Revisionism and the Recent Historiography of the Mexican Revolution Open Access

The Mexican Revolution continues to attract the attention of scholars, and the flow of writing shows no sign of abating. Even specialists find themselves overtaxed to read—and sometimes to locate—the books, articles and dissertations that pour forth, not only in Mexico and in the United States but also in a half-dozen other countries.

There are several reasons for the topic’s durability, apart from its undeniable fascination. For North Americans, who still dominate the field in terms of scholarly production, there is the appeal of Mexico’s proximity for research trips and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of source materials. Moreover, the Revolution was among the first Latin American specializations claimed by U.S. historians, and that early lead, seconded by the work of a numerous academic progeny, won for revolutionary studies a respected niche in college and university curricula. Even after U.S. attention shifted away from Mexico after World War II, the subject’s popularity did not wane. The upheavals that swept the post-war world sparked new interest in the phenomenon of revolution and the Mexican experience took on added significance, as a case study and as a base for comparative analysis. By the 1960s Mexican revolutionary studies had reached a maturity that rivaled the larger and more established fields of European and U.S. history. Papers and commentaries offered at the international congresses on Mexican history at Oaxtepec in 1969 and especially at Santa Monica in 1973 showed dramatically how diverse the field has become,¹ and few indeed are the recent publications on the Revolution that fail to produce surprises of one kind or another. Today there is a historiography that is almost as complex as the Revolution itself.

The salient characteristic of recent revolutionary scholarship is its sophistication. There have been imaginative advances in methodology, and historians now regularly apply techniques and accept insights from other disciplines. Social and economic history have overtaken the “great man” approach that prevailed in previous decades. Researchers are aided by a rich assortment of bibliographical tools. All this, together with the growing accessibility of archival data, have opened lines of investigation that would have been impossible only a few years ago. These developments are gratifying although, given their professional antecedents and the expanding horizon of historical studies in general, they are not totally unexpected.

At the same time, these changes coincide with a wave of change in scholarly interpretations of the Revolution. The new revisionism is exciting and perplexing. It has already altered the field and clearly there is more to come. Specialists are sharply divided over its merits and probably the only common ground left is the acknowledgment that there is less agreement today about the nature and meaning of the Mexican Revolution than at any time since scholars first turned their attention to it more than fifty years ago.

What follows is a survey of recent revolutionary scholarship that reports on changes in the field since the mid-1960s. It examines briefly some of the major technical and methodological developments and analyzes a variety of directions within current revisionism.

Increased access to archival sources and the diligence of scholars in exploiting them have insured a steady infusion of research into monographic literature.² Revolutionary investigation received a major impetus in the 1960s with the inauguration of the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México at the Fundación Cultural de Condumex in Mexico City. The Center’s holdings include the archives of Venustiano Carranza, Francisco León de la Barra and Zapatista general Jenaro Amezcua.³ Mexican state and municipal archives are beginning to be used, their condition and availability varying widely. Recent studies cite local records in Jalisco, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Veracruz and Chihuahua.⁴ Twentieth-century demographic history remains almost untouched, but sources are abundant in parish archives and civil registries. During the 1960s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints carried forward a sustained effort to film birth, confirmation, marriage and death records, copies of which are available in Mexico and the United States.⁵ Historians have neglected Mexican business history, but Clark W. Reynolds (1970) and Robert Jones Shafer (1973) showed that there is a wealth of documentation in the hands of Mexican commercial firms on the subject of business relations with the revolutionary and post-revolutionary governments.⁶ Access to the Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional has been increasingly restricted for reasons not adequately explained, but a substitute in Washington that scholars find useful is the Adjutant General’s Office Records (War Department) in the National Archives, which began to be made available in the 1960s. The Records of the U.S. Department of State are now open through 1950. European archives offer a valuable new range of visions; and citations, most notably from the Foreign Office Papers in Britian’s Public Record Office and from the German Foreign Ministry, are beginning to adorn footnotes.⁷

