This is a book with an agenda. Editor Jaime E. Rodríguez intends that The Revolutionary Process in Mexico should counter what he terms the “traditional Revolutionary historiography,” which treats the Mexican Revolution as if it were a radical break with the past. Rather Rodríguez sees the Mexican Revolution and its after-math as a product of an evolutionary process, events that changed Mexico but did not actually transform it. In this he consciously follows the revisionist path of Alfred Cobban and Francois Furet’s recent work on the French Revolution.
It is reasonable, of course, to see the Mexican Revolution as “part of the continuum of the national experience” and no doubt valuable to shift “the focus of analysis from events to processes” (p. 3), as Rodríguez calls for in his introduction. And one certainly may track large processes over the longue durée, as John Tutino does so well in his From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (1988).
To show continuity, however, between the independence era and the Mexican Revolution a century later (which was the underlying theme of the series of symposia from which emerged these essays) is no easy task, and only Maria del Refugio Gonzalez’s short essay on the legal-ideological similarities (and differences) between “La Independencia y la Revolución” attempts to do so. Christen Archer, on whose shoulders falls much of the responsibility to connect the two grand events, cautions: “Too great an effort to produce historical connections and comparisons can lead to meaningless generalizations rather than useful synthesis” (p. 286).
Most of the essays treat limited regional or topical subjects. Indeed, Paul Vanderwood’s interesting article, “Explaining the Mexican Revolution,” specifically (and unfairly, I believe) characterizes as “impressionistic” (p. 99) Alan Knight, John M. Hart, and Francois-Xavier Guerra’s sweeping studies of the Revolution, citing their failure to examine local village documents. In his own work on the valley of Papigochic in western Chihuahua, Vanderwood finds a variety of responses, noting that the “villages did not rebel as entities; they split apart and probably along faults long established by local feuds and differences” (p. 102).
In one of the volume’s more useful contributions, Gilbert M. Joseph and Allen Wells write of the crisis of oligarchical rule in the Yucatan, 1909-1915. They argue that the “Yucatan was thoroughly transformed by the requirements of North American industrial capitalism” (p. 165), that popular resistance to these changes was much greater than usually assumed, and that the popular classes themselves had been changed by their participation in the Madero-era upheavals. In this the authors specifically support Alan Knight’s contention that the Revolution aroused a new assertiveness in Mexico’s peasantry. As usual, Joseph and Wells’ work is enhanced by a thorough grounding in the relevant historiographic issues and the broader conceptual questions.
Particularly evocative is Alan Knight’s “Revolutionary Project, Recalcitrant People: Mexico, 1910-1940.” Knight contends that Mexico’s tenacious cultural “Little Traditions” (local, rural, “traditional”) resisted the post-revolutionary states’ attempt to impose the “Great Traditions” (urban, national, “modern”), only to succumb to the post-1940s cultural homogenization carried out by capitalist market forces. Commercialization and consumerism succeeded where the heirs and provocateurs of the Great Traditions (liberal, Catholic, radical)—the cultural nationalists and social activists of the 1920s and 1930s—had failed.
Knight resists the revisionists’ efforts to package post-revolutionary Mexico in the same wrap as the Porfiriato. He recognizes the continuity of the Porfirian and the revolutionary leadership’s desire to create a national, capitalist society, but he maintains that the Revolution had forever changed the terms by which this effort might be accomplished; the ends were similar, but the means were radically different.
This argument highlights the crux of the revisionists’ perspective—that while similar political ends may suggest continuity of historical eras, this may be only a commentary on the modern state, rather than an accurate map of the historical topography of people’s lives. Just because one valley may resemble another does not mean that the trip across the mountains is not a significant adventure.
Other essays are Javier Garciadiego Dantan’s exceptionally well documented and coherent study of revolutionary Mexico’s university students’ and faculty’s essentially conservative view of the Revolution; Romana Falcon’s look at the roots of the 1893 rebellion against Díaz; Gregorio Mora’s well-researched examination of Sonora in the last decade of the Porfiriato; Mark Wasserman’s brief synopsis of politics in Chihuahua in the 1930s; Linda Hall’s “Banks, Oil, and the Mexican State,” the only essay to study the consequences of the Mexican Revolution for U. S.-Mexican relations; Virginia Guedea’s sensible critique of the essays; and Ricardo Avila’s study of a “good” Porfirian governor, José Vicente Villada.
In summary, this is a useful book, with several outstanding essays and a number of solid period pieces. Six of the 12 essays are in Spanish, and the work contains a short collection of photographs from the era of the Revolution and an extensive bibliography. It is exceptionally well edited and free of errata. The revisionist theme is lightly applied, neither limiting the offerings nor overwhelming the authors’ conclusions.