THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

Author(s): Alan Knight

Source: Past & Present , NOVEMBER 2010, No. 209 (NOVEMBER 2010), pp. 223-273
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40960938

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40960938?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

and Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Past & Present

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN
REVOLUTION

In 2010 the Mexican Revolution has just turned one hundred.

The predictable spate of commemoratory - but not necessarily
celebratory - literature has already begun.1 Compared with the
grand self-congratulatory commemoration of I960., which was
held when the party born of the Revolution - the PRI (Partido
Revolucionario Institucional; Revolutionary Institutional Party)
- still held a near-monopoly of political power,2 the current com-
memoration is likely to be rather more nuanced - that is to say,
more respectful of history and less respectful of official ideology
(not least because there is now no official ideology, the PRI having
lost national, that is, presidential, power in 2000, after some sev-
enty years in office).3 Some analysts attribute the fall of the PRI to
its abandonment of revolutionary principles and ideas: the PRI
fell because it ran out of discursive ammunition; it found itself
firing blanks.4 Another way of putting this point would be to say
that the 'myth' of the Mexican Revolution had evaporated, that it
no longer conferred legitimacy as it had in the past: either because
the people had given up believing in it; or, even if some still
believed, because the regime had given up adhering to it. Either
way, the 'myth5 of the Revolution, its make-up and appeal, become
crucial factors in the grand trajectory of twentieth-century
Mexican politics. That the new wave of cultural historians,

1 See Alicia Mayer (ed.), México en tres momentos: 1810 - 1910 - 2010, 2 vols.
(Mexico City, 2007).
2 Mexico: cincuenta años de revolución (Mexico City, 1963).
As I note below, the 'official' party was established in 1929 and, under three
successive titles - PNR (Partido Nacional Revolucionario), PRM (Partido de la
Revolución Mexicana), PRI - ruled Mexico until 2000. It virtually monopolized
elective office, in both the legislature and the executive (presidency and governor-
ships), until the 1970s, when proportional representation gave the opposition a foot-
hold in Congress; during the 1 990s the opposition won a clutch of governorships; and,
as I describe in conclusion, it finally secured the presidency in 2000.
Vincent T. Gawronski, 'The Revolution Is Dead. ; Viva la revolución! 'The Place of
the Mexican Revolution in the Era of Globalization', Mexican Studies I Estudios
Mexicanos, xviii (2002).

Past and Present, no. 209 (Nov. 2010) © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 20 1 0
doi: 1 0. 1 093/pastj/gtqO 1 0

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
224 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

particularly numerous in the United St

store by such discursive and 'mythica
surprising, given the strong dose of
based on the power and autonomy of
through their collective bloodstream.5
goes wider: a recent analysis, written b
economist and political commentator, as
whose hundredth birthday has just occur
the twentieth century is, for Mexico, the
Revolution. But this is a concept, not a fa
marks the [twentieth] century . . . never ha
Mexican Revolution on which was founded
ruled from 1938 and for nearly fifty years is

So, the Revolution - as a 'real' histori

pened; it is a myth, created from above,
albeit on the basis of some original raw
Mexican people belatedly became awar
ruling emperor had no clothes - they
outofofficein2000.
Is this a valid view of twentieth-century Mexican history? In this
article I consider the rise and fall of the 'myth of the Mexican
Revolution' - that is, the bundle of ideas, images, icons, slogans
and policies which became associated with the Revolution and the
regime to which it gave birth. The form of the article is loosely
narrative: it first locates the Revolution within the broader sweep
of Mexican history and then describes and periodizes the 'rise and
fall' (actually, I spend more time on the rise than the fall: an im-
balance which reflects the limitations of space, of sources and of
my own expertise). The article also embraces two arguments, of
unequal scope and significance. The first argument, echoing the
convincing analysis of Thomas Benjamin, contends that, given
the origins and character of the armed revolution (1910-20), the
formulation (rise) of the myth was slower and more halting than

5 The character and merits of the 'new cultural history', as practised by Latin
Americanists (especially Mexicanists), are debated in Susan Deans-Smith and Gil
Joseph (eds.)5 Mexico's New Cultural History: ¿Una lucha libre?, special number
of Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxix, 2 (1999).
Macario Schettino, Cien años de confusión: México en el siglo XX (Mexico City,
2007), 13. The idiosyncratic reference to 1938 - the year of the oil expropriation - is
meant to underline (I presume) the top-down, ideological creation of 'the Revolution'
by the nationalist state.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 225

often assumed.7 This argument chiefly concerns the archit

the myth (it is a 'top-down' argument).8 But I also try
something about the cbottom-up' manufacture, endorseme
repudiation of the myth. This is a vital, if difficult, topic, sinc
power of a myth obviously depends upon its capacity to d
attract, charm and motivate. Myth-making being ca comm
tion process which involves reception as well as communic
a 'good' - in other words, successful - myth has to be
'même'.9
So, how successful was the myth of the Mexican Revolution?
My second argument is somewhat negative and, I think, more
original: I suggest that the myth was less extensive and 'success-
ful' than often supposed; and that its 'decline', too, was less cru-
cial - as an 'explanatory variable' - than often supposed. To put
it bluntly, many students of post-revolutionary Mexico, not just
historians, have exaggerated the influence of ideas as compared to
economics and interests. However, the phrase 'than often sup-
posed' is one of those slippery formulas beloved of historians.
Supposed by whom? I shall not offer a lengthy justification of
this assertion (though it certainly would be possible to give
ample, albeit non-quantitative, evidence of how the 'myth of
the myth' has been propagated). I am less concerned with
self-interested political assertions - that is, the regime's own
declarations of its pervasive myth, which are legion - than
with supposedly objective scholarly evaluations. Thus, llene
O'Malley, a historian, argues that, in the years following the Revo-
lution, Mexico underwent 'a tremendous subjective change of
national consciousness' and that the 'cult of the Revolution'
involved profound mystification, even false consciousness;
all of which was made possible by 'the public's ideological

7 Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth,

and Historv (Austin, 2000"). 33. The nresent article owes a lot to this hook.
Debates concerning the Mexican Revolution, which in the past often centred on
class analyses (was the Revolution a 'bourgeois' revolution, a 'peasant war', both, or
neither?) have now shifted to a more state-centred approach: did the Revolution spawn
a strong or weak state, and were the revolutionary policies enacted during the 1920s
and 1930s the product of 'bottom-up' popular pressure or 'top-down' state
imposition?
9 Christopher S. Flood, 'Political Myth: A Definition', in Robert A. Segal (ed.),
Myth, 4 vols. (London, 2007), i, 298. On mêmes, see Susan Blackmore, The Même
Machine (Oxford, 1999); and, for a sympathetic critique, Scott Atran, In Gods We
Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford, 2002), 236-43.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
226 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

ignorance'.10 A very reputable politica

survey data of the 1960s and 1970s, state
of the Mexican Revolution is an omnip
fact' of Mexican political life. 1 1 It would n
a long carpet of comparable quotation
which has the merit of both sound pr
states that 'we, the Mexicans have two
Virgin of Guadalupe and our Lady the
The myth of the Revolution is thus elev
most ancient, influential and pervasive r
readers of this article dispute the accuracy a
empirical data, or question the logic and
ment, they will, I think, find it difficult to
the topic - the myth of the Mexican Rev
that the argument presented here, whet
trivially self-evident.
There is one final preliminary observ
made. It is sometimes essential to begi
with a careful conceptual introduction
As the Chinese proverb says, 'the beginn
things by their right names'. However, s
sometimes superfluous and pedantic. In t
mation of 'mythistory' and theories of m
into the second category. Much of what
concerns either cosmic and religious belie
Some of it, notably the mystical psychob
obscure and, certainly for my purposes,

10 llene V. O'Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero

tion of the Mexican State, 1920-1940 (New York, 1986
sumption of popular gullibility.
1 1 Rafael Segovia, La politización del niño mexicano (
Andres Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos: Mexico's
Prosperity (Boston, 1998), 97-8.
12 Jesús Silva Herzog, quoted by Arnaldo Cordova, 'La mitología de la Revolución
Mexicana', in Enrique Florescano (ed.), Mitos mexicanos (Mexico City, 1995), 21.
13 Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004); Laurence
Coupe, Myth (London, 1997); William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths
and Rituals (Tuscaloosa, 1986). A simple indicator: the last two books contain no
references to Georges Sorel.
14 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (Princeton,
1991). Anthropological studies of myth (notably those of Malinowski and Lévi-
Strauss) may be more persuasive, but their relevance to the study of modern polit-
ical myth is moot: see Henry Tudor, Political Myth (London, 1972), 48-60; and, of
course, the anthropologists themselves are seriously divided over the character and
(cont. on p. 227)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 227

reader of this article expects to encounter maieutics, meta

choanalysis or the great Cosmic Egg, they will be disappoin
Of course, perfectly rational analysts have hypothesized th
Mexican Revolution, like the French or the Russian, develo
kind of 'secular religion'.16 In respect of ritual, they may b
- that is, secular ritual sometimes emulated or parodied re
ritual.17 However, ritualistic mimesis is one thing (which m
turn derive from cultural inertia or even a kind of situational l
there are only so many ways to gather large groups of peop
gether and, literally and/or metaphorically, get them 'sin
from the same hymn sheet');18 when, on the other ha
comes to the ideas and expectations which are bound up
myths, the distinction between secular and religious my
striking and should be stressed. Whatever may have been
of Marxist/Soviet teleology or of its Nazi counterpart
without being an expert, I think the parallels are easily ex
ated and misconceived - the 'myth' of the Mexican Revo
was resolutely secular, anticlerical and this-worldly.19 It d

