Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval is the best regional study we have for the years surrounding the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910 in Mexico. It takes head-on the currently prevailing thesis that Yucatán experienced no revolutionary fervor until the radical general Salvador Alvarado arrived from the “outside” and imposed significant change in 1915. In exquisite detail, Wells and Joseph demonstrate how the economic downturn that started in the 1890s and the political vacuum created by the unseating of President Porfirio Díaz in 1911 combined to stimulate widespread demand for social reform on the peninsula, much of it fueled by Maya peons and urban workers who followed local leaders. In doing so the authors close the gap in a most enterprising and original way between their previous, individually-written, fine monographs: Yucatán’s Gilded Age (Wells) and Revolution from Without (Joseph).
In many ways this is a bold book, well written and clearly argued. Starting with their stimulating introduction, the authors lay out the conceptual issues au courant in the field, such as the nature of the so-called dialogue between elites and popular groups, the ways in which official documents should be read, the question of what the revolution changed, if anything, and the nature of the wellspring of the rebellion, popular or otherwise. On these sorts of debatable issues, Wells and Joseph take their stand but at the same time warn against an essentialist stance. They note, for example, that while riots and revolts brought rural people together around shared grievances and identities, “villagers and peons were rarely amalgamated into durable alliances. Much less did they constitute a campesino class that struggled against landowners” (p. 246). And while these lower groups (subalterns) had been struggling for social betterment for years and were therefore primed for the fundamental reforms of 1915, the changes would not have materialized had not General Alvarado smashed once and for all the oligarchic mechanisms that had orchestrated Yucatecan society during most of the Porfiriato.
These mechanisms, according to the authors, maintained an uneasy peace on the peninsula both before the revolution and after it had unleashed its fury on other parts of the country. The stabilizers had three components: 1) isolation; 2) coercion; and 3) security. In the first case, plantation owners isolated workers on henequen estates, away form their native pueblos as well as from the potentially liberating political swirl of Mérida. Second, corporal punishment, debt peonage, the hacienda store, and an extralegal system proved to be effective weapons for social control. Third, subsistence and other forms of paternalism provided peons with personal moorings in their uncertain and harsh world. So although two or three powerful camarillas of elites vied for the recognition of the federal government, for control of the state house in Mérida, and, above all, for the lucrative henequen trade, and even though organized reform groups agitated for change and peasants periodically rioted and rebelled against the harshness of their condition, an undulating tranquility managed to prevail in Yucatán. However, when world henequen prices fell and planters squeezed their employees for ever more work at ever less pay, frustration bubbled over and serious upheaval erupted, especially in sectors where a local leader with political savvy and ties of his own to potent and dissatisfied elites could rally forces from his own locale and lead them against their enemy, whether it be an unjust municipal official, a hated jefe político, a cruel plantation boss, or the domineering estate owner himself. Horrible, grisly encounters followed, which hinted at a recrudescence of a caste war that was sleeping with one eye open.
No one is more aware than Wells and Joseph that broad generalizations do not hold up in these roiling circumstances. A great strength of their book is that it highlights the enormous diversity of ways in which peasants react to their situations and emphasizes that different conditions in varied geographical locations produce varied responses. Thus it shows that some plantation owners and political reformers actually did have the welfare of the downtrodden in mind, that opportunism can move people as much as anything else and cause contradictory behavior, and that differing points of view among historians studying the same events can be salutary. In fact, the authors recognize and invite debate over their own findings and conceptualizations, and no doubt they will get it. Some will complain that they promise more in their challenging introduction than they deliver in the main text of the book. Still, without a doubt Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval is a classic of its type.
