Between 1920 and 1952 Mexico’s postrevolutionary governments attempted to assert control over the freewheeling regional caudillos who comprised the country’s revolutionary leadership, but they were not wholly successful. Although President Lázaro Cárdenas managed to unseat Governor Saturnino Cedillo from his governorship of San Luis Potosi in 1938, Cedillo was quickly succeeded by Gonzalo Santos. The latter was so dismissive of centralized control that he argued that his methods of encierro, destierro, y entierro (prison, exile, and burial) meant he needed gravediggers, not bureaucrats.
The link between centralized control and regional power forms the essential tension of this book. To what extent did the revolutionary regime manage to pull state leaders into line? How did these governors resist? Perhaps most importantly, how did these essential strains map themselves onto the demands of popular politics? Did cross-class networks support populist governors (as in the case of Cedillo)? Or did peasant...