(n. 14 com.)
function of myth: Edmund Leach (ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism
(London, 1967).
Eliade, Images and Symbols, 35, 77-9. For a more temperate and considered
dismissal of Eliade, see Tudor, Political Myth, 62-3.
Adrian A. Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the
Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, 1998), 15-21; and Adrian A. Bantjes, 'Burning
Saints, Moulding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic Ritual, and the Failed Cultural
Revolution', in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin and William E. French
(eds.), Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in
Mexico (Wilmington, 1994), 263 ff., which sees the revolutionaries striving for 'a
"transfer of sacrality" away from Catholicism to a new secular or civil religion, the
revolutionary religion of a new society'. Benjamin, La Revolución, 2 1-2, 136, similarly
refers to the 'religion of the patria' and 'sacralization', while O'Malley, Myth of the
Revolution, 113-14, points to the Revolution's use of 'Christian imagery and the pro-
motion of Catholic values'.
17 Alan Knight, 'Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State, 1910-1940',
Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxiv C1994Ì, 407-9, 412-13.
18 On the ritualistic appeal of religion - which may typically involve large gather-
ings, rousing music and reiterated formulae - see Atran, In Gods We Trust, ch. 6, esp.
pp. 170-2; Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(London, 2006), 141-51.
19 See also Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge,
1972), 22-3, and Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London,
2001), 5-21; and, for a persuasive critique, Stanley Stowers, 'The Concepts of
"Religion", "Political Religion" and the Study of Nazism', Jl Contemporary Hist.,
xlii (2007). Tudor, Political Myth, 35, rightly points out that, pace Ernst Cassirer,
'there are many myths in which the sacred plays no role whatsoever and most
(com. on p. 228)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
228 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

claim universal validity and it was not

inspiration was national-historical, as I
no great intellectual founding fathers,
no Mexican Marx and Engels.20 And it w
torians) 'Utopian' in any real sense.21
However, it is quite correct to discer
this-worldly, mobilizing - cmyth' arisin
and playing some role in the legitimizat
regime (how big a role is another ques
my purposes, the 'myth' of the Revolut
policies - such as land and labour reform
and economic nationalism: taken togeth
constitute the 'project' of the Revolutio
and more diffuse set of images, icons,
songs and anniversaries. Needless to say
sentations require effective media, deplo
tions, for their diffusion: books, newspa
monuments, public buildings, schools, p
ejidos (agrarian reform communities).
need carriers (something which idealist
look). The 'project' of the Revolution is,
political kernel of the process; the 'myt
pulp which surrounds it, and which make
and appealing. The 'myth' of the Mexica
fits tolerably well within the broad definit
offers a kind of story (today we might
would even favour 'metanarrative'); th

(n. 19cont.)
modern political myths . . . fall into this category , in
Mexican Revolution.
0 Frank Tannenbaum, La paz por la Revolución (1938; Mexico City, 2003), 135-6.
Adolfo Gilly, El Cardenismo, una utopía mexicana (Mexico City, 1994). That
myths are not - necessarily or usually - Utopian was stressed by Sorel, among
others: Tudor, Political Myth, 15, 115; Ben Halpern, '"Myth" and "Ideology" in
Modern Usage', in Segal (ed.), Myth, i, 280-1.
The list of 'exemplary policies' may vary somewhat from scholar to scholar, but
there is substantial overlap and, hence, consensus: compare Ramón Reséndiz García,
'Del nacimiento y muerte del mito político llamado Revolución Mexicana', in Estudios
sociológicos, xxiii (2005), 146-52, and Alan Knight, 'The Ideology of the Mexican
Revolution, 1910-40', Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, viii
(1997). There are a few dissenting outliers: for example, the list of fourteen tenets
of the 'Revolutionary Creed' compiled by Frank Brandenburg and listed by
Gawronski, 'Revolution Is Dead', 376-7, which contains some odd elements (such
as 'economic integration' and 'financial stability') .

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 229

past, with implications for the present and future; it is n

course, literally 'true', nor is its importance necessarily pr
tional to its truth content; but it needs to be believed (hence
content may be crucial, especially if we do not regard peo
gullible fools);23 and it has a key function, that of mobilizin
port and, in some measure, generating legitimacy.24

II

Since myths, especially political myths, usually involve st

begin the analysis by locating the Revolution within the b
sweep of Mexican history. Revolutions are supposed to ush
major structural change in society, carrying with them a
break with - and repudiation of - the past.25 The F
Revolution, the conceptual template for so many later mo
was powered by a 'will to break with the past5, involving no
'deluge of words', but also the very 'invention of ideology' a
'instant creation of the new community'.26 Prescriptive a
ments, based on historical precedent, were the privilege o
servatives.27 Thus, 'the chief accomplishment of the F
Revolution was the institution of a dramatically new politic
ture'.28 Not all revolutions (conventionally defined) hav
played quite this character. Those which preceded the F
Revolution - the English and American revolutions - ac
modated history, either drawing inspiration from the pas
Norman yoke, the rights of freeborn Englishmen),29 or all
for more incremental, linear change (the survival, for exam

23 Cf. O'Malley's low opinion of Mexican credulousness (see n. 10 abo

Tudor, Political Myth, 123, observes: 'if a myth is to be a practical argum
chief condition for its success is that it be understood as a true narrative of events. If
it is regarded as a pack of lies, it may well provide entertainment, but it will fail as an
explanation and will lack prescriptive force'; see also Flood, 'Political Myth', i, 298.
On the narrative aspect of myth, see Tudor, Political Myth, 27; Segal, Myth. 4-5, 84-5.
24 Tudor, Political Myth, 91, noting how revolutionary 'foundation myths' (linked,
for example, to 1776 or 1917) come to perform a conservative legitimizing function.
25 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia, and China (Cambridge, 1979), 4, 33.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984),
12-13, 19,27.
Zi Ibid., 28-9.
28 Ibid., 15.
29 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English
Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1962), ch. 3; Tudor, Political Myth,
100-2.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
230 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

bicameral legislatures in the majority of

after independence). Since 1789, howeve
ideological and historical break has beco
the minds of both students and practitio
there may be qualified exceptions: in
priated older notions of 'national sent
. . . with the return of Russian history to t
But this was a highly selective appropria
history; what is more, it represented a
purer and more radical Bolshevik rejecti
past; perhaps it was even emblematic of
Mexico, however, is an odd case - in
else.32 The Revolution of 1910 certainly
profound conflict, leading to major s
Mexican society. In this sense it was c
But repudiation of the past was highly qu
There was no 'invention of ideology', no
The Revolution began, as Arnaldo Cordo
ing defence of the past' - chiefly, of th
associated with Benito Juarez and his
1920, as the new revolutionary state con
on substantial reform, which, in turn
changes wrought by the armed revoluti

30 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary

Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), 104, 225.
31 Ibid., 107; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast
1970), 53-4, 313-18.
32 Alan Knight, 'The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin
America, 1821-1992', Jl Latin Amer. Studies, xxiv, Quincentenary Suppl. (1992).
33 I make this point because some revisionist historians have questioned whether
it was a 'proper' revolution at all: see Alan Knight, 'The Mexican Revolution:
Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a "Great Rebellion"?', Bull. Latin Amer. Research, iv
(1985).
34 Arnaldo Cordova, La ideologia de la Revolución Mexicana: la formación del nuevo
régimen (Mexico City, 1973), 87. Marx, too, had noted how, 'just when they seem
engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things', revolutionaries 'anxiously conjure
up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and
costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured
guise': Tudor, Political Myth, 132.
35 I would stress the importance of the informal, unplanned and unforeseen
changes which the Revolution brought about - in terms of economic organiza-
tion, spatial and social mobility, demography, and class and ethnic attitudes - as
against the formal, planned legislation which tends to dominate a good deal of trad-
itional history (legislation which, it should be added, was often very imperfectly
(com. on p. 231)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 23 1

inspirational - invocation of the past continued. As a percep

American journalist noted in the 1920s:
the contemporary Revolution is the culmination of an entire past ...
truism that every nation is a derivative of its past. But in other cou
the present has frequently so far distanced its remote past that much
has only an attenuated and academic relation to contemporary ev
The reverse is true in Mexico. Continuity is the marrow of Mexican
tory beneath changing surface events.36
And as another, somewhat less perceptive, American journa
concurred some sixty years later: 'the past remains alive in
Mexican soul . . . history, revised and adjusted to suit conte
porary needs, is therefore mobilized to maintain the cohesi
modern society'.37
So how do we arrive at the paradox of a genuinely revolutio
state and society which harped on about its pre-revolutio
history? Was this mere discursive camouflage? Or quasi-
Stalinist backsliding? And, if we stretch the analysis, rather am-
bitiously and necessarily superficially, beyond the watersheds of
c. 1940 and e. 1982,38 what was the legacy of this odd relationship
between past and present in twentieth-century Mexico?
The revolutionaries of 1910, as they confronted and overthrew
Porfirio Diaz's thirty-five-year-old developmental dictatorship,
regularly invoked the past. Revolution was justified less as a
leap into an unknown future, than as a restoration of a preferred
status quo ante (in which respect, therefore, the Mexican
Revolution resembled the English Revolution rather than the
French, which is unfortunate for historians who insist on export-
ing the French metanarrative to Mexico).39 Francisco Madero

(n. 35 com.)
implemented): see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986),
ii, 517-27.
36 Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage (London, 1928), p. x.
37 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York, 1986), 19.
These are rough dates: 1940 conventionally marks the end of the Cárdenas ad-
ministration, hence the end of the more radical phase of the Revolution; 1982 signals
the onset of the debt crisis and the definitive end of the Mexican 'economic miracle',
based on import substitution industrialization; however, the miracle had been running
out of steam for some time (assumine miracles run on steanr) .
39 See François-Xavier Guerra, Le Mexique: de l'Ancien Régime à la Révolution, 2
vols. (Paris, 1985), a study whose many merits are not wholly eclipsed by the dogged
application of the French metanarrative to a country whose monarchical ancien régime
had ended in 1821. Guerra's more recent work has focused on the period of inde-
pendence (c. 1 800-c. 1 830), where his preferred model is much more appropriate. See
Alan Knight, 'La Revolución mexicana de François-Xavier Guerra: coincidencias y
(com. on p. ¿5¿)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 232 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

and his respectable, literate, largely urb

Benito Juárez and the generation of L
feated the conservatives, the French an
Maximilian, thus saving the republic an
of 1 857. The Maderistas sought not to s
ity of that constitution (which Diaz had
and traduced). Had they succeeded, th
about a significant political reform, inv
civil rights (analogous, perhaps, to th
Argentine Radicals after 1916), but they
eered a social revolution.
The fact that a social revolution - certainly a major social
upheaval - occurred derived from other causes, especially the
tensions which had accumulated in the Mexican countryside
during Diaz's thirty-five years of 'order and progress' dictator-
ship.40 In particular, the central state had imposed its capricious
authority on rural society; and agrarian Mexico had undergone
rapid commercialization, involving the expansion of haciendas
(large estates) and the expropriation of peasant landholdings.
The victims now demanded a reversal of Porfirian policies of
political centralization and agrarian commercialization. Such
demands posed a more radical - social, economic, sometimes
ethnic - challenge to the Porfirian status quo than that posed by
Madero's political liberals. However, there was a measure of
common ground, rooted in history, which went beyond mere
expedience ('my enemy's enemy is my friend'). Popular rural
rebels often shared with their urban middle-class allies a respect
for Mexico's liberal heritage: they favoured free elections and
municipal freedom (both as ends in themselves and as means to
protect peasant landholdings); they revered the figure of Juárez
and his fellow liberals (even the young Porfirio Díaz figured in this
liberal pantheon); and they conceived of liberalism as a popular
and patriotic movement which embodied enduring Mexican
values - defence of the patria, representation of the people and
affirmation of local autonomy. Indeed, the capacious umbrella

