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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Viewpoints / Puntos de Vista
- Sprache: Englisch
Explore the forces and movements shaping contemporary Mexican politics and society
In Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions: Political and Social Change Since 1958, distinguished historian Stephen Lewis offers a well-argued—and provocative—presentation of Mexico’s recent “unofficial” grassroots revolutions. The book explores generational change and youthful rebellion in the 1960s and the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. It also discusses Mexico’s uniquely protracted democratic transition, initiated by the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) but pushed forward at critical moments by ordinary citizens, opposition parties, and even armed insurgencies.
In clear, accessible prose, the author argues that persistent inequality and authoritarian practices have hobbled Mexico’s democratic consolidation since 2000. He also provides coverage of the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), who promised peaceful revolution but seemed nostalgic for a return to Mexico’s populist, authoritarian past.
Readers will also find:
- A revealing examination of racism and classism in Mexico, which persist despite the state’s celebration of the country’s Indigenous heritage and its promotion of biological and cultural mixing, known as mestizaje.
- The provocative suggestion that democratization may have unwittingly contributed to the surge in cartel-related violence.
- A timely chronicle of how women took advantage of the democratic opening to push for gender quotas in politics, which has produced gender parity today in the national congress and in state legislatures.
- An overview of Mexico’s surprising and growing religious diversity, both within the Catholic Church and without.
Perfect for undergraduate students studying Mexican and Latin American history and politics, Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions: Political and Social Change Since 1958 will also benefit students in Latin American Studies, political science, anthropology, religious studies, and women’s studies and laypersons with an interest in contemporary Mexico.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
The Mexican Revolution in Context
Overview of This Book
Notes
1 Revolution or Bust? The Long Sixties in Mexico
Mexico at Midcentury
A
Pax PRIísta
?
Youth Culture in the Long Sixties
The Student Movement of ‘68
After Tlatelolco
Conclusion: Remembering the Long Sixties in Mexico
Notes
2 Twilight of the “Perfect Dictatorship” The Democratic Transition, 1977–2000
Origins of the Perfect Dictatorship
Reluctant First Steps
The Twilight of PRI Hegemony
The 2000 Elections: the End of the PRI?
Conclusions
Notes
3 Mexico's Partial Embrace of Its Dark‐Skinned Majority
The Origins of Mexican Racism
The Cult of Mestizaje
From Indigenismo to (Neo) Zapatismo
Racism and Classism in Contemporary Mexico
Alfonso Cuarón's “Roma”
Conclusions
Notes
4 Church(es) and State in Contemporary Mexico
Mexico's Extraordinary Religious Diversity
The Reconciliation of the Catholic Church with the Mexican State
Non‐Catholic Denominations
Self‐inflicted Wounds in the Catholic Church Since 1992
Dynamism on the Margins of the Official Catholic Church
Is Mexico Still an Essentially Catholic Country?
Conclusions
Notes
5 The Women's Revolution
The Revolution in Family Size
Second‐Wave Feminisms
The Push for Political Representation
Conclusions
Notes
6 Finally, a Democracy Without Adjectives?
The PAN in the Driver’s Seat: 2000–2012
2012: The Return of the PRI
Landslide: the 2018 Elections
Current Threats to Mexico’s Democratic Consolidation
Conclusions
Notes
7 Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions and the “Fourth Transformation”
The “Fourth Transformation” at a glance
Notes
Bibliography
Periodicals
Published Sources
Websites
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Mexico’s National Indigenist Institute (INI) built coordinating c...
Figure 1.2 Students are escorted by soldiers after being arrested during a d...
Figure 1.3 Mexican soldiers just outside the Tlatelolco housing complex one ...
Figure 1.4 A self‐defense militia group in Temalacatzingo, Guerrero commemor...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 José López Portillo (wearing sash) waves to the crowd after his p...
Figure 2.2 The earthquake that struck Mexico City in September 1985 register...
Figure 2.3 Insurgent presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas on election ...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Philosopher José Vasconcelos directed the Ministry of Public Educ...
