Latin America since Independence

Establishing clearly defined historical periods can be challenging. This chapter, which covers 1910–1940, is a prime example, overlapping the age of the export economies (1870s—1930) and the following plunge into the Great Depression, political change, and the Cold War (1930–1959). This book places the Mexican Revolution in the 1930–1959 period because the culmination of the country’s revolutionary transformation occurred during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940).

We examined the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in Chapter 5. While it was hailed for bringing economic development and political stability to Mexico, the Porfiriato also sowed the seeds of its own destruction. As Díaz aged, his collaborators aged with him and the lengthy dictatorship grew brittle, shutting off meaningful political participation for Mexico’s small but growing middle class and some of its elites. In the opinion of a contemporary observer, Francisco Bulnes, the national Senate “housed a collection of senile mummies in a state of lingering stupor.”¹

More important, economic development was achieved on the backs of Mexico’s working class and its indigenous villagers. New kinds of jobs on the railroads, in the copper mines and oil fields, and in the factories that produced consumer goods created a new working class, or proletariat, that was heavily exploited and denied the right to defend its interests by forming unions and striking. As railroads knit the country together, previously marginal lands occupied largely by Indians suddenly became valuable because they were capable of producing commodities for the burgeoning urban markets or for export. As a result, Mexico’s ejidos—the communal landowning villages that predated the Aztec and survived the colonial period largely intact—came under attack from hacienda owners and entrepreneurs. The Díaz government sided with the powerful, and around five thousand villages lost some or all of their land.

Another negative aspect of the Porfiriato was the U.S. appropriation of much of the Mexican economy. Lacking capital and technology, Mexico clearly needed both from foreign sources in order to develop its resources for export. Díaz promoted the development of railroads, mining, agriculture, oil, and other sectors by offering contracts and concessions to foreign investors on very favorable terms. As a result, U.S. corporations and wealthy individuals came to control much of the Mexican economy and own some of the country’s largest haciendas. Total U.S. investment exceeded one billion dollars by 1910.

This dominating U.S. presence generated an intense nationalist reaction. Mexican entrepreneurs had difficulty competing with their better-capitalized American rivals. And Mexicans working for U.S.-owned railroad companies, mines, and oil fields experienced the conditions that prevailed wherever foreign-owned enclaves developed. This gave rise to the popular refrain: “Mexico is the mother of foreigners and the stepmother of Mexicans.” Experiencing blatant discrimination in their own country, many developed the view that Mexico should recover its resources from exploitive foreign interests.

The Porfiriato, then, had two very distinct sides: order and progress, which benefited the few, versus exploitation and misery, which was the fate of the great majority. The observations of two U.S. citizens of the time reflect the different sides of the Porfiriato. Elihu Root, U.S. secretary of state, said in a 1907 tribute to Díaz: “I look to Porfirio Díaz, the President of Mexico, as one of the greatest men to be held up for the hero-worship of mankind.”² The other observer, John Kenneth Turner, published a book in 1911 whose title encapsulates the negative side of the Porfiriato: Barbarous Mexico?³ It was the negative side of the Porfiriato that Turner saw and wrote about that led to the regime’s destruction in the Mexican Revolution.

Despite a generalized discontent shared by displaced peasants, workers, the middle classes, and some elites who did not enjoy Díaz’s favor nor share the bounty of economic development, the regime faced only nominal opposition owing to Díaz’s political astuteness and powers of repression. The Mexican Liberal Party, founded in 1900, was the only significant opposition party, and when its leader, Ricardo Flores Magón, became too radical, he was harassed, then exiled. But a series of developments between 1906 and 1910 began to undermine the regime. News of brutally repressed strikes at the Cananea copper mine in 1906 and the Río Blanco textile mill the following year, the greatest Mexican labor protests to date, was widely disseminated. Beginning in 1907, drought set back agricultural production and drove up food prices, and a bank panic the same year hurt Mexican entrepreneurs. In a 1908 interview with James Creelman for publication in a U.S. magazine, Díaz was quoted as saying: “I have waited patiently for the day when the people of the Mexican Republic would be prepared to choose and change their government at every election without danger of armed revolutions and without injury to the national credit or interference with national progress. I believe that day has come…. I will retire when my present term of office ends.”⁴ That term was to end in 1910.

Although Díaz soon changed his mind about retirement, the Creelman interview set off an unprecedented flurry of political activity. The Presidential Succession in 1910, a thin book written by Francisco Madero, called for a fair election and further stoked political activism. Madero began a speaking tour of the country in 1909 and in April 1910 was nominated as the presidential candidate of a new party named for Díaz’s original slogan: the Anti-Reelectionist Party. As crowds and enthusiasm for Madero grew, Díaz had the audacious upstart and hundreds of his supporters arrested before the June 21 election, which Díaz, as always, won by an announced landslide.

