Dictablanda edited by Paul Gillingham & Benjamin T. Smith

8/12/2019 Dictablanda edited by Paul Gillingham & Benjamin T. Smith

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DICTABLANDA||||POLITICS, WORK, AND CULTURE IN MEXICO, 1938 1968 |||||

PAUL GILLINGHAM

and

BENJAMIN T. SMITH,

editors


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Dictablanda


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A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and resh interpretive

rameworks or scholarship on the history o the imposing global pres-

ence o the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment

and contestation o power, the construction and deconstruction o cul-

tural and political borders, the uid meanings o intercultural encoun-

ters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local.American

Encountersseeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between histo-

rians o U.S. international relations and area studies specialists.

The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical

research. At the same time, it supports a recognition o the representa-

tional character o all stories about the past and promotes critical in-

quiry into issues o subjectivity and narrative. In the process,American

Encountersstrives to understand the context in which meanings related to

nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, chal-

lenged, and reshaped.


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DictablandaPOLITICS, WORK, AND CULTURE IN MEXICO, 19381968

PAUL GILLINGHAM and BENJAMIN T. SMITH, editors

| | | | | | | | | |

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014


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2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper

Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Quadraat by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dictablanda : politics, work, and culture in Mexico, 19381968 /

Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith, editors.pages cm(American encounters/global interactions)

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5631-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5637-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. MexicoPolitics and government19461970. 2. MexicoHistory

19101946. 3. MexicoHistory19461970. I. Gillingham, Paul, 1973

II. Smith, Benjamin T. III. Series: American encounters/global interactions.

.

972.08'2dc23

Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the support o the University o Pennsylvania,

Department o History, which provided unds toward the publication o this book.


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CONTENTS

vii PREFACE | Paul Gillingham

xv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xvii GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS

1 INTRODUCTION | Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith

The Paradoxes o Revolution

45 HIGH AND LOW POLITICS

47 CHAPTER 1 | Alan Knight

The End o the Mexican Revolution? From Crdenas to Avila Camacho,

19371941

70 CHAPTER 2 | Roberto Blancarte

Intransigence, Anticommunism, and Reconciliation: Church/State

Relations in Transition

89 CHAPTER 3

|

Thomas RathCamouaging the State: The Army and the Limits o Hegemony

in PRIsta Mexico, 19401960

108 CHAPTER 4 | Rogelio Hernndez Rodrguez

Strongmen and State Weakness

126 CHAPTER 5 | Wil G. Pansters

Tropical Passion in the Desert: Gonzalo N. Santos and Local

Elections in Northern San Luis Potos, 19431958

149 CHAPTER 6 | Paul GillinghamWe Dont Have Arms, but We Do Have Balls: Fraud, Violence,

and Popular Agency in Elections


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vi CONTENTS

173 WORK AND RESOURCE REGULATION

175 CHAPTER 7 | Michael Snodgrass

The Golden Age o Charrismo: Workers, Braceros, and the Political

Machinery o Postrevolutionary Mexico

196 CHAPTER 8 | Gladys McCormick

The Forgotten Jaramillo: Building a Social Base o Support or

Authoritarianism in Rural Mexico

217 CHAPTER 9 | Christopher R. Boyer

Community, Crony Capitalism, and Fortress Conservation

in Mexican Forests

236 CHAPTER 10 | Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves

Advocate or Cacica? Guadalupe Urza Flores: Modernizer and Peasant

Political Leader in Jalisco

255 CHAPTER 11 | Benjamin T. Smith

Building a State on the Cheap: Taxation, Social Movements, and Politics

277 CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY

279 CHAPTER 12 | Guillermo de la Pea

The End o Revolutionary Anthropology? Notes on Indigenismo

299 CHAPTER 13 | Andrew Paxman

Cooling to Cinema and Warming to Television: State Mass Media Policy,19401964

321 CHAPTER 14 | Pablo Piccato

Pistoleros, Ley Fuga, and Uncertainty in Public Debates about Murder in

Twentieth-Century Mexico

341 CHAPTER 15 | Tanals Padilla

Rural Education, Political Radicalism, and NormalistaIdentity in Mexico

afer 1940

360 CHAPTER 16 | Jaime M. Pensado

The Rise o a National Student Problem in 1956

379 FINAL COMMENTS | Jeffrey W. Rubin

Contextualizing the Regime: What 19381968 Tells Us about Mexico,

Power, and Latin Americas Twentieth Century

397 Select Bibliography

427 Contributors

429 Index


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This book is about power in a place beyond dichotomies o democracy or dic-

tatorship, namely modern Mexico. The authors come rom distinct disciplines

and different historiographical traditions, have diverse research interests,

and were brought together without any single theoretical diktat. It was in part

the very breadth o interests and approaches that suggested their incorpora-

tion, in a deliberate search or academic biodiversity. We encouraged dis-

agreement. This approach to collaborative work has been dubbed a dogs

breakast.We hoped instead or a cats cradle: a skein o threads that, whendrawn tight, might reveal a pattern.

Initially the only evident common actor was a shared curiosity in the no

mans land o historicizing power in the mid-century, those three decades

between 1938 and 1968 when dominant party rule coalesced and peaked. A

preerence or controlled eclecticism over theoretical monoculture did not,

however, mean the absence o a ramework.We sought contributors whose

work ell into one o three broad categories: high and low politics; work and

resource regulation; and culture and ideology. These thematic choices pre-

supposed an organizing concept: that the relations between rulers and ruled

were characterized by authoritarianism, competitive politics, and resistance,

making Mexico an early variant o a dictablanda, a hybrid regime that com-

bines democratic and authoritarian elements; and that such hybrid regimes

are prooundly complex, dynamic, and ambiguous, demanding heterodox ap-

proaches.They reected a debt to those scholars who have made empirical

cases or the ability o everyday subjects to resist the projects o the powerul,

shaping their lives in constant haggling with authority; or the state as a

masque; and or the causal signicance o popular culture in determining dy-namic political outcomes.They also reected the proposition that this was

not the whole story.

PREFACE | Paul Gillingham


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viii PAUL GILLINGHAM

We posited that cultural and materialist explanations were not so much

dichotomous as complementaryand that struggles or power encompassed

additional phenomena. Some were previously hidden. Cumulative case stud-

ies and once-unobtainable sources, notably declassied intelligence, revealed

the underestimated violence deployed by both rulers and ruled; the relatedsalience o popularpoliticalinputs; the enduringly central role o petty author-

itarianism, also known as caciquismo; and the way that local autonomies and a

ragmented public spheremany Mexicosmight strengthen rather than

weaken central power. Other phenomena were more obvious and as such

might be undervalued by the seductive episteme o the hidden. They should

not be: laws, institutions, and budgets were more than aades under which

deeper causal mechanisms lurked. Moreover, the importance o an economic

model that overtly privileged towns at the expense o countryside was unmis-

takable. Finallyand criticallywe were struck by the ubiquitous phenome-

non o actors who shifed uently along a spectrum o resistance to, tolerance

o, and alliance with the state.

The resulting ramework identies three arenas o power: the political,

the material, and the cultural. It conceptualizes power as the ability to do

things, to get other people to do things, and/or to stop other people rom

doing things. This draws on two resistance-centric denitions: that o Max

Weber, who deemed power an actors capacity to carry out his will despite

resistance, and George Tsebeliss idea o veto players, those individual orcollective actors whose agreement (by majority rule or collective actors) is

required or a change o the status quo.In between the extreme outcomes

o imposition or veto lies negotiation, in itsel both a process and an out-

come: a statement o a balance, albeit skewed, o power.