Figure 3.2 Girls at an INI school in highland Chiapas.
Figure 3.3
Subcomandante Marcos
was a former university professor who hailed...
Figure 3.4 “Roma” star Yalitza Aparicio, photographed in Los Angeles in 2018...
Figure 3.5 Mexico's fantastic National Museum of Anthropology opened in 1964...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Bishop Samuel Ruiz consoles two Tsotsils during funeral ceremonie...
Figure 4.2 The modernist Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe was built next to...
Figure 4.3 The faithful take part in the Holy Convocation of La Luz del Mund...
Figure 4.4 Pope John Paul II embraces Marcial Maciel, founder of the powerfu...
Figure 4.5 Devotees of the Santa Muerte pray at her shrine in Tepito, Mexico...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Marta Lamas at a book presentation in Mexico City, 2017.
Figure 5.2 Zapatista
comandantas
(women commanders) at a rally in Tuxtla Gut...
Figure 5.3 Pink crosses placed in Lomas del Poleo Planta Alta in Ciudad Juár...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Friends and relatives of the 43 students missing from the Ayotzin...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 AMLO at one of his morning briefings, known as “mañaneras.”
Figure 7.2 Mexican president López Obrador standing with his
amigo
Donald Tr...
Figure 7.3 Mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, at a news conference on ...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Viewpoints/Puntos de VistaThemes and Interpretations in Latin American History
Series Editor: Jürgen Buchenau
The books in this series will introduce students to the most significant themes and topics in Latin American history. Intended as supplementary textbooks, the books will also discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating to students that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Unlike monographs, the books in this series will be broad in scope and written in a style accessible to undergraduates.
Published
A History of the Cuban Revolution, Second EditionAviva Chomsky
Bartolomeé de las Casas and the Conquest of the AmericasLawrence A. Clayton
Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United StatesTimothy J. Henderson
The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican RevolutionJürgen Buchenau
A Concise History of the Haitian RevolutionJeremy D. Popkin
Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulars?Mark A. Burkholder
Dictatorship in South AmericaJerry Dávila
Mothers Making Latin America: Gender, Households, and Politics Since 1825Erin E. O’Connor
A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the CaribbeanAlan McPherson
Latin American Cultural Objects and EpisodesWilliam H. Beezley
Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions: Political and Social Change since 1958Stephen E. Lewis
Forthcoming
Emancipations: Latin American IndependenceKaren Racine
Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions
Political and Social Change since 1958
Stephen E. Lewis
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data:Names: Lewis, Stephen E., 1967– author.Title: Mexico’s unscripted revolutions : political and social change since 1958 / Stephen E. Lewis, California State University.Other titles: Political and social change since 1958Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley‐Blackwell, [2024] | Series: Viewpoints / Puntos de vista : themes and interpretations in Latin American history | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2023048965 (print) | LCCN 2023048966 (ebook) | ISBN 9781444337600 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119719106 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119719120 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Mexico–History–1946– | Mexico–Politics and government–20th century. | Mexico–Politics and government–21st century. | Social change–Mexico–History–20th century. | Social change–Mexico–History–21st century.Classification: LCC F1235 .L45 2024 (print) | LCC F1235 (ebook) | DDC 972.08/2–dc23/eng/20231101LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048965LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048966
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Sipa US/Alamy Stock Photo
Series Editor’s Preface
Each book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series introduces students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history. In an age in which student and faculty interest in the Global South increasingly challenges the old focus on the history of Europe and North America, Latin American history has assumed a prominent position in undergraduate curricula.
Some of these books discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Others offer an introduction to a particular theme by means of a case study or biography in a manner easily understood by the contemporary, non‐specialist reader. Yet others give an overview of a major theme that might serve as the foundation of an upper‐level course.
What is common to all of these books is their goal of historical synthesis. They draw on the insights of generations of scholarship on the most enduring and fascinating issues in Latin American history, and through the use of primary sources as appropriate. Each book is written by a specialist in Latin American history who is concerned with undergraduate teaching, yet has also made his or her mark as a first‐rate scholar.
