Historia breve de la Revolución Mexicana

Felipe Arturo Ávila Espinosa and Pedro Salmerón Sanginés have produced a workmanlike survey of Mexico's revolutionary decade from 1910 to 1920. The authors' ambition, rather than simply to produce another general narrative, is to respond to what they regard as an ahistorical strain of historiography in which scholars have misinterpreted the revolution because of what came in its wake. As the authors explain, scholars cannot blame the Zapatistas for the authoritarian and heavily bureaucratized state that took form decades later any more than they can blame Russia's Bolsheviks in 1917 for the excesses of Stalinism. In asserting the revolution's dynamic, multiclass, and popular character, the authors are not offering anything entirely new. The point nevertheless bears repeating, since many have dismissed the revolution as something less than revolutionary.The rest of their narrative proceeds through the familiar cast of characters and cascade of events: the liberal oligarchy of Porfirio Díaz accelerated patterns of landlessness, inequality, and corruption, drawing diverse sectors of the nation's population toward the common cause of overthrowing the regime; the reformist democrat Francisco Madero reluctantly led a revolution that he could not contain and opportunistically made promises that he could not keep; a counterrevolutionary military coup d'état led by Victoriano Huerta threatened a reversion to the old regime; a factional struggle between the comparatively radical Conventionists, led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and their more moderate counterparts the Constitutionalists, headed by Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón, led the nation into civil war; a succession of interventions by the United States further destabilized the country and fanned the flames of nationalism; and ultimately a triad of Sonorans—namely, Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles, and Adolfo de la Huerta—emerged victorious.According to the authors, the actual changes delivered by the revolutionaries through this chaotic process were threefold: agrarian reform, whose advocates sought in earnest to address the nation's terribly lopsided land distribution patterns; a new, more active state that discarded the laissez-faire logic of the Díaz regime in favor of a more interventionist approach; and the use of popular mobilization and violence as political tools by the masses. The authors acknowledge that not all the structural changes in the first third of the twentieth century were due to the revolution, nor were all of them entirely unique to Mexico. But they nonetheless convincingly assert that the revolution did lead to profound and enduring change, in spite of the eventual drift away from the revolutionary agenda that began under the long reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.These points are convincing, and any effort to reassert the importance of the revolution is welcome. Nevertheless, the book's thesis would be more powerful if the chronology extended beyond 1920. This, of course, opens a now tired periodization question: When, if ever, did the revolution end? 1920? 1940? To some extent it is futile to delineate a revolutionary and postrevolutionary break, since violence endured well beyond 1920, above all with the religiously motivated Cristero reaction, and constructive change did not wait for 1920, or even 1917, to begin. Instead, there was an uneven progression—fluid in certain moments, halting or even backward-moving in others—by which violence gradually gave way to institutionalization before the system hardened into its final form.But at the minimum, if the authors intend to demonstrate that agrarian reform, a new developmentalist state, and popular mobilization were the fruits of the revolution, then their account should logically afford comprehensive coverage to the very processes that bore those fruits—the consolidation of a labor movement and the emergence of functional political parties in the 1920s, the creation of a single-party-dominant regime at the end of that decade, the organization of class-based social sectors into corporatist bodies linked to party and state in the 1930s, and above all the Lázaro Cárdenas–era land redistribution of 1934–40.In stylistic terms, the book's excessive detail, which adds unnecessary weight and density to the narrative, could stand to be trimmed down. The quantity of names, dates, places, battles, and the like makes for a sometimes tedious read. In substantive terms, the historiographical survey at the end of the book is useful, especially for graduate students early in their careers who quickly need to piece together over a century of analysis on the revolution, although it should be acknowledged that the survey almost exclusively lists Spanish-language titles. For those too reliant on British and Anglo–North American scholarship, this is a benefit.In sum, despite some shortcomings, this comprehensive yet accessible book is worthy of substantial praise and should be included in the library of any scholar of modern Mexico

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