Following the election, Madero was released from jail but confined to the city of San Luis Potosí. In early October, he escaped across the border to San Antonio, Texas, where he issued the backdated Plan de San Luis Potosí. The plan declared Díaz’s reelection illegal, named Madero provisional president, and called for a national uprising on Sunday, November 20, 1910, at 6 PM. What began as an insurrection to overthrow a government would become, after a number of twists and turns, Latin America’s first true revolution.

Madero was a member of a large, prestigious, and very wealthy family based in the northern state of Coahuila—an unlikely background for the leader of an insurrection against a regime supported by most of his social class. But owing in part to his education in Paris and Berkeley, California, he had imbibed notions of political democracy and come to embrace it as the cure for Mexico’s ills. While he observed the deprivation and exploitation afflicting the majority of Mexicans and empathized with the victims of the Díaz system, he did not waver from his belief that political democracy was a panacea for the country’s problems. Persistence in this principle would put him on a collision course with other leaders who preferred direct action to right the social and economic wrongs, with or without democracy.

When Madero crossed the border into Mexico on November 20, 1910, he was met by a handful of men rather than the hundreds he expected. Disheartened and uncertain of his future, he retreated to New Orleans to confer with family and supporters. But his ineptitude and absence did not deter hundreds, soon thousands, of Mexicans of all occupations and social classes from taking up arms, driven by pent-up grievances and frustrations that had accumulated for years. Rebels began attacking outposts of the federal army and Díaz’s rural police, capturing villages and towns and merging into larger, ill-organized groups of fighters. Díaz’s army proved less than battle-ready, since approximately half of its ranks were paper soldiers. The northern state of Chihuahua, where Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa emerged as leaders, was the early center of the insurrection; soon, pockets of rebellion spread to other parts of the republic, including the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City, where Emiliano Zapata gathered campesinos and drove the army out of the state. These developments led the timid Madero to return to Mexico in February 1911 to attempt to assert his leadership over the forces he had set in motion.

Villa and Orozco focused on capturing Ciudad Juárez, an important city on the U.S. border. As residents of El Paso watched from across the Río Grande, the rebels won a hard-fought battle on May 11, 1911. Shaken by this defeat, Díaz agreed to the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, resigned on May 25, and sailed into European exile. On his way out, the old dictator reputedly said, prophetically: “Madero has unleashed a tiger. Now let us see if he can control it.”⁵ Rather than claiming the presidency immediately, Madero agreed to the naming of Díaz’s foreign minister as interim president to serve until a special presidential election in October. Meanwhile, Madero made his way triumphantly from Chihuahua to Mexico City, feted at each stop along the way by local notables and rebels alike. He won the election overwhelmingly and was inaugurated as president on November 6.

Madero’s administration was fraught with peril from the beginning. An idealist who believed in human goodness and a democrat who believed in the rule of law, Madero was not well suited to govern during turbulent times. With Díaz gone, so was the common enemy who had united very disparate interests and individuals. Madero refused to take advantage of his enormous popularity to dissolve the national and state governments that Díaz had put in place and replace them with men loyal to him. He urged the rebels who had overthrown Díaz to disarm but left the federal army with its Díaz-appointed officer corps intact. In other words, the old regime remained in place while Madero waited for regularly scheduled elections that he hoped would replace it.

A captive of his conviction that reform could come about only through legislation, Madero rejected demands for executive action on burning issues such as workers’ rights and land reform. Zapata, the rebel leader from Morelos, visited Madero before his election to make the case for the immediate restitution of peasant lands stolen during the Porfiriato but left disillusioned by Maderos gradualist approach. Thus on November 11, 1911, only five days after Madero’s inauguration, Zapata rebelled under the flag of his Plan de Ayala, which called for the immediate restoration of communal lands and went further, demanding the distribution of a third of haciendas’ remaining lands to peasants and, in the case of landowner resistance, confiscation of their entire estates. In addition to Zapata’s, Madero faced four other serious rebellions and several minor ones driven by policy disagreements or individual ambitions that made it impossible for him to consolidate his presidency. To put down the rebellions, he had to rely on Díaz’s army.

Two of Díaz’s generals, Victoriano Huerta and the former dictator’s nephew, Félix Díaz, ended Madero’s presidency and his life after fifteen months. They were among several military and political leaders of the old regime who wanted Madero gone and a heavy-handed administration installed to calm the constant agitation and general unrest. They were encouraged and abetted in this endeavor by U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, an appointee of President William Howard Taft and a determined protector of U.S. economic interests in Mexico. From the time of Madero’s election, Wilson set out to undermine him in cables he sent to the U.S. State Department labeling him weak and indecisive, and predicting that his presidency would be short.

In October 1912, Félix Díaz instigated a rebellion but was captured and sentenced to death by a court-martial, a sentence that Madero, ever the naïve idealist, commuted to prison time. In February 1913, Díaz escaped from prison and with Huerta conspired to overthrow Madero. Known as the Pact of the Embassy, their agreement to rotate in the presidency, with Huerta serving first, was sealed under Ambassador Wilson’s tutelage—the first but not the last U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution. The conspirators imprisoned Madero and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, and on February 21, had them assassinated by gunfire at point blank range. Queried about the assassination by newly inaugurated U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the ambassador answered hypocritically that he could not interfere in Mexico’s internal affairs.