The books in this series can be used in a variety of ways, recognizing the differences in teaching conditions at small liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and research‐oriented institutions with doctoral programs. Faculty have particular needs depending on whether they teach large lectures with discussion sections, small lecture or discussion‐oriented classes, or large lectures with no discussion sections, and whether they teach on a semester or trimester system. Recently, and especially since the COVID‐19 pandemic, online teaching has also gained greater prominence. The format adopted for this series fits all of these different parameters.
The 11th book in this series, Stephen E. Lewis’s expertly crafted Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions: Political and Social Change since 1958, is an example of a work that is both great and timely. Serendipitously, a project that began some years ago as an effort to synthesize Mexico’s postrevolutionary history since 1940 has become the best explanation of Mexico’s current “Fourth Transformation,” spearheaded by the controversial populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO for short. It is not often that historians can explain the present, but that is precisely what this book does, in pithy chapters that include both political and social transformations since 1958, the year before the Cuban Revolution. The author tells the intertwined stories of a number of “unscripted revolutions,” which collectively reshaped Mexican politics and society in even more consequential ways than the “big” revolution of 1910, which ended in 1917, 1920, 1929, 1940, or 1946, depending on the historian.
Seven cohesive chapters tell Professor Lewis’s story. The first two chapters are chronological, tracing Mexico’s political and social history in the long sixties and into the 1980s, covering issues such as neopopulism, neoliberalism, and democratization. The next three chapters examine three specific unscripted revolutions: the rethinking of race and ethnicity, religious movements, and women’s roles, respectively. The final two chapters return to a chronological examination of recent events in Mexico, covering the 2000s all the way to the AMLO presidency (2018–2024). This is a tour de force through high and low politics, with examples from many of Mexico’s regions, and due attention—especially—to the subaltern segments of Mexican society. The book will surely attract a wide readership for years to come.
Jürgen Buchenau
Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies
Professor of History and Latin American Studies
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to series editor Jürgen Buchenau, who proposed this project to me and guided it from start to finish. He wisely recommended that I structure the book as a series of linked, thematic essays. Other projects, obligations, and family commitments prevented me from completing the job sooner, but Jürgen stood by me, for which I am deeply grateful.
Shannon Mattiace guided my attempts to understand and interpret contemporary Mexican politics. She also read the manuscript from start to finish. Chapters 2, 6, and 7 especially benefited from her wise, subtle interventions. Another longtime friend, Susie Porter, gave a close read to Chapter 4. Tanalís Padilla helped me think through Chapter 3. Federico Morales Barragán has been a generous host and friend. He may disagree with my assessment of AMLO’s “Fourth Transformation,” which ensures that we will have plenty to debate in the coming years! Mariam Yitani Baroudi, Margarita Sosa Suárez, and Martín González Solano have also informed my thinking about contemporary Mexico.
Jürgen Buchenau, an anonymous Wiley reviewer, and Jessica Vandehoven read the entire manuscript and made additional valuable comments and suggestions. I am wholly responsible for any remaining errors and oversights.
I would like to dedicate this book to the thousands of Chico State students who have taken Latin American history classes with me over the years. They have humored my fascination with modern Mexico, asked good questions, and shared smart insights. My most engaged students have shaped my thinking in more ways than they realize. To those students past, present, and future, this book is for you.