Archival guides to revolutionary collections are still scarce, but efforts are being made to correct this.⁸ For the major troves nothing produced in recent years compares to Berta Ulloa’s descriptive index of documents in the Archivo de Relaciones Exteriores (1963),⁹ although catalogs are promised for the Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional and for the Condumex collection. For a general description of materials on the Revolution in the U.S. National Archives there is the John P. Harrison guide, recently updated by George S. Ulibarri (1974).¹⁰ Brief descriptions of lesser known collections, supplied by investigators who are willing to share their finds, are beginning to appear in professional journals, especially The Americas.¹¹ Researchers working in the Mexican hinterland usually must fend for themselves, although the archives of one state capital that figured prominently in the Revolution—Saltillo—have been surveyed by David C. Bailey and William H. Beezley (1975).¹²

By far that most important published documentary collection on the period, Documentos históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, edited by Isidro Fabela, the Comisión de Investigaciones Históricas de la Revolución Mexicana and Josefina E. de Fabela, was completed with the printing in 1971-1973 of the last of the twenty-seven volumes.¹³ The index to the huge set, unfortunately, is inadequate.

A new array of bibliographical tools makes most of those produced before 1960 obsolete. The five-volume Fuentes de la historia contemporánea de México, edited by Luis González and Stanley R. Ross and published between 1961 and 1967 by El Colegio de México, is basic and indispensable.¹⁴ Also published under the auspices of El Colegio, beginning in 1967, is the Bibliografía histórica mexicana, competently edited by Susana Uribe de Fernández de Córdova. Other important listings, indexed for ready use and often annotated, include Daniel Cosío Villegas’ Cuestiones internacionales de México: Una bibliografía (1966);¹⁵ the section on modern Mexico in David F. Trask, Michael C. Meyer and Roger B. Trask, A Bibliography of United States-Latin American Relations Since 1810: A Selected List of Eleven Thousand Published References (1968);¹⁶ and Jorge Martínez Ríos, Tenencia de la tierra y desarrollo agrario en México: Bibliografía selectiva y comentada, 1522-1968 (1970).¹⁷

Historiographical analysis and criticism are at last receiving expert attention. The Third International Congress of Mexican Studies in 1969 featured a series of papers that evaluated revolutionary scholarship, and the proceedings assess the state of the field at the end of the 1960s.¹⁸ Other historiographical offerings also attest to the new maturity. In addition to the useful annotations and interpretative summaries found in the Handbook of Latin American Studies there are several pieces that describe new trends in revolutionary writing. Representative of these works are Eugenia Meyer, Conciencia histórica norteamericana sobre la Revolución de 1910 (1970);¹⁹ Michael C. Meyer, “Perspectives of Mexican Revolutionary Historiography” (1969);²⁰ Manfred Mols and Hans Werner Tobler, “Mexiko: Bilanz einer Revolution” (1975);²¹ and pertinent sections of El Colegio de México’s Veinticinco años de investigaciones históricas en México (1966);²² Charles W. Bergquist, “Recent United States Studies in Latin American History: Trends Since 1965” (1974);²³ and Charles A. Hale and Michael C. Meyer, “Mexico: The National Period” (1971).²⁴

At least rivaling the work in bibliography and criticism are innovations in methodological approaches to the study of the Revolution. James W. Wilkie (1967, 1970) demonstrated the possibilities of quantification for charting the policies and priorites of the revolutionary governments.²⁵ Particularly interesting, and controversial, is Wilkie’s “poverty index,” designed to gauge the extent to which revolutionary benefits have reached the Mexican masses.²⁶ In another application of computer methods, Peter H. Smith (1973) offered a new explanation of Mexico’s post-revolutionary political stability.²⁷

Scholars have long supplemented their written sources by interviewing survivors of the Revolution, but in the last seven or eight years oral history has become a standard research technique, accompanied by efforts to build banks of recorded data. The result of one such undertaking is James W. Wilkie’s and Edna Monzón de Wilkie’s transcription of talks with seven aging, important figures of the revolutionary era (1969).²⁸ Another more extensive and on-going effort, launched in 1972, is the Programa de Historia Oral of the Departamento de Etnología y Antropología del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Coordinated by Eugenia Meyer and Alicia Olivera de Bonfil, the project includes interviews with important but lesser known veterans of the period and with prominent contemporary Mexicans such as educators and luminaries of the motion picture industry.²⁹

In sum, the last decade has seen remarkable progress in professional craftsmanship. Never have scholars been so well equipped to probe the Mexican Revolution’s complexities. At the same time, the technical and methodological flowering has paralleled—and contributed to—a diversity of historical interpretation that has ended the years of consensus. The change has been rapid. As recently as the Oaxtepec congress of 1969 John Womack could point out that the work of recent years had left the field essentially unchanged as regards scholars’ perception of the Revolution.³⁰ Since then matters have shifted dramatically. There is in progress a reassessment of assumptions that once were accepted almost without challenge. Most of the new revisionism is selective and cautious. It questions and sometimes rejects old frames of reference but with important exceptions it does not advocate new ones. The direction of recent scholarship is uncertain, but it is possible to offer an interim report, to identify origins and to show some of the ways traditional interpretations are changing.

