SEVEN |
Internal Market |
An international crisis may, if the powerful bleed from their own wounds, provide a chance, especially for peripheral countries, to reshape policies. Such a chance befell Mexico in the 1930s, when, thanks to the Great Depression—a malady of the capitalist West and a sledgehammer blow to the economy of the almighty Uncle Sam—Mexico had the opportunity to rethink old habits and, more important, to change course.
The international debacle, long before it wreaked havoc in other Western nations, savaged Mexico, turning topsy-turvy an economy reeling from years of strife. Export earnings plummeted, with petroleum and mining hit hardest. A similar catastrophe struck the country’s farms. As exports dropped, so did the national income, by 25 percent between 1929 and 1933, and consequently the value of the peso also dropped. Not only did exports decline by almost 50 percent between 1928 and 1930, but a downturn in the term of trade, particularly for agricultural products, slashed revenues more.1 For the poor, particularly those whose livelihood depended on the export sector, the times were catastrophic. At Cananea, the copper emporium of the Republic, half of the miners were unemployed. At Nacozari and Pilares, two other camps in Sonora, all the miners lost their jobs when the Moctezuma Copper Company shut down. When sales collapsed, factories closed their doors, leaving the jobless to fend for themselves. In Toluca, capital of the big state of Mexico, the Toluca y México brewery went out of business, one of many to do so, as did the textile mills in María de Otzolotepec, San Ildefonso de Nicolás Romero, and San Pedro de Zinacatepec. In the towns and cities of Jalisco, armies of the jobless begged for work, while the return of Mexicans deported from the United States exacerbated the unemployment rate. Facing a budget deficit, authorities cut salaries of bureaucrats, adding to middle-class unrest. The ranks of the jobless tripled between 1930 and 1932.2 The poor were not merely worse off than before but more numerous.
To complicate matters, the harvests of Mexico’s two basic crops fell on hard times. In 1933, Mexico produced 30 percent less corn and 22 percent fewer beans than in 1907, the last of the good years. Per capita consumption of corn, the mainstay of the popular diet, dropped from 136 kilograms to 88. Meanwhile, commercial agriculture took a nose dive. With the end of the war in Europe, demand for cotton and henequen petered out. As their markets shrunk, so did lands under cultivation. When textile mills slashed production and let workers go, cotton planters reduced the size of their crops and cut their labor force, a formula adopted by henequen hacendados, their difficulties augmented by competing fibers from Africa and the Philippines. The brunt of this decline fell on the backs of labor. Hardest hit were commercial zones with the bulk of jobs. Difficult times spawned labor unrest. Strikes flared from one end of the Republic to the other. In Mexico State, a skip and jump from the National Palace, workers, risking the ire of politicos and business owners, went on strike, while campesinos occupied hacienda lands.3
Reluctantly at first, after it became virtually impossible to borrow from foreigners and markets for exports dried up, Mexico’s leaders began to reassess the export-oriented model, one that like drug addiction requires constant infusions.4 These were years when Mexican economists avidly read Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes and learned that full employment required state intervention. Mexican social reform, however, is one of those national oxymorons, like Italian Protestantism or British cooking, of which nothing much is expected. But somehow, once in a while that threadbare tradition finds a spokesman who reaches out beyond the narrow confines of his adherents to strike a chord in the larger society. Such a man was Lázaro Cárdenas, called upon to rethink the model of external development and replace it with an internally driven one.
Why did Cárdenas modify or, better still, alter course? Given his background, an answer is hard to find, because he was neither well read nor a master of economic theory. He had no schooling beyond the primary grades, nor were the men he relied on always economists. A singular man in many respects, he loved horses, plants, and water. Neither tall nor short of stature, he did not smoke, drink liquor, or dress stylishly, and unless far from home, he ate breakfast and dinner with his family. He hailed from Jiquilpan, a town in Michoacán, its name signifying “a place of flowers” in Purépecha, the local Indian tongue. Jiquilpan lived off the weaving of rebozos (shawls) in blue and black, tightly knit woolen sarapes, leather huaraches, and the tanning of hides, all done at home. It was a poor town; many of its one thousand inhabitants farmed lands as sharecroppers or cultivated tiny parcels of rocky soil of their own. The people of Jiquilpan, like most natives of Michoacán, including Cárdenas’s mother, worshiped at the Catholic altar. Yet Cárdenas, neither an intellectual nor a flaming radical by any means, somehow had an incredible clarity about what was right. There were things in Mexican society that were rotten to the core and needed fixing.