Madero’s assassination plunged Mexico into civil war. Huerta assumed the presidency, governed as a dictator, and supported himself with a greatly expanded federal army. Governor Venustiano Carranza of Coahuila was the first to announce nonrecognition of Huerta’s government, and other northern governors followed suit. In March 1913, Carranza issued his call for action, the Plan de Guadalupe, a purely political statement that named him “First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army” and interim president upon Huerta’s defeat. An aging patrician, Carranza relied on selfmade general Álvaro Obregón from Sonora to do his fighting. He also formed a loose alliance with Pancho Villa, who created his Division of the North—also known as “los dorados” (the golden ones)—and honed his strategy of riding the railroads southward, unloading his cavalry for battles, and capturing important cities along the rail lines. South of Mexico City, Zapata extended his control over Morelos and parts of neighboring states.

John Reed, a U.S. journalist, wrote the following description of Villa’s army:

“Along the single track in the middle of the desert lay ten enormous trains, pillars of fire by night and of black smoke by day, stretching back northward farther than the eye could reach. Around them, in the chaparral, camped nine thousand men without shelter, each man’s horse tied to the mesquite beside him, where hung his one sarape and red strips of drying meat. From fifty cars horses and mules were being unloaded. Covered with sweat and dust, a ragged trooper plunged into a cattle car among the flying hoofs, swung himself upon a horse’s back, and jabbed his spurs deep in with a yell. Then came a terrific drumming of frightened animals, and suddenly a horse shot violently from the open door, usually backward, and the car belched flying masses of horses and mules.”

Source: John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 155.

Massive participation of women was a common phenomenon in the rebel armies. Some of these fabled soldaderas followed their men into the armies; some fought for the cause in which they believed; others joined because they were left with few options due to the massive destruction caused by fighting, looting, and pillage; and still others joined for adventure. The soldaderas played varied roles: They shared their man’s makeshift bed, sometimes bore children, scavenged for and prepared food, provided what medical service they could, and generally made up for the lack of support services found in formal armies. Many also bore arms and fought alongside the men, then did most of the hauling of supplies to the next camp down the line, only to fight the next battle. Many soldaderas are celebrated in the corridos, or ballads that emerged from the years of seemingly endless fighting.

“From the tops of the boxcars and the flatcars, where they were camped by hundreds, the soldaderas and their half-naked swarms of children looked down, screaming shrill advice and asking everybody in general if they had happened to see Juan Moñeros, or Jesús Hernández, or whatever the name of their man happened to be…. One man trailing a rifle wandered along shouting that he had had nothing to eat for two days and he couldn’t find his woman who made his tortillas for him, and he opined that she had deserted him to go with some of another brigade.” (156) “The water train pulled out first. I rode on the cowcatcher of the engine, which was already occupied by the permanent home of two women and five children. They had built a little fire of mesquite twigs on the narrow iron platform and were baking tortillas there; over their heads, against the windy roar of the boiler, fluttered a little line of wash.” (163)

Source: John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).

His military fortunes deteriorating by early 1914, Huerta faced a new and powerful enemy. President Woodrow Wilson, who took office almost simultaneously with Huerta, refused to recognize the general’s regime, calling it “a government of butchers.” In keeping with U.S. interventionist policies in the Caribbean, Wilson used a minor incident involving U.S. sailors and Mexican federal troops to occupy the port of Veracruz in April 1914. The Marines met serious resistance and in the ensuing battle hundreds of civilians were killed, causing outrage throughout Mexico and provoking anti-American demonstrations. In Mexico City, a U.S. flag tied to the tail of a donkey was used to sweep the principal plaza. But the intervention cut off Huerta’s arms supply and revenue from the Veracruz customs house, giving the rebels the military advantage and forcing him to resign on July 8, 1914.

Their common enemy gone, the different orientations, priorities, and ambitions among the rebel groups came to the fore. Attempting to forestall conflict and consolidate his standing as “First Chief,” Carranza called a convention of the fighting forces in the city of Aguascalientes in October 1914. But rather than achieve unity, the conference led to rupture: After Zapata’s delegates sharply rebuked the attendees for not embracing agrarian reform as their top goal, Carranza responded by expelling them. The failure of the Aguascalientes convention plunged Mexico back into war. Obregón remained loyal to Carranza, while Villa and Zapata developed an arm’s-length, tentative alliance, captured on film when they alternated sitting in the presidential chair in Mexico City. Of the four major leaders, Zapata was the only one who stood steadfastly by a guiding principle: the land redistribution called for in his Plan de Ayala.

