Douglas Richmond gives us the first synoptic study of Carrancismo based on an extensive investigation of archival and printed primary sources. Particularly noteworthy is the use made of the Carranza Archive. The account is pleasantly and clearly written, and the book benefits from the author’s empathetic understanding of the personality and policies of Mexico’s first Constitutionalist president.
The main thesis is controversial and, in the opinion of this reviewer, only partially sustained by the evidence marshalled in the study. Historians, Richmond argues, have failed to note the extraordinarily nationalist, reformist, and populist character of the Carrancista regime. Instead, they have preferred to portray Carranza as an authoritarian patriarch out of touch with the drift of change in the labor, agrarian, and economic arenas.
This seems a little unfair. Students of Mexican foreign policy, for example, have long emphasized the nationalist and even antiimperialist content of the Carrancista period. Nevertheless, Richmond does us a valuable favor by describing in great detail the changing course of Carranza’s reformism with useful discussions of policy on foreign investment, taxation, social reform, agriculture, and relations with organized labor. The only theme that is inadequately treated is the evolution of state ideology. But reformism combined with nationalism does not automatically create populism. Lacking a sustained treatment of the large and heterodox literature on Latin American populism, the book tends to see “populism” every place that there is evidence of economic nationalism, growing state interventionism, and ideas of multiclass state ideology. What is striking in this period, surely, is the absence of the organizational basis for a populist project of the kind that emerges in the 1920s and that is consolidated under Cárdenas.
The reformist zeal of Carranza fades, as the author notes, after 1917 partly because of the urgent need to increase food production and partly in response to a felt need to harness bourgeois support for the work of reconstruction. The sheer volume and density of the data that Richmond provides, however, somehow obscures the dramatic nature of certain global developments. One of these is the reconsolidation of the hacienda regime following the return of estates confiscated under the Bienes Intervenidos arrangement. There are other issues that require sharper analysis. Richmond gives a great deal of play to Carranza’s audacious taxation policy toward both domestic and foreign capital; but is this a product of “reformism” or of the desperate search for liquid cash shown by virtually all caudillos, caciques, and cabecillas during this period? Some of the language and assertions employed can also be questioned. Can someone be “mildly charismatic” (p. 136)? Would agrarian historians of this period defend the thesis that Carranza “controlled” rural Mexico (p. 80) in 1915 and 1916 or, indeed, at any time in the period 1915-20?
These criticisms notwithstanding, Richmond’s book represents a major achievement. It will provide academic historians and students with a provocative and richly detailed treatment of the Carranza regimes to put alongside Friedrich Katz’s The Secret War and the writings of Charles Cumberland. It deserves our close attention.