Jiquilpan had a land problem. On the road to Chapala and Guadalajara stood the hacienda of Guaracha, the property of Don Diego Moreno. One of the richest haciendas in Mexico, Guaracha dated from colonial times, when African slaves cultivated sugar cane on its lands. On its outskirts lay the haciendas of Cerro Pelón, Platanal, Cerrito Colorado, Guarachita, San Antonio, Las Arquillas, El Sabino, Guadalupe, Las Ordeñas, and Capadero—all more or less part of Guaracha. Don Diego did not know exactly how much land he owned. His holdings included a sugar mill, twenty thousand head of cattle, as well as horses, mules, and sheep. Don Diego’s labor force, which largely consisted of sharecroppers, cultivated sugar cane for the manufacture of sugar and alcohol, as well as wheat, corn, and alfalfa for the markets of Guadalajara and Mexico City. Don Diego, and afterward his son, spent little time on the hacienda, preferring Guadalajara and Europe.
On March 25, 1895, Cárdenas was born into this world. His father, Dámaso, was the son of a soldier, a native of Jalisco, who married a girl from Jiquilpan and stayed there, at first making his living as a campesino and weaver of rebozos. In time, Dámaso became the proprietor of La Reunión de Amigos, a small store, and because he could read, he also became a curandero, or healer. By then Dámaso had married and sired a family; the eldest was Lázaro. The family resided on San Francisco, the main street in Jiquilpan, in one of the biggest houses in town, the bequest of a well-off grandmother and distant aunt of Felicitas del Río, mother of the Cárdenas clan.
At the age of six, Lázaro enrolled in a private school, but after two years he transferred to a public one in Jiquilpan, where its sole teacher, Don Hilario de Jesús Fajardo, worshiped José María Morelos and Benito Juárez and talked of the heroes who fought against the clergy and the French invaders. To Fajardo’s school came the sons of the artisans, merchants, and rancheros of Jiquilpan, the better-off. Shy and not talkative, qualities that earned him the sobriquet the Sphinx of Jiquilpan, young Cárdenas preferred the company of older men, known as banqueros, who spent their time seated on the benches of the Plaza Zaragoza, the town square. As he grew older, Cárdenas found a job in the tax collector’s office in Jiquilpan. After his father’s death, he became the assistant to the secretary of the prefect, the political boss of the district. In June 1913, Cárdenas, then sixteen years old, went off to fight Victoriano Huerta, the usurper, and had a long and distinguished military career, fighting under many of the Revolution’s famous military chieftains, including Plutarco Elías Calles. From then on, Cárdenas rode the coattails of Calles, who considered him one of his loyal muchachos, and he should have, because Cárdenas served at his master’s pleasure.
Cárdenas had few peers as a politico. He always knew which way the winds blew. He was a politico a la mexicana; when necessary, he bent with the wind, looked the other way when his companions dipped their hands into the public coffer, and rarely questioned the wisdom of his superiors. With intimate knowledge of the jungle of Mexican politics, he kept his guard up and spoke only when spoken to. Cárdenas, the people who knew him say, was desconfiado, wary and distrustful, a man who wanted to control his own decisions. All the same, he felt the poverty and exploitation of the poor profoundly, the condition of campesinos above all. His policies as governor of Michoacán, a term he began in 1928, provide an insight into this complex man.
When Cárdenas arrived in Morelia, the capital of the state, he faced the united opposition of hacendados, clergy, and Cristeros, the Catholic fanatics then battling the federal government. To deal with them, and bring his allies under one roof, Cárdenas organized the Confederación Regional Michoacana del Trabajo. Made up mainly of campesinos, it included a smattering of workers, public employees, university students, and teachers. By 1932, Cárdenas’s last year as governor, the confederación had one hundred thousand members, plus four thousand agrarian committees. Beyond that, Cárdenas organized the ejidos, many the result of his land reform program, into armed rural defense units.
But Cárdenas kept political power to himself. As “honorary president,” he presided over the meetings of the confederación and helped finance it. Both profited: Cárdenas won a popular base of support in Michoacán, which he could use against Mexico City, and the members of the confederación, in turn, had agrarian and labor reform. In reality, Cárdenas co-opted the leaders of the confederación. They became members of the state legislature, the national Congress, or ayuntamientos (town councils), and on occasion they sat on the courts. The backing of the confederación converted Cárdenas into one of the provincial caudillos to be reckoned with in an era when rifles often ran politics. With the confederación behind him, Cárdenas climbed the political ladder to become head of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) and then became the secretary of war. By 1932 he was one of that select body of men who, with Calles, governed Mexico.
Cárdenas won the presidency with an eclectic band of supporters. Despite his reform credential, he had antagonized no major rival on the political scene. He had the backing of key caudillos, among them Saturnino Cedillo, boss of San Luis Potosí. Thanks to him, Cárdenas’s quest for the presidency received the blessings of the Confederación Nacional Campesina, the most important in Mexico. When Cárdenas became the popular favorite, Calles, the Jefe Máximo, chose to back him. His election was a foregone conclusion; the PNR ruled, not the people. Just the same, Cárdenas, despite being certain of election, traveled the length and breadth of the Republic, the first political candidate to do so. His travels took him by horseback to countless villages, to pueblos whose inhabitants spoke no Spanish. The times, meanwhile, had taken on a rosy hue for the Cardenistas: sales of cash crops for export rose, the gross national product climbed upward, and the economy improved.
