The last volume of the greatest historical work on modern Mexico, this is a political history of the Porfiriato in its prime and in decay. It begins with Don Porfirio’s return to the presidency in 1884 and ends with his exile in 1911. Its central subject is not the man himself or his policies but the consolidation and exercise of his rule, how he remained the madrugador máximo for more than 25 years, and how he finally fell.
As in the earlier political volumes of this work, the main sources for the narrative are the immense files of the contemporary Mexico City press and the private archives of significant politicians, viz., Rosendo Márquez, Bernardo Reyes, Francisco I. Madero, Samuel Espinosa de los Monteros, and above all Porfirio Díaz himself, whose 675,000 documents now accessible at the University of the Americas inform the whole book. The author’s resort to the press is sometimes excessive and tedious—by his own admission, “immoderate.” But the use of the private papers is careful, skillful, and majestically persuasive. Other notable sources include the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, the Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, and contemporary political essays.
Sources not open to the author include the private papers of Manuel González, Ramón Corral, and José I. Limantour. Other sources not used—whether or not the author could have seen them, he does not say—are the papers of Manuel Romero Rubio, Rosendo Pineda, Joaquín Baranda, and Teodoro Dehesa, as well as many provincial newspapers, state archives, and material from the U.S. State Department and the foreign ministries of European and other Latin American countries.
The book is organized in three nearly equal parts—“El Último Toque,” in Díaz’s first term back in office, 1884 to 1888; “El Necesariato,” on his tenure through six more reelections, 1888 through 1910; and “La Nota Disonante,” on the resentments and resistances to his power also from 1888 to 1910, culminating in the dissolution of his rule in 1911. Because the author assumes here a definition of politics as the art of manipulating resistance, the topical organization of the last two parts is incongruent with the line of argument. The second part often resounds with “dissonance,” and the third part is thick with the question of Díaz’s indispensability. The book would probably be stronger if the author had kept to a simple chronological presentation, treating politics during Díaz’s prime and then during his dotage.
In summary the author argues that Díaz returned to office in 1884 far from insurmountably powerful, that from the beginning he deliberately played González and Romero Rubio against each other while he rigged the deals for his reelection in 1888, and that henceforth he managed affairs—here are the book’s finest and most original passages —so that no one, not the científicos, not Reyes, and of course not the new breed of Liberals emerging after the turn of the century, could even consistently influence him, much less successfully oppose him or arrange a succession to him. Therefore, as the author demonstrates, Díaz’s increasing age brought on a conflict increasingly difficult to resolve. And political lapses in 1910-11 entailed the collapse of the whole Porfirian regime, releasing all the terrific tensions accumulated in Mexican society for the past 30 years. So whatever it became, the Mexican Revolution started with a political crisis.
Because of the author’s abiding concern with manipulation, some questions that were serious issues in Porfirian politics but rather institutional in character do not get serious treatments here, e.g., Díaz’s way with his generals and the bishops. But despite these missing considerations, the author’s explanation of an entire generation’s politics is after all masterful and fascinating. By the strictest standards of modern history, this is altogether a very good book, ingenious, judicious, demanding, and within its limits convincing. In a section of the field where only a couple of other historians have explored deeply before, it is a massive landmark.