The six months following the Aguascalientes convention was a time of almost indecipherable chaos. It is difficult to sort out the factions, alliances, and objectives of the various armies and their component parts. Rather than for principles, many of the ordinary soldiers fought for men they respected, for revenge, for personal enrichment, for adventure, or for no apparent reason at all; and once caught up in the fighting it was difficult to stop, as many had nothing to return to. There was no effective central government, and the leaders and many states printed their own currencies. Mariano Azuela’s classic novel, The Underdogs, offers insights into why Mexico seemed to lose all direction during this period and essentially disintegrated. Azuela’s characters reveal their motives for fighting, lack of understanding of the differences among the major leaders, and the difficulty of quitting the fight.

War Paint, a soldadera: “What the hell is the use of the revolution? Who’s it for? Come on, Pancracio, hand me your bayonet. Damn these rich people, they lock up everything they’ve got!” (89)

Quail, a fighter: “’One good thing about it is that I’ve collected all my back pay,’ Quail said, exhibiting some gold watches and rings stolen from the priest’s house.” (111)

Anastasio Montanez, a fighter: “’What I can’t get into my head,’ observed Anastasio Montanez, ‘is why we keep on fighting.’ Didn’t we finish off this man Huerta and his Federation?” (133)

Demetrio Macias, leader of his band of fighters, and his wife: “’Why do you keep on fighting, Demetrio?’ Demetrio frowned deeply. Picking up a stone absent-mindedly, he threw it to the bottom of the canyon. Then he stared pensively into the abyss, watching the arc of its flight. ‘Look at that stone; how it keeps on going.’ “(147)

Source: Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs, translated by E. Munguía, Jr. (New York: Signet, 1962).

The situation began to clear up in April 1915, when Obregón defeated Villa in two battles at Celaya. Villa was the master of the cavalry charge, but Obregón studied reports of World War I battles in Europe and used trenches and machine guns to defeat Villa decisively. Along with setbacks suffered by Zapata, Villa’s defeat gave the Carranza—Obregón faction the upper hand, and President Wilson recognized Carranza as acting president in October 1915. Both Villa and Zapata continued to fight, but with diminishing success. Angered by Wilson’s recognition of Carranza, Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, killing eighteen, wounding many more, and burning the town. In response, Wilson sent an expedition under General John J. Pershing to capture Villa, but to no avail. Villa soon retired in exchange for the gift of a ranch, and Zapata was eventually assassinated by a federal army officer and his troops in 1919.

Carranza decided to cap his success and assure his place in history by giving Mexico a new constitution, as Benito Juárez had done in 1857. The document that he drew up closely paralleled the 1857 constitution but strengthened the powers of the executive; it did not address social or economic matters. He presented his draft in December 1916 to a convention assembled at Querétaro. Although the 220 delegates to the constitutional convention were all Carranza and Obregón loyalists—Villistas and Zapatistas were rigorously excluded—a majority rejected the draft. What emerged from nearly two months of acrimonious but creative proceedings was the world’s most advanced constitution, a blueprint for revolution in Mexico.

How did Mexico pivot from an insurrection designed simply to replace dictatorship with democracy to adopting a constitution that spelled out a commitment to revolutionary change? There is no simple answer, but several factors were in play. Mexico by 1916 lay in ruins. Between one million and two million people had died since 1910, the result of fighting, wounds sustained in battle, epidemics, and starvation. Agricultural production dropped dramatically, leading to food riots in the cities. The economy was shattered: mines and factories had been destroyed or shuttered and many of the railroads had been rendered inoperable. The country had been humiliated by two U.S. military interventions. And Carranza, a man who had been a governor during the Porfiriato, was in charge. The delegates at the constitutional convention, a majority of them relatively young men, had to wonder what purpose had been served by years of warfare and destruction.

Several calls for radical change had surfaced during the period of warfare. None was more influential than Zapata’s Plan de Ayala, and Zapata’s persistence in pushing his agenda both militarily and politically made agrarian reform an issue that could not be ignored. Pascual Orozco, who along with Pancho Villa defeated the federal army at Ciudad Juárez, issued his Plan de la Empacadora in March 1912; this too was a radical document that called for improving the lot of workers and for distributing land to peasants. Even the old Porfirian Carranza eventually called for social and economic reforms in his Additions to the Plan de Guadalupe, issued in January 1915 in a bid to enlist peasant and labor support in his struggle against Zapata and Villa. The Additions called for both agrarian reform and labor legislation, and they succeeded in getting the emerging labor organization, Casa del Obrero Mundial, to commit “Red Batallions” of workers to Carranza’s side. Given Orozco’s subsequent support of Huerta and the absence of social content in Carranza’s draft constitution, it is unlikely that either man was sincere in calling for radical reform. Nonetheless, the ideas they generated circulated and, along with Zapata’s plan and the platform of Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party, influenced the thinking of the constitution writers assembled at Querétaro.