The job ahead was formidable. Despite the Revolution, the traditional interests had stayed alive, if not in the saddle, determined to keep their wealth and privileges. Hacendados, kingpins under the Old Regime, controlled rural Mexico, and they were now joined by “revolutionary generals” turned hacendados, many of whom were now governors or military heads of provinces and were as opposed to agrarian reform as the most reactionary of the Porfiristas. Landless peons with negligible buying power inhabited much of the countryside, and Indian campesinos were no less penniless.5 Corrupt bosses headed what passed for labor unions, one and all beholden to politicos in Mexico City and empresarios who admired the dictates of the Old Regime. Over this scene presided Plutarco Elías Calles, the Jefe Máximo, who had made his peace with the rich and powerful, Washington among them, and now looked askance at any sign of revolutionary unrest. If change were to come, Cárdenas must rid Mexico of Calles and his henchmen, roll back the power of the hacendados, curb Washington’s meddling, and revive the dormant Revolution. It was a herculean challenge.
Under the Cardenistas, big government sat at the tiller of the ship of state. The formula adopted led to a “mixed economy,” using state intervention to promote economic growth and retool the productive structure so that it would respond to internal demand. Believing that it could not be implemented without his consent, Calles, the Jefe Máximo, accepted the Plan Sexenal of 1934, an ambitious six-year plan of reform, because of rising labor unrest. One goal of the plan was to build up the internal market and thus give a boost to industry.6 Mexico would have land reform, an ejido system, and loans for ejidatarios and small farmers. The plan also provided guarantees for “authentic small property.” Of tremendous importance, the plan gave peones acasillados the right to petition for the lands of their haciendas, which sounded the death knell of the haciendas. The plan also upheld labor’s right to organize and strike. Highly nationalistic, it called for the enforcement of legislation dealing with the subsoil, specifically petroleum and mining. For Cárdenas, agrarian reform was an integral part of a model of economic development, but hardly revolutionary. The future, Cárdenas affirmed, would be capitalistic but with a soul.7
Cárdenas inherited a Mexico where nearly three out of every four economically active Mexicans labored in rural areas. Fewer than 15 percent had jobs in industry, which included mining and petroleum, and only 5.5 percent in commerce. Just 3.5 percent of the farmland had been given to campesinos. Land reform started in the Laguna, a cotton belt lying mainly in Coahuila, where the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers watered rich alluvial soil, ideal for planting cotton. The Tlahualilo and Rapp-Sommer y Purcell companies were the biggest of the conglomerates in the Laguna. “Revolutionary” generals had also acquired haciendas, among them Eulogio Ortiz, who, after being stripped of his ill-acquired lands, uttered the much-quoted statement “The Revolution gave me my lands and the Revolution took them away.” Aside from Torreón, two more cities straddled the Laguna: San Pedro, once home to Francisco I. Madero, and Gómez Palacio; 125,000 inhabitants dwelled in the area, nearly all, in one way or another, linked to the cotton industry. The hacendados employed, in about equal numbers, both wage workers, many of whom lived in the nearby cities, and peones acasillados.
The time was ripe for change. The Great Depression and a prolonged drought had led to social unrest; workers had gone on strike, threatening the cotton harvest. In response, the hacendados had imported esquiroles (scabs). Cárdenas spent the summer of 1936 in Torreón, supervising the expropriation of the haciendas. When it was over, more than thirty-four thousand campesinos had land; 73 percent of the irrigated lands had been given to them. The rest, about 70,000 hectares, were subdivided into plots of 150 hectares for distribution among dispossessed hacendados, sharecroppers, and colonos. The Cardenistas did not simply carve up the Laguna. They organized it into a giant collective ejido; the goal was to redistribute the land of the haciendas but leave their productive capacity undisturbed, keeping intact the economies of scale. The Banco Ejidal would provide credit, offer technical assistance, and oversee operations. The collective ejido of the Laguna became the forerunner of similar ones, “islands of socialism floating in a sea of capitalism.”8
Yucatán’s turn came next. Henequen, once the state’s golden crop, sat in the doldrums; with markets closing and prices falling, production had dropped. Not illogically, private investors, both Mexicans and foreigners, showed no interest in Yucatán, to the sorrow of its three hundred thousand inhabitants, a multitude of them jobless. To alleviate discontent, state authorities had earlier redistributed 30 percent of the henequen lands. In the biggest single act of land redistribution in the history of Mexico, Cárdenas granted the campesinos more of the henequenales, as the fields were called. The henequen haciendas had been banished from the face of Yucatán, replaced, in the manner of the Laguna, by 272 collective ejidos. The desfibradoras, the rasping machines that shredded henequen into fiber, went with them. To maintain the unity of henequen production, the Cardenistas established a henequen “trust” run by campesinos and “small farmers,” the former hacendados.