Negotiation was central to rule in Mexico, but that does not imply the pre-

eminence o a consent-based cultural hegemony because negotiation in hy-

brid regimes involves violence past, violence present, and the ear o violence

in the uture. This is incompatible with one type o Gramscian hegemony,

which opposes hegemony to authority and dictatorship, quarantines it

rom violence, and stresses instead its consensual core.It is compatible with

Gramscis alternative idea o hegemony as the balance (or dual perspective

or dialectical unity) o orce and consent, which, when effective, estab-

lishes a compromise equilibrium between rulers and ruled.Yet advancing

this is (as Michael Taussig observed regarding social construction) nothing

more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation, rather than a conclu-

sion.As Kate Crehan suggests, rather than being a precisely bounded theo-

retical concept, hegemony or Gramsci simply names the problem that ohow the power relations underpinning various orms o inequality are pro-

duced and reproducedthat he is interested in exploring. What in any given


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PREFACE ix

context constitutes hegemony can only be discovered through careul empiri-

cal analysis.The question is not whether Mexican elites achieved stability,

however rudimentary, on a national level through a balance o orce and con-

sent; they did. The questions, rather, are where that balance ell, how it was

struck, and how it swayed rom time to time and rom place to place.We discuss these questions in specic terms in the introduction. In gen-

eral terms, gauging answers to those questions involves all three arenas o

power: the political, the material, and the cultural. There is no single inde-

pendent variable that provides a comprehensive explanation or the pro-

cesses o state ormation and its outcome. The three are, rather, tightly

interwoven. For example, the political unction o any states management o

economic resources is coalition-building, but in Mexico, at all levels, those

resources were leveraged by a cultural phenomenon: the pervasive revolu-

tionary rhetoric that gave the excluded some hope o joining such coalitions

in the uture. Revolutionary nationalism did provide something o a common

language or both hegemonies and counter-hegemonies, but that language

was underpinned by violence. Everyday people were coerced into nationalist

ceremonies by the threats o nes or jailing; archaeological artiacts were ap-

propriated by platoons o soldiers despite village protests; journalists and

Catholic militants, or agraristasand teachers, could ace beatings or assassi-

nation. Briberylunches or marcheswas also salient. Moreover, rulers

and ruled were polyglot, and in addition to the common language o revolu-tionary nationalism (which some reused to speak) there were other com-

mon languages that were tactically adopted as political mores shifed, such

as the rhetorics o democracy and development. To see economic processes

at work shaping culture, cultural orces shaping economies, and politics

both ormal and inormalat the intersection o the two; to posit that causal

primacy varies rom case to case, when it can be pinned down at all; and to

note a high prevalence o equinalitydifferent processes leading to similar

outcomesis not a live-and-let-live conceptual mush. It is a reasonable re-

ection o the case studies we have.

Mexican historiography is highly dependent on case studies or the obvi-

ous epistemological reasons o a large and diverse territory and population.

This should not shut the door on systematic comparison both across and be-

yond Latin America.Deviant case studies, exploring the exceptions that test

the rule, can revise broad generalizations, as regional histories o revolution

demonstrated.Most likely (those where a theory should i anywhere work),

least likely (those that should lie beyond the limits o a theor y), and crucial

case studies can test, extend, and even suggest theories. These may be lessgrand and more middle-range: universal but comparatively narrow pro-

posals o social processes ounded on the concrete, the specic, and the


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x PAUL GILLINGHAM

time-sensitive.Yet such generalizations are particularly apt or Mexico in

the mid-century, with its neither-sh-nor-owl relationships o power. As

Fernando Coronil observed, ragmentation, ambiguity, and disjunctions are

eatures o complex systems; in Mexico and other hybrid regimes the rag-

mentation and the ambiguity are not just down to complexity but also ormpart o the ruling classs strategies o domination: divide, conuse, and rule.

The limitations o methodology are, in other words, perhaps less limiting in

Mexico than elsewhere. At the same time historys strengthsbroad and

deep empiricism, the explanatory richness that creates, and a sophisticated

appreciation o the diverse rhythms and causal effects o timemight allow

historians o Mexico to advance more universal discussions.

It is diffi cult (but not impossible) to generalize about the requency o the

processes o domination and resistance that studies in this eld are starting

to trace. But in identiying and tracing the multiplicity o those processes,

combining case studies, qualitative overviews, and basic cliometrics, we

might come up with a coherent model o mid-century Mexico. That model is

neither o a system based on consensual cultural hegemony nor one o Al-

thussers Repressive State Apparatuses, such as bureaucratic authoritarian-

ism.The essays in this book argue that orce was real, strategically applied,

and successully masked. It also was exercised by both rulers and ruled. It

went hand in hand with a certain degree o consent: one produced by eco-

nomic growth and a coalition-building distribution o resources, by politi-cal accommodation, and by culture. The outcome was not stasis but rather

something like a chemists dynamic equilibrium, in which reactions move

in opposite directions at broadly similar speeds.

This can be described by the term dictablanda: the combination o dictadura

(dictatorship) with the switch o dura(hard) or blanda(sof). This has, as Je-

rey Rubin argues, a powerul, untranslatable resonance. It also enjoys a rec-

ord o some usage inside Mexico, bypassing the more misleading labels o

the democracy with adjectives, the perect dictatorship, or even the sta

state. Dictablanda, in both popular and general terms, is good to think or

mid-century Mexico.In comparative terms, however, Guillermo ODonnell

and Philip Schmitters denition, which denotes liberalizing authoritarian

regimes, without elections, in transition, suggests the need or translation,

or a parallel, more precise, and broadly understood category. Translating

the dictablanda seems particularly relevant given that Mexico shared some

aspects o old Latin American authoritarian states while oreshadowing

the postCold War genus o hybrid regimes, species o which encompass

between a quarter and a third o all contemporary states.In our period Mex-ico was in many ways a competitive authoritarian regime, a type o civilian

regime in which ormal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed


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PREFACE xi

as the primary means o gaining power, but in which incumbents abuse o

the state places them at a signicant advantage vis--vis their opponents.

Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic insti-

tutions to contest seriously or power, but they are not democratic because

the playing eld is heavily skewed in avour o incumbents. Competition isthus real but unair. Some o the characteristics behind the Mexican re-

gimes resiliencethe institutionalized circulation o national elites within a

single party, a powerul national story, and a deliberately ragmented public

sphere, the negotiated nature o rule, the hidden violence, the local elec-

toral contestsmight interest political scientists who apply this histori-

cally contingent theory to places like contemporary Malaysia, Russia, or

Tanzania, extending its ambit beyond the electoral and the elite toward a

model o power that is simultaneously comprehensive and disaggregated,

one that gives ull play to the local and the inormal and the cultural: sof

authoritarianism.

Notes

1. Barrington Moore, cited in James Scott, Foreword, in Everyday Forms o State For-

mation: Revolution and the Negotiation o Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and

Daniel Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), vii.

2. For controlled eclecticism, see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution(2 vols.) (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. I, 84. See also Alexander L. George

and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cam-

bridge, MA: Press, 2004), 310; Terence J. McDonald, Introduction, in The His-

toric Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald, 117 (Ann Arbor: University o

Michigan Press, 1996).

3. Guillermo ODonnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions rom Authoritarian Rule:

Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2013); Larry Diamond, Elections without Democracy: Thinking about Hybrid

Regimes,Journal o Democracy13, no. 2 (April 2002): 2135.

4. The classics are Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants,

and Schools in Mexico, 19301940(Tucson: University o Arizona Press, 1997); Jeffrey W.Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitn, Mexico(Dur-

ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms o State

Formation.

5. Emilia Viotti da Costa, New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Eco-

nomic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionismin Search o Dialectics, in Reclaim-

ing the Political in Latin American History: Essays rom the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph,

1731 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

6. While, as David Nugent points out, It is a curious act that neither o the two

approaches to the state that currently inorm academic debatethe organizational

nor the representationalhas had much to say to each other, scholars have long in-

dicated the potential o such dialogues. David Nugent, Conclusion: Reections on

State Theory Through the Lens o the Mexican Military, in Forced Marches: Soldiers and


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xii PAUL GILLINGHAM

Military Caciques in Modern Mexico, ed. Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (Tucson: Univer-

sity o Arizona Press, 2012), 240; William Roseberry, Marxism and Culture, inAn-

thropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy, 3054 (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); William B. Sewell, Logics o History:

Social Theory and Social Transormation (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005);

Richard Biernacki, Method and Metaphor afer the New Cultural History, in Beyond

the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study o Society and Culture , ed. Victoria E. Bonnell

and Lynn Hunt, 6294 (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1999); John Tutino,

Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajo and Spanish North America(Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4748.

7. This identication o loci o power complements Wil Pansters more process-

based model o state ormation, which identies zones o hegemony, zones o coer-

cion, and gray zones in between. Wil G. Pansters, Introduction, in Violence, Coercion

and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Hal o the Centaur, ed. Wil G.

Pansters, 339 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanord University Press, 2012).8. Weber as cited in Alan Knight, The Weight o the State in Modern Mexico, in

Studies in the Formation o the Nation-State in Latin America, ed. James Dunkerley, 21253,

215 (London: , 2002); George Tsebelis, Decision Making in Political Systems:

Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism and Mutiparty-

ism, British Journal o Political Science25 (July 1995): 289325, 289.