(n. 39 cont.)
discrepancias', in Elisa Cardenas Ayala and Annick Lempenere (eds.), Una ausencia
que convoca: homenaje a François-Xavier Guerra (Guadalajara, 2007).
40 What follows is a very brief, somewhat 'traditional', non-revisionist (some would
say 'post-revisionist') outline. For a fuller version, see Knight, Mexican Revolution^ i,
ch. 3.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 233

of patriotic liberalism spread even wider, sheltering also

working-class radicals who rallied to the Partido Liberal M
cano after 1906.41 Popular liberalism embodied some ser
contradictions: it glossed over Juarez's palpable failings
abuses;42 and it made possible, for the time being, a pop
alliance with elite liberals whose socio-economic interests were
substantially different. But its force often derived less from any
careful, cost-benefit analysis (still less, from any minute exam-
ination of the historical record of Juarismo), than from local and
family loyalties: thus, José Zapata had led local forces in the
final successful campaigns against the French and imperialists
in the Villa de Ayala region of Morelos, where, fifty years later,
his great-nephew Emiliano would captain the agrarian revolu-
tion of the south.43 Similar liberal lineages, which would later
transmute into revolutionary activism, were to be found in other
regions, such as Michoacán or the Huasteca.44
Patriotic liberalism could thus rally a diverse range of Mexican
groups and classes. In their eyes, Diaz was at fault chiefly for
reneging on his own early popular liberalism. Hence it was logical
for them to hark back to the Restored Republic and early
Porfiriato (when Diaz himself had campaigned under the
slogan 'the Constitution of 1867 and electoral freedom5)45 and,
even further, to the glorious days of the Reforma and the War of
the French Intervention, when Diaz had been a dashing and suc-
cessful young officer at the victorious Battle of Puebla (5 May

41 On Mexican popular liberalism, see Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The
Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, 1995); Guy P. C. Thomson, 'Popular
Aspects of Liberalism in Mexico, 1848-1888', Bull. Latin Amer. Research, x (1991);
Guy P. C. Thomson with David G. LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular
Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra
(Wilmington, 1 999); Alan Knight, 'El liberalismo mexicano desde la Reforma hasta la
Revolución (una interpretación)', Historia Mexicana, xxxv (1985), 59-85; Charles A.
Weeks, The Juárez Myth in Mexico (Tuscaloosa, 1987); Rodney D. Anderson,
'Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution, 1906-1 9 11', Hispanic Amer. Hist.
Rev.,'iv('91A).
42 Laurens Ballard Perry, Juárez and Diaz: Machine Politics in Mexico (DeKalb,
1978); Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 248-56.
John Womack Jr, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1 968), 8-9. The
exact relationship is unclear; José Zapata was probably Emiliano's great-uncle. 'In any
case', Womack observes, 'his [José's] part in village history served to establish Zapata
as an honored name there': ibid., 9.
44 Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras, i, Apuntes, 1913-1940 (Mexico City, 1986), 6; Claudio
Lomnitz- Adler, Las salidas del laberinto: cultura e ideologia en el espacio nacional mexicano
(Mexico Citv, 1995), 250.
45 Paul Garner, Porfirio Diaz (Harlow, 2001), 60-5.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 234 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

1862). The Revolution of 1910 could th

re-run and re-affirmation of the Reform
Liberals to power in the 1 850s. If a Eur
would clearly not be Bolshevism, but so
democratic opposition to Italian Fascism
otic ideals of the Risorgimento.
Furthermore, the prescriptive resort
there. If the Revolution reprised the
back to the Revolution of Independen
ended Spanish colonial rule and establ
eign nation state: as a boy, in that nota
Zapata's maternal grandfather, José
through the Spanish lines at the siege o
embattled patriot garrison those esse
fare: 'tortillas, salt, liquor and gunpo
tive popular-patriotic waves thus carr
(1810-21) to consolidated liberal repub
lution (19 10-1 7). 47
If the liberal-patriotic umbrella was ca
plenty of people left outside: the Porfi
and its creatures, notably the army a
betrayed popular liberalism in order
progress dictatorship'); its time-serving
a degree, foreign interests); and, a larg
merous constituency, political Catholics
wholly reconciled to the Porfirian regi
memory of the anticlerical Juárez, who
never happened and who, in some cases,
God-fearing colony had given way to th
public. Thus, just as the revolutionari
1910 as the third wave in a progressi

46 Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 7.

47 Benjamin, La Revolución, 43, 52. Javier Garcí
historia', Nexos, cclxxxv (2001), 34, states that 'th
be seen - thanks to Jesús Reyes Heroles - as the thi
tive experience, along with the Reform and Independ
Reyes Heroles's grand vision, but wrong in attrib
himself: it is much older.
48 By 'political Catholics', a term I shall use recurrently, I mean Mexicans whose
politics were premised on their Catholicism, especially (but not solely) at times of
Church-State conflict. Obviously, Mexicans of many political complexions - liberal,
socialist, even Marxist - were also Catholics; but 'political Catholics' took their cue
from the Church, and the Church was often quick to provide such cues.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 235

(1810, 1854, 1910), so their clerical Catholic enemies regard

as a final fall from grace, compounding the errors of inde
ence and the Reforma. Indeed, the enduring polemic be
clerical Catholics and Jacobin liberals/revolutionaries o
the door to a fourth, even older, historical bifurcation: the
Spanish Conquest of 1519-21, which, according to the clerical
Catholic camp, replaced monstrous paganism with the true faith,
or, according to (some of) their liberal/revolutionary rivals, in-
augurated a regime of benighted superstition on the ruins of
once-great Indian civilizations.49
However, the bonds of ideology and expedience which united
the loose revolutionary alliance of 1910 soon frayed. Madero 's
winning coalition of 1910-11 came apart during 1911-13;
Carranza's reconstituted coalition (1913-14) experienced a simi-
lar fate in 1914-15, leading to a major intra-revolutionary civil
war (the so-called 'War of the Winners'). A common attachment
to patriotic liberalism could not counteract the centrifugal forces
of class, regional and clientelisi loyalties. Zapata's agrarian revo-
lutionaries, eager for a swift land reform, spurned Madero and
Carranza, as did serrano ('highland') rebels, who had no desire to
replace the centralizing Porfirian state with an equally centraliz-
ing revolutionary one (they were, in so many words, resisting the
classic Tocquevillean sequence of revolution).50 Factional/clien-
telist affiliations, too, prised apart the grand national coalitions;
while, at the grass roots, the local loyalties which had often
prompted popular mobilization easily degenerated into parochial
squabbles: San Cristóbal against Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Juchitán

49 I introduce this fourth 'bifurcation' with a caveat: while the Independence >
Reforma > Revolution sequence tended to divide liberals and conservatives fairly
consistently, the Conquest is a more ambiguous marker - chiefly because
nineteenth-century liberals, even if they dabbled in early indigenismo, nevertheless
admired European culture, were often Catholics and, like most elites of the time,
entertained racist ideas; they were therefore leery of seeming to endorse the Aztecs.
It was not until the twentieth century - after the Revolution - that a more
full-blooded indigenismo flourished, leading to a blanket condemnation of both
Conquest and Colony, and a romantically uncritical revalorization of pre-Conquest
culture, a classic example being the case of Cuauhtémoc's bones: see Paul Gillingham,
'The Emperor of Ixcateopan: Fraud, Nationalism and Memory in Modern Mexico', Jl
Latin Amer. Studies, xxxvii (2005).
50 A sequence whereby an oppressive and centralized ancien régime state is replaced
by an even more oppressive and centralized revolutionary state: Alexis de Tocqueville,
L'Ancien Régime, trans. M. W. Patterson (Oxford, 1962), 1 1, 66, 77.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
236 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

against Tehuantepec, Xalatlaco against

and Ixtepeji - a particularly belligerent
Juárez of Oaxaca - against Ixtlán, Lach
del Río, Amatlán, Atepec, Calpulalpan, A
mezúchil and Tlalixtac de Cabrera.51
As the Revolution progressed, theref
clientelisi motivations often tended to t
ments. It did not matter that Carranza
Juárez; or that the young Cárdenas sh
patriotic upbringing as many of his Vil
the main historico-ideological division
anticlerical liberals and clerical Catholics - was initially
(1910-13) marginal; and, even as it became more salient after
1913, its chief consequence was to demarcate anticlerical revolu-
tionaries (Calles, Diéguez, Villareal) from the mass of conserva-
tive Catholics who, while bitterly hostile to the Revolution, had no
hope or means of contesting for national power. Although the
revolutionaries adopted different official stances towards the
Church (most being either hostile or indifferent), the clerical
question was not usually a crucial determinant of intra-
revolutionary loyalties, still less of the Revolution's final out-
come.52 It would, however, become a crucial issue in the 1920s,
when the revolutionary government, now ensconced in power,
enacted radical anticlerical - and anti-religious - measures,
provoking a serious Catholic ('Cristero') rebellion in 1926-9.
The final triumph of Obregón, Carranza and the Constitution-
alists after 1915 did not therefore mark a decisive ideological
break. Had the Villistas won, as they nearly did, the result

51 Thomas Benjamin, A Rich Land, a Poor People: Politics and Society in Modern
Chiapas (Albuquerque, 1989), 106-10; Miguel Covarrubias, El sur de México
(Mexico City, 1980), 205-8, 287; Soledad González Montes and Alejandro Patino
Díaz, Memoria campesina: la historia de Xalatlaco contada por su gente (Toluca, 1994),
87-8; Michael Kearney, Los vientos de Ixtepeji: concepción del mundo y estructura social de
un pueblo zapoteco (Mexico City, 1971), 58. It would be easy to extend this list of local
'dyadic rivalries'.
52 That is to say, the decision to support Villa or Zapata as against Carranza or
Obregón was not likely to hinge upon the clerical question. It is true that Carranza and
Obregón tended to be more systematically anticlerical, which probably affected public
opinion more broadly (political Catholics were fonder of - or, at least, less hostile
towards - Villa, for example); but they were not part of the revolutionary camp, and
therefore could not significantly affect the outcome of the 'War of the Winners', which
was decided by rival revolutionary armies on the battlefield: Knight, Mexican
Revolution, ii, 263-303.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 237

would have been - in broad ideological terms - much the s

Mexico would still have emerged from the Revolution w
liberal-republican constitution, now incorporating some
radical social provisions: the protection of labour, the pro
of agrarian reform, the commitment to secular education.
it crudely, the discursive content of the Mexican Revolution
have been much the same; the chief difference concerned
institutional make-up of the state, which, as a result of the
gón/Carranza victory, promised to be more structured, ce
ized, incipiently bureaucratic and - to use an ugly but
term - 'massified'. During the 1920s and 1930s, therefor
state consolidated itself on the basis of new institutions: the
labour unions and confederations; the federal school system
and the Ministry of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública;
SEP); the ejido (the agrarian reform community); and, after 1 929,
the official party (PNR, later PRM during 1938-46, then PRI
from 1946). These were decisive changes, largely lacking Porfir-
ian precedent, and constitutive of a politico-social revolution.
However, if we switch the focus from institutions to ideology or
discourse, innovation is much less obvious. In discursive/ideo-
logical terms, the Revolution - compared with its French coun-
terpart - displays striking continuity, even conservatism; hence
the unsuitability of the French revolutionary model.

