If the Mexican state of Michoacán is the sort of laboratory of postrevolutionary political culture that I claimed it was in my 1988 Yale dissertation, if its dependent capitalist culture was based on the hyperexploitation of women as I claimed in the second volume of my multivolume work on revolution, democracy, and longing in Mexico — a specific question hovers. That is, if women did the vast amount of work (however unseen and unpaid), what sort of political structure would respond to this inequity? In short, what would it take to create full democracy in postrevolutionary Mexico?
It is ironic that this appears to be the sort of issue that Lázaro Cárdenas, arguably Mexico’s most important modern president, considered. Or at least, his instinctive political strategy — that of specifically listening and paying attention to “ordinary” Mexicans — implies as much. Yet, his political experiences in Michoacán led to another...