The revisionism is not of course identical with anti-Revolution literature, which is as old as the Revolution itself and pre-dates the beginning of serious scholarship on the subject. From 1910 until today there has existed a shadow history that rejects the Revolution and all its works. Mexicans who served Porfirio Díaz or Victoriano Huerta equated the Revolution with anarchy. Many foreign observers echoed the views of foreign investors that the Revolution was simply an excuse to steal. There accumulated a mound of polemic written by Catholics, both Mexican and foreign, who attacked the Revolutions anticlerical excesses.

Most foreign writers abandoned their antagonism by World War II, but in Mexico the genre continued to flourish, although in less vitriolic form. Jorge Vera Estañol (1957) and Ricardo García Granados (1956) still insisted that the movement begun by Francisco I. Madero was a tragic mistake.³¹ Catholic dissidents pressed old arguments with new data and renewed vigor; between 1945 and 1965 Editorial Jus and other houses published more than two dozen volumes of memoirs, exposés and documentary collections that sought to justify the Catholic militancy of the 1920s. Added to all of this was a small Marxist historiography which, especially in its early stages, had little to recommend it to serious scholars. Professionals recorded this as evidence of reactionary thinking or puerile radicalism but ignored it as history. It may have reassured pro-Revolution scholars of the rectitude of their views; certainly the mainstream of revolutionary historiography told a far different story.

The present revisionism departs from a distinguished tradition. In the 1920s, U.S. scholars began to embrace the Revolution. It was the start of a love affair that has been long and productive. Beginning with Herbert Ingram Priestly (1923) and Charles Hackett (1926), the school was soon joined by Frank Tannenbaum (1929, 1933), Wilfred Hardy Callcott (1931), Henry Bamford Parkes (1938), Eyler N. Simpson (1937), and by para-professionals such as Ernest Gruening (1928).³² Their work differed in detail but their larger message was uniform: the Revolution was a great and good thing; it was purging Mexico of the burden of a dismal past and was moving the country toward a happy future as a liberal democracy. It had essential unity; there were easily identifiable villains and heroes, and even the bloody conflicts among the latter were necessary parts of a process that, in the end, converged to assure success.

The merit of this early scholarship was formidable. If today many of the interpretations remain in question, nevertheless much of the research and no small portion of the insights have held up. Callcott’s analysis of the 1917 constitution and its antecedents still has few equals. Gruening’s description of Mexico in the 1920s remains an indispensable source, especially his reporting on the Revolution’s impact at the local level.

Professional history written during the next forty years, particularly in the United States, was primarily a refinement of the work of these pioneers. There was modification, disagreement in emphasis, and a steady accretion of data, but the fundamental optimism predominated. Writers acknowledged that many of the hopes invested in the Revolution were unfulfilled, that many Mexicans still lived in deprivation, and that political processes often were less than edifying, but they expressed confidence that the situation would improve because the Revolution’s premises were basically sound. This literature, which Eugenia Meyer has called the United States’ historiografía mexicanista,³³ reached fruition in the 1950s and 1960s. Howard F. Cline (1953, 1963), Charles C. Cumberland (1952, 1968, 1972), Stanley R. Ross (1955), and Robert E. Quirk (1960), to cite only better-known examples, gave the field a scholarly prestige that placed it in the forefront of Latin American historical studies.³⁴

The views of the pro-Revolution school harmonized with the history of the Revolution propagated by the political elite that emerged to govern Mexico.³⁵ And indeed there seemed to be little room for gainsaying. The establishment of an official party and the achievement of domestic peace in the 1930s was followed by an economic surge that by the 1950s was being called, with some justice, a miracle. The Revolution had succeeded, and there was a generally accepted version of the historical process that had made it possible.