Stephen E. Lewis
California State University, Chico
List of Abbreviations
ACG
Asociación Civil Guerrerense (Guerrerense Civic Association)
AMLO
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
ACNR
Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria (National Revolutionary Civic Association)
CDI
Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples)
CFE
Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission)
CNDH
Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Commission on Human Rights)
CONAPO
Consejo Nacional de Población (National Council on Population)
CONAPRED
Consejo Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación (National Council to Prevent Discrimination)
CTM
Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers)
DFS
Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate)
EZLN
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army)
FNALIDM
Frente Nacional por la Liberación y los Derechos de las Mujeres (National Front for Women’s Rights and Liberation)
IFE
Instituto Federal Electoral (Federal Electoral Institute)
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INAI
Instituto Nacional de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales (National Freedom of Information Institute)
INE
Instituto Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Institute)
INI
Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute)
INPI
Instituto Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas (National Institute of Indigenous Peoples)
IPN
Instituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute)
MAS
Mujeres en Acción Solidaria (Women in Solidarity Action)
MLM
Movimiento de Liberación de la Mujer (Women’s Liberation Movement)
MORENA
Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (National Regeneration Movement)
MURO
Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (University Movement of Renovating Orientation)
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NGO
Non‐Governmental Organization
PAN
Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party)
PDLP
Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor)
PEMEX
Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico’s national petroleum industry)
PNR
Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party)
PRD
Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution)
PRM
Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution)
PRI
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party)
PT
Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party)
PVEM
Partido Verde Ecologista de México (Mexican Green Party)
SEDENA
Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (National Defense Ministry)
SEP
Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education)
SIL
Summer Institute of Linguistics
TEPJF
Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary)
UNAM
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
Introduction
When most people think of revolution in Mexico, they are drawn to the Revolution of 1910, and with good reason. What started as a political rebellion against an aging dictator devolved into a full‐blown civil war in 1913, followed by a constitutional convention and two decades of postrevolutionary state and nation building.1 We think of Francisco Madero's quixotic call for electoral democracy, Emiliano Zapata's relentless pursuit of land reform, and the photos of Pancho Villa and Zapata in the National Palace in late 1914, Villa enjoying himself immensely while Zapata looks like a trapped animal, expecting an ambush at any moment.
Mexico's Revolution of 1910 is still regarded as the country’s most important single event since independence. But what if Mexicans experienced more meaningful change decades after the Revolution with a capital R?
This book proposes just that. It looks at Mexico's unscripted, unheralded, relatively understudied “revolutions” that have unfolded since 1958. What historians now call the Long 1960s brought generational change as many young Mexicans joined a global rebellion against patriarchy, religion, and government authority. By the late 1970s, Mexico's democratic transition was underway. Initiated by the hegemonic official party, it was pushed forward at crucial moments by ordinary citizens who joined social movements, opposition parties, and even armed insurgencies. Meanwhile, Mexican feminists challenged traditional gender roles. They were propelled forward by economic crises that forced them into the formal workplace as never before. Mexican society was in flux, and some of the ideological assumptions of the postrevolutionary state were challenged and cast aside. Not even the Catholic Church was immune to Mexico's unscripted revolutions, as the faithful increasingly sought alternative religious expressions. By 2000, a tenuous, thin democratic transition seemed complete, but democratic consolidation was hobbled by the persistence of inequality and corruption and a chilling spike in violence. The man who won the presidential election in 2018, populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), promised Mexico's “Fourth Transformation” but attacked the institutions that had presided over the democratic transition. This left some to wonder if, in fact, Mexico risked reverting to its authoritarian past.
The Mexican Revolution in Context
The Revolution of 1910 and the Constitution of 1917 cast long shadows over more recent Mexican history. The Revolution's first major protagonist, Francisco I. Madero, is remembered as the “apostle” of democracy. When he called for a national uprising in November 1910 against President Porfirio Díaz, who had just had himself reelected for a seventh time, he famously unleashed a tiger that he could not control. President Madero was betrayed and murdered by his most important general in 1913, but his antireelectionist crusade against Díaz left its mark. Four years after his demise, delegates at the constitutional convention in Querétaro enshrined his campaign slogan, “effective suffrage, no reelection,” into law. Article 83 of the Constitution of 1917 limited presidents to a single four‐year term. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) later made a mockery of Madero's legacy by controlling the presidency and every congressional and statewide political post for decades, but antireelectionism prevented any single individual from remaining in power indefinitely.
