population of the state. We learn of instances when Cardenismo...