Mexico's Once and Future Revolution

Joseph, Gilbert M. and Buchenau, Jürgen (2013) Mexico's Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule Since the Late Nineteenth Century, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), ix + 264 pp. £61.00 hbk, £16.99 pbk. Mexican history has a reputation for paradox: the paradox of revolution, or the paradox of postrevolutionary inequality. Less noted is the scholarly conundrum that, despite a vast historiography and a strong demand, there exists little in the way of English-language textbooks on the modern period. Most courses compensate with a ‘pick'n’ mix' approach: perhaps a concise textbook covering the Porfiriato and the Revolution – although there is nothing canonical there – a handful of articles and chapters on what came next, perhaps the odd film, at times a straightforward lifting from the sound but dated Cambridge History of Latin America. Gil Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau's book, beneath its slightly odd title – what is a ‘once revolution’? – is a compendious attempt to deal with that yawning gap, bridging the mainstream of revolutionary history and the newer currents of post-revolutionary history. This is the first point in its favour. This is not an account of the origins and denouement of the revolution with a nod to everything else; it provides genuine coverage of the modern period, with six chapters leading up to the standard 1940 watershed (after which, until recently, history ended) and three chapters descending the other side. A broad-based and revisionist survey of the order and progress dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz sets the scene for a detailed two chapters delineating the armed revolution (1910–1920). Such length is mildly surprising, scholarly production on that period's politico-military history in particular having fallen off, and distinctly welcome; if revolution is the Ariadne's thread through Mexico's labyrinth then it is critical to see precisely how that thread was spun. The authors then dedicate a chapter apiece to the reconstruction of the 1920s, the social reform and state-building of the 1930s, the authoritarian capitalism that engendered and its overseers' (very) long goodbye across the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In light of the marked imbalance in Mexican historiography, with the overwhelming majority of both Spanish-language and anglophone work concentrated on the period before 1940, this is a balanced approach to chronology. It is paralleled by a balanced approach to some quite different ways of reading history. This is a heterodox book, whose authors' complementary strengths are evident in their blending of high political, social and cultural history, and there is a broad apportioning of scholarly credit encapsulated in a useful bibliographical essay. (The only real score settling is with Hector Aguilar Camín, who as a friend of the unloveable Salinas receives a genteel but unmistakeable kicking.) The relatively concise chapter on the Porfiriato, for example, ranges across the class system, infrastructural development, the school curriculum, early propaganda films, Mexico City fashion and a traditional, comparatively detailed, account of Díaz's blundering response to that most unlikely of revolutionaries, Francisco Madero. While the authors draw substantially on the classics, their interpretations of Mexican political history tend to the matizado [nuanced] and provocative. Díaz, they argue, didn't do all that bad a job given the circumstances (at least until 1905, a conclusion and a periodisation that are grounds for productive arguments). Cárdenas, far from being an everyman revolutionary, hunkering down in hamlets to talk ideals and corn mills, was among other things a duplicitous opportunist with an authoritarian bent. Echeverría, while overseeing his own dirty war, granted asylum to thousands of refugees from South America's dirty wars. The Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca [Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca], a contemporary organisation uncritically adopted by many Mexicanists as a purely grassroots indigenous movement, is also linked to elite faction-fighting, machiavellian chilangos (natives of Mexico City) and national oligarchs. The only exception to this general pattern of scepticism towards the century's heroes and villains is neozapatismo, which the authors exempt from revisionism. Joseph and Buchenau may tell a clear story; it is not simplistic. Their account has some of the errors that crop up in sweeping overviews. Most are trivial. Che Guevara trained in Chalco – these were the days before it was all urban sprawl – and sailed out of Tuxpan, not Veracuz. The ‘puppies of the revolution’ were not the younger generals, but rather Alemán and his civilian arrivistes. The chaotic 1940 election was only ‘handily won’ on paper: victory required numerous, conspicuous murders, and Avila Camacho tearily conceded defeat to his friends. These however are exceptions to the rule of a book that showcases the authors' deep and catholic knowledge of modern Mexican history. Mexico's Once and Future Revolution deftly incorporates numerous and evocative primary sources, succeeds in being concise, clever and accessible without being condescending to its readers, and as a consequence should enjoy a large audience

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