Cárdenas was not through altering the Republic’s landownership map. In Mexicali, capital of Baja California Norte, Cárdenas expropriated the cotton plantations of the Colorado River Land Company, converting it into ejidos. In 1937, too, El Mante and Santa Barbara, the haciendas of Calles in Tamaulipas, went to their workers. Then the axe fell on the hacendados of Los Mochis, the rich Fuerte River valley of Sinaloa. In 1938, the Dante Cusi family, originally from Italy, lost Nueva Lombardía and Nueva Italia, haciendas growing rice and citrus fruits in Michoacán. Guaracha, fiefdom of Diego Moreno, also felt the axe. Both Nueva Lombardía and Nueva Italia became collective ejidos. In 1939, some of the coffee planters of Chiapas, notorious for their ill treatment of their workers, lost their lands.9
When Cárdenas entered the National Palace, just 6 percent of the Republic’s land had been redistributed; in six years, he added another 12 percent, a good part of it fertile. Virtually by his own hand, Cárdenas had distributed nearly 18.4 million hectares of land to over 1 million campesino families. By 1940, there were over 1.5 million ejidatarios. They were the owners of nearly half of the arable land and constituted nearly 42 percent of the agricultural population. At the same time, the percentage of landless laborers dropped from 68 to 36 percent. Of equal importance, the farmers on the collective ejidos, as well as those on lands restored to pueblos, had doubled the value of the country’s agricultural output. Given equal access to fertile land, water, credit, and the right equipment, the ejido, as well as the small farm, could be more productive than the hacienda.10
But Cárdenas also made social justice a priority, not the least for the Indian.11 The case of Sonora, where he returned to the Yaquis seventeen thousand hectares of irrigated lands stolen from them at the point of a rifle by the Porfiristas, serves as an example. Also, wanting closer ties with the indigenous population, and to show them that the president of Mexico cared, Cárdenas convoked regional meetings of Indian groups and never failed to attend, listening and asking questions. For the first time in Mexico’s history, a national leader had taken an interest in the forgotten Indian. Dirt farmers, many of them Indians, needed schools, according to an axiom of the Cardenistas, so rural education, neglected since the twenties, became a priority once again. A “hungry Indian cannot be turned into a good scholar,” it was said, nor, it can be added, into a consumer. Indian parents, once enamored of schooling, had started to question its efficacy. In isolated pueblos, children either dropped out of school early or stayed home to help with the chores. Because children must eat, an old Indian told the teacher in Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes’s El India, a popular novel of those days, time “was wasted going back and forth to school.” When “there is not enough to eat, schools are a luxury.”12 Familiar with their plight, Cárdenas sought to improve the quality of the special schools for Indians. Then, in a bold departure from past practices, he organized the Autonomous Department of Indian Affairs, a cabinet-level office, to handle all of their needs.
A dynamic capitalist sector in the countryside emerged out of agrarian reform, adding thousands of consumers to the country’s rolls.13 Formerly landless campesinos had money to spend and, along with a multiplying number of urban dwellers, enlarged the size of the home market. Consequently, the possibility of a home industry emerged, opening the way for the process known as import substitution. The government’s role—enlarged many times by the needs of the rejuvenated agrarian sector and, after 1938, management of the petroleum industry, which was nationalized by Cárdenas—added to the federal payroll agronomists, engineers, architects, physicians, clerks, and secretaries. Intellectuals, never ones to reject public jobs, seldom failed to proffer their wisdom in return for one of them. Some of the recipients of land went on to swell the ranks of a rural middle class. Economic growth, which, with the exception of the World War I years, had stagnated until 1935, hovered around 8 percent during the Cardenista years.
Industry, too, profited. Cárdenas believed that Mexico had to industrialize; to that I can attest. In 1950, when I was doing research for a doctoral thesis, I had been in Michoacán visiting Indian schools with the help of Angélica Castro, an anthropologist and head of the Indian language program of the ministry of education. We were in Pátzcuaro at the home of a teacher in one of the Indian schools, who one day remarked that he had just seen General Cárdenas in Uruapan, a nearby city. Angélica asked if I would like to meet El General. Of course, I replied, jumping at the chance to talk to the man I so much admired. The next day we drove to Uruapan. Cárdenas then headed the Comisión del Río Balsas, a federal water agency in Michoacán. When we arrived, just about noon, we found ourselves among hundreds of campesinos and politicos from Mexico City waiting to talk to El General. How, I wondered, would I ever get the opportunity to see him? Angélica, however, was not fazed. She made her way through the crowd to the office of a licenciado (lawyer) in charge of appointments, as it turned out a close friend of both Cárdenas and Angélica. “Don’t worry,” he assured us. “I will speak to El General.” That done, he disappeared to return to tell us that I had an appointment for that afternoon and that El General had asked him to take us to lunch.
