This book of essays on the Mexican Revolution consists of six regional case studies and six general analyses. The former are more convincing and useful. Raymond Buve’s essay on Tlaxcala and Gilbert Joseph and Allen Wells’s on Yucatán are good, cogent, and original. Romana Falcón offers a well-researched analysis of the important and neglected topic of land confiscations in San Luis (unfortunately, the translation is awful). Heather Fowler provides an interesting study of pseudo-agrarianism in Tamaulipas, Paul Garner a solid—though disappointingly “top-down”—analysis of the Oaxaca sovereignty movement, and Mark Wasserman a brief, bloody, but informative account of the political “freebooters” who governed and grafted in Chihuahua in the 1920s. Of the general essays, Wasserman’s introduction is succinct and, although somewhat quote-laden, useful in providing signposts for the reader. Thomas Benjamin’s review of the state governments of the 1920S is interesting, though necessarily superficial, while his concluding historiographical essay is balanced, erudite, and insightful (it’s a boon for graduate students).
The remainder of the essays are somewhat disappointing. John Tutino relies on a straightforward (some would say reductionist) class analysis to explain the revolutionary factionalism of post-1913; he asserts (but does not prove) that foreign interests preferred the Carrancistas to the Villistas and Zapatistas, and that the Villa-Carranza split was essentially a class division. David LaFrance attempts a brave summary of the Maderista phase of the revolution that embodies some elastic geography (Veracruz forms part of the “center,” Coahuila part of the northwest not surprisingly, most of the revolution is therefore “central or northwestern” in origin) and that, while ditching the “great man” theory of the revolution so far as Madero is concerned, credits the Chihuahuan revolution “principally to Pascual Orozco” (p. 28). So we dethrone the national caudillos only to elevate their provincial counterparts. Stuart Voss’s concluding essay—which steams way past the 1929 terminus where the rest of his colleagues get off—is based on a wide, though somewhat dated, bibliography; it offers little by way of original analysis and suffers from both opaque “organizing concepts” (e.g., “hierarchy” versus “egalitarianism”) and incidental errors and misinterpretations (Vasconcelos did not run for the “provisional” presidency [p. 287]; the accommodating pope of the 1930s was Pius XI not Leo XI [p. 295]; the “wholly passive function” of the “popular classes” in the 1940s [p. 301] is a sweeping misconception).
Throughout the book, the editing is sloppy: we encounter misspelled—and even misplaced—places (such as “Yucután,” “Navajoa, Nueva León, and “Sabina,” Tamaulipas, which should be Sabinas, Coahuila); as well as “conspicious,” “free reign,” “resiliance,” leaders “martialing” their men, and Voss’s first name spelled two different ways. More important, most of the authors, while stressing the importance of “regions” and “regionalism,” make no attempt to explain or theorize these notions, which are deemed to be self-evident; and, while correctly pointing to the tensions, constraints, and contradictions of the 1920s state, several also conclude by asserting the unalloyed triumph of the hegemonic state/party under Cárdenas in the 1930s (pp. 66, 85, 230, 301). This makes for a neat conclusion, but a considerable misconception. Thus, while the book adds a good deal to our knowledge of key examples of revolutionary politics, it offers rather less by way of general explanation of the revolution.