The 1917 Constitution also had important consequences for peasants and industrial workers and for Church‐state relations. Article 27 codified Emiliano Zapata's call for land reform, even though Zapata was not invited to the constitutional convention and was, in fact, later assassinated by the faction that signed the new constitution into law. Article 123 granted workers the right to form unions and go on strike and gave the Mexican state a role in mediating between capital and labor. Articles 3 and 130 limited the Catholic Church's role in education and politics. These two articles, and others, reflected the surprising intensity of anticlerical sentiment in revolutionary Mexico. In the 1920s, President Plutarco Elías Calles brought the long‐simmering Church‐state conflict to a boil. He declared himself “the enemy of the political priest, the scheming priest, the priest as exploiter, the priest who intends to keep our people in ignorance, the priest who allies with the hacendado (hacienda owner) to exploit the campesino (peasant), and the priest allied with the industrialist to exploit the worker.”2 When Calles enforced some of the Constitution's anticlerical provisions, the Catholic Church hierarchy suspended Mass for three years. Catholic guerrillas, meanwhile, fought the armies of the federal government to a draw. In time, the Church learned to coexist with a Mexican state that remained fiercely anticlerical, at least on paper.
Ordinary Mexicans made their greatest gains in the immediate postrevolutionary period during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Cárdenas lived up to the promise of Article 3 of the Constitution by investing in public education and endorsing a popular curriculum that celebrated revolutionary heroes like Madero, Zapata, and Villa. He put some teeth to the nationalist provisions in Article 27 and nationalized the oil fields operated by U.S. and British companies. His sweeping land reform redistributed nearly fifty million acres to landless peasants. The Cárdenas administration also gave new life to Article 123 by supporting most industrial strikes and grouping together over 3000 unions to form the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, or CTM).
The Cárdenas administration also looked poised to clarify an issue that the Constitution of 1917 had not directly addressed—voting rights for women. In late 1937, after many years of suffragist activism, Cárdenas called on Congress to amend the Constitution to give women the right to vote in federal elections and to hold public office. The proposed constitutional amendment sailed through the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies; statehouses then prepared to ratify the amendment. But legislators found a loophole and failed to publish the vote counts in the Congressional Record. The amendment was stopped in its tracks. Perhaps Cárdenas himself feared that the women's vote might jeopardize his ability to manage the upcoming 1940 elections. In 1958, twenty years after Congress had passed the original amendment, women were finally allowed to cast votes for president.3
After President Cárdenas left office, the one‐party state consolidated its control over both workers and peasants and entered a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. By the 1950s, the much‐celebrated Revolution of 1910 had lost its punch for ordinary Mexicans. Textbooks continued to celebrate state‐sanctioned heroes and urban planners still named streets after Madero and Zapata. But some of the great conquests of the Revolution had not worn well. The pace of land reform slowed, and workers bristled under the control of corrupt union bosses. The PRI‐government perfected the pageantry of holding elections regularly while remaining in almost complete control of the results.
When I was in graduate school, in the 1990s, my cohort and I spent many long hours in seminars, libraries, archives, and in informal gatherings discussing the Revolution of 1910 and its immediate aftermath. In part, we were responding to (and inspired by) the pathbreaking work of historians who had published grand narratives of the Mexican Revolution in the 1980s. Alan Knight's monumental two‐volume study focused on the internal causes of the Revolution and argued that the process was revolutionary even if the outcome was not; John Hart argued persuasively that the Revolution was largely a nationalist rebellion against foreign (and especially United States) capitalism. Ramón Ruíz, for his part, claimed that the Revolution was not a revolution at all, but rather a “great rebellion.”4 Knight's book and articles had the greatest impact on my generation. Many of us wrote dissertations that took regional and state‐level approaches to measure the impact of the Revolution on ordinary people. Inspired by the work of Mary Kay Vaughan and Adrian Bantjes,5 among others, we zeroed in on the immediate postrevolutionary period, the 1920s and 1930s.6 Few of us ventured beyond the mid‐1940s.