9. Antonio Gramsci, Selections rom the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and

Wishart, 1996), 124, 170, 239. See, or example, Claudio Lomnitzs denition o hege-

mony as an institutionalized structure o interactional rames, localist ideologies,

and intimate cultures which allow or consensus around a particular regime. Claudio

Lomnitz, Exits rom the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space(Berke-ley: University o Caliornia Press, 1992), 40.

10. Gramsci, Selections rom the Prison Notebooks, 124, 161.

11. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History o the Senses (London:

Routledge, 1993), xvi.

12. An analysis that ully recognizes Gramscis intense concern with the materiality

o power; a concern that, Crehan argues, has been largely lost in anthropologists

usage. Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology(Berkeley: University o Caliornia

Press, 2002), 104, 17276.

13. Sandra Rozental, Mobilizing the Monolith: Patrimonio and the Production oMexico through Its Fragments (PhD dissertation, New York University, New York,

2012); Carlos Moncada, Del Mxico violento: periodistas asesinados(Mexico City: Edomex,

1991); Pablo Serrano Alvarez, La batalla del espiritu: el movimiento sinarquista en El Bajio,

19321951(2 vols.) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992),

vol. II, 80; Tanals Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land o Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement

and the Myth o the Pax Prista, 19401962(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

14. For Latin Americanists (largely missed) potential to shape theory in the social

sciences, see the introduction to Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando Lpez-Alves,

eds., The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens o Latin America, 323, 14 (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).15. Important works include Luis Gonzlez y Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo(Mexico City:

, 1984); Heather Fowler-Salamini,Agrarian radicalism in Veracruz, 192038(Lincoln:


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PREFACE xiii

University o Nebraska Press, 1978); Romana Falcn, Revolucin y caciquismo: San Luis

Potos, 19101938(Mexico City: Colegio de Mxico, 1984); Thomas Benjamin and Mark

Wasserman, eds., Provinces o the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican History, 19101929

(Albuquerque: University o New Mexico Press, 1990); Barry Carr, Recent Regional

Studies o the Mexican Revolution, Latin American Research Review15, no. 1 (1980): 3

14, 7.

16. Harry Eckstein, Case Studies and Theory in Political Science, in Handbook o

Political Science. Political Science: Scope and Theory, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W.

Polsby, vol. 01.7, 94, 137 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975). For a skeptical consid-

eration o Mexico and grand theory, see Alan Knight, The Modern Mexican State:

Theory and Practice, in Centeno and Lpez-Alves, The Other Mirror, 177218.

17. Fernando Coronil, Foreword, in Close Encounters o Empire: Writing the Cultural

History o U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand,

Ricardo D. Salvatore, viixi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

18. Patrick Joyce, What Is the Social in Social History? Past and Present206, no. 1(2010): 21348, 216.

19. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards

an investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. Louis Althusser, 145

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

20. The term was coined to describe Spanish politics under General Berenguer dur-

ing the 1930s and subsequently applied to the last years o the Franco regime. By the

1950s it had been adopted by Mexican intellectuals to describe rst the Porrian and

later the sta state. It lay at the heart o the stormy exchange between Octavio Paz,

Mario Vargas Llosa, and Enrique Krauze o 1990s televised Encuentro Vuelta, in

which Vargas Llosa dubbed modern Mexico the perect dictatorship, Paz reacteduriously, and Krauze suggested the compromise o dictablanda. (Paz abruptly can-

celled the ensuing round table; Vargas Llosa lef the country adducing amily rea-

sons.) William D. Phillips, Carla Rahn Phillips,A Concise History o Spain(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 246; Daniel Coso Villegas quoted in Enrique

Krauze, Mstico de la autoridad: Porrio Daz(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica,

1987), 34; Xavier Rodrguez Ledesma, El pensamiento poltico de Octavio Paz: Las trampas de

la ideologa(Mexico City: Plaza y Valds, 1996), 41418.

21. Guillermo ODonnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions rom Authoritarian

Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 2013), 814.

22. Andreas Schedler, The Logic o Electoral Authoritarianism, in Electoral Author-

itarianism: The Dynamics o Unree Competition, ed. Andreas Schedler, 114, 3 (Boulder,

CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 3; Diamond, Elections Without Democracy, 27.

23. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes

Afer the Cold War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5.

24. There are several extant types o what might be called authoritarianism with

adjectives. While cautious to introduce one more, we think it is useul in this instance

to think as splitters rather than lumpers: hegemonic party autocracies, or example,

are generally thought o as noncompetitive, whereas competitive authoritarianismdoes not capture the distinct origins and multiple strategies o domination that char-

acterize mid-century Mexico. Neither does Tocquevilles concept o sof despotism,


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xiv PAUL GILLINGHAM

with its subtle capture o ree agency in the bureaucratic networks o small, com-

plicated rules elaborated by an immense and tutelary power, which ends up secur-

ing servitude o the regular, quiet, and gentle kind; and neither does Joseph Nyes

ormulation o sof power as getting others to want the outcomes that you want.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeves, vol. II, 39293 (Cam-

bridge: Sever and Francis, 1863); Joseph S. Nye Jr., Sof Power: The Means to Success in

World Politics(New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 56.


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This book grew out o a series o panels that led in turn to a two-day interna-

tional conerence at Michigan State University in 2009. We would like to

thank all the departments and individuals who generously supported that

conerence, in particular Mark Kornbluh, Dylan Miner, Elizabeth OBrien,

Antonio Turok, Lapiztola, Zzierra Rrezzia, and Edith Morales Snchez, to-

gether with the Department o History, the Residential College in the Arts

and Humanities, the Center or Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the

Department o Political Science, the School o Journalism, and the School oCriminal Justice. For the next step o turning the resulting papers into a book

we owe warm thanks to Gil Joseph and to Valerie Milholland and Gisela Fo-

sado at Duke University Press, whose backing or this project has been pa-

tient and considerable.

We have incurred substantial proessional and personal debts along the

waysubstantial enough, when combined with those o our contributors, to

dey detailed listing. The archivists, librarians, interviewees, students, col-

leagues, and riends who helped us along the way have been undamental to

our work; they know who they are, and how grateul we are to them. Our au-

thors have been much put upon and have responded with tolerance and mul-

tiple drafs. Other colleagues have contributed as commentators and critical

readers. Heather Fowler-Salamini, Alan Knight, Pablo Piccato, and John

Womack Jr. were the original discussants at Michigan State University; they

went on to read drafs o the manuscript and make valuable observations and

suggestions a second time around, to which Oscar Altamirano, Chris Boyer,

Barry Carr, Ben Fallaw, Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves, Gladys McCormick,

Tanals Padilla, Wil Pansters, Andrew Paxman, Eric Van Young, and Dukesanonymous readers subsequently added. John Womack Jr. asked some

diffi cultand consequently useulquestions, which we greatly appreciated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


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xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Above all we would like to thank Jolie Olcott and Jeffrey Rubin or their inci-

sive readings o this book, which have signicantly shaped its nal orm.

Finally we would like to thank our amilies, in particular our wives, who

contributed in ways ranging rom interviews and translations to technology

and contracts.


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Institutions

Agrarian Department Departamento Agraria (19341960); Departamento

de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonizacin (19601974)

Attorney General Procurador General

Department o Agriculture Secretara de Agricultura y Fomento (19171946);

Secretara de Agricultura y Ganadera (19461976)

Department o Deense Secretara de la Deensa Nacional (SEDENA)

Department o Education Secretara de Educacin Pblica (SEP)

Department o Foreign Secretara de Relaciones Exteriores

o Affairs

Department o Health and Secretara de Salubridad y Asistencia

Social Security

Department o the Interior Secretara de Gobernacin

Department o Secretara de Comunicaciones y Obras Pblicas

Public Works (19201959); Secretara de Comunicaciones y

Transportes (1959)

Federal Security Directorate Direccin Federal de Seguridad,(DFS)

General Directorate o Direccin General de Investigaciones Polticas y

Political and Social Sociales (IPS)

Investigations

Offi ce o the State Prosecutor Ministerio Pblico

Treasury Secretara de Hacienda

GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS


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xviii GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS

Acronyms

AGN Archivo General de la Nacin

ACPEO Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Oaxaca

AHEV Archivo Histrico del Estado de Veracruz

AHSDN Archivo Histrico de la Secretara de Deensa National

ALM Adolo Lpez Mateos

AMI Archivo Municipal de Ixcateopan

BCCG Biblioteca Carmen Castaeda Garca

CMGUF Coleccin Mara Guadalupe Urza Flores

CNCA Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes

CNTE Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacin

CTM Conederacin de Trabajadores de Mxico

DFS Direccin Federal de SeguridadDGG Direccin General de Gobierno

DGIPS Direccin General de Investigaciones Polticas y Sociales

FCE Fondo Cultura Econmica

FLACSO Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales

FO National Archives, Foreign Offi ce

ILAS Institute o Latin American Studies

INAH Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia

IPN Instituto Politcnico Nacional

LC Presidentes, Lzaro Cardenas

LCA Liga de Comunidades Agrarias

MAC Manuel Avila Camacho

MAV Miguel Alemn Valds

MIDRF Military Intelligence Division Regional Files

MRM Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio

NARA National Archives and Records Administration

NARG National Archives Record Group

ONIR Obra Nacional de Instruccin Religiosa

PAN Partido Accin Nacional

PCM Partido Comunista Mexicana

PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party

PRM Partido de la Revolucin Mexicana

PRO Public Records Offi ce

SCM Secretara de Deensa Nacional

SEP Department o Education


20/62

Revolutions have unintended consequences. In 1910 Mexicans re-

belled against an imperect dictatorship; afer 1940 they ended up

with what some called the perect dictatorship.Mexico was ruled

by a singleadmittedly mutation-proneparty rom 1929 to 2000,

a record o longevity surpassed only by Liberias True Whig Party

(18781980), the Mongolian Peoples Revolutionary Party (19211996),

and the Communist Party o the Soviet Union (19171989).While

everyday people and scholars debated the details o this long-running regime, a compelling story survived the passing o time,

governments, and scholarly ashions. This metanarrative held that

the revolution had evolved rom violent popular upheaval to sweep-

ing social reorm in the 1930s. Mexicos new rulers o the Partido

Revolucionario Institucionalthe had with that reorm signed

a revolutionary social contract to reestablish central control.Peas-

ants traded in their radicalism or land grants; a diverse labor move-

ment mutated into a monolithic servant o government. The new

state delivered economic growth, political stability, and a discourse

partially ullledo social justice. The years between 1940 and

1968 were consequently a golden age.History, in the pejorative sense

o one damn thing afer another, ended in 1940.

Yet this vision o a thirty-yearpax pristadoesnt add up: it drops

history out at every turn.Numerous studies o the revolutionary

period have demonstrated that Mexico was nowhere near this sort

o synchronic stability in 1940. The state that emerged rom Crde-

nass agrarian, labor, and educational reorms was inchoate and ofenineffective. The political class remained ragmented, a loose, hetero-

geneous, and shifing coalition o radicals, reormers, moderates,

INTRODUCTION | Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith

THE PARADOXES OF REVOLUTION


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2 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH

opportunists, and veiled reactionaries. The partys peasant corporatist bloc

still supposed to represent (and control) a majority o the populationwas

an umbrella organization o little practical import. Vigorous electoral com-

petition endured, particularly in the provinces; managing the 1940 presi-

dential election required a massacre in the capital.Mexicos state apparatusremained underunded, understaffed, and ill-inormed. Although social

spending increased, bureaucrats complained that they lacked the competent

agronomists, teachers, and indigenous advocates to implement central poli-

cies.Socialist education ailed, Crdenas concluded, not just through con-

servative opposition but also because the Secretara de Educacin Pblica

didnt have enough socialist teachers.Furthermore, political actions can-

nibalized critical government agencies, reorienting them to service local and

rent-seeking goals.Popular groups, rom the Mayo and Tarahumara in the

north, to the Sinarquistas o the Bajo, to the Zapotecs and Triquis o Oaxaca,

resisted state integration.And economic elitesranging rom rural ruffi -

ans like Manuel Parra to industrial heavyweights like the Monterrey group

used the weapons o the strong to press or the reversal o state reorms.

Crdenass ailure to construct a corporatist Rechtsstaatcasts doubt on pre-

vailing interpretations o the succeeding decades and leaves the historian

with two paradoxes. There is the paradox o revolution: how did millions o

Mexicans who made anarchic popular revolution end up as apparently peace-

able subjects in the worlds most successul authoritarian state?And thereis the urther paradox o state capitalism. Transitions rom revolution to

authoritarianism are relatively commonplace; France, Russia, China, and

England all underwent similar shifs.Simultaneous, drastic shifs toward

highly inequitable economic models are less common. Mexico is extraordi-

nary in that a revolutionary movement, which experimented with collectivist

and even socialist modes o production, led to such a deeply inequitable capi-

talist regime. Mexico experienced strong economic growth across the period:

gross domestic product rose at an average rate o 6.4 percent and manuac-

turing output 8.2 percent per annum. Agricultural production more than tre-

bled. Yet urban real wages declined, only regaining 1940 levels in 1967, and

rural wages ell 40 percent.Wage earners, moreover, were not the hardest

hit: peasant household income was statistically not just insuffi cient but ri-

diculous. Government policies o retrenched per capita social spending

and effectively regressive taxation urther increased inequality.In compara-

tive terms, Mexicos Gini coe icient, a compound measure o national in-

equality in the distribution o wealth, averaged 0.55 between 1950 and 1968.

By the end o the 1960s it had risen to 0.58. This outstripped every other LatinAmerican country bar Honduras and Brazil,and was only comparable, out-

side the region, with the economies o sub-Saharan Arica; the countries o


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INTRODUCTION 3

postcolonial Asia and North Arica all developed signicantly more equitable

economies in this period (see table I.1).Even afer the populist reorms o

the 1970s a marked inequality endured, and nutritionists estimated that

nearly a third o the population suffered severe malnutrition.Behind up-beat stories o Mexicos extraordinary political and economic models lay a

more complicated realityone masked, relatively successully, by the cul-

tural managers o the state.

Mechanical Metaphors, Messy Realities

The success story o the revolution made government was written by Mexi-

can politicians, offi cial historians, and social scientists such as Frank Bran-

denburg, whose inuential work was dedicated to the visionaries o the

Revolutionary Family.It was not unanimously accepted in Mexico, where

people across classes, regions, and ideologies bitterly criticized the postrevo-

lutionary state. Politicians struggled under the re o what James Scott called

the weapons o the weak: gossip, slurs, satirical songs, black jokes, and

other means o character assassination. Discourse deemed them vam-

pires; when President Adolo Ruiz Cortines ickered across a cinema screen

his gigantic image met with cries o Dracula!From joke to threat was no

big step. A peasant told his village treasurer that he was a whoreson just like

the other municipal authorities and very soon theyd get ucked up.Even thepresident was not immune to the subversive violence o gossip. In 1948 a spy

inside the miners union reported one worker saying that the President o

TABLE I.1.Income Inequality in Mexico and Nine Comparatives, 19681970

Country Mean Gini Coeffi cient Year

Mexico .

Brazil . Colombia .

Chile .

Turkey .

India .

Taiwan .

Japan .

Tanzania .

Sierra Leone .

Source:Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, A New Data Set Measuring Income Inequality,World Bank Economic Review10 (1996): 56591, restricted to high quality data points.


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the Republic and the bunch o bandits who surround him were to blame [or

the economic crisis], that they were sick o it and should exercise direct ac-

tion against the Government, and that Chapultepec woods had lots o ne

trees to go and hang every last one o them.The listeners laughed, perhaps

a bit nervously. They might also have laughed at Abel Quezadas cartoons, inwhich bandolier-estooned revolutionaries sliced gol shots, or new elites

wore diamonds on their noses and sported names like Gastn Billetes.In the

theaters and cinemas they could see comedians like Cantinas or Palillo irt-

ing with similar dissidence or hear Rodolo Usiglis bitter denunciations o

revolutionary cant.I they read Carlos Fuentes or Mariano Azuela they could

be shocked by the cynical intermarriages o pre- and postrevolutionary elites,

knowing exchanges skewered as give me class and Ill give you cash.The

government could restrain popular revisionism, but it could not end it.

Across the mid-century, historians including Daniel Coso Villegas, Jess

Silva Herzog, Jorge Vera Estaol, and Moiss Gonzlez Navarro all imported

some o that popular revisionism into the early historiography o the revolu-

tion. Others subsequently reconstructed some o the tricky juggling acts

underlying elite endurance in power.Yet these were exceptions, and until

recently most historians ignored the period afer 1940, leaving interpretation

to anthropologists, sociologists, and, above all, political scientists. The latters

models o state/society relations were ambiguous rom the start: was Mexico

a democracy or a dictatorship? Such incertitude was exemplied in Branden-burgs work, which evolved in the late 1950s rom considering Mexico a one-

party democracy to concluding that it was a liberal authoritarian system.

