The agriculturally rich state of Veracruz was always reputed to have had a violent and radical agrarian history centering around the struggle to gain control of its lands and water resources, but only recently has it been the object of study. Romana Falcón’s monograph traces the history of the Veracruz agrarian movement during the Mexican Revolution, focusing specifically on the conservative years of the Maximato. She applies Juan Linz’ well-known views on authoritarian government to the Mexican revolutionary regime during this time period. The federal government permitted a limited form of pluralism to exist to retain popular support, but it constantly tried to control, channel, and restructure worker and peasant organizations and political parties within the already existing governmental institutions.
Her study begins with a brief summary of Mexican land tenure patterns and rural conditions before 1930. Then in a rather disorganized fashion she reviews the socioeconomic history of Veracruz before Colonel Adalberto Tejeda was reelected governor in 1928. A considerable amount of her data is based upon Fowler’s 1970 dissertation. Falcón proceeds by explaining how Governor Tejeda molded the Veracruz peasant organization into a Tejedista political and military power base through subsidization of the League of Agrarian Communities and the creation of an independent guerrilla force to confront the powerful commercial and agricultural interests in the state. Most interesting is the relationship the Tejedista agrarian movement developed with two of its political rivals, the CROM and the PNR, in its gradual takeover of state politics. The inevitable confrontation between the Veracruz agraristas and the Callista-dominated national government trying to retain control over national politics and to reverse the course of the agrarian revolution is the strongest part of Falcón’s study. She astutely analyzes how the Maximato puppet presidents dismantle the Tejedista forces in the municipalities, state legislature, federal legislature, and within the state PNR hierarchy.
Falcón has relied heavily on Mexico City newspapers and State Department papers, as well as Foreign Office records, for her thorough treatment of the central government’s tightening stranglehold on Veracruz politics. The weakness of her study lies in her failure to consult Veracruz sources, in particular the personal archive of Tejeda himself. Instead she has relied heavily on Fowler’s dissertation for local events and for all of her agrarian reform statistics. As many as 115 of her footnotes, not to mention a number of uncited paraphrases, out of a total of 416 cite Fowler’s regional study of the Veracruz peasant movement. In short, there are at present two books with almost the same title by Falcón and Fowler-Salamini dealing with Veracruz agrarian history to choose from. One emphasizes the means used by an authoritarian central government to quell an insurgent Marxist agrarian movement, while the other focuses on the regional origins of a revolutionary peasant movement, how it came to power, and how eventually it was coopted into the Mexican corporate political structure, leaving the lands of Veracruz once again in the hands of commercial agricultural interests.