At the much-anticipated meeting, I shook hands with General Cárdenas and spent an hour or so asking questions about contemporary Mexico. These were the days of the presidency of Miguel Alemán, held in high esteem by the burguesía, who had tossed into the wastebasket the agrarian promises of the Revolution and had given free rein to business owners who wanted to industrialize Mexico. In the opinion of the old Cardenistas, Alemán had betrayed the Revolution. These were also the days when new industrial blueprints were being hotly debated, when men such as Luis Chávez Orozco, a rabid Cardenista, distinguished historian, and former head of the Autonomous Department of Indian Affairs, wanted Cárdenas to speak up and call for a return to an agrarian elixir. I asked General Cárdenas what he thought of current policy. An astute politico, and loyal to the political party he helped form, Cárdenas, no friend of Alemán, did not speak ill of him, but insisted that Mexico must industrialize, though, he emphasized, not in the manner that it was being done. What he lamented, obviously, was that Alemán had given corrupt politicos and grasping, profit-hungry business owners, the monopolists of yesterday and today, a free hand to exploit the people of Mexico. Cárdenas also had by his side Narciso Bassols as minister of hacienda, a fierce critic of nineteenth-century Liberalism, who believed that a national industry had scant chance of taking root in Mexico unless the purchasing power of rural Mexicans took on new life. Nor did Bassols think highly of the idea that foreign investment offered Mexicans a way out of the economic doldrums, especially if investors took home more than they brought in. Cárdenas and his advisors wanted to put the horse, the consumer, before the manufacturer’s cart. Industrialization needed to be built from the bottom up, by creating a mass of consumers. Agrarian reform was a step on the path toward that goal.14
That Cárdenas, an agrarian reformer, espoused industrialization should not shock anyone. He had witnessed time and time again the poverty and misery of landless campesinos dependent for their livelihood on an antiquated agrarian structure of heartless hacendados and their allies. He was a fierce nationalist, perhaps because he recalled his days as military commander of the Huasteca, a region rich in petroleum, where Americans flouted Mexican laws and exploited Mexican workers. At the time of the petroleum expropriation, Cárdenas said that he wished to free Mexico from its reliance on “imperialistic capital.” He wanted limits set on the foreign ownership of Mexican resources and recognized that reliance on the exports of primary goods placed Mexico at the mercy of outsiders. Nor did Cárdenas believe that paying off the foreign debt should take precedence over the needs of Mexicans.15
Ironically, during the Cardenista years, manufacturing was a star performer, the fastest-growing sector of the economy, with a 25 percent increase in industrial production.16 The devaluation of the peso made imports more expensive, helping protect domestic industries from outside competition and also spurring local manufacturing. For example, Mexican cement drove foreign competitors out of the local market. From then on, theoretically at least, the internal market would help propel the economy. Funds spent on public works—roads and irrigation projects, a feature of the Cardenista years—helped industry prosper, especially cement and steel. Earlier, the Nacional Financiera, a kind of development bank, had been established by the Callistas.17 Cárdenas added the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, a rival of the stodgy National University, to prepare engineers, chemists, physicists, and others to advance the technology of Mexico. That said, the character of exports did not change: minerals and petroleum made up two-thirds of them.
Not unexpectedly, the Cardenista reforms sparked angry opposition from conservatives. One unexpected but logical antagonist was the embittered Calles, no longer enamored of revolutionary change. Cárdenas, to the surprise of nearly everyone, sent him packing. Empresarios, unwilling to make the slightest concessions to labor, were up in arms, especially in Monterrey, their heartland. In 1936, when a strike, partly over low wages, broke out in the Vidriera de Monterrey, the Republic’s biggest glass factory, its owners, the Garza-Sada clan, mounted antilabor demonstrations, calling both labor and the Cardenistas Communists. Local business magnates, clasping hands with the Garza-Sadas, locked out their workers, despite a ruling to the contrary by the Department of Labor. When Cárdenas, who sided with the workers, confronted the empresarios, he told them that if they were tired of the social struggle, they could hand over their factories to the workers or to the government.18
Later, when workers in the petroleum fields asked for higher wages and benefits, a strike erupted after the foreign oil companies said no. When the companies refused to budge, Cárdenas, by the stroke of his pen, expropriated the properties of Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil; for the first time, the nationalist vows of Article 27 had carried the day. Whether the oil barons thought Cárdenas a Communist, as the empresarios of Monterrey apparently did, is not known, but they surely had no desire to eat crow handed to them by the chief of a peripheral country. Washington and the oil barons took their pound of flesh, doing what they could to prevent the sale of Mexican petroleum to Latin America and stopping the purchase of Mexican silver by their Treasury Department. From the two confrontations, Mexican workers emerged with higher wages and better benefits, and the internal market enjoyed a shot of adrenalin. The dream of domestic growth helped drive Cárdenas and his allies. Petroleum would spur national development; supply gasoline for autos assembled in Mexico and as well as trucks; power water, electrical and fertilizer plants; help produce plastics and chemicals; and update the railroads.