As the 1960s endedwith the landmark student massacre at Tlatelolco and

without alternation in poweruncertainties dwindled. By the 1970s broad

consensus held that Mexico was an authoritarian state, where a powerul cor-

poratist party exercised tight social control through its three class-dened

subentities, which marshaled peasants, workers, and the middle classes in

massive support, part coerced and part ounded on the social compact o

revolutionary reorm.And Mexico was a hyper-presidentialist state in which

a single man and his coterie monopolized national power.

These interpretations and their everyday counterparts drew heavily on

mechanical metaphors: the country was run by el sistema, la maquinaria ocial,

the party machine, a political solar system, in which Mexicans rotated

around the presidential sun and his electoral machinery.Less mechanical

metaphors were similarly sweeping: Mexico was, commonplace held, a Levi-

athan state.Its immediate past, particularly in the poca de orobeore 1968,

was one o static and uncontested domination over an apathetic people.Such ideas were not wholly to the distaste o Mexican elites: the elites

image o invincibility was a key tool or survival.Across the period both


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INTRODUCTION 5

sympathetic and skeptical analyses centered on these two assumptions: that

the postrevolutionary state was powerul, dominating a largely unresisting

population, and as a consequence wasby the standards o both the Mexi-

can past and the Latin American presentexceptionally stable.

Such assumptions begged clear questions o class conict and resistance:how had the state either hidden or bypassed them? These interpretive prob-

lems led historians to reconsider state ormation rom a cultural perspective,

embracing the poststructuralist textual analyses and anthropology-inected

works o European cultural historians. In doing so, they challenged reied

Marxist or Weberian examinations o the state as a material object o study,

preerring Philip Abramss interpretation o the state as an a-historical mask

o legitimating illusion. In the most inuential ormulation o this shif,

Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent leaned selectively on the work o Derek

Sayer and Philip Corrigan to argue that the states power derived not rom

its laws, its institutions, its armed orces, or even its broad capitalist under-

pinnings, but rather rom the centuries-long cultural process which was

embodied in the orms, routines, rituals, and discourses o rule.As state

ormation was nothing less than a cultural revolution, it was estivals,

comic books, education programs, and muralsrather than parties, bureau-

cracies, or systems o land tenurethat created the modern Mexican state.

At the same time, historians drew on the insights o subaltern studies the-

orists to investigate the relationship between these state-building efforts andpopular culture, arguing that peasants neither blithely accepted nor bitterly

rejected revolutionary cultural shifs. Instead, they argued that country

people tactically negotiated, appropriated, and reormulated state discourses

and rituals. Eliding cultural interpretations o the state and a sophisticated

conception o popular responses, scholars concluded that this hegemonic

process o appropriation and negotiation produced a common material and

meaningul ramework or living through, talking about, and acting upon

social orders characterized by domination and that this ramework under-

pinned the postrevolutionary states endurance.It was neither a shared

ideology nor a low-rent alse consciousness but rather a shared language

that led to a consensus on the cultural bases or (and scope o ) political

action.

This approach had several advantages. In analytical terms it reestablished

the sheer messiness o reality, meshing neatly with studies o caciquismo.It

stressed that resistance existed in everyday orms, outside o set-piece bat-

tles, and argued cogently or its impact. In so doing it unearthed multiple

examples o popular inputs to state ormation, corrected earlier concepts opopular passivity, and continued social historians traditional appreciation o

the diffi culty and complexity o achieving order. It urthered Nora Hamiltons


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pathnding analysis, lowering estimates o elite autonomy and stressing the

imsiness o central power. Finally, it argued that hegemonic discourses

over revolution, nation, and gender both subsumed and were shaped by

counter-hegemonic voices, a process that channeled resistance and hence,

ironically enough, helped to explain the states apparent stability.Yet employing cultural hegemony as an exclusive ramework or under-

standing sta dominance also has constraints because reality is compli-

cated in conceptual terms as well. Reducing the state to a mask and the

process o state ormation to a cultural revolution or a series o discursive

acts can promulgate a model o the state as one-dimensional as earlier rei-

cations. As Mary Kay Vaughan observed, the new cultural history requires

those practicing it [to] combine culturalist approaches with continued at-

tention to economic processes and to layers o political power.Festivals,

rituals, state narratives, and discourses did all play undamental roles in dis-

torting visions o the state, shaping popular opinion and elite policy, and

generating some consensus. But contrary to Abrams original ormulation,

which works best as constructive challenge rather than stand-alone theory,

the stateor all its awsdid exist as a social act; the state, to paraphrase

Alan Knight, had weight. It was a series o political-bureaucratic institu-

tions with dedicated personnel who developed an array o distinct interests,

preerences, and capacities.Some o those bureaucratic institutionsthe

Banco de Mxico, the Secretara de Hacienda, the Departamento Agrariowere considerably more Weberian than others, such as the Secretara de

Communicaciones e Obras Pblicas or the Departamento General de Inves-

tigaciones Polticas y Sociales. The state both reected and regulated eco-

nomic relations. While it was never a simple instrument o bourgeois rule, as

tax collector, investor, and policy-maker it ormed what Bob Jessop terms a

social relation: not just a product, but also a generator o various class strat-

egies.Revolutionary nationalism may have mitigated the political impact o

growing inequality, but state scal and economic policy bankrupted peas-

ants, impoverished the urban poor, and beneted the rich. Circuses were

important; so too was bread; and so too were guns.

The rapidly expanding historiography o the last decade or so tacitly re-

ects this realization. There are our principal themes that have drawn his-

torically minded Mexicanists to this period, namely national and elite politics,

popular politics and violence, religion and the right, and culture. The study o

elites spans individuals; camarillas, such as the Grupo Atlacomulco; critical

analyses o (long-overlooked) institutions such as the Supreme Court and the

Secretaria de Hacienda; and critical conjunctures, such as the Henriquistacampaign o the early 1950s and the textbook conict o the 1960s.Building

on the regional studies o Cardenismo, works on popular politics and vio-


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INTRODUCTION 7

lence comprise analyses o social movements, caciquismo, governorships,

and increasingly guerrilla campaigns and state repression.Scholarship on

religion and the right, which cover Sinarquismo, the Partido Accin

Nacional), and Protestant sects, amply demonstrates how enduring divisions

over state land reorm and anticlericalism shaped the succeeding decades.Finally, works on culture, rom comics to Cantinas to rock n roll, pick apart

the intimate ties between the state and the media industry and suggest the

multiplicity o responses o Mexicos new generation o cinema-going, radio-

owning, record-collecting mass media consumers. Much remains to be

done, and smart, hybrid works, mixing high and low politics, labor and iden-

tity, such as those o Steven Bachelor, Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Ariel Rodr-

guez Kuri, may show the way orward.For the moment, though, despite the

recent urry o publications, undamental questions over sources, approaches,

chronologies, and overarching rameworks remain.

Historicizing Authoritarianism: Problems and Possibilities

In looking or answers there is no shortage o data. Historians o the mid-

century ace a data ood: one driven by archival liberalization (and the new

technology to deal with it), the possibilities o oral histories, the post-war

surge o print production, and a new level o government and international

agency technocratic output. Moreover, these years saw a dramatic expansion

o the social sciences, and Mexico proved an area o positive ascination orboth oreign and domestic scholars. Their work needs to be engaged with: it

provides both irreplaceable data and analyses that ell rom avor yet antici-

pate, in cases, our own. Merely reviewing such a body o sources is one chal-

lenge. Sorting the reliable rom the unreliable is another. This is particularly

the case with the two most positivist groups o sources, namely statistics and

intelligence.

stas relied heavily on the positivist magic o numbers. Governors

claimed to have implemented imaginary land grants and built hypothetical

roads; the statistical blizzards o presidential reports systematically and dra-

matically inated agricultural production gures.Some sneered: the Agri-

culture Secretary, one journalist wrote, knew how to make such marvellous,

eloquent statistics that the hungriest, afer reading them, would be ull up

and burping chicken.(Forty years later the bitter jokes continued: cartoon-

ists invented a statistics ministry called the Secretara de Vericacin Nacio-

nal del Discurso Estatal, or short.)But politicians were right to

bet on a residual popular aith in statistics, and spies eavesdropping in cas

ound that statistics claiming increased production caused the best impres-sion.Historians need to beware the same trap. Quite ofen the state had no

way o counting accurately, or it counted with a pronounced optimism.Yet a


27/62


rough-and-ready cliometrics remains valuable. Even unbelievable statistics

reveal what rulers wanted the ruled to believe; they are as useul as cultural

artiacts as they are useless or straightorward representation. Furthermore,

grassroots or backdoor statisticsthose assembled by local bean-counting

or inductioncan tell us what the state either didnt want known or couldntitsel know. Chris Boyers chapter, or example, estimates deorestation

through the backdoor o the volume o timber transported by rail. Finally,

some statistics o questionable absolute worth are o great relative worth.