Thus—although the struggles between 1910 and 1916 were battles of men more than of parties, platforms, or ideologies, excepting Zapata—when men gathered to deliberate on the country’s future, a majority embraced profound change. The revolutionary constitution was not only a reaction against the Porfiriato, it was an attack on all of the colonial legacies that had persisted into the twentieth century. It countered authoritarian governance by reaffirming the democratic provisions of the 1857 constitution. It went beyond that document’s restrictions on the Catholic Church by banning religious schools and religious orders, expropriating all church property, prohibiting religious observances in public, forbidding clerics from criticizing the government, requiring all priests to be native Mexicans, and empowering states to regulate the number of priests within their jurisdictions.

The new constitution addressed the rigid social hierarchy primarily in three articles. Article 123 ordered the states to draw up labor legislation following guidelines that included a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, legalization of unions and their right to strike, and equal wages for equal work. Article 27 subordinated private property rights to the public interest, as determined by the government, and incorporated Zapata’s principles by recognizing only two legal types of agricultural holdings: the ejido (or traditional communal landowning village) and “small” property. The requirement of free public education for all (article 3) would offer prospects of social mobility that had not existed before. By requiring government to protect workers, redistribute land, and educate the populace, the constitution promised a more dignified life for the lower classes. By destroying the hacienda, it would contribute to social leveling while attacking another colonial legacy: the large landed estate.

Finally, the 1917 constitution partially addressed the colonial legacy of economic dependency. Porfirio Díaz had promoted economic development by opening Mexico to U.S. and other foreign investment, with the result that foreign capital came to dominate Mexico’s economy. The new constitution aimed to recover Mexico’s resources from foreign control by limiting, without prohibiting, foreign ownership of land and by claiming ownership of all subsoil resources for the nation. This would abrogate Díaz’s concessions transferring outright ownership of minerals, including oil, to foreign investors and put Mexico on a collision course with the United States.

The constitution, of course, was only paper. It rejected the past—both the recent Porfirian past and the more remote colonial past. It was a blueprint for the future, a set of ambitious goals whose implementation would amount to a revolution. Before discussing the process that implemented major parts of the blueprint, let us briefly focus on the term “revolution.”

In Latin American history, the numerous rebellions that overthrew governments—such as Mexico experienced during the half century after independence—are often referred to as “revolutions.” But in these cases, little or nothing changed except the personnel at the helm of government. “Revolution” as used generally, including here, has another, more restricted meaning. The twentieth century witnessed several upheavals that not only overthrew sitting governments but also instituted radical changes in their countries’ economies, societies, and political systems—not just changes in governmental leadership. The 1917 Russian or Bolshevik Revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin, the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution under Mao Zedong, and the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro are well-known cases of such radical revolutions. They replaced capitalism with socialist economies, eliminated their countries’ upper classes and reorganized society on an egalitarian model, and installed very different political systems—not just different political leaders. To qualify as a true revolution, then, a new regime must bring about fundamental and thorough change—although it need not be as radical as those noted above.

Mexico’s revolution, though not nearly as sweeping, was the first to address one of the most pressing questions of the twentieth century: What about the common man and woman? Will they continue to accept their traditional place at the bottom of the social pyramid, denied decent standards of living and a voice in governance? Or will they challenge the elites for a share of their bounty and political power, or even for outright control of their countries? At century’s end, this burning question was answered in the negative. But in 1917, prospects for a different outcome seemed viable.

Between the constitution’s adoption in 1917 and the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), progress on carrying out the promised revolution was slow. Carranza, the old Porfirian, was not enthusiastic about the document he did not want but was forced to accept. Thus during his formal presidency (1917–1920), little changed. His successor was colorful revolutionary General Álvaro Obregón, who lost an arm in the fighting and proclaimed that people preferred him over other politicians because with a single arm, he could not steal as much as they. Obregón was more open than Carranza to implementing the constitution but did so cautiously, for two main reasons. First, he reasoned that Mexico’s reconstruction should be his priority, and that disruption of the economy through rapid dismantling of the haciendas or excessive benefits to labor would impede recovery from the destruction caused by years of warfare. Second, with two recent U.S. military invasions fresh in Mexicans’ memory, the U.S. business lobby’s loud and persistent calls for intervention to prevent implementation of the constitution’s antiforeign provisions counseled prudence. Yet, Obregón made a start. Under Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos, a thousand rural schools were built and two thousand public libraries were opened. With Obregón’s support, Mexico’s first major national labor union, the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, CROM), expanded its membership and gained considerable political and bargaining power. Implementing article 27, Obregón distributed three million acres to over six hundred villages.

Obregón’s successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, was another general risen through the ranks during the civil wars. He held office for four years (1924–1928) as prescribed by the constitution; but having built a powerful political machine, he named and controlled three short-term presidents who followed him between 1928 and 1934. During his own presidency, he built upon and accelerated Obregón’s beginnings at reform, distributing some eight million acres of land, opening two thousand rural schools, and supporting the growth of the CROM. At his direction, however, progress on the promised revolution slowed under his three puppet presidents. In 1929, Calles engineered the unification of all the revolutionary generals who controlled various parts of the country under the umbrella of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party, PNR).