Ill

Analysis of this discursive continuity demands some rough peri-

odization. So far, I have set the scene by briefly describing the
decade of armed conflict, 1910-20. Three subsequent periods
can be identified (according to the relevant politico-social cri-
teria).54 Plagiarizing Meso-American archaeology, I shall refer

53 Again, this is my view, but it is by no means mainstream opinion: Alan Knight,

'The Mexican Revolution: Five Counter-Factuals', in Jaime Bailón Corres, Carlos
Martínez Assad and Pablo Serrano Alvarez (eds.), El siglo de la Revolución Mexicana,
2 vols. (Mexico City, 2000), i, 52-8.
Unless we believe that history advances in lockstep, with politics, the economy,
demography, foreign relations, science, culture etc. all changing synchronically (a
pretty far-fetched belief), then periodization will obviously depend on the processes
being periodized; in this case, I am focusing on political and social trends (or, we could
say, 'state and society') . These trends are bound up with - but do not faithfully reflect
- economic and demographic transformations; 'cultural' history, in the traditional
sense of the history of art, literature, music, is yet more detached.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
238 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

to these as the 'formative', 'classic' an

First, the 'formative' period, which is m
some twenty years of revolutionary rec
1920-40, when the generation which ha
the armed revolution consolidated pow
party (1929), implemented some of th
Revolution and strove to create a hegemonic revolutionary
myth. Second, there ensued a longer period, c.l940-c.l982, the
'classic' period, when two successive generations, gathered under
the broad banner of the PRI, inherited and enjoyed a secure lien
on power, shifted the thrust of policy away from social reform, but
sustained the now ostensibly hegemonic myth of the Revolution,
albeit in a significantly changing context. A third and final period,
the 'post-classic', covers roughly the last twenty-five years, when a
fourth, 'neo-liberal' and technocratic, generation came to power,
opted for yet another national project and finally ditched - or
had wrested from them - the myth which had been forged in the
1920s and 1930s, and triumphantly brandished from the 1940s
to the 1970s. They were the last generation of the ruling PRI,
since - perhaps because of its mythic/discursive apostasy? -
the party dramatically lost power in 2000, which year could be
seen, if we pursue the Meso-American analogy relentlessly, as the
counterpart of the Spanish Conquest of 1519, which ended the
post-classic and ushered in something radically new. Indeed, as I
note in conclusion, although President Fox, the surprise victor in
2000, was no Hernán Cortés, he helped topple the shaky old
regime and, like Cortés, he seems to have believed that he had
God on his side when he did so.

The Formative Period, 1920-1940

It proved easier for the infant revolutionary regime of the 1 920s to
create institutions than ideas. Government fiat could bring new
institutions into being: the agrarian reform community, the ejido;
the federal school system; the Ministry of Education (1921); the
Bank of Mexico (1925); the National Irrigation Commission
(1926); the official party, the PNR (1929); the Six Year Plan
(1934); and the state oil company, PEMEX (1938). Of course,
the success of such ventures depended a great deal on the engage-
ment of civil society. Demands for agrarian reform varied from
place to place, and from time to time: success - that is, rapid and

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 239

effective reform - was most apparent where and when of

policy conspired with 'bottom-up' activism. The same was tr
federal schools: top-down and bottom-up pressures vari
the left bank of the Yaqui Valley the school became the ce
of community activism; in the Sierra Norte de Puebla,
viewed with greater suspicion.55 A similar dialectic aff
labour mobilization. The first dominant labour confederat
the CROM (Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, 19
drew on previous - lapsed or lapsing - anarcho-syndicalist
leaders; but the state acted as midwife and wet nurse, hence the
prodigious growth of the infant CROM depended a great deal on
official feeding. The same was true of the CROM's successor, the
CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores de México) in the 1930s.
When it came to creating and disseminating the myth of the
Revolution, however, things moved more slowly. Indeed, it is
striking how slowly the regime set about securing its discursive
moorings. No revolutionary school textbooks were devised
during the 1 920s; José Vasconcelos, the first minister of education
(1921-4), was happy to reprint Justo Sierra's History of Mexico,
and the expanding federal school system relied on old Porfirian
texts and old Porfirian teachers.56 The commemoration of revo-
lutionary anniversaries was largely the work of private citizens and
informal associations.57 Statues - which the Diaz regime had
delighted in erecting, especially in the capital - were conspicu-
ous by their absence. President Obregón, assassinated in 1928,
got an official mausoleum in 1 935 (so he had to wait seven years);
but there was no Zapata statue until 1932 (thirteen years), and no
monument to Carranza until 1936 (sixteen years).58 And what,
readers may ask, of the famous murals of the Mexican
Revolution? The first official post-revolutionary mural, Roberto
Montenegro's Dance of the Hours (1921), 'portrayed elegant
ladies dancing around an armoured knight leaning against a

55 Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants and Schools in
Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson, 1997).
56 Benjamin, La Revolución, 141; Engracia Loyo, 'Lectura para el pueblo, 1921-
1940', Historia Mexicana, xxxiii (1984), 306; Mary Kay Vaughan, The State,
Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880-1928 (DeKalb, 1982), eh. 7.
57 Benjamin, La Revolución, 72.
Ibid., 123. See also Jürgen Buchenau, 'The Arm and Body of the Revolution:
Remembering Mexico's Last Caudillo, Alvaro Obregón', in Lyman L. Johnson (ed.),
Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America (Albuquerque,
2004).

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 240 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

Persian tree of life', the whole captio

Goethe.59 Not much socialist realism th
a couple of years later, the more celebr
Orozco, Siqueiros) started producing the
scapes, the reaction was often hostile: th
tion minister Vasconcelos, did not like th
and university students defaced them, e
of their rector for doing so.60 One new
Orozco 's, in this case - which reduced
Indians [and] labourers - the dregs of
ment's disquiet was hardly surprising, g
were (often) using the walls of public b
representations of government graft an
have been art in the service of revolution, b
service of the revolutionary government
There were several reasons for this a
regime to construct a convincing myth
have been suggested already.) First, no
existed in the 1920s. As a protracted a
ment (1910-20), the Mexican Revolution
of a coherent, centralized Vanguard p
PNR/PRM/PRI came into existence ni
Revolution began, and served to unite a
coalition. Thus, the Soviet and Chines
vanguard party battled its way to power
vision on state and society - was quite d
thetical) questions 'what does the Revo
is its historical significance?', differe
would have given very different answe
little imaginatively, the historian migh
respondents' mouths, or these thoughts
First, members of the revolutionary el
in maintaining themselves in power (
to-power has been rightly stressed b

59 Vaughan, State, Education, and Social Class, 259.

60 Ibid., 261-2.
61 Ibid., 262.
62 Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, 64 1 .
Paul Friedrich, The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method
(Austin, 1986), addresses a local agrarista elite, but the collective portrait has rele-
vance for the Sonoran national regime too.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 24 1

In pursuit of this goal - which, with hindsight, looks much

than it really was - the elite could deploy a range of metho
three of which were crucial: coercion, clientelism and social
reform.64 But these were pragmatic means; and the ideology
underpinning government was vague and eclectic. The revolu-
tionaries set themselves apart from 'Reaction5 - a sort of reified,
all-purpose bogeyman - which stood in the way of the
'Revolution' (also reified). The most egregious embodiment
of 'Reaction' was not Diaz (who stirred somewhat contradic-
tory emotions), but Victoriano Huerta, the military usurper
who took power in 1913, killing Madero and inaugurating an
eighteen-month military dictatorship. Most revolutionaries
could agree that Huerta was, in the terminology of Sellar and
Yeatman, a thoroughly Bad Thing: a jackal, a Judas, even a
'Zapotee Caligula'.65
Beyond that point of limited agreement there was loose con-
sensus only regarding the Revolution's historical niche: it did not
subvert, so much as consummate, Mexico's past. As I have noted,
the Revolution was readily slotted into a teleological sequence:
Independence > Reforma > Revolution, which had the advantage
of appropriating for the Revolution the still-strong tradition of
patriotic liberalism. Prescription counted for more than innova-
tion. Though loose, this was by no means an all-embracing con-
sensus: a large chunk of the Mexican population, political
Catholics in particular, remained beyond the pale. As anticleric-
alism gathered strength, culminating in the C alles presidency
(1924-8), and provoking the great Catholic rebellion, the
Cristiada (1926-9), so the Catholic versus anticlerical, Cristero
versus Callista, 'reactionary' versus revolutionary dichotomy

64 By 'clientelism' I mean the discretionary distribution of rewards to a favoured

group, by a personal leader (caudillo or cacique), in return for support, while 'social
reform' connotes a broader, more disinterested, even 'universal' distribution of bene-
fits, according to defined principles, rather than discretionary authority. Bribery and
nepotism are extreme forms of clientelism. Needless to say, the boundaries between
the two phenomena are blurred: agrarian and labour reform obeyed broad principles,
which carried weight; but their implementation often involved discretionary authority
and clientelisi bias. Identifying and explaining these related phenomena are among the
chief tasks of the historian of the revolutionary state.
Which was unfair on the Zapotees (Huerta being a native of Jalisco, where there
were no Zapotees) and possibly even unfair on Caligula. The epithets are those of
Francisco Padilla González, quoted in Benjamin, La Revolución, 61. On the concep-
tual framework, see W. C. Sellar and RJ. Yeatman, 1 066 andAll That (London, 1930).