Pablo Piccatos offi cial homicide statistics do not believably reect real mur-

der rates (although they may well reect the states systematic massaging o

those rates), but they do believably indicate their long-term decline.

Mexicos intelligence archives pose a similar mixture o problems and pos-

sibilities. They have multiple uses: spies wrestled with the same problems

o the unknown provinces as historians do now, and they enjoyed the ad-

vantage o actually being there in trying to resolve them. They were given

unambiguousunortunately, usually verbalbries: one inspector in San

Luis Potos was asked, Why are there unopposed candidates? Why do they

have overwhelming political power? Through the townsmens ear o the

authorities? Through the indifference o the voting masses? For other rea-

sons?Questions like theseand some o their answersoffer insights

not just into politics, but also into the ederal governments priorities and

mentalit. Some o the raw data collected by agents also are useul or social,cultural, and economic history. Yet the darker corners o the sta state are

now in some ways too accessible, the intelligence archives one-stop shops on

an archival motorway. This poses three problems. One is what psychologists

call the availability heuristic: the tendency to judge the requency or likeli-

hood o an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.

Another ollows Hibberts stricture that people who rely excessively on in-

ormation rom secret sources . . . are bound to receive a distorted view o

the world.Finally, these agencies were marked by amateurism, clientelism,

and political bias. For much o the 1940s and 1950s they remained small, ad

hoc, and amateurish agencies. In 1952 the state could only spare feen Gober-

nacin agents to oversee the contested ederal elections throughout the

country; in 1957 the staff o one service seems to have totaled all o twenty-

eight agents.Even in police states, intelligence material demands careul

contextualization, and with a handul o agents, many o whom were incom-

petent, Mexico was no police state.

The host o competing voices in these and other sources demand (and en-

able) creative triangulation and elegant research design. Michael Snodgrass,or example, analyzes the growing subordination o miners and metalwork-

ers in the North beore shifing to rural Jalisco, where he explores one o the


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INTRODUCTION 9

rewards o union acquiescence: privileged entry to the limited good o the

Bracero Program. Piccato uses an unholy mix o tabloid crime reporting

and intelligence to examine murder as an optic ontoand a critical exchange

withthe state. Wil Pansterss least-likely case study selects the most notori-

ously cacicalregion o the period, San Luis Potos, to investigate the balance opower between local actors and state representatives, reasoning that conclu-

sions regarding popular inputs in such unpromising circumstances are gen-

eralizable across the country. Gladys McCormicks most-likely case study o

Zacatepec, one o Mexicos largest peasant cooperatives, reasons that the

processes o domination are most likely to be revealed among those who co-

operated in a zone o endemic rebellion. These and other contributors move

uently rom the micro to the macro and rom detailed case studies to the

broadest sustainable conclusions; their work shares Eric Wol s idea that so-

ciety is a totality o interconnected processes, and [that] inquiries that disas-

semble this totality into bits and then ail to reassemble it alsiy reality.

The combination o local and national, popular and elite realities is com-

plemented by a heterodox approach that strives to avoid cultural or economic

reductionism. Some essays center on culture: Andrew Paxmans analysis o

mass media, Jaime Pensados tracing o student protest, and Guillermo de la

Peas examination o indigenismo. Others seem more political or materialist:

Thom Raths work on the military, Benjamin Smiths analysis o the states

scal impotence, or Roberto Blancartes overview o church/state relations.In reality these and the other authors were characterized by their explorations

o the interstices o culture, economics, and politics. While Raths chapter

demonstrates civilian governments continuing dependence on the military,

it is equally concerned with the causal impact o a linguistic phenomenon:

the mystiying discourse o demilitarization. Paxmans enthusiasm or media

production and consumption is intertwined with the institutional and busi-

ness histories o culture. Snodgrasss work on the political economy o

unionized and transnational labor ends up outlining a culture o migration;

Pansterss history o Gonzalo N. Santoss political reach begins by consider-

ing that literary gunmans textual strategies. Such an integrated scholarship

studying local and national actors in tandem, blending grassroots and elite

sources, considering among others linguistic, institutional, electoral, inrapo-

litical, and economic variablesis particularly indicated or hybrid regimes

like Mexico, where neither Namierite nor subaltern approaches capture the

complexities and subtle dialectics o history.

Toward a ModelMoving rom different starting points, these essays add up to a working

model o sta Mexico. Future debates are oreshadowed in the ollowing


29/62


chapters. Certain basic agreements also are evident. Some are not startling:

restatements, rediscoveries, or renements o earlier scholars work. Others

are less anticipated. Taken together, they suggest that the diversity, dyna-

mism, and contradictions o mid-century Mexico are best captured in a series

o mid-range theories and an emic label: dictablanda.Perhaps the most basic agreement (unsurprising given the predominance

o historians) was that time mattered. While prior studies were dominated

by more synchronic disciplines, our contributors emphasize what William

Sewell Jr. calls the temporalities o social lie, the understanding that out-

comes are contingent not only upon a wide range o other actions, trends, or

events, but also upon the precise temporal sequence in which these occur.

This reveals how different social processes with diverse temporalitiesrom

long-running trends to sudden individual decisionsaffected the entire pe-

riod, or the decades between 1938 and 1968 were extremely dynamic. Mexi-

cans experienced shifs at all three levels o the annaliste concept o time,

imagined as an ocean marked by the rapid movements o surace otsam, by

the tides o mid-level change, and by the deep, slow-moving currents o the

longue dure.At the surace sexeniosmoved rom lef to right and, to a lesser

extent, back again. The tides o growing industrialization and uctuating

control in the provinces ran ast. Finally, the period witnessed two bursts

o that rarest brand o change, marked shifs in longue dure patterns.

Ater three centuries o stability the population trebled in three decades.People ocked to the growing cities: by 1960 more Mexicans lived in cities

than in the countryside. Simultaneously, in part consequently, people

undamentally reshaped their environments: whether through deorestation,

irrigation canals, land grabs by squatters, or developmentalist macroproj-

ects. Such objective shifs were complemented by shifs in subjective experi-

ences o time. These ranged rom the adoption o mechanical timeby the

1950s a majority o tenement dwellers in downtown Mexico City owned

watchesto the paciying acceleration o time that Paxman tentatively links

to high consumption o mass media. They included the stas adept

management o boom and bust cycles o hope, drip-eeding Mexicans with

politicians who proclaimed renewed political and social reorm. This may

well have delayed popular classication o the state as authoritarian, its econ-

omy inequitable, its revolution past.

Reintroducing time begs the questions o periodization, continuity, and

change. Current schemes end the revolution in 1940 and the golden age in

1968. These traditional watersheds are here to stay, in part because they also

are embedded in popular memory, products o a nostalgia that invoked (andinvokes) Cardenismo as a critique o smo, and the early as a critique

o the later . In analytical terms they need to be qualied. Across the mid-


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INTRODUCTION 11

century there was no steady progression into authoritarianism but rather a

series o lurches in the dynamic balance o power between rulers and ruled

and a series o turning points. The beginning o the end o the revolution

came in 1938, Knight argues; rom a Church perspective, Blancarte demon-

strates that it occurred even earlier. The government o the early 1940s wasmore tight-sted, repressive, and conservative than its predecessor, a shif

that stretched beyond peasant and labor politics to encompass phenomena

as diverse as teacher training and conservation strategy.Pent-up political

demand afer the war, however, shaped the early and lent electoral sub-

stance to its modish rhetoric o democracy. Both mode and substance largely

died across Latin America in the late 1940s, and Mexico was no exception.

