Francisco Madero’s attempts to limit the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to a change in the political system while leaving the social structures nearly unchanged has been described in detail by historians. The attempts by Madero’s collaborators to carry out these policies on the local level have only been insufficiently analyzed. William Beezley’s book, Insurgent Governor: Abraham González and the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua, helps to fill this gap. It describes the administration of the first revolutionary Governor of Chihuahua, Abraham González. Like the Maderos in Coahuila, the González family in Chihuahua had belonged to the ruling oligarchy of the state, but unlike the Maderos had suffered a serious loss of economic and political power during the Porfiriato. Like his mentor, Madero, Gonzalez sought to establish free elections, a free press, and democratic institutions in his native state, but he refused to carry out any large-scale social transformations that would have required substantial expropriations. Except for tax reforms and the granting of autonomy to municipalities (which meant the wholesale abolition of company towns), González did not limit the economic or social power of the Terrazas-Creel group of hacendados and of the foreign entrepreneurs who together dominated the economy of Chihuahua. Like Madero, this policy coupled with the dissolution of the revolutionary army, cost him the backing of many of his original supporters, without gaining him any adherents among the oligarchy (which participated in the Orozco revolt against him) or among the Federal Army, which finally murdered him. Unlike Madero, though, González had begun to have strong doubts about the Federal Army by 1912 and was setting up a new revolutionary force when he was killed.
Beezley has consulted a broad array of primary sources, both in Mexico and the United States. Unfortunately, he does not seem to have gained access to the papers of the Mexican Defense Ministry nor did he consult the files of the Ayuntamiento of the city of Chihuahua. He gives a good description of González’s personality and ideas. But little effort is made to analyze and depict the social problems he faced. What were the specific characteristics of the agrarian problems in Chihuahua? Were the majority of the peasants debt peons or free sharecroppers? Had expropriations of peasant lands in Chihuahua been as extensive as in other Mexican states? What was the social and economic situation of the cowboys who formed such a large part of the rural population of Chihuahua? No explanation is given of why Chihuahua played such an outstanding role in the Mexican Revolutionary movement of 1910-1911. While Beezley mentions that the crisis of 1907-1908, with its attendant unemployment, and the bad harvests of 1908-1910 contributed to the outbreak of the Revolution in Chihuahua, he does not examine how the general economic situation of the state—especially as far as mining, agricultural production, and prices were concerned—changed under González.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is Beezley’s description of the evolution of the labor movement in Chihuahua and González’s institution of compulsory arbitration for strikes. On the whole, this is a useful book, with gaps in the field of social history.