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 242 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

came to dominate Mexican politics, especi

of the country, where the war raged most fi
although the Cristero War was ended by
the arreglos ('arrangements') of 1 929 - it w
in the 1930s, albeit in a less bloody form.
could not compare with the first in terms
but, much more significantly, Church
up to each other in the metaphorical tren
especially the schools. With the introduct
anticlerical - and, soon, 'socialist' - education in the schools;
and the growing confrontation between, on the one hand, rad-
ical, sometimes marxisant, 'popular-frontist' ideas and policies,
and, on the other, rival policies and ideas couched in conservative-
clerical and fascist guise, Mexican politics acquired a distinctly
Manichaean dimension in addition to its older Machiavellian
realpolitik.
The logic of Manichaean politics was that ideas mattered.
Calles, president in 1924-8 and jefe máximo ('big boss') in
1928-34, saw Mexican history in somewhat apocalyptic terms:
it involved a century-long struggle between a benighted clergy,
the gift of gachupín colonialism, and progressive forces, now
represented by the revolutionary state.67 The state, in C alles 's
memorable words, had to take possession of the minds of
Mexicans, especially of the young.68 As in the United States of
the 1920s, questions of nationalism, pedagogy, religion and

66 Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1973-4); Jennie Purnell, Popular
Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of
Michoacán (Durham, NC, 1999).
67 Calles shared many of the ideas common to the revolutionary elite of the time,
especially the Sonoran leadership. But he was, I think, crucial in three respects, which
set him somewhat apart from the more pragmatic, cynical Obregón. First, he took
power at a time when the revolutionary state, having survived the difficult years 1 920-
4, was beginning to flex its muscles, especially in opposition to its perceived enemies
(the Church, the oil companies). Second, as his rich personal archive shows, he was a
cerebral president, keenly interested in both grand systems and international ex-
amples, hence disposed to see politics in macro-systemic terms. Third, he had a ruth-
less, authoritarian, even vindictive streak, perhaps linked to his personal origins (an
illegitimate child, he was spurned by his well-to-do father and brought up by an aunt) :
see Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-
1996, trans. Hank Heifetz (New York, 1997), 405-6, 412 ff. Jürgen Buchenau,
Plutarco Elias Calles and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, 2007), offers a recent syn-
opsis. Gachupín is the popular derogatory term for 'Spaniard'.
68 Meyer, La Cristiada, i, 361; Victoria Lerner, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana,
vi, 17, Periodo 1934-40: la educación socialista (Mexico City, 1979), 75.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 243

moral reformation were paramount (in part because th

nomic model - market capitalism - was not, as yet, ope
serious question). After Vasconcelos, education - indoctrin
for some - acquired a more militant, practical and pre-
scriptive edge. Vasconcelos, the poet-philosopher and first post-
revolutionary education minister (1921-4), had espoused a
vague, idealistic, classicism: give the peasants Plato and Goethe
and they would lift their eyes beyond their miserable milpas.69
He objected to Rivera's stolid Indians and advocated images of
Homeric or Quixotic inspiration. But Vasconcelos's successors
were both more pragmatic and more ruthless.70 They favoured
a practical pedagogy which would make Mexicans more loyal,
patriotic, hard-working, secular and - by the 1930s, at least -
class-conscious. The school therefore became an engine of accul-
turation and political mobilization; and the school curriculum
mirrored the nationalist and class-conscious concerns of the
regime. Cosmopolitan classicism gave way to earthy Mexican
social realism. Native artisanry and folklore, which had been
boosted by amateur (including North American) enthusiasts in
the 1920s, now received official sponsorship.71 For the first time,
a reified vision of the Revolution was systematically formulated
and disseminated.
It is worth stressing that this did not occur until some twenty
years after the initial outbreak of the armed revolution in 1910.
The myth was a long time coming. In part, as I have just sug-
gested, it was devised to counter the sharp threat of clerical reac-
tion. (Calles had confidently assumed that the Catholic Church
could be beaten into submission and that popular Catholicism
would wilt in the bright light of revolutionary secularism: he was

69 Milpas are 'cornfields'. Hence the well-known joke of President Obregón, who,
when arriving at a godforsaken village mired in poverty and afflicted by drought,
(allegedly) observed that what these campesinos clearly needed were a few more
copies of Vasconcelos's editions of Plato and Goethe.
70 A fuller discussion of education ministers and policies would bring out important
differences, for example between Puig Casauranc (minister 1924-8, 1930-1), Moisés
Sáenz (1928), Ezequiel Padilla (1928-30) and Narciso Bassols (1931-4); what they
had in common - in contrast to Vasconcelos - was a commitment to socially active
pedagogy, instrumentally linked to a strongly nationalistic and, ultimately, 'socialist'
project. Vaughan, State, Education, and Social Class, chs. 4-6, offers a good analysis
(up to 1928).
71 Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, 636-7. On US tastes, see Helen Delpar, The
Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and
Mexico, 2 92Ö-7 935 (Tuscaloosa, 1992).

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
244 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

wrong on both counts, especially th

factors determined this belated timetable.
First, the revolutionary elites faced the major problem that the
armed revolution had been a bitter internecine struggle, produ-
cing winners and losers. Especially in the later years of the war
(1914-20), the winners and losers alike were to be found in the
broad revolutionary camp. If the insurrections against Diaz
(1910-11) and Huerta (1913-14) had displayed a clear political,
even class, logic, pitting popular rebels against conservative/
authoritarian regimes, the final big bout of civil war - the 'War
of the Winners' and its aftermath (1914 onwards) - was an intra-
revolutionary struggle. A quick roll-call of the revolutionary dead
illustrates the difficulty of achieving an easy consensus: Madero,
angrily repudiated by Zapata in 1 9 1 1 , and murdered by Huerta in
1913, while many of his erstwhile supporters stayed silent;
Zapata, betrayed and killed in classic 'bandit' fashion by the
minions of Carranza in 19 19;72 Carranza, slain by traitorous
allies, who went over to Obregón, in 1920;73 Villa, gunned
down in the streets of Parral by hit men hired (almost certainly)
by Obregón's government, in 1923;74 a clutch of Carrancis-
tas killed or exiled at the time of the De la Huerta revolt in
1 923-4. 75 The only magnicidio (high-level assassination) that, it
could be said, obeyed any grand political logic was the killing
of Obregón by a Catholic fanatic in 1928; except that León Toral
should have gunned down the arch-clerophobe and comecuras
('priest-eater') President Calles, rather than the more pragmatic
president-elect Obregón. But then we can hardly count on

72 On (pre- and post-1919) Zapatista invective against Carranza, see Benjamin, La

Revolución, 53-4; O'Malley, Myth of the Revolution, 46; see also n. 78 below. The
Carrancistas allegedly reponsible for the killing were not particularly apologetic:
Roger Bartra, Blood, Ink and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican
Conditions trans. Mark Alan Healey (Durham, NC, 2002), 98.
73 Hence the Carranza family's brusque refusal of a pension offered by the Obregón
government, a refusal signed 'your loyal enemies': Benjamin, La Revolución, 70; see
also Alfonso Taracena, La revolución desvirtuada, iv, Año 1936 (Mexico City, 1967),
60-1, 68-9.
74 Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, 1998), 771-82.
Benjamin, La Revolución, 69-70. The list of fratricidal victims was so long and
distinguished that, when Villa's name was finally added to the roster of heroes -
Madero, Zapata, Carranza - whose gilt names graced the walls of the national legis-
lature, one deputy 'likened the Chamber to the temple of the Aztec god Huitzilo-
pochtli, in the sense that sacrificers and sacrificial victims were linked together':
Katz, Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 791.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 245

fanatical assassins to do their research properly and rea

tional conclusions.
Thereafter, magnicidios stopped, at least until the 1990s.76
Top-level conflicts - for example. President Cárdenas versus
jefe máximo Calles in 1934-6 - were resolved more peacefully
and decorously (which no doubt helped the contemporaneous
formulation of a more consensual myth). During and even
beyond the 1920s, however, revolutionary leaders were often
too acutely conscious of their personal, factional and clientel-
isi loyalties to buy into a common, consensual myth of the
Revolution. And leaders and factions could usually count on
some pet historians - factional organic intellectuals, it could
be said - who would put their case.77 The Zapatistas excoriated
the Carrancistas, the killers of Zapata; the Carrancistas dispar-
aged the Zapatistas - as benighted peasants, practitioners of
banditry and pawns of 'Reaction5 - and distanced themselves
from the Obregonistas, who had toppled their hero, the First
Chief, el varón de Cuatro Ciénegas.78 Obregonistas and Callistas
agreed in their dismissal of Carranza and their common view of
Sonora as the cradle of the Revolution, but they were mutually
suspicious (not least because Obregón depended on the army,
Calles on the labour unions); and loyal Obregonistas, like
Aaron Saenz, kept the flame of their old caudillo burning long
after his death in 1928.79 Eight years later, in 1936, the exile of
Calles was welcomed by some of the old Carrancistas (such as
Cándido Aguilar, Carranza's son-in-law), who saw in Cárdenas

76 Assassination attempts were made against presidents Ortiz Rubio (1 929-30) and
Avila Camacho (1940-6); neither was successful and neither was the product of major
political conspiracies (they were the work of lone, and not very expert, gunmen).
However, in 1993-4 the archbishop of Guadalajara, the PRI presidential candidate,
and the party's secretary-general were all gunned down in broad daylight; and, while
the explanations remain contentious, these recent magnicidios are widely believed to be
linked to broader 'narco-political' interests and conflicts.
77 Benjamin, La Revolución. 137-8.
78 'The hero of Cuatro Ciénegas' (Carranza's home town): Taracena, La revolución
desvirtuada, iv, 86-7; Benjamin, La Revolución, 62, 1 38. Thirty-six years after Zapata 's
death, the old Zapatista Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama was 'still strong against Carranza,
[who was] responsible for the killing of Zapata': interview with J. W. F. Dulles, 30 Oct.
1955: Benson Library, University of Texas at Austin, Dulles Papers, IV/28.
79 Benjamin, La Revolución, 69. J. W. F. Dulles, interviewing Aaron Saenz some
twenty-five years after Obregón's assassination, noted how Saenz's study resembled an
Obregonista shrine (my words, not Dulles 's), containing pictures, busts and memen-
toes of the dead caudillo; and when Saenz took his family through the Monument to
the Revolution 'tears came into his eyes': Benson Lib., Dulles Papers, IV/27.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
246 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

the avenger of the long-dead First Chie

self-conscious disciples of Madero, the d
of the Revolution, called for genuine
reelectionism' was their less than catc
the corrupt, populist, machine politics
sway in Mexico, irrespective of who o
palace.80
The creation of a common revolutionary myth - beyond the
most superficially bland and banal - was therefore seriously
compromised by these intra-revolutionary conflicts. The power-
ful centrifugal forces of factionalism countered the weak gravita-
tional pull of the incipient revolutionary myth. Some factional
conflicts were largely personal and non-ideological. For example,
I do not think that Villismo offered a radical alternative to the
Carrancista/Sonoran axis which eventually prevailed; still less do
I think that Villa's murder was 'ideological', in the sense of
responding to ideological or major policy differences; rather, it
was an egregious example of standard power politics - the elim-
ination of a threatening rival. Some conflicts, however, did carry
an ideological edge: the disciples of Madero preached democracy;
those of Zapata, agrarianism. Presidents from Obregón (1920-4)
to Salinas (1 988-94) regularly invoked Zapata when they wanted
to flaunt their agrarian credentials.81 When Calles and Cárdenas
squared up to each other in 1934-6, power politics (who would
rule in Mexico, the jefe máximo or the President?) conspired with
ideology and policy (Calles stood for the status quo, Cárdenas for
radical reform). Either way, it proved difficult to agree upon a
common myth. Did the Revolution mean liberal-democratic
emancipation (the gospel according to Madero), peasant agrarian-
ism (the Zapatista vision), or state-building, economic growth
and 'modernization' (the Callista alternative)?82 Even individual
caudillos were subject to rival interpretations: thus, Friedrich
Katz divides the Villista 'legends' (or 'myths'?) into the black,
the white and the epic.83 One consequence was a surfeit of his-
toriographical debates, which still rumble on; another, more