Whereas Carranza and Obregón had largely ignored the constitution’s anticlerical provisions, Calles began implementing them, stepping up the deportation of foreign priests and the closing of monasteries and religious schools. He also tolerated the more sweeping measures taken by Tabasco state governor Tomás Garrido Canabal, who was not only anticlerical but antireligious. Garrido closed and looted churches, removed crosses from graves, and required all priests in his state to marry, which the Catholic Church prohibited. On his farm, he had a hog named the Pope, a donkey named Christ, a cow named the Virgin of Guadalupe, and a bull named God. English author Graham Greene’s acclaimed novel The Power and the Glory portrays Tabasco under this purge of all traces of religion.

Calles’s and Garrido’s measures elicited a response from the archbishop of Mexico City, who declared that Catholics could not accept the 1917 constitution—setting up a confrontation not unlike that between Pope Pius IX and the authors of the 1857 constitution. The archbishop’s next step was audacious: a strike by the church, which stopped the holding of mass and dispensation of all the sacraments, including baptisms and last rites, so that people entered and exited the world without proper ceremony. The moves and countermoves led in 1926 to the Cristero Rebellion—so named for the rebels’ battle cry “Viva Cristo Rey” (Long live Christ the King). The uprising was carried out primarily by thousands of conservative peasants, sometimes led by priests, centered in rural Jalisco and neighboring states. Both rebels and government carried out atrocities until negotiations brought peace and the resumption of church functions after three years.

While progress on implementing most of the constitution was slow, Mexico in the 1920s experienced important change of a different kind: the recasting of national identity. Throughout the first century of independence, Mexico’s elites had identified themselves and their country with Europe. Europe offered the models, the ideas, and the fashions. The 1910 celebration of the centennial of independence featured French champagne and an exhibition of Spanish art, while beggars were kept off the streets so as not to sully the splendid occasion. But the upheaval of war and the constitution’s provisions for uplifting the common people focused attention on the Indian, past and present.

Ethnic composition: mestizo 62%, Amerindian (predominantly) 21%, Amerindian 7%, and other (mostly European) 10%

Household income (proportion in the highest and lowest 10%): highest 37.5% and lowest 2%

Source: The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs).

Secretary of Education Vasconcelos invited artists to use the walls of public buildings, and Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Siqueiros, and others took full advantage to depict natives as noble souls vitiated by the Spanish conquest, whose protagonists—s oldiers and priests—were rendered as villains. The Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors issued a manifesto in 1923 admonishing artists to produce “at this historic moment of transition from a decrepit order to a new one, … a rich art for the people instead of an expression of individual pleasure.”⁶ Archaeologists studied the magnificent ruins left by preconquest peoples, while anthropologists and folklorists discovered what had been hiding in plain sight: the Indian. The government created the Department of Indigenous Affairs in 1936 to heighten the focus on Mexico’s forgotten past and the reality of its present. The emergence of the despised and marginalized Indian into the light of art and scholarship fostered the development of a new national identity: Mexico was not European, but a mestizo nation.

Calles and the new PNR backed Lázaro Cárdenas, another revolutionary general and former governor of Michoacán, in the 1934 presidential election. Cárdenas entered office determined to move Mexico toward the promised revolution. His background was modest, and his upbringing in the heavily Indian state of Michoacán familiarized him with the plight and needs of Mexico’s most exploited. As governor from 1928 to 1932, he had promoted labor and peasant organizations, distributed land, and emphasized rural education.

Cárdenas campaigned throughout the country, covering some sixteen thousand miles by airplane, train, burro, and foot, reaching remote communities where rather than make flowery speeches, he listened to the residents’ needs and grievances. He was elected president at a propitious time for change. Mexico was in the depths of the Great Depression, with production down and unemployment soaring, and as in the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dire situation called for creative, even radical, solutions. Moreover, with Roosevelt’s newly announced Good Neighbor Policy that proclaimed the end of U.S. military interventions (Chapter 8), the specter of yet another U.S. military foray into Mexico faded. The last obstacle to vigorous implementation of the constitution was Calles, who had become conservative and still dominated national politics. Astute maneuvering and alliance-building allowed Cárdenas to outflank his former patron and send him into exile in April 1936.

Among Cárdenas’s priorities was implementing article 123 of the 1917 constitution on labor relations. He supported a new, more progressive national union, the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Confederation of Mexican Workers, CTM), over the corrupt CROM. Under the 1931 national labor code, government-appointed arbitrators were required to resolve strikes that could not be settled amicably. Using this tool, Cárdenas encouraged strikes and put the weight of the state on the side of workers, resulting in real advances in wages and working conditions. The labor code stipulated that if companies could or would not comply with arbitrators’ rulings, they would be expropriated; when this tactic was used against foreign companies, Cárdenas also advanced the goal of recovering the Mexican economy from foreign control while benefiting labor.