To me, at least, the period after midcentury seemed relatively uninteresting. I dismissed it as a time when the hegemonic party successfully managed an economic “miracle” and kept workers, peasants, and the middle class under its thumb. My ignorance stemmed in part from the fact that the PRI‐government restricted access to many important archives, making historical research on more recent decades difficult, if not impossible. Fortunately, graduate students nipping at our heels gained access to newly available archival collections and began to push into the middle decades of the twentieth century, revealing the fascinating complexity and effervescence of this period. Their publications provide the foundation for the early chapters of this book.
Overview of This Book
Mexico since 1958 is not a standard textbook. It does not aim to cover everything that has happened in Mexico over the last several decades. Instead, it can be read as a series of linked essays that discuss the rebellious Long Sixties, the democratic transition, the rejection of the cult of mestizaje, Mexico's religious diversity, the revolution in women's lives, and the country's democratic transition and consolidation in historical and contemporary terms. The early chapters draw heavily from historical work, but the latter chapters become more contemporary and pull increasingly from anthropology, sociology, political science, and journalism.
Chapter 1 begins with the paradoxes of Mexico at midcentury. The PRI‐government presided over a growing economy and growing inequalities. Mexican workers and peasants challenged the PRI to live up to the promises enshrined in the Constitution of 1917. They tested the limits of a government famous for co‐opting and negotiating with its opposition. Inspired by the tumult of the Global Sixties, students in Mexico City challenged government authoritarianism and paid a steep price at Tlatelolco in October 1968, just days before the opening ceremonies of the Mexico City Summer Olympic Games. The likely architect of the Tlatelolco massacre, Luis Echeverría, became president in 1970. He would spend the next six years trying to shore up the agonizing PRI‐government.
Chapter 2 mixes history with political science as it explores Mexico’s remarkable and protracted democratic transition. The process was unique to Mexico and garnered international headlines. It focused on national elections and strengthened political parties but left key elements of the authoritarian state intact. In 1997, the PRI lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies and conceded the presidency to the opposition National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN) in 2000. Had Mexico become a democracy without qualifying adjectives like “emerging,” “partial,” “fragile,” and “thin?” Time would soon render its verdict.
Chapter 3 draws on history, sociology, and journalism to explore how Mexicans resisted and refashioned two of the foundational ideologies of the postrevolutionary Mexican state—mestizaje, or biological and cultural mixing, and indigenismo, which celebrated Mexico’s Indigenous past but called for their “improvement” and integration into the national mainstream. These two ideologies seemed to offer a place at the table to the mestizo majority and gave a conditional welcome to the Indigenous. In practice, however, Mexicans with dark complexions remained the country’s poorest and most marginalized citizens. In the 1990s, Indigenous Mexicans emphatically rejected attempts to “incorporate” them into a homogenous nation of mestizos. But they and other dark‐skinned Mexicans still struggle to overcome Mexico’s pigmentocracy, which makes them invisible in the media and more likely to experience poverty, incarceration, and violence. Some analysts are hopeful that Mexico can more honestly confront its racist and classist legacy now that the ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo have been overturned.
Religious life in Mexico has also undergone revolutionary changes, as explored in Chapter 4. The Catholic Church, so steeped in tradition, is also now remarkably diverse. Since the late 1960s, several important ideological, theological, geographic, and ethnic expressions have emerged within Mexican Catholicism. Meanwhile, alternative devotions have emerged. Some are tolerated by the Church hierarchy while others—like the Santa Muerte (Saint Death)—are not. Outside of the Catholic Church, Protestant and especially Evangelical denominations are making steady inroads. Other Mexicans consider themselves agnostics or practice no religion at all. The incredible dynamism and fluidity of spiritual life in Mexico today often go unnoticed but are key to understanding how most Mexicans make sense of their existence.