The 1950 end to party primaries restricted competitive politics; 1952 proved

the last threatening presidential election or thirty yearsyet also marked the

end o the armys overt meddling in presidential politics. The year 1959 saw

not just the repression o the railroad workers strike but also a mass extinc-

tion o the biggest regional caciques, a purge o the armys top regional

commanders anda year laterthe nationalization o the Jenkins lm mo-

nopoly. The early 1960s combined increasing antisystemic revolt and in-

creasing authoritarianism with increased land grants and increased avenues

or limited electoral pluralism; a modicum o proportional representation in

1963, a brie ing with primaries in 1965. Such ambiguitiesa dening char-

acteristic o a dictablandaleave room or debate over the signicance oeach shif. One argument is clear and runs across several chapters: 1968 was

a turning point more in perception than in reality.Military repression had

never lef the countryside and urban protests had never ended. As Pensado

demonstrates, multiple pro-democracy student movementscountered with

soldiersstretched back over a decade. Imagining the golden age as a clearly

bounded period is as much a unction o the ideological remembering o time

as o dramatic historical rupture.

The most revision-proo aspect o the golden age is macroeconomic. Be-

tween 1940 and 1970 the state implemented protectionist and investment

policies designed to develop key industries and stimulate the economy. This

projectImport Substitution Industrialization ()generated impressive

growth and one o the lowest import coeffi cients in Latin America. Quality o

lie indicators such as literacy and longevity rose alongside the economy.

Yet the ormer originated in the 1930s and the latter was in part a product o

global medical advances. Mid-century economic growth was quantitatively

strong but qualitatively weak. Government investment channeled growth to-

ward two sectors: manuacturing and export agriculture.Development alsowas geographically concentrated: between 1940 and 1955 more than three

quarters o industrial value added occurred in the north or Mexico City.In


31/62


northern cities wages were more than double the national average.Yet huge

swathes o the urban population remained outside the countrys explosive

economic growth, orced to earn low wages in a (largely unmeasured) inor-

mal economy; urban women remained particularly marginalized. Rural

workers, above all, paid the bills or . Population growth was not matchedwith land or credit; the agrarian reorm was curtailed amid accusations o

congenital low productivity. The role o agriculture was to supply export

crops to the north and cheap ood to the cities, permitting the low urban

wages that enabled industrialization. The state supported agribusiness

through massive irrigation projects and tax breaks and credits, policies

thatcombined with price controlsundermined ejidatariosand smallhold-

ers.Between 1939 and 1947 the purchasing power o agricultural workers

declined 47 percent; corn prices, adjusted or ination, ell 33 percent be-

tween 1957 and 1973.Meanwhile scal policy ailed to redistribute wealth

rom richer urban to poorer rural zones. The Mexican miracle presup-

posed, in short, a systematic transer o resources rom countryside to city

and rom south and center to north.

Why did peasants accept this? The second clear consensus o this volume

is that many did not. Rural communities across Mexico protested vigorously

and at times violently against stolen elections; against crooked politicians,

tax collectors, alcohol inspectors, or orestry wardens; and against enduring

poverty. Insurgencies did not begin in the 1960s: they were a constant duringthe earlier period.The state consequently relied on violence, exercised by

pistoleros, policemen, and soldiers, ar more than is traditionally appreciated.

The petty undeclared counterinsurgencies o the 1940s gave way in the 1950s

to repression o peasant movements linked to Henriquismoor the Unin Gen-

eral de Obreros y Campesinos de Mxico (), peaking with the crush-

ing o the 1961 Gasca rebellion. Evenperhaps especiallypetty local

rebellions or jacqueries could be met with extreme, perormative violence. In

1955 villagers rom La Trinitaria, Chiapas, rebelled, citing high corn prices

and local corruption; an army captain beheaded ve o them in the main

square.In 1956 Triquis rom northwest Oaxaca murdered a lieutenant and

two soldiers who had raped a local woman; the army called in planes to bomb

the village. In 1957 soldiers in Cuaxocota, Puebla, countered plans or an

ejidowith beatings, mass arrests, and the threat to burn the village.This was

all in the mid-1950s, generally considered to be the most peaceul stretch o

the mid-century. Such unequivocal object lessons in state terror were, as one

soldier told a spy, standard (i secretive) practice. The army was critical to

rural order: in the early 1950s, Rath nds, some 20 percent o municipiosheldsmall garrisons, and conict zones ofen were ruled by unelected councils

headed by an offi cer. State violence was careully maskeddeployments


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INTRODUCTION 13

ofen began by night, soldiers killed while dressed as peasantsand careully

targeted. It continued the tradition o decapitating social movements by se-

lectively killing their cadres.

Yet there was more to violence than draconian repression, and popular vi-

olence sometimes secured popular demands. A Mexican variant o what EricHobsbawm dubbed collective bargaining by riot obtained, as rulers and ruled

haggled through choreographed low-intensity violence, which ranged rom

street ghts to riots to simulacra o rebellion.Collective bargaining by riot

characterized both electoral and economic protests, and even the most radi-

cal, antisystemic mobilizations ofen led to concessions once they had been

repressed. The 1965 guerrilla attack on an army base in Ciudad Madera, Chi-

huahua, led to the army hunting down and killing the attackers, but it also led

to a tour o inspection by ex-president Crdenas, which in turn generated a

major redistribution o land. When local agrarian protests threatened to

spread across regions o high-yield agricultural production the government

would sometimes revive the agrarista largesse o the 1930s. In 1957 Jacinto

Lpez and the invaded the sugar latiundiaso Los Mochis, Sinaloa,

and the lands o the U.S.-owned Cananea Cattle Company in Sonora, inva-

sions that spread to the Yaqui and Mayo valleys, the Laguna, Colima, and

Nayarit. Although soldiers arrested Lpez, President Lpez Mateos re-

sponded by expropriating the Cananea lands and creating seven ejidos cov-

ering a quarter o a million hectares. Collective bargaining by riot wastime-honored practice: it was obtained in resource regulation and in the local

elections, and it was salient in the s retreat rom power in the 1990s. It

applied to both policy and personnel choices, was partially protected by revo-

lutionary rhetoric, and underlay much co-option by the state.

The main mass beneciaries o state co-option were workers. As Kevin

Middlebrook details, the state largely subordinated labor by engineering

union cacicazgosbetween 1949 and 1951. Yet although that subordination held

down real wages, it was offset by new social benets: subsidized ood staples,

housing, health care, and eventually worker prot-sharing.As Snodgrass

demonstrates, the sheer range o those benets outweighed, in popular mem-

ory, the high costs o repression; it wasagain paradoxicallya golden age

o charrismo. Moreover, economic co-option stretched ar beyond own-

ership o the means o production or benet packages. One o the hallmarks

o the period was the dramatic expansion o state control over the access

points to a mixed economy, epitomized in legislation such as the 1950 Law on

Federal Executive Powers in Economic Matters. Governments could buy

consent by direct and indirect means; both involved rigging the competitionor limited resources, broadly dened as any generator, whether tangible or

intangible, o wealth. Intensive direct incentives to cooperationstate benets,


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development undingrewarded relatively narrow sectors, above all unionized

labor, bureaucrats, and soldiers. Yet government revenues were exiguous,

and such benets were perorce limited: the state had to pay market price (in

cash) or the Cananea expropriation. As Boyer, Snodgrass, Paxman, and

McCormick all show, less tangible resources were many and ranged rom thenaturalwater, orestry, grazingto the institutional, such as licenses or

transport businesses, cantinas, television and radio stations, actories, im-

ports and exports, street vendors, bureaucratic sinecures, or braceropermits.

Government permits were ubiquitous: one cartoonist drew a policeman de-

manding that the three kings produce their permit to distribute Christmas

presents.Regulating such a wide range o resources cost the state relatively

little, while tactically ceding access to local, national, and export markets

purchased support across classes, spanning the unemployed who got street

vendors permits, the workers and peasants who were granted bracero per-

mits, the middle classes who received transport concessions or taxis, buses,

trucks, and drugs plazas,and the major industrialists who won avorable

shares o national import and export quotas.(Permit-givers at all levels

rom crony capitalist presidents like Rodrguez or Alemn down to the lowest

bureaucratalso personally proted rom controlling entry to the broadest

range o economic activity.) Failure to support the government could be pun-

ished by blocking that entry: Azcrraga waited a decade or his concession

afer backing Almazn.This regulation o resources was critical in buildingcoalitions o consenters on the cheap because it lent Mexico one o the main

advantages o a gatekeeper state: the counteracting o state weakness by

the stabilizing, coalition-building tool o controlling access to capitalist

markets.

