The recent surge of interest in Yucatán’s revolutionary past is part of a larger current of historical scholarship on the region which began in the mid-1970s, has an interdisciplinary flavor, and entails an increasing level of collaboration between Mexican and international scholars. Yucatán’s new revolutionary historiography has mapped out the social and economic contours of the innovative revolutionary projects put forward by the Socialist Party of the Southeast, initially led by the reform-minded Salvador Alvarado (1915-1918) and subsequently by the militant Marxist Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922-1924). Moreover, it has attempted to show how the region’s political economy played a pivotal role in frustrating the revolutionary drive prior to 1924.
More research, however, remains to be done regarding the impact that the Mérida-based party and its programs actually had on local communities and sectors of the working class, particularly outside the dominant henequen zone. Nor have full-length scholarly biographies been written for either Alvarado or Carrillo Puerto.
Unfortunately, James Carey’s volume does not fill these lacunae. Carey has written the kind of traditional political history that the current generation of “yucatecólogos" has reacted against. His goals are “to see what took place in revolutionary Yucatán” (p. xi) between 1915 and 1924, and to address the significant social changes of the period in the form of a more readable narrative of the lives and personal aspirations of “two outstanding men” (p. 210). Regrettably, the political landscape has already been ably surveyed in English, particularly in the detailed dissertations of David Franz and Ramón Chacón, and in Spanish, in the more traditional chronicles of Edmundo Bolio and Alvaro Gamboa Ricalde, whose work Carey’s book most closely resembles.
One must also question Carey’s “great man” approach to history. To be sure, Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto are intriguing revolutionary caudillos, but can an understanding of the revolution’s local development be centered on the aspirations and fortunes of these two men? Carey presents some interesting details regarding Carrillo Puerto’s whirlwind courtship of American journalist Alma Reed and provides a comprehensive account of the last tragic days of each caudillo’s life, but the reader vainly searches in the book’s bite-size chapters for some larger structural context—for the kind of social and economic analysis that will render more intelligible the personal drives of these leaders as well as the ebbs and flows of their political careers.
I was struck by the author’s isolation from recent scholarship on both modern Yucatán and the Mexican Revolution. For example, Carey’s failure to read Allen Wells’s work and local contributions on the formation and character of the henequenero elite enters into his erroneous generalization of the planter class as nouveaux riches lacking in both tradition and intelligence.
Perhaps even more glaring is Carey’s failure to keep abreast of the “revisionist” trend in revolutionary historiography that has emerged since 1968. Almost eerily, he sums up the revolutionary legacy in 1985 much as Frank Tannenbaum did in the 1930s and subsequent generations of “prorevolutionary” writers did before 1968. Carey sees Yucatán’s revolutionary heritage most clearly in nation-building, increasing ideological consensus between left and right, improving prospects for electoral democracy, and a diminution in social inequality. I am hard pressed to think of a Yucatecan writer at any point on the political spectrum who would agree with this assessment.