But is was precisely in this ambience that there appeared in Mexico a thoughtful literature of dissent. It did not attack what had come to be the standard treatment of events between 1910 and 1940, but it challenged the revolutionary mystique by questioning how much good the Revolution had accomplished, and it tended to reject the concept of “institutional revolution” whereby governments after Lázaro Cárdenas legitimized themselves by claiming to be faithful heirs of the epic struggle.³⁶ This was “in-house” criticism, written more in disappointment than anger by men who had known the Revolution at first hand, who in many cases had served it, and who had come to believe that something had gone wrong. Some of them, such as Jesús Silva Herzog (1943, 1949), concluded that the Revolution had lost its moorings because the objectives of democracy and social justice had been sacrificed in the country’s rush to industrialize.³⁷ Others, such as Daniel Cosío Villegas (1947), asserted that the great movement had been corrupted and had died short of its goal.³⁸ U.S. historians took note of the new dissidence but most of them preferred to probe the dissenters’ motives rather than weigh the merit of their arguments.

The Mexican historical profession, which gained new prominence after World War II, early expressed skepticism regarding the pro-Revolution position. The seminar at El Colegio de México produced its spectacular first fruits in 1955 with the appearance of the early volumes of the Historia moderna,³⁹ a project which, as Charles A. Hale has perceived, apparently originated in Cosío Villegas’ disillusionment with the course of events after 1940.⁴⁰ The title of the series was itself provocative: modern Mexico did not begin with the Revolution but rather with the Porfiriato, that dismal regime that the Revolution dislodged in order to make modernity possible. But if Porfirian Mexico was modern, what was the Revolution and what did it achieve?

Mexican academics in the 1960s continued to criticize contemporary conditions and edged closer to debating the Revolution’s nature. Moisés González Navarro (1966) observed that Mexico’s economic growth had been paid for in classic fashion by the working class and that progress had touched only certain fortunate sectors of Mexican society—a situation he characterized as an “unbalanced revolution.”⁴¹ Pablo González Casanova (1965) argued the Revolution’s incompleteness. He did not brand it a failure, but he assembled an array of data to show that, half a century after Francisco Madero’s uprising, Mexico still lacked political, social and economic democracy.⁴²

U.S. scholars were slower to abandon their sanguine outlook. Robert A. Potash in 1960 observed that “the crisis of confidence in the present and future states of the Revolution would seem to have opened the way for critical evaluations of the past,”⁴³ but the invitation was not immediately accepted. Few were prepared to challenge dogmas that were deeply entrenched in the profession. Moreover, as Stanley R. Ross pointed out, the Mexican example was still the “preferred” revolution—non-Communist, recognizably Western, and non-threatening to a Cold War generation.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, as the 1960s progressed, U.S. writing became more cautious, and some scholars raised unpleasant issues. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz (1963) catalogued the inadequacies of the Revolution’s program of education.⁴⁵ Frank R. Brandenburg (1964) found little evidence that the political system spawned by the Revolution held promise of becoming truly democratic.⁴⁶ But not until the end of the decade did the trend become general.

The reasons for the disenchantment of U.S. scholars appear to have been both empirical and philosophical. There was a heightened awareness that Mexico continued to exhibit the malaise typical of the underdeveloped world. Even the nation’s vaunted stability came into question after the violent disorders that erupted in the summer and fall of 1968. Besides, Mexico’s revolution for the first time had a serious competitor in the hemisphere as a model for national transformation: Fidel Castro’s root-and-branch reordering of Cuban life made the Mexican Revolution appear, to some, timid and misdirected by comparison. It is possible that liberal academics, jaded by the apparent failures of Great Society programs and the debacle of Vietnam, may have projected their disillusionment to the gradual reformist policies of the sort favored by Mexico’s “institutional revolutionaries.”⁴⁷ In any event, at least by 1969 it was apparent that U.S. specialists were uncomfortable with much of the pro-Revolution construct. Increasingly free of the compulsion to portray the movement as a success, a number of them began to reexamine historical postulates and to explore areas that might shed new light on Mexico’s revolutionary experience.