80 Benjamin, La Revolución, 50-1, 106; O'Malley, Myth of the Revolution, ch. 2.

81 O'Malley, Myth of the Revolution, ch. 3; Benjamin, La Revolución, 70; Dennis
Gilbert, 'Emiliano Zapata: Textbook Hero', Mexican Studies I Estudios Mexicanos, xix
(2003).
82 Benjamin, La Revolución, 56, 146.
83 Katz, Life and Times of Pancho Villa, pp. xiii, 2-8.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 247

significant, was a reservoir of icons and images which later pol

could exploit: Madero the democrat, Zapata the agrarian, C
the state-builder, Cárdenas the nationalist.
Other revolutions, of course, have faced this familiar dile
how to turn the sow's ear of a messy revolution into the sil
of a stable, effective regime. But in Russia and China thing
rather different: first, because the victorious revolutionarie
at least, a coherent ideology with which to work (Marxism:
pare the eclectic, loose-at-the-edges, shifting 'ideology
Mexican Revolution');84 and second, and more impo
I think, because the revolutionary victors in Russia and Ch
had both the will and the capacity to enforce uniformity,
as policies and entire 'projects' changed. Stalin, notoriou
switched policies, silenced critics and even eliminated his
nents from the historical record; so, somewhat less paranoi
did Mao Zedong. No such centralized, 'totalitarian' control
existed in Mexico. The party, as I have said, came into being
long after the Revolution; the president, for all his burgeoning
power, came and went every four or six years;85 and, of course,
the ruling party faced stiff opposition from 'civil society', notably
the powerful Catholic Church, with which it had to compromise.
Thus, while Mexican elites feuded and sometimes killed each
other, they did so in a political arena that was more confused,
pluralist and decentralized than, for example, that in which
Stalin systematically slaughtered his opponents. Again, the
murals tell the story: though state-sponsored, the work of
Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco was never wholly state-controlled;
politico-artistic licence, combined with competing patronage,
gave the muralists a latitude which their Soviet counterparts
lacked.86

84 Knight, 'Ideology of the Mexican Revolution'. Not that Marxism is a glabrous

monolith; it does, however, possess some key thinkers and canonical texts, hence it is a
somewhat more indicative guide to action.
85 The presidential term lasted for four years up to 1 928; thereafter it was extended
to six (the famous sexenio), which it has remained ever since.
86 Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, 641; cf. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 113.
The same would be true of major mass media like film and radio (which lie beyond the
scope of this article): official efforts to disseminate ideas and influence opinion, how-
ever assiduous, were more than offset by a range of private interests. At root, this
reflected the obvious fact that the Mexican Revolution did not establish a command
economy and a one-party state as, for example, the Russian Revolution (soon) did.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
248 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

Elite conflicts aside, the creation of a M

myth encountered resistance 'from belo
course, regarded the Revolution (incr
masonic, communistic and pro-Protest
pinned the Cristero rebellion of the 192
quista movement of the 1930s.87 Hence,
the state took steps to counter these vie
version of past and present. At least the
to this conflict: a majority of revolutiona
tional allegiance, could agree that the C
threat and that, more vaguely, the (reif
Independence and the Reforma, confr
tion'. The Catholics often subscribed to
revolutionary metanarr ative: for them,
and Colony were squandered by Indep
Revolution. Many damned the Revolution
as we have seen, shot the wrong man, O
of a clerophobe than Calles - but that
Catholics applauding 'the encouraging
of Obregón'.88 Not until the 'classic'
political Catholicism shift ground, and s
'heroic' status to chosen revolutionary
Cárdenas.89
This clear dichotomy aside, the mass of the Mexican people,
including many of the revolutionary 'rank and file', also enter-
tained different images of the Revolution which they had experi-
enced. In part, subaltern loyalties paralleled the allegiances of the
elites: the Zapatistas were strong in Morelos, the Villistas in
Chihuahua, the Obregonistas in Sonora, the Cardenistas in
Michoacán. Zapata and Villa were popular figures (in terms of
both origin and appeal); Carranza, in contrast, provoked no pop-
ular ballads (corridos), save those, like La Cucuracha, in which he

87 The Unión Nacional Sinarquista was a mass clerico-fascistic organization,

roughly comparable - and strongly sympathetic - to Spain's Falange, which
acquired widespread support, especially in the centre-west of Mexico in the late
1930s and early 1940s: Jean Meyer, El Sinarquismo: ¿Un fascismo mexicano?, 1937-
1947 (Mexico City, 1979); Pablo Serrano Alvarez, La batalla del espíritu: el movimiento
sinarauista en el Bajío, 1932-195L 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1992).
88 Luis González, Pueblo en vilo: microhistoria de San José de Gracia (Mexico City,
1972), 158.
89 Ibid., 200.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 249

was lampooned.90 Factional allegiance was therefore pop

well as elitist. Many iconic leaders had local or regional
for example, Primo Tapia, the agrarian pioneer and mar
Naranja (Michoacán); or Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the radic
ernor - and also martyr - of Yucatán.91 Since Tapia had
up arms against C alles, and Carrillo Puerto had fallen vict
the De la Huerta rebellion of 1923-4, these icons - celebrated
in songs, pictures and statues - were, in a sense, provincial
obstacles to national myth formation. Similarly, every Zapatista
statue, song or commemoration (especially, perhaps, those cele-
brated on 9 April, the day of Zapata 's treacherous killing) re-
minded devotees of the deceit of the state and the culpability
of the Carrancistas.92 And so it went on, albeit at a diminishing
tempo: the death of Obregón signalled a purge of some of his
enemies (such as the labour boss Morones); the ouster of Calles
by Cárdenas not only ended the political careers of many top
Callistas (Luis León, Melchor Ortega and, of course, his son,
Rodolfo Elias Calles), but also favoured anti-Callistas like
Cándido Aguilar and Román Yocupicio. Factional feuds con-
tinued to flicker down the years, although time and mortality
gradually diminished their intensity.

90 Gruening, Mexico audits Heritage, 647; Benjamin, La Revolución, 67. Even today,
the two most celebrated revolutionary heroes are Zapata and Villa (although, surpris-
ingly, Carranza comes fourth, after Madero, but ahead of Cárdenas): Ulises Beltrán,
'El ranking de los héroes patrios', Nexos, cclxxxv (2001), 93-4. A caveat: the question
that was put to respondents in this survey was 'when you think of heroes in the history
of Mexico, who are the first three who come to mind?' - a question which tests
salience rather than sympathy per se. It is also worth noting that the outright winners
were Juárez and Hidalgo, on 60 per cent, followed by Morelos (27 per cent), then
Zapata (17 per cent) and Villa (15 per cent). Thus, while popular revolutionaries
outstrip their 'bourgeois' colleagues (Madero: 12 per cent; Carranza: 10 per cent),
all are eclipsed by their three nineteenth-century predecessors. Distance makes the
heart grow fonder, it seems.
91 Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Chicago, 1977), tells the
grim story of Primo Tapia; for Carrillo Puerto, see G. M. Joseph, Revolution from
Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924 (Cambridge, 1982).
92 For examples of political controversy and point-scoring at the time of Zapata's
anniversary, see O'Malley, Myth of the Revolution, 45-6, 54-5; Alfonso Taracena, La
revolución desvirtuada, v, Año 1937 (Mexico City, 1968), 79. In 1936, communists
('sent by the agents of Moscow') took advantage of the commemoration of Zapata's
death, held in the official forum of Bellas Artes, to attack Portes Gil, then president of
the PNR, and to shout 'down with Cedillo!' (the minister of agriculture) . See (US
Consul) Montgomery, San Luis Potosí, to State Department, 22 Apr. 1936: State
Department Records, College Park, Maryland, Internal Affairs of Mexico, 812.00/
30361.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 250 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 209

These revolutionary swings and roun

national, regional and local level. Lo
allegiances ran deep: Don Gabriel, a
from Namiquipa, Chihuahua, was in
Alonso and Daniel Nugent some sixty
Lying on a sagging bed, ill, nearly blind, too
about his body, Don Gabriel said, 'What's
Revolution? My general [Pancho Villa] is de
reconsider. 'Come back tomorrow mornin
mariachis who can sing Villista corridos. M
can talk about the Revolution'.93

At the grass roots, however, there wa

problem. It was not just that 'the p
the same factional cleavages as thei
cthe people' did not share the concept
national revolution at all (no matter w
couched in Maderista, Zapatista, Vil
or Cardenista terms). I do not mean
locked in their narrow, parochial, lar
(their patrias chicas, 'little fatherland
nation or the Revolution.94 On the
tends to confirm that notions of the
well established, even before 1910.9
ably had a rough idea of what was
whether they were illiterate.96 The p

93 Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolutio

Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago, 1993), 236.
94 For example, Frederick C. Turner, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel
Hill, 1968), 10, citing Robert E. Scott. Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos
imaginarios: memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apologia del vicio triunfante
en la República Mexicana (Mexico City, 1993), though more sophisticated, arguably
errs in a similar direction.
95 Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State:
Guerrero, 1800-1857 (Stanford, 1996), stresses the precocity with which remote
Indian and mulatto communities espoused new notions of republican citizenship
and electoral participation; similar arguments are convincingly advanced in the
same author's The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850
(Durham, NC, 2005).
96 It is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the depth of 'local knowledge'. However,
I think it would be wrong to place too much faith in literacy and newsprint as means to
banish benighted ignorance and parochialism: for one thing, Mexicans have not usu-
ally paid much attention to newspapers (perhaps with good reason) . And there are
straws in the wind which suggest a brisker circulation of news, even among rustic
illiterates, than one might expect. Thus, we find backwoods rebels in 1816 showing
a good grasp of events in Spain; or, a hundred years later, a rough revolutionary-bandit
(José Inés Chávez García) twitting a captured Italian about his country's recent defeat
(com. on p. 251)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 2 5 1

'the people' formulated their own notions, memories and my

In particular, the bottom-up, local and popular view of t
Revolution tended to be confused, episodic and shapeles
For example, even veterans of undoubted Zapatista affilia
recall the Revolution as a tale of sound and fury, punctua
by individual - usually bad - experiences: skirmishes, kill-
ings, escapes, depredations, migrations, illnesses and hardships.
Decisions - to join the Revolution, to enlist with a particular
cabecilla (local leader) - often seem random and reactive: 'if it
was a choice between being carted off to fight miles away, God
knows where, and staying here to fight, better to stay and fight';
'I didn't want to be a revolutionary, but the government wanted
me for a dead body, so I preferred to shoot the bullets myself'.98
One veteran recalls the Zapatistas coming to his village and
sequestering his horse: 'the horse went, but he didn't go rider-
less'.99 Popular ballads also present a picture of the Revolution
which is often highly personal, episodic and, in its 'keen sense of
reality', sometimes reminiscent of the philosophy of the Good
Soldier Schweik: 'heroic, tragic, gruesome, pathetic themes pre-
vail. Deeds of valor, floods, earthquakes, famine, calamities gen-
erally, which affect the people are instantly sung'.100 The grand
leaders of the Revolution - Zapata and Villa aside - are cut
down to size: Carranza in La Cucuracha; an archetypal careerist
in 'Oh! My Beloved General!':
Lieutenant Killseven
Got up at ten;
A lieutenant at eleven
He was a captain at twelve;
At ten minutes past noon
General of Division.
He showed great bravery
In the battles he won;