The lives of Mexican women have been fundamentally transformed over the last several decades, as discussed in Chapter 5. The “second wave” of Mexican feminism took off in the 1970s and became popularized in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the federal government launched family planning initiatives that succeeded in halving Mexican fertility rates within a generation. During the 1990s, women took advantage of democratic openings to push for greater political opportunities. Gender quotas were first introduced at the party level, and then mandated at the federal and state levels. Today, remarkably, there is gender parity in Mexico’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies and in state legislatures. Mexican women exercise more control over their lives and their bodies today than ever before and are flexing their political muscles at the highest levels.
Chapter 6 draws from political science and journalism as it considers Mexico’s precarious democratic consolidation. The first sign of serious trouble came in the aftermath of the hotly disputed 2006 presidential election. The declared winner of that election, Felipe Calderón, sought to bolster his legitimacy by declaring war on the country’s drug‐trafficking organizations. The results were disastrous and defined his presidency. The return of the PRI to national power in 2012 ushered in an especially venal form of politics. Several PRI governors ended up behind bars. Meanwhile, the violence continued unabated. By 2018, most Mexicans regarded the two main parties of the democratic transition, the PRI and the PAN, with disgust. AMLO and his new party, Morena, swept the 2018 election with promises to destroy the old regime and initiate Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation,” following Mexico’s independence from Spain (1810–1821), the period of Liberal reforms, known as la Reforma (1854–1876), and the Revolution (1910–1920).
The final chapter draws heavily from Mexican scholars and journalists as it assesses President López Obrador and his “Fourth Transformation.” Was AMLO’s movement truly transformative? Did it live up to its brash billing? Because a recurring suggestion in this book is that in recent Mexican history, the most meaningful transformations have taken place at the grassroots, outside of the political arena, where ordinary Mexicans have struggled and often prevailed against authoritarian political and cultural practices, tradition, and patriarchy.
Notes
1
See, among others, Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds.,
The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–
1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
2
Quoted in Jürgen Buchenau,
Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 127.
3
Stephanie Mitchell, “Revolutionary Feminism, Revolutionary Politics: Suffrage under Cardenismo,”
The Americas
72:3 (July 2015), 439
–
468; and Jocelyn Olcott,
Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2, 234.
4
See Alan Knight,
The Mexican Revolution
2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John M. Hart,
Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Ramón E. Ruiz,
The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905–1924
(New York: Norton, 1980).
5
Mary Kay Vaughan,
Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); and Adrian Bantjes,
As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1998).
6
Many of us later turned our dissertations into books. An incomplete list includes Christopher Boyer,
Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alexander S. Dawson,
Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Ben Fallaw,
Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Stephen E. Lewis,
The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910–1945
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Rick A. López,
Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Patience A. Schell,
Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).
1Revolution or Bust? The Long Sixties in Mexico
Until recently, many considered the middle decades of the twentieth century in Mexico to be a time of relative peace and prosperity that ended abruptly on October 2, 1968, with the massacre of students in Mexico City. Now, as historians focus their attention on the “Long” Sixties—from about 1958 through the early 1970s—a more nuanced and paradoxical picture emerges. Was this truly a time of economic “miracles?” If so, for whom? Was this a time of PRIísta peace marred only by the bloody crackdown at Tlatelolco? Or was the crackdown less of an aberration than we had once thought?
Mexico at Midcentury
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. On the one hand, Mexico was in the midst of its so‐called economic miracle. Using protectionism and investment policies to stimulate domestic industry, the federal government oversaw a period of remarkable, sustained economic growth. The economy grew at an average annual rate of 6.4 percent from 1940 to 1970, which allowed the Mexican government to make major investments in education, public health, and social security. As modern health care services extended into the countryside, life expectancy increased dramatically. Literacy rates also increased during this period, from 44 percent in 1940 to 66 percent in 1970. The federal government had also begun investing in public housing projects, including the Tlatelolco complex in Mexico City, just north of the historic downtown. Mexicans were living longer and better, especially in urban, industrial areas and in the northern and central regions of the country.
Figure 1.1 Mexico’s National Indigenist Institute (INI) built coordinating centers in Indigenous regions in the 1950s and early 1960s and launched controversial development and assimilation programs. These boys from Chamula, Chiapas, had just been vaccinated by INI nurses.
