Abstract
General Salvador Alvarado earned renown as a visionary leader during and after his time as governor of Yucatán during the Constitutionalist revolution (1915–18), even contemplating a presidential run before his life was ended by an assassin's bullet. In ensuing decades, politicians, historians, and poets—whether admirers or detractors—repeatedly evoked his figure and his words as they celebrated, reviled, or sought to restore the Mexican Revolution and its legacies. This article takes the measure of Alvarado's political, corporeal, and textual powers over the century following his assumption of power in 1915, with attention to the ways that historical memory and historiography were central concerns of political action and discourse for Alvarado, as much for his partisans as for his critics. I argue that the history of Alvarado's physical and textual corpus—in life and after death—demonstrates how political power may operate beyond the present, with an emergent, future-oriented dimension that unfolds over time.
