The Mexican Revolution's Wake

Over the years, locating the roots of Mexican radicalism has become a bit of a cottage industry. For early commentators like John Womack, the roots of this radicalism (and its demise) were in the sugar plantations of the Morelos lowlands and the Zapatista uprising that sought to distribute them among the peasants. For others, like Alan Knight and Friedrich Katz, they lay in the small villages and mining towns of the Mexican sierras where charismatic strongmen like Pancho Villa shaped a distinct serrano ideology out of a blend of political autonomy, workers' rights, and limited land reform. For more recent historians, they lay in the rich, rural lowlands of the center-west where politicians, reformers, teachers, and peasants hashed out a distinctly localized brand of land reform and socialist education.Now, in this excellent book, Sarah Osten has found these roots in a place often left out of discussions of Mexico's revolutionary era—the southwest. Osten argues that from 1915 onward reformers like Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto came up with a new, “socialist” way of doing politics. For these men, socialism was a relatively loose term. Though it contained some aspects of socioeconomic reform, it functioned more as a catchall political category to denote those who supported the Mexican Revolution against its detractors and enemies. On the ground, it was concerned less with grand changes and more with the messy business of forming political organizations and winning elections.In the bulk of the book Osten traces how these loose “socialist” ideas shaped politics not only in Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto's test laboratory of Yucatán but also in the neighboring states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche. In Tabasco Tomás Garrido Canabal built on the programs introduced by Carrillo Puerto as well as what he perceived as the reasons for Carrillo Puerto's downfall at the hands of the 1923 de la Huerta rebellion to construct a particularly durable form of socialism. Garrido Canabal relentlessly purged suspected rebels, kept the federal army at a distance, formed a party, and then filled it with a network of local “ligas de resistencia” and unionized workers. This organization then allowed him to introduce a handful of strikingly radical policies, including (most famously) a virulent anticlericalism and (less well known) a move toward female suffrage.In Chiapas, attempts to create a version of Yucatán socialism were less successful. Most historians have put this down to the state's deep-seated economic inequality and hard racial divisions. Though Osten doesn't deny these, she views Chiapas governor Carlos A. Vidal's failure as one of political circumstance. He sought to use his local organizations to back General Francisco Serrano's attempt to beat General Álvaro Obregón's bid for reelection. By doing so, Vidal came up against not only Obregón and the federal army but also Garrido Canabal's pro-Obregón network.As the Chiapas case suggests, Osten's work not only focuses on the spread of this particular type of southwestern socialism but also cleverly and clearly indicates how state politics interacted with the shifts in federal politics. The de la Huerta and Gómez-Serrano rebellions, which are often relegated to footnotes in studies of the 1920s, are given ample treatment. Osten demonstrates how what sometimes appears as a personalist uprising actually interacted in complex ways with politics at the state and local levels. While the de la Huerta rebellion pushed Garrido Canabal to reform and refine Mexican socialism, the Gómez-Serrano rebellion put an end to Vidal's attempts to introduce these forms of organizing to Chiapas.If most of Osten's work is a readable and well-researched discussion of state and local politics, her concluding chapters place this book in the top tier of the regional histories of the revolution, up there with books by Ben Fallaw, Jocelyn Olcott, and Romana Falcón. Rather than simply viewing developments in the southwest as an interesting aside, Osten claims that the forms of socialist organizing pushed by Carrillo Puerto and developed into a powerful political machine by Garrido Canabal actually formed the basis of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR). This is a big claim. But Osten does a fine job of meticulously laying out the connections between the beginning of Mexico's one-party dominant state and the infrapolitics and socialist organizing of Yucatán, Tabasco, and Chiapas.Chapter 7 in particular is a bravura piece of political history that frankly changed my views on what I thought was a fairly well-traveled era of the Mexican past. Here, as Osten escapes the often rather dense undergrowth of names and acronyms that fill the individual state-focused chapters, it is possible to see a genuinely original take on the early years of the Mexican revolutionary state.This is perhaps a little churlish (my standard operating tenor), but I suppose that if I have any criticism of this well-written, well-researched, and novel work, it is that Osten fails to locate her own vision of Mexican state formation within some of the other literature on the late 1920s, which sees the building blocks of the PNR in the anti-Cristero groups of the center-west. If the southwest socialism shaped the relationship between the federal and state governments, was it the example of the armed agraristas of Michoacán and Jalisco that molded how state governments related to and negotiated with the tier below of village authorities and local strongmen

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