Cárdenas also accelerated the pace of agrarian reform. From 1917 to 1934, six presidents had distributed some twenty-six million acres to ejidos and individuals; Cárdenas awarded nearly fifty million acres, primarily to ejidos, and established a special credit bank that made loans to over three thousand five hundred ejidos during his term. Many of the recipients were villages that produced primarily for their own subsistence, but such was the president’s faith in communal landownership that he turned eight million acres of prime cotton land in Coahuila and Durango states into a thirty-one-thousand-family ejido that produced primarily for the market. By 1940, around a third of Mexico’s still heavily rural population had received land and twenty thousand ejidos had benefited. Haciendas still existed, but whereas half the rural population in 1910 lived and worked on them, in 1940 only around 15 percent continued to do so. Not only were millions of persons liberated from the onerous life of hacienda laborers, but the colonial legacy of large landed estates dominating rural Mexico also ended.

From the promulgation of the Constitution until Cárdenas’s presidency, the promise of political democracy had been met in form but not in substance. Carranza, Obregón, and Calles were generals, accustomed to command. National political parties appeared in the 1920s, and Congress blunted some presidential power, but authoritarianism was still entrenched at the national level and in numerous states where generals ruled like old-fashioned caudillos. The PNR founded by Calles was essentially an organization of those generals. As president, Cárdenas was also head of the PNR, and he used that as an instrument to promote democratization.

His strategy was to reduce the generals’ power by incorporating broad sectors of the population into the party. In 1938, he renamed the party the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution, PRM), whose statement of purpose was “the preparation of the people for the establishment of a workers’ democracy as a step toward socialism.”⁷ The party was comprised of four sectors with ostensibly equal power: the military; the “popular,” which included bureaucrats, white-collar workers, and business interests; the CTM, representing labor; and the Confederación Campesina Nacional (National Peasant Confederation), which he had established in 1935 to organize the beneficiaries of agrarian reform. This corporatist arrangement brought millions of Mexicans into the political system through their associations. Cárdenas’s idea was that rather than competing in the political arena as separate parties, the sectors could bargain within the PRM on issues such as candidates for office, programs, and specific policies. Critics found the single-party democracy undemocratic, particularly in more recent times; but for the first time in Mexico’s history, common people had access to the political system through the PRM.

Cárdenas was also concerned with recovering Mexico’s economy from foreign domination. As noted above, his administration used labor laws to expropriate numerous foreign, largely U.S.-owned enterprises, and foreign holdings were also taken in the course of redistributing land. But since the 1917 constitution’s promulgation, the major issue involving foreign economic domination had been oil. Development of oil fields along the Gulf of Mexico by U.S. and British companies had made Mexico a major oil producer and exporter. Article 27 negated the ownership of subsoil resources that Díaz had sold, and the threat of expropriation caused great concern abroad, especially in the United States.

Heavily influenced by oil interests, President Warren Harding had withheld recognition of Obregón’s government until an agreement was reached on the impact of article 27. The oil men wanted an international treaty, but a face-saving compromise known as the Bucareli Agreements emerged from negotiations in 1923, stipulating that any properties that had been developed for production prior to the Constitution would not be subject to nationalization. The issue came to the fore again under Calles, who proposed that the exemption for working oil fields be capped at fifty years, but the president essentially dropped the proposal under U.S. pressure. So when Cárdenas took office, the question of ownership of oil fields remained unresolved.

It was not Mexico’s claim to subsoil rights, imbedded in article 27, that led to the showdown over oil. Rather, it was a 1936 strike by a union of oil workers. As stipulated by the labor code, after the parties failed to agree, the strike went to arbitration. According to the oil companies, the outcome was a set of concessions that they could not afford, and they appealed to the Mexican Supreme Court, which upheld the arbitrators’ decision. In response, the companies made a counteroffer of wages and benefits, accompanied by a demand that the government not intervene again in their business. Incensed and insulted by this behavior, Cárdenas expropriated the companies on March 18, 1938, and created a government monopoly, Petróleos Mexicanos (Mexican Petroleum, PEMEX), over the production and distribution of oil and gasoline. This bold gesture of nationalism elicited broad support: School children and adults lined up to donate pennies, pesos, and jewelry for the anticipated cost of paying the companies off, which ultimately was negotiated down to a fraction of actual value. March 18 was designated the Day of National Economic Independence, and PEMEX became a symbol of Mexican economic nationalism.

Following the oil expropriation, Cárdenas began to moderate his policies, focusing less on social change and more on economic development. As Obregón and Calles had done, and as Mexican presidents would continue to do throughout the twentieth century, he designated his successor—an act known as the dedazo (finger pointing). Rather than point the presidential finger, as expected, at Francisco Múgica, a firebrand who had been instrumental in making the 1917 constitution revolutionary, he selected a moderate and the last military man to rule Mexico, General Manuel Ávila Camacho. Under Ávila Camacho and his successors, governments emphasized economic progress over social engineering without stopping the social changes that Cárdenas set in motion or accelerated.