(n. 96 com.)
at Caporetto: Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the
Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford, 2001), 176; Knight, Mexican
Revolution, ii, 400.
97 'Their narratives are simple and concrete. Names play a part in them, as do the
little, everyday things . . . Their conversations are rich and prodigal in details that to the
ears of the worshipful listeners sound like heresy in their apparent insignificance':
Arturo Warman, 'We Come to Object': The Peasants of Morelos and the National State,
trans. Stephen K. Ault (Baltimore, 1980), 91-2.
98 Ibid., 113 (my translation of the original differs slightly).
99 Ibid., 114 (my translation of the original differs slightly).
Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, 647.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 252 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

He was six miles away

While the fighting was on,
Proving thus to the world
Greater man there was none.101

Schweikian realism also consorted wit

inconsistency. A staunchly Zapatista w
admiration for Porfirio Díaz and his edu
Sierra, who brought primary schoolin
Alta.102 Such individual, sometimes inco
accounts are not incompatible with a col
tismo, however kaleidoscopic it might
through personal memories, was clear
responding to local socio-political cond
coherent agrarian - and political - goa
the Cristero revolt of the 1920s - a fo
hence, in a sense, ideologically coherent
comparably idiosyncratic accounts and m
Thus, not surprisingly, personal narrat
narratives' diverged a good deal. In some
Morelos or Chihuahua, the Revolution w
- episodic, reactive and apparently irrele
vail amost entirely. In San José de Grac
perhaps 'conservative', community in Mi
Revolution, 1910, was remembered for d
Halley's Comet.104 Two years later, th
rebellions by Zapata, Orozco and Félix
'these reports had come to be regard
another world'; cin San José and its env
nothing was happening - except for E
to become a bird' (Elias hurled himself fr
'wings of grass matting'; 'he was nearly k
because he forgot to make himself a tai
later, the Revolution had come to San J
recession, forced recruitment, highway

101 Ibid., 649-50 (1 have slightly changed the word

102 Fernando Horcasitas, De Porfirio Diaz a Zapata:
(Mexico City, 1968), 37, 39, 85.
103 González, Pueblo en vilo, eh. 5.
104 Ibid., 1 14, 1 18. Cf. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, i, Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture (London, 1994), 12, 443, who notes how 'in popular [British]
memory . . . the great flood or the freak storm may eclipse wars, battles and the rise and
fall of governments'.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 253

abductions, feuds and fornication. The people of San J

remembered 1917, the year of the new constitution, as
'year of hunger'.105 Thus, the image of the Revolution as a
trary hurricane, sweeping individuals along as if they were
blown leaves, which we find in the pages of Mariano A
novels, was, in a sense, true to life.106 It reflected the expe
of individuals and families, both revolutionaries and non-
revolutionaries alike, who felt themselves to be in the grip of
Tolstoyan 'grand impersonal forces' over which they had no con-
trol. No doubt this is a common grass-roots perspective in times
of great collective upheaval and warfare. Individual, close-to-the-
ground, cbottom-up' accounts sacrifice distance and perspective
for immediacy and impact. The 'face of battle' looks very differ-
ent for foot soldiers in the trenches compared with staff officers
back at headquarters, still less the 'Napierite' historians who later
try to make sense of it all.107 Time counts as well as distance: as
historians we know a lot about the Mexican Revolution which
participants, leaders included, did not know at the time (and I
refer not just to subsequent outcomes, but also to previous and
contemporaneous events and their interrelationship) . However,
we can only strive inadequately to capture the fears and feelings of
participants, be they elite or subaltern. As historians, we are ana-
lytically privileged, but emotionally stunted; and any amount of
empathy will not turn us into honorary historical actors.108
For the revolutionary leaders, this episodic version of the
Revolution presented a problem (even if they, as leaders, had
probably shared some of the same sentiments and dilemmas).109
Once the new government was in place, and seeking to parlay
short-term survival into long-term regime stability, so the need
to forge a stronger, positive, collective image of the Revolution

105 González, Pueblo en vilo, 127.

106 John Rutherford, Mexican Society during the Revolution: A Literary Approach
(Oxford, 1971), 122.
107 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Harmondsworth, 1978), 35-40, discusses
'Napierism': rousing, rhetorical, top-down accounts of military conflict.
108 A point worth making, I think, given the current vogue for forms of cultural
history which seek, nobly but sometimes naively, to penetrate subaltern thoughts and
feelings, thus privileging empathy over evidence, and sometimes sinking into a kind of
sloppy romanticism.
For example, note the tergiversations of revolutionary leaders at the time of the
Villa/Carranza schism in 1914-15: allegiances did not follow a clear class (or other)
logic, they were often highly contingent, and they were sometimes also superficial:
Knight, Mexican Revolution, ii, 274-85.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
254 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

became crucial: the initial, fragile, Carr

comparing the Mexican to the French R
fix the Revolution in its sequential nich
and the Reforma.110 The battle with th
with its Manichaean overtones, coincidin
a young post-revolutionary generation w
armed struggle, made revolutionary m
imperative. Azuela, the great novelist
taken to task precisely because he disse
aimless, episodic revolution, the revoluti
quake, as a capricious force of nature
purposive, patriotic and progressive soc
Over time, it seems, elements of the g
and were grafted onto individual and loc
ary history. By the 1930s, the revoluti
celebrate official anniversaries, key dat
dar': the death of Madero, the death of
the Revolution. Statues of revolutionary
erected; street names were changed (th
streets in Mexico City); the first official
appeared; and, in Mexico City, the rus
fated legislative chamber was conver
Monument to the Revolution (comple
Monument gradually acquired the as
Madero (1960), Calles (1969), Cárdenas (1970) and Villa
(1976), the iconography of the exterior was resolutely reified
and abstract: it displayed nameless 'redeemed' workers and
peasants, rather than individual - and contentious - heroes.
Likewise, some of the best revolutionary murals - those of
Orozco and Siqueiros - depicted abstract forces or personifica-
tions, not instantly recognizable caudillos (à la Rivera). Official
history followed suit: divisive partisanship had to give way to
consensus and 'eclecticism' (non-partisanship); factional and
personal allegiances had to yield to the reified Revolution (with

110 Benjamin, La Revolución, 60-1.

111 Azuela's pessimism was shared by other novelists of the time. However, while
the latter were often motivated by 'straightforward right-wing hostility towards the
Revolution' (see Rutherford, Mexican Society during the Revolution, 67, 73), Azuela was
a revolutionary veteran, as well as being a better novelist, who had acquired iconic
status; hence his criticism cut to the quick.
112 Benjamin, La Revolución, eh. 5.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 255

a capital CR'). Ramírez Garrido, editor of the pioneering r

La Revolución Mexicana (1934), rejoiced - a little premature
that 'with the bitter and painful experience of years, we ha
liberated ourselves from this or that -ISTA'. 1 13 What the s
sizers of the 1930s sought was a new myth (in its way
subjective) which blurred differences and stressed comm
ities, so that history would henceforth serve the interests
divisive factional partisanship, but of 'revolutionary' - tha
regime - unity. Myth would serve its key legitimizing
tion.114 In political science terms, this was to be a step
direction of 'elite convergence', the discursive counterp
the elite 'pact' of 1929 which had established the PNR.115
The success of this strategy is hard to measure. 1 16 As I state
the outset, it is often supposed that the myth of the Rev
crucially underpinned the stability of the post-revolut
regime. But the 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy may be
ing here: we know the regime endured, we can see the his
graphical and iconographie efforts of the regime, and we p
too readily assume a decisive causal link. The murals and m
ments, famous and eye-catching, are a case in point. Thou
mobility of Mexicans has often been greater than historian
supposed, the percentage of the population who, prior
1940s, beheld the Monument to the Revolution or filed pa
murals in the Ministry of Education must have been tiny. A
all were impressed. The Monument to the Revolution looke
some observers, like 'the world's largest petrol station'.117
when it came to collecting public subscriptions to pay for i
10 per cent of the cost was recouped; the rest had to be co
up by the Party and the city government (in other words,

113 Ibid., 143.

114 Tudor, Political Myth, 91, 139.
115 Alan Knight, 'Mexico's Elite Settlement: Conjuncture and Consequen
John Higley and Richard Günther (eds.), Elites and Democratic Consolidation
America and Southern Euro-be (Cambridge. 1 992V
116' u j '
116' Benjamin, L
Ibid.) 133. Is th
seen the Monu
spectators? By w
the space often
Archbishop Pas
Schott to State
of Mexico, 812.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 256 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 209

state).118 Changing school textbooks

contentious business, which provoked
sus. lig The murals, we have seen, init
Though they later became an integral
nationalism, this was a slow process
provincial. In small-town Michoacá
mural painting' had no place in the
which put it in the same irrelevant c
Marxism, psychoanalysis, neuroses,
and the philosophy of Teilhard de Ch
For the revolutionary myth to make he
it needed more diffuse, daily and insis
tion. Probably the most effective was
by the 1930s, had become both ubiqui
conscious mission to change popular m
For the first time, standard textbooks
emphasizing nationalist and revolutio
was expected to make Mexicans mor
(hence, borrowing Lynn Hunt's phr

118 Benjamin, La Revolución, 132; see also Alfon

tuada, iuAño 1934 (Mexico City, 1966), 45.
1 19 In 1 934 the governor of Jalisco burned 8,000 copies of Abel Gámiz's Historia de
México, so that schoolchildren would avoid its contagion: Taracena, La revolución
desvirtuada, ii, 45. Similarly, the change in street names could generate resentment,
or indifference: people protested and continued to use the old names in defiance of the
new orthodoxy, for example in León in the 1940s: Daniel Newcomer, 'The Symbolic
Battleground: The Culture of Modernization in 1940s León, Guanajuato', Mexican
Studies I Estudios Mexicanos, xviii (2002), 73-82. For Mexico City, see Patrice Elizabeth
Olsen, 'Revolution in the City Streets: Changing Nomenclature, Changing Form, and
the Revision of Public Memory', in Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis (eds.),
The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
(Durham, NC, 2007), who reaches the safe conclusion that both space and history
were 'contested'.
120 González, Pueblo en vilo, 245.
121 Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution', Elsie Rockwell, 'Schools of the
Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms (Tlaxcala, 1910-30)', in Gilbert
Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.) , Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the
Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC, 1994).
122 Loyo, 'Lectura para el pueblo', 337-9; Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution,
97, 125, 182-3. Lerner, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, eh. 5, discusses the broad
thrust of 'socialist education', suggesting (pp. 104-5) that it was both confused and
unconvincing. For a more positive evaluation, focusing on Zapatismo and agrarian-
ism, see Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico
(Berkeley, 2002), 42-54. It seems likely that, while the 'socialist' content of teaching in
the later 1930s proved divisive and even counter-productive, the decade saw vital
advances in terms of infrastructure and recruitment, which bore fruit when 'socialism'
was shelved after 1940.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 257