The third consensus o this books case studies is that rowdy mass politics

never ended in the cities, where in between large-scale, set-piece conronta-

tions and everyday orms o resistance a mid-range rumbling o dissent

and mobilization persisted. During the early 1940s protests ocused on the

combination o spiraling ood costs and ostentatious corruption. The

harvest crisis o 1943 precipitated bread riots in Mexico City and Monterrey;

two years later, dissidents blockaded downtown Xalapa to protest the price

o bread.In the later 1940s urban grievances turned toward taxes, and

social movementssome nominally attached to y-by-night parties or

unionsemerged to veto scal increases.During the 1950s and 1960s the

ocus o urban discontent shifed to student organizations rom Puebla, Mi-

choacn, Sonora, and San Luis Potos. Throughout the period, squatter

(paracaidsta) organizations invaded private lands, demanded services and eji-dos, and rejected state regulation. Governments were orced to respond, im-


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INTRODUCTION 15

porting grain, desperately attempting to control ood prices, punishing

high-taxing state offi cials, titling lands, and dishing out water and electricity.

These measures were costly and ofen ineffective. Lasting alliances between

the state and single-issue movements were slow to build and unreliable. It

took twenty years o repeated ad hoc concessions to co-opt the marketwomen o Oaxaca City into the offi cial apparatus o the Conederacin Nacio-

nal de Organizaciones Populares (), and even then they occasionally

held the government to ransom.Although Ernesto Uruchurtu built thou-

sands o market stalls or traders, in 1966 they turned on the mayor and

helped topple him when he tried to dislodge paracaidsta groups. Some

researchers conducting eldwork in the 1970s observed a well-regimented

party, lording it over a populace committed to conormity to the rules rather

than manipulation o them and avoiding violent or clearly illegal orms o

political action.Others, slightly earlier, did not: in the late 1960s, or ex-

ample, Carlos Vlez-Ibaez witnessed groups o viejas chingonas burning

down mortgage offi ces and throwing managers into sewage ditches in Ciu-

dad Nezahualcyotl.Collective bargaining by riot was not conned to the

countryside.

As the last example suggests, and several o our contributors demonstrate,

these movements also saw women enter the political sphere with increased

orce. The revolution ushered in a new wave o eminists, who linked de-

mands or voting rights with broader social claims. Some sought to workwithin the system, exchanging conditional loyalty or economic benets,

orming their own unions, and supporting state-linked cacicazgos.Others

joined the Partido Comunista Mexicano ( and harassed the government

or emale suffrage rom the outside.At the other end o the ideological

spectrum, Catholic womens groups mobilized against government anticleri-

calism, especially socialist schools.Improving church-state relations, the

co-option o leaders, and the political demobilization o World War II proba-

bly combined to suffocate more radical demands.But, during the succeed-

ing decades, these lef- and right-wing discourses and organizational structures

percolated down to the urban and rural poor. In the process, peasants, work-

ers, street vendors, and paracaidsta housewives blended and recongured

previously polarized ideals and redirected them toward immediate goals.

In Morelos, women provided oot soldiers or Rubn Jaramillos radical

agrarismo. In the 1940s in Oaxaca City women harnessed the organiza-

tional power o the Accin Catlica Mexicana ( to press the government

to cut taxes and ulll its promise o greater democracy, which they dened

as having their newly granted vote actually count. By the 1960s, womenalso embraced the new biopolitics o ertility. Despite Catholic opprobrium,


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Mexican women overwhelmingly accepted the use o contraception, which

they adopted in soaring numbers across the 1970s, in some cases whether

their husbands liked it or not.

Elites were orced to react to this new level o power and treated women as

a distinct political category. They established emale branches o the ,publicly endorsing a handul o emale deputies and cacicas, and channeled

social spending toward womens organizations. Mexican women devel-

oped longer school careers than women in countries o comparable wealth,

which translated into signicantly lower inant mortality. The Secretara

de Salubridad y Asistencia concentrated its paltry unds on constructing

hospitals, kindergartens, and education centers or poor working moth-

ers.Throughout the country community organizers, such as Celia Ramrez,

head o the Unin de Mujeres de las Colonias 20 in the Federal District, and

Guadalupe Urza Flores, the advocate o the outcasts o Jalisco, gained gov-

ernment support.Offers o state largesse and political leadership brought

results. As Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves argues, second-generation emale

leaders,by securing unevenly distributed social services, assured widespread

emale backing or the afer ull suffrage was granted in 1952. Women

could also be, as Heather Fowler-Salamini points out, caciques o much the

same stripe as their male counterparts: the leaders o the Veracruz coffee

sorters negotiated notable benets or their constituents while simultane-

ously grafing and getting seats on the Crdoba town council.Some istas brokered similar deals. Genoveva Medina, cacica o the Oaxaca City

stallholders association, drafed her union into the afer accepting a seat

in congress.By the mid-1950s, the growing numbers o working women,

suffragettes, aspirant caciques, and militant Catholics all offered conditional

support to the . As a result, women voters in general, Blancarte reminds

us, lef sta ears o their generic opposition unullled.

sta hopes or cultural engineering through education, on the other

hand, generated ambiguous results. Raael Segovia ound the schoolhouse to

be the main space or political discussion.However, the contents o many

such discussions were ofen critical o the state. As Tanals Padilla notes, by

the 1960s the very schools the revolutionary government had once designed

to create a loyal citizenry were now producing its most militant oes. Guer-

rilla leaders rom Chihuahua and Guerrero were teachers; Subcomandante

Marcoss parents were maestros rurales.The cities were the most educated

zones, where the state lavished its greatest efforts in controlling the public

sphere. Yet city-dwellers seemed skeptical rom the start. Ca gossip was

virulent and all-encompassing: presidential untouchability did not obtainover a coffee or a beer.That gossip translated into political opposition is

clear not just in inormal politics but also in election results. Unmanipulated


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INTRODUCTION 17

gures show Alemn winning a mere 59 percent in Mexico City in 1946; more

manicured numbers still showed the acing consistent and substantial

opposition in both the center-west and north.Cultural production and re-

ception reected, in short, the double-edged legacy o revolutionary dis-

course, an instrument o both control and contestation.Various authors question the states control o the public sphere and o

mass media in particular. Some were overtly controlled by the government: El

Nacionalbilled itsel as the offi cial organ o the government (in sales pitches

pressuring town councils to subscribe).The government credit agency Na-

cional Financiera () owned 51 percent o the shares in Clasa Films

Mundiales , which made many o the newsreels.From 1955 on there was

only one television provider, (later Televisa), whose owner declared the

network part o the governmental system and the President his boss.

Wartime censorship agencies endured, supposedly controlling everything

rom newsreels to comics. The censors work was supplemented by an array

o covert control strategies that targeted the mainstream, offi cially pluralist

press. The government used advertising contracts, sof loans, and its control

o newsprint through a state monopoly supplier, , to induce compli-

ance. Most o the time this worked.Survey data rom the 1940s to the 1970s

suggest a certain core belie in the national statein abstractthat may be

causally linked to this virtual world o state-approved mass media.As Pax-

man argues, however, that world was not just a product o dominant partysocial engineering but also straightorward prot-maximizing; in ceding

much control to the private sector the state also bet on the controlling effect

o sheer quantity rather than on hegemonic quality alone.

Media control was also a lot more partial than generally thought. Censor-

ship agencies enjoyed mixed results: newsreel and lm censorship was dy-

namic and effective, while comics ourished despite the best efforts o the

cultural bureaucrats.There were backdoors to effective social commentary,

as Piccatos analysis o the national crime pages demonstrates. There was a

muckraking oppositional press en provincia. Newspapers such as La Verdad de

Acapulco, El Diario de Xalapa, El Chapulnin Oaxaca, El Inormadorin Guadalajara,

El Sol del Centroin Aguascalientes, and Tampicos El Mundoand Apizacos Don

Paco all managed, at times at least, to ollow prooundly critical editorial

lines. They constituted a ourth estate. They were joined by traveling corrido

sellers, modern-day troubadours equipped with thin sheets o popular songs,

which were read out and sung in markets, cantinas, and town squares. Many

such Mexican samizdatexplicitly criticized the state, rom the Corrido del bra-

cero, which decried the brutal taxes/the nes and donations/the vile mo-nopolies/o repulsive individuals, to the Corrido de Jaramillo, which warned

prospective peasant leaders that presidential hugs might be ollowed by a


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jaramillazo: a bullet and a coffi n.They were, the U.S. embassy concluded,

truly a mass medium.Furthermore, even when bureaucrats could control

the medium, they were unable to regiment reception. Vlez-Ibaez described

the atmosphere at a cinema in

Documents

Dictablanda edited by Paul Gillingham & Benjamin T. Smith