Culture and Revolution

“Culture did not provide the revolution with a nation because the revolution wanted one, but simply because the revolution revealed itself as an almost pure wanting”; “It was the function of the void to elicit an entity able to satiate its own vacuums through the expediency of cultural intervention” (pp. 15, 20).Disclaiming relevant specialization when a book baffles may be defeatist, but Culture and Revolution frequently baffled this historian. It is perhaps not so much a work of Mexican history as one of critical studies, yet it tells stories about the past, some of them good ones; its characters act in the classic period of revolutionary state building and cultural transformation, 1920–40; it draws on major historians, such as Daniel Cosío Villegas, Enrique Florescano, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Alan Knight; and it is billed as social and political history in the Library of Congress cataloging data, so it seems reasonable to read Horacio Legrás's book as (at least in part) history.As a work of history it suffers from errors of interpretation and fact. At the broadest level, Legrás's presentation of the last 30 years of historical thinking on the Mexican Revolution is wrong. Citing with approval Leonard Folgarait's argument that a dramatic growth of scholarship has made “the causes, origins, and early development of the Mexican Revolution” more obscure than ever, he bypasses the broad agreement on a largely endogenous, strongly agrarian revolution that arose from the Alan Knight–John Mason Hart debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, reinforced by Friedrich Katz's later work, and developed and matizado by further research on Porfirian economy and culture, citing instead an art historian and a historiographical overview from 1978 (p. 3). The attachment to the patria chica that regional studies established as a critical determinant in Mexican political behavior is absent; instead “people do not belong naturally to any particular region” (p. 5). In terms of outcomes, 20 years of revisionism are overlooked in favor of a restatement of the 1930s as a time when “state power consolidated rapidly” and Cardenismo “never lacked regional experts on the ground” (pp. 1, 62). At times the imprecision is surreal but unimportant, as when he notes that “although Galeana was illiterate, she typed out her autobiography,” or when things become “even more unique,” or when synchronicity is “the technical desire to present a diversity of figures and motives under a unified representation” (pp. 87, 30, 7). (Either time or Carl Jung is dead, it seems.) At other times it really does matter, as when the modern census defines respondents racially (and as “creole” into the bargain), or the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is created in the late 1930s, or Hispanism is established “under the tutelage of Alfonso Reyes” and is “seldom considered together” with indigenismo, perpetuating “the colonial division between Indians and creoles” (pp. 57, 114, 6). The census of the 1930s and 1940s never defined respondents racially, the PRI was created in 1946, and hispanismo dates back to the late nineteenth century and from more or less the start was intertwined, in both popular and academic perception and debate, with indigenista discourses.Legrás's overall project is to assess the revolution as a series of texts through five organizing concepts, each of which gets a chapter: extension, depth, life, fantasy, and synchronicity. The range of those texts is impressive, spanning novels, memoirs, autobiographies, films, photography, painting, and interesting lives tout court: thus Colonel Amelio Robles, the gifted transgender Zapatista, rubs shoulders with Alfonso Reyes and a large cast of intellectuals and creators in a series of miniessays. These deal with topics as disparate as La noche mexicana, a complex piece of nationalist public theatre, José Vasconcelos's memoirs and political career, Manuel Gamio's work at Teotihuacán, and Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que viva México! Most texts are mainstream; some, such as the novel on which ¡Vámanos con Pancho Villa! is based or the long-lost film Redes, are not. Legrás's depth is not always manifest: writing about Frieda Kahlo as “the most successful self-created character of the revolutionary myth,” he omits the quite relevant detail that she was half-German (p. 90). But his breadth is incontestable and means that most readers will find something new in his synthesis.What it all adds up to, though, is difficult to see, a difficulty increased by the absence of a conclusion; the book ends abruptly in the “gibberish” of Cantinflas's masterpiece, Ahí está el detalle (p. 183). Both Legrás's vignettes and ocurrencias are often worth having: the pages on popular theater and revolutionary photography are good. Yet drawing on that material is difficult due to inaccuracy; when factual claims seemed surprising and were checked, they didn't invariably stack up. The population statistics cited on page 47 are indeed from the source footnoted, but nearly 30 pages away from the page reference given. Diego Rivera was not the oldest of the three great muralists of the revolution; that honor goes to José Clemente Orozco (p. 140). Again, neither of these was of any real importance. But in combination with the more important errors of fact and interpretation above, they cast the sneaking suspicion over many another interesting detail—is this really true? And given the linguistic and empirical casualness of Culture and Revolution, it is hard to tell

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