Photographer unknown. Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas. Circa 1955.
The ruling PRI‐government presided over all of this. One of the keys to its success was corporatism, the incorporation of various political and economic actors, like the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, or CTM) and the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesina, or CNC). Another key was clientelism, the deeply rooted patron–client relationships that permeate Mexican life. The PRI‐government combined near‐absolute control with the outward appearance of democratic participation. It was, as Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa stated on Mexican television in 1990, “the perfect dictatorship.”
Some historians have embraced the term “dictablanda”—“soft” dictatorship—to describe Mexico at midcentury.1 They argue that the PRI‐government was a hybrid regime that combined elements of authoritarianism and democracy. It ruled through tactical negotiation and the deft application of co‐optation and repression. Perhaps the strength of the government was its weakness; perhaps the need to negotiate its rule required flexibility and pragmatism that, in turn, allowed it to remain hegemonic for so long. The PRI‐government could not hold onto power through brute force. The Mexican army was small, at about two soldiers per thousand citizens, and its share of the budget actually declined over the period.2 Nor could the PRI dominate the country through largesse; Mexico’s tax structure was heavily regressive, meaning that those who had the most paid the least relative to their income. Tax evasion was easy. This “limited the state’s capacity for authoritarianism, corporatism, or even cultural hegemony,” writes Benjamin Smith.3
Co‐optation and repression were at the heart of PRI rule. Nobody mastered these tactics better than Fidel Velázquez, who dominated and tamed organized labor in Mexico from 1941 until his death in 1997. In the 1920s, Velázquez worked at a milk factory in Mexico City, making deliveries by mule. He became the union representative of the Union of Dairy Industry Workers. He joined the CTM in 1936. When the CTM’s founder fell out of favor with the revolutionary elite, Velázquez became secretary general, a position he would hold for all but three of the next 56 years.
Pragmatism allowed Velázquez to survive at the pinnacle of organized labor in Mexico for so long. He was committed to realizing the Revolution’s egalitarian goals, within reason. He was careful never to threaten the established order. His ideology—a mix of anti‐communism and conservative nationalism—fit perfectly in Cold War Mexico. He also delivered the goods to his co‐opted clients. CTM members had seats at the table in the PRI and in the Mexican Congress. Pliant union bosses, known as charros, often enjoyed lavish lifestyles so long as they kept the rank and file in line. They helped Velázquez preside over most of the country’s labor unions even at times when workers’ wages failed to keep pace with the cost of living.4
Co‐optation offered material advantages to those who temporarily or permanently shelved their grievances. Michael Snodgrass argues that Mexico’s much‐maligned charros “delivered considerable benefits to rank‐and‐file workers” from the mid‐1940s to the mid‐1970s. By the 1960s, some industrial workers could purchase modern appliances and cars and enjoyed “greater job security and material progress than any generation of Mexican workers experienced before or since.”5 Co‐optation also worked in rural Mexico, where campesinos produced cheap food for the industrializing cities. In the restive state of Morelos—home to legendary Emiliano Zapata and his steadfast disciple, Rubén Jaramillo—most sugar growers chose to remain loyal to the PRI. One historian chalks it up to “a combination of co‐option, divide and rule among popular groups, the narrowing of protest channels, and the strategic deployment of repression.”6 In any case, the cost of continued resistance was high. Jaramillo ran for governor twice and took up arms three times to protest electoral fraud and repression. In 1961, he finally won approval for an agrarian community that combined Zapatista and Cardenista principles. But the PRI‐government grew tired of trying to co‐opt the irrepressible agrarian leader. In May 1962, the federal army kidnapped and assassinated Jaramillo, his wife, and three sons. Their bloody demise, writes Tanalís Padilla, “demonstrates the extent to which state terror undergirded Mexico’s ‘perfect dictatorship’.”7
A Pax PRIísta?
The fate of Rubén Jamarillo notwithstanding, PRI apologists spoke glowingly of a Pax PRIísta