So far, only a minority of specialists have expressed general disillusionment with the Revolution. Robert E. Quirk, in his 1971 synthesis of Mexico’s history, observed that the nation’s long search for ultimate solutions had been in vain; the Revolution, he said, had promised too much, and he expressed doubt that “national socialization” (as he called it), in Mexico or elsewhere, could bring freedom or justice.⁴⁸ Others admitted that Mexico had progressed, but like the English scholar Peter Calvert (1969) they objected to crediting it to the Revolution.⁴⁹ Most historians have not dwelt on the Revolution’s failures. The more sweeping condemnations came from the pens of political scientists, sociologists, economists and members of other present-minded disciplines.⁵⁰ Historians, for the most part, have preferred a limited approach that singles out leaders and events for new treatment.

Especially interesting is the problem of periodization, a subject that occupied an entire session of the Fourth International Congress of Mexican History at Santa Monica in 1973. What are the watersheds of Mexico’s recent history? A chief target for debate has been the hallowed date of 1910. Already challenged by the Historia moderna, still more specialists now argue that 1910 was a wayside stop, not a cosmic divide. For example, Albert L. Michaels and Marvin Bernstein proposed ordering modern Mexican history by reference to the rise of the national bourgeoisie, which began in the 1870s.⁵¹ In this view, the Revolution was a stage in which that group strengthened its hold, finally achieving domination in the 1940s and 1950s. The old Porfirians, these scholars insist, would have rejoiced at the outcome. Also at Santa Monica, Eugenia Meyer proposed an end to the blanket use of the label “revolution” to describe the decades after 1910, because so broad a definition does not correspond to the experience of most Mexicans who have lived in the twentieth century.⁵²

One of the most promising lines of inquiry that are modifying older interpretations of the Revolution is the recent work in local and regional history—a field in which the possibilities for Mexican historical studies was described by Luis González (1973) in his seminal essay, Invitación a la microhistoria.⁵³ The concept of “many revolutions” was sometimes implied in the early literature, but most local revolutionary history remained the domain of amateur historians and antiquarians.⁵⁴ Only in the 1960s did trained historians begin to pursue the subject in depth, and their findings are confirming the immense diversity of the upheaval. Revolution meant different things at different times and in different places. González (1968), who recounted the life of his native town in Michoacán from the colonial era through the Revolution, discovered that San José de Gracia’s time of greatest dislocation was not the “violent decade” of 1910-1920, but rather the later Cristero rebellion.⁵⁵ John Womack’s classic study of Morelos (1969) made clear that the Revolution there was a war to recover stolen lands and restore traditional autonomy.⁵⁶ William H. Beezley (1973) described the Chihuahua rebels not as oppressed peasants but as a conglomerate of small entrepreneurs, sharecroppers, miners, muleteers, peddlers and clerks—people who had achieved some degree of well-being but who were frustrated by lack of opportunity and fearful of being engulfed by haciendas and foreign businesses.⁵⁷ Still another regional study, by Heather Fowler Salamini on the state of Veracruz, depicted a movement centered around peasant leagues and urban workers and led by disaffected middle-class ideologues.⁵⁸

Some historians have directed their talents to a new look at old faces, and have reached conclusions that dispute the pro-Revolution line. Michael C. Meyer (1972), amplifying earlier studies by Kenneth J. Grieb (1969) and by William L. Sherman and Richard E. Greenleaf (1960), made a persuasive case that Victoriano Huerta was not the monster of iniquity he was thought to be and that the Huerta government of 1913-1914 did not seek to reestablish the Porfirian social order.⁵⁹ Womack (1969) rescued Emiliano Zapata from the official myth-makers in Mexico City and gave him back to Morelos.⁶⁰

In the category of institutional history, Edwin Lieuwen (1968) interpreted the quest for political stability from 1920 to 1940 as a struggle between civilians and soldiers; he concluded that the army lost and that after Cárdenas, its decision-making role in national affairs declined steadily.⁶¹ But David Ronfeldt (1973) stressed that the army after 1940 retained an important political role, that its level of professionalism remained low, and that in fact it was not very different from other Latin American military establishments.⁶² Jorge Alberto Lozoya (1970) maintained that militarism has never existed in Mexico, but, like Ronfeldt, he insisted that the army in the post-Cárdenas era was still an integral part of the state apparatus.⁶³