As to Cárdenas’s political views, he was no more of a Communist than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Neither was he anticapitalist; rather, he was a nationalist with a social conscience who wanted capitalism with a human face. The times were ripe for him to stand up to both the bully empresarios and the arrogant oil companies. As a young man, José López Portillo, destined to be president, proudly recalled how Cárdenas had expropriated the petroleum properties of Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, but he lamented how much of the middle class, even students at the national university, who applauded the move initially, had subsequently turned against Cárdenas.19 Unable to visualize a Mexico independent of Uncle Sam, the burgueses were terribly frightened.
Hopes for a less dependent economy, one less inclined to worship at the shrine of the markets of others, a society with a bit of social justice for campesinos and workers, gave birth to an artistic and literary renaissance. Its writers and artists antedated the Cardenista years, the “revolutionary” ones; their endeavors saw the light of day during the ambivalent times of the Sonorenses. They were ahead of their times. Not until the Cardenista regime did economists and politicos join hands with artists, writers, and intellectuals.
As I have argued earlier, the behavior of intellectuals reflects and reinforces the contours of a society. Intellectuals are a barometer of their society, as Diego Rivera, the great muralist, asserted. It is only when people rebel, whether with paint or in print, that they emerge to stand alongside the exploited. What they say, what they write, and what they paint provide insights into the nature of a society. We learn much about a society by analyzing its literature and art. One advocate of such a view was Antonio Gramsci, whose thoughts on intellectuals in capitalist societies pervade his Prison Notebooks.20 As one critic theorized, this may, in part, reflect the special conditions in Italy before the advent of the unified state in 1870. Given those conditions, Italian language, literature, and culture, the offspring of intellectuals, took on greater importance, perhaps greater than in the history of other countries. Gramsci argued that before Italian national unity had been achieved, the behavior and thought of intellectuals tended to embody a universal spirit, akin to that of the Roman Catholic Church.21 That spirit was hardly nationalistic. Rather than helping to build national unity, the Italian intellectuals blocked it.
What Gramsci said of Italy, the implications of its tardy arrival as a nation, applies to Mexico. The Reforma and the Porfiriato pieced together parts of what would become the Mexican nation, but it was not until the Revolution of 1910 that Mexico truly started to become a nation. Mexican intellectuals helped bring about this transformation. Earlier, with only a few exceptions, Mexican intellectuals, in their writings, aped European culture, turning their backs on pre-Columbian and Spanish inheritances alike, their minds gobbled up by foreign models. They worshiped at the altar of English and French thinkers, then later at the feet of Anglo Americans and, under the Porfiriato, added, in flowery poetry, an escapist mumbo jumbo that turned a blind eye to the horrific social inequities of society. This literary movement was called Modernismo and was the brainchild of Ruben Darío, a poet from Nicaragua who rarely set foot in his native land, preferring to hobnob with the upper crust of Paris. Salvador Díaz Mirón, one of Mexico’s much-lauded Modernistas, even applauded the Victoriano Huerta military coup of 1913, which toppled the democratically elected Francisco Madero.
But, as Gramsci explained, when a people break with their past, intellectuals can no longer simply sit on their hands and rely on oratory eloquence; they have to actively participate as organizers and persuaders. In Mexico, the earlier error of intellectuals came from believing it possible to be detached from the passions of the people. When they did so, they became a caste, a priestly brotherhood akin to the colonial clergy. The Revolution opened the eyes of Mexican artists and writers to the necessity of fighting for the independence of their country, the seedbed of an authentic national culture, to cite Frantz Fanon. The abandonment of the Europeanized ideal signaled the defeat of the old system. As Gramsci explained, since society was full of complexities and contradictions, the intellectual had to explain and justify its nature. If intellectuals, one of the social groups most responsible for change, led, the people would follow.
In Mexico, it was the muralists who most fully embodied Gramsci’s thoughts, and in the 1930s they were joined by Cárdenas and his band of reformers. As Guillermo Bonfil Batalla writes, the muralists of the escuela nacional (national school) assumed the role played by Tlacaelel, the priest servant of Cihuacoatl who, at his master’s command, burned the ancient books so they could be replaced by others depicting the glory of the mexica (ancient Mexicans).22 What captured the spotlight for Mexico was the Revolution as a cultural event, the epic of a people searching for its soul, tossing aside centuries of adoration for the European. It was in mural art, a form largely ignored since the days of the Italian masters of the sixteenth century, where Mexicans saw visions of a new day and in so doing gave meaning and substance to the dream of a Mexico standing on its own feet. In these murals, indigenous roots were everywhere, glorifying a pre-Columbian Mexico.23
Overwhelmingly powerful and, both in theme and color, Mexican, the mural was conceived as a popular art for a people untrained in looking at objects of art, to cite Diego Rivera, who most epitomized Gramsci’s dictum. The artist had to provide an understandable art, interesting at first sight. An art for the people, it was also an epic art, dealing with momentous themes and controversial subjects. Above all, it was art with a message; this was particularly true of the work of Rivera. Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros were known as the “Big Three.”
