Barry Carr can be a perceptive historian, as his essay on Sonora testifies. Unlike many of his cohorts of the Cold War era, he never equated Marxism with the devil or labeled all Communist parties lackeys of Moscow. They could act independently of the Comintern; and that, he says, often characterized the behavior of the Partido Comunista Mexicano. With that statement, Carr alerts his readers to the bent of this study of the Mexican Communist party since its inception in 1919. Nor was Browderism, the gospel according to Communist kingpins in the United States, always the watchword in Mexico. As expected, Mexican Communists saw through Washington’s Clayton plans. And Carr is not blind to the realities of Mexican political rhetoric. Social injustice, despite the verbiage of PRIista disciples, is as Mexican as the tortilla. Time and again, Carr reminds us of how reactionary Mexican rulers are; their neglect of the poor, regardless of postulates to the contrary by the Howard Cline school, is a cancer. The fruits of a “revolution” aside, the underdogs, the antiheroes of Maríano Azuela’s perceptive cuento, are still a pervasive feature of Mexican society.
Yet Carr’s work has limitations. It is political history, essentially institutional in outline. The story examines the ups and downs of the PCM, with a running commentary by Carr on its errors and failings, a nod to its virtues and successes. Much of the book deals with labor’s struggles for its rights, with Carr rightly castigating the evils of the charro. Nevertheless, Carr errs occasionally, as when he applauds uncritically the removal of La Quina, the boss of the petroleum workers, by the Salinas crowd. La Quina may have been corrupt, but he was no patsy of the oligarchy, and the petroleum workers enjoyed benefits shared by no other labor sector in Mexico. That Rolando Cordero and other “dissidents” applauded Salinas is meaningless, for they, like similar “leftist” intellectuals, were rapidly embracing the establishment.
It is strange that Carr does not end his book with the demise of the party but instead continues telling the story of attempts at political reform, including efforts to build a PSUM, a Socialist party, and the Partido de la Revolutión Democrática of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and his believers. Carr justifies this by saying that Communists of the old PCM have been active in these efforts. This implies, however, that Communists are in the forefront. But these attempts at reform are hardly the brainchild of the Communist old guard or of Marxism. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is no more Marxist than was his father, who seldom read books and knew little about matters of leftist ideology.
To emphasize once more, Carr’s study contains excellent chapters, such as the one about the Communists and agrarian reform in the Laguna during the years of Lázaro Cárdenas. We can sense why some Mexicans, in this case rural workers, were beholden to Communist compatriots. Another worthy section deals with the reactionary years of Miguel Alemán, the darling of the Howard Cline school of Mexican history in the United States and England, and with what Carr aptly labels the “taming of the Left.”
What is missing in this study is the Mexicans who accepted Marxism and built the Communist party. There are scores of names, but we never get to know any of the personalities. They remain simply names, sometimes accompanied by a capsule biography. Who these Mexicans were and what led them to join the party is never explained. Moreover, a discussion of the Mexican brand of Marxism is strangely absent from these pages, in spite of Alan Knight’s glib assertion to the contrary in the blurb on the dust jacket.