The Church-state conflict that accompanied the Revolution has been subjected to new treatment that modifies older accounts. Pro-Revolution history was contemptuous of the Catholic opposition, but scholars since the mid-1960s, making extensive use of Catholic archival sources, have generally concluded that the anticlerical view was one sided or at any rate simplistic. Alicia Olivera Sedano de Bonfil (1966) led with a carefully documented book which, although sparse in analysis and slighting the crucial U.S. involvement, presented for the first time a dispassionate study of the question.⁶⁴ David C. Bailey (1974) emphasized changes in Mexican Catholicism before 1913 that produced a militant social movement, heightened the fury of the clash with the Constitutionalists, and, in the 1920s, divided the Catholic leadership and helped doom the Cristero rebellion.⁶⁵ Jean Meyer (1972-1973) sympathetically portrayed the Cristeros as Catholic peasants who launched a massive effort to stave off imposition of a secular state.⁶⁶ He drew a sharp distinction between the Cristeros and the middle-class Catholic leaders, whose world outlook, Meyer insisted, was similar to that of the revolutionists with whom they contended for political power.⁶⁷

A fundamental precept of the traditional school was that the Revolution possessed an internal logic that propelled it along the road of national renovation long after the upheaval of 1910-1920. But Peter Calvert (1969) argued that the so-called institutionalization that came late in the 1920s resulted from personal clashes among a few leaders and from plain accident, rather than from some grand plan.⁶⁸ Womack (1970) elaborated on the point, contending that Mexico’s new masters reacted to events rather than shaping them and were, as he put it, “surprised” into presiding over national development.⁶⁹

Another object of scrutiny has been distinctions between the Revolution’s alleged moderate and radical phases, especially as these refer to the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas. The debate on Cardenismo is now lively. Specialists are far from agreement, but the burden of most recent research, for example the work of David L. Raby (1972), Josefina Vázquez (1969) and Tzvi Medín (1972) emphasized the moderate ideological nature of the Cárdenas government, however politically radical it may have been.⁷⁰ Medín, whose book-length study of the period is the most complete and balanced to date, held that Cárdenas accepted class conflict as a normal state of affairs and used it to promote social reform, not to impose socialism. The capitalists were one among several competing groups which the state would alternately restrict or encourage in the interest of national unity and progress.

Other examples abound, but those cited above are fairly representative of the revisionist mainstream. Growing numbers of authors seek to correct some part of the historical record without, however, explicitly challenging the overall standard interpretation of the Revolution. Taken alone, none of these efforts deal a mortal blow to the pro-Revolution position, but the combined effect is to leave it badly tattered. Most specialists are clearly ill at ease with the old formulas, but few appear anxious to offer new ones. It may be that the liberal tradition within which most academicians still work, particularly in the United States, is incapable of doing so.⁷¹ Rather, the alternate frameworks are being proposed by scholars who adhere to philosophical positions that were long denied serious consideration but are now contending to fill what appears to be a conceptual void. One of these is a Marxist interpretation, best expounded by the Mexican historian Arnaldo Córdova. The other is a traditionalist interpretation, contained notably in studies by the French scholar Jean Meyer and, more incidentally, in the work of U.S. historian Frederick B. Pike. Significantly, the two approaches agree at many points about the nature of the Revolution despite the ideological gulf between them.

Marxist historians of the Revolution gained a respectability in the 1960s and early 1970s that they lacked before—a change that seems less attributable to an increased confidence in their scholarly diligence (few of them cite manuscript sources) than to an ideological appeal to certain younger scholars and a willingness of non-Marxists to contemplate new possibilities. Soviet historians, supported by the Latin American Institute of the University of Moscow, have become increasingly prolific. Most of them have advanced beyond proclaiming that the Mexican Revolution perforce failed because it preceded the Bolshevik Revolution,⁷² but their conclusions remain generally uniform and reliable. The Mexican Revolution was led and won by the bourgeoisie, who broke the domination of the large landowners in order to allow a freer development of capitalism; a potentially revolutionary peasantry, led by Zapata and Villa, faltered because it lacked the guidance of an urban proletariat; the United States for a time was confused by the upheaval but it unerringly backed the bourgeoisie and regained its imperialistic hold on Mexico during World War II.⁷³ Soviet writers of course reject the notion that the Revolution is a model to be followed by the rest of Latin America.