Why the renaissance? Why at this time in Mexican history? I believe there are two answers. As stated earlier, artists, writers, and intellectuals are barometers of their times; with either the written word or design, they embody the mood of the people. Gerardo Murillo, the artist most responsible for the muralist outburst, offered the classic answer. For Murillo, or Dr. Atl, as he called himself, the Revolution held the secret to the renaissance. Before 1910, art had been both Spanish and Christian, basically an architectural art, orphaned by the culture that had produced it. Imitation was the result. To overcome the cycle of mediocre art, a sharp break with the past was necessary; that rupture, said Atl, must be Mexican and pagan. The Revolution made such a break possible; it was an anticlerical crusade that acquired a religion of its own, becoming a facsimile of the Counter-Reformation, the mother, as Atl rightly pointed out, of Spanish art. The Revolution symbolized the struggle for social justice; from it a spiritual renewal arose, conferring importance on the common Mexican and rediscovering the Indian and Mexico’s pre-Hispanic heritage. Unlike Europe, ancient Mexico had had “no art for the sake of art,” no artistic elite. Everyone was an artist, while the useful and beautiful were one and the same. Folk art, which had survived the tastes of the Porfiristas, provided examples for others to emulate, such as murals in the pulquerías, where the poor went to drink, and in the retablos of churches, artistic testimonials to miracles. These things, Atl concluded, explained the renaissance.24
A second, equally plausible answer also explains this outburst of art and its ideas. Atl’s theory sheds only partial light on the renaissance. Bertram Wolfe, one Rivera’s biographers, provided the other answer, and it also reflected the changing character of Mexico. For Wolfe the answer lay in the official patronage of mural art. When talented painters like Orozco and Rivera did not have to depend for their livelihood on the sale of their art to burgueses, previously closed channels opened to them. No longer captive to the tastes of private buyers, artists were free to experiment, to paint in a novel fashion. No longer dependent on the goodwill of the rich, they could refuse to paint a wealthy Mexican wife or mistress; the horizons of their art were thus liberated from the dictates of critics in the European mold.
Over and beyond that, the pragmatic politicians of the twenties had risen to power partly on their revolutionary rhetoric, and now they had to make good on it. Since they had little inclination to do so, they had to offer something on account, a promise of better things to come. If contemporary Mexico had changed ever so slightly, tomorrow, politicos swore, would be different. Mural art—which evoked nationalistic aspirations, hailed the bronze native, took comfort in the fall of tyrants, and pictured, in the drawings of Rivera, happy campesinos tilling land of their own—filled that need. If the people believed, they would have their banquet. Walls for the muralists to paint, similarly, beckoned everywhere, on the buildings of government ministries, the National Palace, schools, and mercados. By encouraging artists to cover the walls of public buildings, the government, by association, gained for itself a “revolutionary” and nationalistic veneer.
Artists had radical ideas on their minds. As early as 1917, Siqueiros, already conversant with socialist theories, had met in Guadalajara with artists of similar views to define, as they phrased it, the “social purpose” of art. By 1923, after they had walls to paint on, their thinking had jelled. The manifiesto of the Sindicato de Pintores y Escultores founded by Rivera and Orozco, among others, called on “soldiers, workers, campesinos, and intellectuals” to quote Orozco, to “socialize art, to destroy bourgeois individualism, to repudiate easel painting and any other art that emanated from ultra-intellectual and aristocratic circles.” It asked artists to “produce monumental works for the public domain,” demanding, “at this historic moment of a transition from a decrepit order to a new one, . . . a rich art for the people instead of expressions of individual pleasure.” Many artists came to believe that pre-Columbian art was their “true heritage,” even talking of a “renaissance of indigenous art.”
Radicals, whether artists or writers, are an odd lot. Some, through a process of indoctrination, turn left, but others, for unexplained reasons, break with established norms on their own. Such is the case of Diego Rivera, the son of a burgués who worshiped the memory of Benito Juárez; yet his son went on to become the spokesman for an independent and socially just Mexico. Big and fat, with bulging eyes like those of a frog but with tiny hands, Rivera was an intellectual of brilliant mind. A picturesque character who craved public acclaim, he painted on a scaffold with a pistol at his waist, “to orient the critics,” he was fond of saying. Educated in Catholic schools, Rivera was never an orthodox pupil, once shocking the nuns by questioning the truth of the Immaculate Conception. In 1907, Rivera departed for Europe, where he spent fifteen years, initially in Spain and then in Paris, earning fame as a cubist painter but then abandoning the style, looking for inspiration to Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Juan Gris.