As in the other large Latin American countries, the economic hardship brought about by the Great Depression led in Mexico to policies favoring industrialization (Chapter 8). As in those countries, the state took a leading role in promoting manufacturing and building the infrastructure necessary to the effort’s success. The economic nationalism displayed by Cárdenas continued in the push for industrialization: Nacional Financiera, a government agency, was established in 1940 to provide financing for industry. In an effort to prevent a recurrence of the foreign takeover of Mexico’s economy that had occurred under Díaz, the government enacted a 1943 regulation requiring 51 percent Mexican ownership in many areas of the economy, while foreign investment was prohibited altogether in others. Through industrialization and the “green revolution” that boosted agricultural production in the 1950s, Mexico experienced steady economic growth of 6 to 7 percent annually from the early 1940s to the early 1970s. Even as the country’s population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1960, when it reached thirty-five million, per capita GDP growth amounted to around 3 percent. With industrialization came accelerated urbanization. Overwhelmingly rural in 1910, Mexico was 51 percent urban in 1960.

While the pace of agrarian reform slowed in the 1940s and 1950s, social progress continued to be made. Organized labor remained strong, although less militant, and labor’s share of the national income remained steady. A comprehensive social security system was established in 1943 and school construction continued apace: 78 percent of Mexicans had been illiterate at the time of Madero’s 1910 uprising; in 1940, the percentage was 55 percent, and in 1960, two-thirds were able to read and write. The quality of life of village women was enhanced as corn mills spread throughout the country, relieving them of the onerous, age-old burden of spending predawn hours grinding corn on the traditional metate (or grinding stone) for the family’s daily tortillas. Due to labor shortages during World War II, the United States and Mexico established the bracero program that sent thousands of Mexican men north to work in agriculture and on railroads, enabling them to bring home cash. The 1940–1960 period brought a significant expansion and consolidation of a middle class and improved living conditions for workers and beneficiaries of agrarian reform.

The political stability that had begun to emerge from the chaos of war in the 1920s was strengthened by Cárdenas and further institutionalized in the 1940s and 1950s. Ávila Camacho eliminated the military sector of the PRM in 1941, cementing civilian control of political life and making Mexico one of only a handful of countries to avoid military dictatorships later in the century. After another name change in 1946, the dominant party, now known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) ruled without serious competition until almost the end of the twentieth century. As noted, this single-party “democracy” had salient undemocratic features: During their six-year terms, presidents were nearly as powerful as absolute monarchs and often corrupt, and the mechanisms that Cárdenas created to allow input from peasants and workers tended to work in the opposite way—transmitting orders from the top of the party to the base. Nonetheless, despite its dictatorial tendencies and its corruption, through most of the twentieth century the PRI proved responsive to the needs of ordinary Mexicans, accelerating agrarian reform when pressure built up or investing in food security and social programs when incomes lagged.

The post-1940 period, then, brought rapid economic development, social improvement, and political stability to Mexico. Observers of Latin America and of what came to be called the “developing world” of Africa and Asia detected a contrast between Mexico and most of the other countries of that group. They called the difference “the Mexican Miracle,” a phenomenon that lasted into the 1970s, when new challenges arose.

Assessing Mexico’s transformation between 1910 and 1940 requires asking the following question: Did Mexico experience thorough and fundamental change in its economy, society, and political system? How does it compare with the benchmark twentieth-century revolutions—the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban? Mexico did not replace capitalism with socialism, but did significantly alter property rights and worker–employer relations. It did not eliminate the upper class, but reduced its influence and allowed other social groups to advance. It did not eliminate authoritarian governance but expanded popular participation in the political process, transforming the political system without fully delivering the promised democracy. Compared with the century’s radical revolutions, the Mexican was moderate. As a result, some scholars have questioned whether what happened in Mexico really qualifies as a revolution, but most think it does qualify, and the term “Mexican Revolution” has stuck.

Becker, Marjorie. Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Benjamin, Thomas. La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution in Memory, Myth, and History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Coffey, Mary K. How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Gonzáles, Michael J. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Hall, Linda B. and Don M. Coerver. Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910–1920. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988.

Hart, John Mason. Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Katz, Friedrich. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

LaFrance, David G. Revolution in Mexico’s Heartland: Politics, War, and State Building in Puebla, 1913–1920. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003.

Meyer, Jean. The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State, 1926–1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Mitchell, Stephanie E. and Patience A. Shell, Womens Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Salas, Elizabeth. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Wasserman, Mark. Persistent Oligarchs: Elites and Politics in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1910–1940. Durhan, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage Press, 1968.

1. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 300.

2. Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, eds., The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 291.

3. John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Company, 1911).

5. John Mason Hart, Revolution in Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 249.

7. Susan Kaufman Purcell, The Mexican Profit-Sharing Decision: Politics in an Authoritarian Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 34.

7 The Mexican Revolution