Some Latin American Marxists echo the Soviet interpretations,⁷⁴ but others have developed imaginative variants. The Uruguayan Adolfo Gilly (1972), writing from Lecumberri Prison, saw the Mexican Revolution as a movement which, despite setbacks, had the potential to create a socialist order; the popular uprising of the 1910-1920 period failed because of ideological undernourishment and bourgeois repression; the masses rallied again during the time of Cárdenas only to be subdued after 1940; yet, Gilly insists, a dynamic tradition survived that could still make it possible to “complete the revolution.”⁷⁵

The most substantial Marxist contribution to revolutionary historiography is the work of Arnaldo Córdova (1972, 1973, 1974), who spares his readers a recital of class-conflict jargon and anti-Yankee diatribes and who makes the most convincing case so far that Marxist thought merits a place in the debate on the Revolution’s nature.⁷⁶ To Córdova, the Revolution was a political movement that had incidental social effects. The goal of its leaders was the promotion of capitalism, and the social reforms they instituted were designed to manipulate the masses to that end. As such, the reforms were counter-revolutionary. The Revolution, according to Córdova, continued a process that began in 1876, or earlier. The centralized regime that emerged was a refinement and a logical extension of the Porfiriato. The genius of the leadership, culminating with Cárdenas, lay in its success at becoming the champion both of the bourgeoisie on the one hand and of the workers and campesinos on the other, and then organizing the latter into corporate groups, isolated and dependent upon a paternalistic state. The Revolution added a popular dimension to capitalism, placating the mass of exploited Mexicans while making possible a generation of economic growth that benefited a dominant middle class.

Jean Meyer (1972, 1973), representing the traditionalist viewpoint, concurs that the Revolution was at heart political, not social.⁷⁷ It imposed an authoritarian, secular state—a process that demanded the submergence of Mexican individualism. A small directive group after 1915 methodically absorbed opposing leaders and movements, and Mexicans who could not be pacified by selective reforms were subdued by violence (Meyer’s prominent examples are the Zapatistas and the Cristeros). Between 1910 and 1940 a new state, built on political absolutism and capitalism, installed and armed itself, its leaders deceptively claiming the title of “institutional revolutionaries.” The regime that emerged after 1940 was a continuation under more efficient management of a centralizing drive that began with the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, reached another plateau in the late nineteenth, and emerged triumphant in the twentieth. The Revolution was a new stage in an old process, and the only thing “revolutionary” about it was its merciless crusade to liquidate the old Mexico, which was Hispanic, Catholic and humanly workable. Like Córdova, Meyer concludes that the Revolution worked to the detriment of most Mexicans. Both insist that the new Mexican state, while gaining a degree of control over its dealings with foreign nations, nevertheless condemned itself to dependence on imperialistic powers by linking its destiny to the concept of modernity prevalent in the North Atlantic world.

Frederick B. Pike (1973) treats Mexico in the larger context of the Hispanic world, and he believes that the Revolution restored more of the past than it negated.⁷⁸ He agrees with Meyer that the Revolution enthroned political centralism, and with Córdova that a major achievement of the revolutionary reorganization was the establishment of corporate groups. Pike, however, does not deplore these developments; on the contrary he believes that the Revolution recreated, at least for a time, a balance of mutual dependence between the dominant class and the subculture that was lost in the nineteenth century but which is fully consonant with Mexico’s earlier historical traditions.

So far, none of these proposals for a new schema to explain Mexico’s recent history has obtained broad acceptance. Perhaps a new consensus will emerge, but for now most Mexican revolutionary historians appear reluctant to commit themselves to an all-embracing ideological position. This is probably to their credit. The interpretation of the Mexican Revolution that became a norm in the 1930s claimed an allegiance that for too long made it difficult to consider alternatives. If much of the work of those early scholars has endured, it is because of their often meticulous research, not their attempts to impose timeless meaning on the events they studied. For the present, most historians, while more tolerant than ever of those who press for final answers, have settled for investigating limited problems and reporting their findings as accurately as possible. Their discoveries are part of a wider reality, and it would be both unnatural and unprofessional never to attempt a link-up. But of all the academic disciplines, history can best justify postponing the giving of ultimate explanations. The rich new diversity of sources, tools, methods and concepts offers opportunities for scholarship that can outlast efforts to impose global judgments on the nature of the Mexican Revolution.

Author notes