Over the course of the years, Rivera started to wonder why artists separated themselves from the community; he studied the history of art, trying to learn how this had come about. Until the European Renaissance, he concluded, artists were not isolated from society but were artisans working among other artisans who taught their neighbors the importance of art and beauty. That was also true for pre-Hispanic artists. The rupture with society occurred during the Renaissance, a break prolonged by the commercial and industrial revolutions, birthplaces of capitalism. At this juncture, easel art, the prerogative of wealthy patrons, came to dominate, and artists catered to the whims of their customers and became outcasts in society and pawns of the rich. Rivera’s visit to Italy, where he saw the murals of Michelangelo, provided the answers to these questions. To integrate the artist into society, Rivera deduced, art, like that of the Italian masters, must be for the people. As he saw it, the Russian revolution, which had brought the Communists to power, had ended the era of “modern Christian art,” which dated from the French Revolution. Socialist Russia opened up a new era, a Marxist world asking artists to give birth to a social art, accessible to the people, nourishing and reforming their tastes.
Determined to be a Mexican artist, Rivera made the Indian the centerpiece of his art. Everything of value in Mexico, he insisted, had Indian roots; without the inspiration of the Indian, he insisted, “we cannot be authentic.” Show me, he declared, “one original Hispanic-American . . . idea and I will . . . beg forgiveness from the Virgin of Guadalupe.” An ideologue who scoffed at the “neutrality of art,” Rivera believed “all of it to be propaganda” and, as a nationalist, scorned the burguesía of Latin America, labeling it malinchista, a class fawning on foreigners, evidencing a colonial inferiority complex. He warned time and time again against imitating “whites and blonds,” saying that such behavior led to feelings of shame for the native.25
Literature, too, embodied the attempt to break out of the colonial mold. The genre was the “novel of the Mexican Revolution,” a neorealistic account of the deeds of campesinos and, at times, their chieftains. Like mural art, it enjoyed the patronage of the public coffer. In December 1924, Manuel Puig Casauranc, a politico in the ministry of public education, dangled a carrot before Mexican writers. If they accepted certain premises, he implied, the government would find jobs for them. For Puig, who thought of himself as a writer, literature had to be shorn of affectation and sham, which had to be replaced by a somber and austere style, faithful to “our way of life.” He wanted fiction to portray anguish and selfless and sincere grief, and he urged writers to spotlight despair and link it to “our terrible social situation, thus lifting the curtains that hide from sight the misery of the damned.”26
The novel of the Revolution made its appearance in 1925, when the soothsayers eulogized Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo. Few had read Azuela’s other novels, some dealing with prostitution, alcoholism, and tragic death, themes that appealed to the burguesía. In Los de Abajo, however, he broke with old formulas. A tale of the Revolution, Los de abajo told of “brutal acts,” to quote a Mexican scholar, in “brutal style.” With the discovery of Azuela, old literary formulas lost their popularity. Like easel art, they had gone out of style. Ironically, Azuela, a physician with Francisco Villa’s armies, had not written a sympathetic account of the Revolution, but probably a realistic one. Focusing on the “underdogs,” it described primitiveness and brutality and told of waiters, barbers, and thieves, as well as campesinos, who had turned warriors, as well as unscrupulous intellectuals looking out for themselves. He described the story’s antiheroes not merely as cruel and grasping but as ignorant of why they fought. As one Mexican reviewer confessed in 1925, “This is not a revolutionary novel because it detests the Revolution,” nor, paradoxically, “is it reactionary because it reveals no zest for the past.”27 Still, Azuela’s fiction met Puig’s demands; in Los de abajo, readers found Mexican life portrayed in somber colors, depicting, in a style that packed a wallop, the agony of the poor.
Azuela opened the floodgates. In 1928, Martín Luis Guzmán published El águila y la serpiente, both fiction and historical memoir. A journalist by trade, Guzmán, who had no love for Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón, wrote about the caudillos of the upheaval of 1910. As early as 1915, this “revolutionary novelist shed no tears for the Indian who, he claimed, lacked ‘pride in race,’ judging him, because of an ‘irritating docility,’ a weight and burden” on Mexico. Quite different are the novels of Gregorio López y Fuentes, an author who championed the exploited campesino. In Campamento, a vivid account of nameless revolutionary soldiers spending one night in a nameless village, Lopez y Fuentes used vignettes to express the humor, melancholy, and tragedy of Mexican peasant life. El indio, another of his novels, tells the story of an Indian village that comes into contact with the outside world through a school, roads, and a church, and Tierra tells of Indian villages robbed of their lands by laws dating from the Juárez era.
A change had taken place in Mexicans’ attitudes toward the white world, wrote, Samuel Ramos, author of Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, a pathbreaking book first published in 1934. Mexicans began to appreciate their own life, to take pride in their own values, and to stop bowing before the European. Mexicans had learned a painful lesson, that imitating a foreign civilization led nowhere, and that they had values and a character of their own, as well as a unique destiny. As Ramos wrote, it was natural that Mexicans should come to resent Europe, because their dependence on its cultural leadership had caused them to belittle national values as well as themselves. The only legitimate course was “to think Mexican.”28