Revolutionary Ideology and Political Destiny in Mexico, 1928-1934

Following the Mexican Revolution, agrarian reformists sought to create an ejidal system that would transform the oligarchic economy and incorporate peasants into the political life of the state. By the late 1920s, reformists were increasingly at odds with many veterans of the revolution, especially Plutarco Elías Calles and his cabinet. For radical peasants and politicians, a weak federal dedication to land redistribution represented a frustrated Mexican Revolution, one that was far from living up to the promises of the 1917 constitution.Eitan Ginzberg's intrepid book is the first to compare two key agrarian governors: Adalberto Tejeda and Lázaro Cárdenas, who respectively represented Veracruz and Michoacán between 1928 and 1932. Analyzing municipal documents, state circulars, and legislation, the book juxtaposes Tejeda and Cárdenas in terms of their ideologies, their strategies for implementing social reform, and their relationships with federal and municipal governments, agrarian leagues, and the Catholic Church. Both governors made significant efforts toward land reform, and both aimed to improve their states' economies by collectivizing factories, building infrastructure, increasing exports, and curbing the influence of foreign capitalists in their states. The two reformist governors also shared the desire to develop rational and progressive—revolutionary—peasantries. They undertook literacy campaigns and opened secular (eventually socialist-minded) public schooling, while Tejeda also closed churches and curtailed religious practices. In 1934, both men made a bid for the presidency. While Cárdenas enjoyed a landslide victory—winning 98.2 percent of the vote and becoming the widely celebrated icon of the cultural revolution—the federal government did everything in its power to oppose Tejeda's increasingly radical platform. They succeeded in ostracizing and vilifying Tejeda, who drew only .68 percent of the ballots. In his carefully researched, well-written, and cogently argued book, Ginzberg explains why and how Cárdenas and Tejeda came to such distinct political ends despite their similar aims.Cárdenas's political success owed to his efforts to forge alliances within the federal government while also widening the net of social reform to include moderates, conservatives, and religious. For Ginzberg, however, Cárdenas was less dedicated than Tejeda to the revolutionary cause. Cárdenas's most significant agrarian reforms coincided with popular unrest, and these efforts declined once dissenters had been appeased. Such a top-down, corporate approach to agrarianism resulted in the allocation of less land, distributed at a slower pace, to peasants in Michoacán than to those in Veracruz. Ginzberg ultimately suggests that Cardenismo became a statist, centralist, bureaucratic, and opportunistic approach to state building. Such accommodationism not only stymied the possibility of a radical, nationwide socialist revolution but also prevented the state from achieving full democratization.Ginzberg's analysis of Cardenismo offers a provocative counter to Mary Kay Vaughan's work on the political legacy of the cultural revolution. More contentious, perhaps, is Ginzberg's insistence that the revolution constituted a break with liberalism. For his part, the author is clearly sympathetic to Tejeda, whom he sees as having been motivated by a true or pure radical ideology. (It is worth noting that Tejeda's political orientation, while Marxist, was also ultrapositivistic, Europhilic, and ill adapted for Mexico's social and economic context.) Whereas Cárdenas treated land reform as negotiable, Tejeda made the Veracruzan Agrarian League—which boasted 140,000 members and 2,000 agrarian committees—a major center of his state's power. At the same time, however, Tejeda used coercion and violence to flex his political muscle. He unnecessarily antagonized the Veracruz University (which he saw as bourgeois), implemented an extensive spy network across the state (whose informants alerted him of antirevolutionary activities), and was quick to remove municipal authorities who did not capitulate to his demands. While Ginzberg tends to see these political decisions as personality quirks that made Tejeda unwise and paranoid, he avoids characterizing the governor as undemocratic, reactionary, or reliant on bossism. By portraying Tejeda as egalitarian, Ginzberg may flatten the contradictions between the controversial governor's dedication to the grassroots, on the one hand, and his exclusionary methods, on the other.Ginzberg's framework is unapologetically Marxist. His analysis is structuralist and based on the material economy, and he sympathizes more strongly with anticapitalist historical subjects. Notwithstanding the conceptual questions that arise from this approach, the author has written an impressive book. The argument rests on exhaustive archival research in municipal and state archives, and the use of empirical data to bolster our understanding of agrarian reform is valuable. Ginzberg's close reading of political documents makes this book a very useful resource, especially for scholars interested in land reform and radical politics in any geographic region

Agrarian reform · Agrarian society · Constitution · Economic history · Ideology · Legislation · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Politics and Society in Latin America · Public Administration