'rationalizing and nationalizing values').123 But, over time, i

promoted, with some success, a more unified, consensu
reified image of the Revolution, blurring the factional div
of the past and focusing on the fihigh principles emanating
the Revolution'. 124 It sought to mould minds, but also to ex
ghosts. As Renan pointed out a long time ago, collective 'im
aries' involve a good deal of selective amnesia.125
In addition to the school, the regime of the 1930s could d
the press, radio, film, sport and public events to dissemin
'mythic' message.126 At critical moments, such as the nat
ization of the Anglo-American oil companies in March 193
state's power of nationalist mobilization was impressive: it
get thousands onto the streets; thus it could mount m
collective demonstrations - which stressed, inter alia, how
economic emancipation of 1 938 consummated the political
pendence of 182 1.127 We should, of course, be careful
assuming that the thousands on the street, or the tens of
sands of radio listeners and film viewers, 'internalized' th
sages they received, or uncritically consumed the now estab
myth of the Revolution. Clearly, some - those recalcitrant
itical Catholics again - were immune. They avoided the dem-
onstrations, tuned in to other programmes and watched different
films.128 Since the regime was far from totalitarian, the state
enjoyed no monopoly of the mass media. In fact, the politically
correct films of the 1930s, like those of El Indio Fernández, were

123 Hunt, Politics. Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 205.
124 For example. Los maestros y la cultura nacional, 1920-1952, iii, Centro (Mexico
City, 1987), 12,28.
125 Ernest Renan, 'What Is a Nation?', in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny
(eds.), Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996), 45.
126 Benjamin, La Revolución, 95, 111-12; Joy Elizabeth Hayes, 'National
Imaginings on the Air: Radio in Mexico, 1920-1950', in Vaughan and Lewis (eds.),
Eagle and Virgin. These are major - but under-researched - themes, which are too
big to be broached here.
Alan Knight, 'The Politics of the Expropriation', in Jonathan C. Brown and
Alan Knight (eds.), The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century (Austin,
1992).
128 In the 1930s, when the Ministry of Education distributed free radios to villages
(villages which had probably benefited from land reform and certainly were endowed
with federal schools: so, in theory, 'revolutionary' communities), the sets came locked
into a single official channel, Radio XFX ('to ensure that the radios were used only for
the government's intended goals of education and cultural unification'); but the vil-
lagers soon opened them up and retuned them to more popular stations: 'in village
after village', an inspector found, 'people were listening to everything but station
XFX': Hayes, 'National Imaginings on the Air', 243-4.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 258 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 209

less successful than the classic 'ranchero

ated a quite different 'public transcri
priests - the lascivious reactionaries of
legend - were benignly avuncular, and
exploiters of the legend, were well-m
archs.129 The music-hall artist turned f
Moreno), whose career was now taking
mythical revolutionary qualities: his dep
fast-talking pelado ('layabout, ruffian')
or the Good Soldier Schweik; and he me
politicians of the day.130 Political Cat
continued repudiation of the Revolut
regime's assiduous myth-making by sup
organizations, such as the UNS (Unió
1937), the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional, 1939) and the
Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia, all of which prospered
during the 1930s, in reaction to Cardenismo, and in emulation
of European (clerical) fascism. Big business, newly mobilized in
opposition to organized labour, took a similar - if more prag-
matic - line, which involved the formulation and dissemination
of an anti-revolutionary counter-discourse.131
Thus, when the regime peddled its standard teleology
(Independence > Reforma > Revolution; Hidalgo > Juárez >
Zapata/Carranza/Obregón/Calles/Cárdenas: take your pick),
political Catholics responded with their own 'metanarrative'
(Crown, Colony and Church > Iturbide > Maximilian and some-
times > Diaz) . They also invoked their trump card - the Catholic
Church - and the queen of trumps, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the regime, for all its supposed
'secular religion', could never outbid the transcendental appeal of

129 Joanne Hershfield, 'Screening the Nation', in Vaughan and Lewis (eds.), Eagle
and Virgin.
130 Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Wilmington,
2001), who notes how, like the regime itself, Cantinflas grew more conservative
and complacent over time: bv the 1950s he had lost his critical satirical edge.
131 Thus, following Cárdenas's bold confrontation with the Monterrey bourgeoisie
in February 1936, local businessmen 'fostered' the growth of Acción Cívica, which
acquired a 'wide membership', and whose 'alleged purpose' was 'to foment interest in
patriotic objects, such as the commemoration of the composition of the Mexican
national hymn'; behind this disinterested discourse, however, the 'real object . . . was
clearly to combat the alleged Communistic tendency of the present Mexican govern-
ment': (US Consul) Nathan to State Department, 30 July 1936: State Department
Records, Internal Affairs of Mexico, 812.504/1610.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 259

Catholicism, which had deep and ancient reservoirs to d

upon. Revolutionary efforts to plagiarize Catholicism, with
lutionary baptisms and Christlike depictions of revolut
martyrs, suggested a certain desperation.132 The state w
surer ground when, like Cárdenas, it avoided such direct c
tition and played to its strengths: this-worldly coercion, cl
ism and social reform. As a result, the ensuing battle o
national myths never ceased; it occurred at local as wel
national level; it ensured that the Revolution never achieved
a discursive monopoly; and it made possible, as I shall note
in conclusion, the ultimate revenge of the political Catholics in
2000.
But how far did the great mass of Mexicans who were not
political Catholics, especially those supportive of the Revolution,
buy into the official myth, thus enabling it to achieve, if not a
discursive monopoly, at least some form of ideological hege-
mony? It is impossible to be precise.133 My hunch is that the
revolutionary regime had some success at weaving local and par-
ticular histories into the grand story, blurring some of the more
obvious internal tensions, and thus converting 'parochial' revolu-
tionary sympathizers into supporters of the national regime.134
We cannot confidently infer this outcome from sheer demonstra-
tions of popular support (like those which greeted the 1938 oil
nationalization) : as James Scott has rightly reminded us, outward
conformity may mask inner dissent; 1 35 and there is good evidence
that, over decades, the revolutionary regime became adept at
mobilizing support - and silencing overt dissent - by means
of subtle, and some not so subtle, clientelisi practices. Some of
the crowds on the streets, in other words, were rent-a-crowds,

132 Knight, 'Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State'.

Benjamin, La Revolución, 136. To my knowledge, there is no systematic polling
data relating to Mexican attitudes and beliefs prior to the 1 960s, and the early polls do
not inspire complete confidence. Mass surveys are really a product of the 1980s and
1990s, which does not afford a very long time sequence in which to chart changing
public opinion.
134 Yhis progressive blending of local and national revolutionary loyalties thus re-
peated, mutatis mutandis, the process whereby, a century earlier, patriotic liberalism
had similarly fused local and national allegiances, at least in many communities (see n.
41 above). However, whereas war had provided the - fortuitous - catalyst in the
1860s, schooling was now the principal and more purposive agent of change.
135 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven, 1990).

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 260 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

even during the revolutionary-nationa

1938. 136
Thus, between the extremes of outright repression on the one
hand and eager popular endorsement on the other lay an ex-
tensive grey area, where the regime elicited support - often
grudging, conditional, even faintly fatalistic - on the basis of
expedience. Ejidatarios (land reform beneficiaries) who wanted
to keep their land had to support the regime, as did trade
unionists who sought the favour of the state arbitration service.
Civil servants were government supporters by definition.137 To
some degree, therefore, demonstrations of mass adherence to
the 'public transcript' were a testimony to state patronage and
state sanctions; they cannot be taken as incontrovertible proof
of popular internalizations of the norms of the revolutionary
regime and its associated myth.

The Classic Period, 1940-1982

There is, however, some suggestive - not conclusive - evidence
of the permeation of those norms. That evidence derives from the
1960s, which means that we make a penultimate chronological
leap from the formative period of myth construction to the
'classic' (post- 1940) period, which saw the comfortable heyday
of the Pax PRIista and the Mexican 'economic miracle' (c.1950-
c.1980). During that period, the official party enjoyed unprece-
dented electoral support and the regime faced no serious threat to
its stability; hence, as the rest of Latin America reeled from civil-
ian to military rule and back again, Mexico remained a major
oasis of political continuity, civilian government and sustained,
low-inflation economic growth. During the same period, the
myth of the Revolution crystallized (or, some would say, ossified) .
More statues went up; the Instituto Nacional de Estudios
Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana (1953) began a plethora
of publications; a fresh batch of free textbooks - still nationalist
and 'revolutionary', but less 'socialist' and class-conscious in
their emphases - was delivered to the proliferating primary

136 Knight, 'Politics of the Expropriation'.

137 For example Benjamin, La Revolución, 1 14. It should be remembered, however,
that, contrary to some assertions, the Mexican government bureaucracy, at least
during the formative and classic periods, was not that enormous (it could not compare,
for instance, with its Soviet equivalent, even in relative terms) . Bureaucratic hyper-
trophy did not occur in Mexico until the 1970s.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 261

schools of the republic.138 In 1960 the fiftieth anniversary

Revolution was celebrated with a good deal of official co
cency and back-slapping; the Revolution was applauded f
constructive achievements over half a century, while the m
ous civil strife of the early years was glossed over.139 The o
party, since 1946 the Partido Revolucionario Institucional,
looked a lot more Institutional than it did Revolutionary.
Again, it does not follow that discursive efforts, the mon
ous incantation of the myth, guaranteed stability. In my v
clientelism coupled with economic growth, which in turn
clientelism more feasible, explains a great deal, without req
forays into normative/discursive aetiology. However, th
some good evidence that, by the 1960s, when reliable survey
data first becomes available, many Mexicans had internalized
the values - hence, in part, the myth - of the Mexican
Revolution. The early surveys show that, while Mexicans enter-
tained a healthy scepticism about politicians, trade unions and
(above all) the police, they still placed faith in the goals and
aspirations of the Mexican Revolution.140 Schoolchildren, too,
were reasonably well informed about national heroes and the
Mexican political system.141 Of course, knowing is not the
same as believing or endorsing (although, it is worth point-
ing out, knowing - that is, cognitive grasp - is a necessary
prerequisite of believing - that is, affective endorsement). But
there is evidence that schools successfully inculcated notions of
nationalism and social solidarity, which accorded with the broad
principles of the Revolution.142 Some cognitive and normative
'internalization' of the Revolution and its myth clearly occurred,

138 Benjamin, La Revolución, 124, 148-9, 150.

139 México: cincuenta años de revolución.
140 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963).
Segovia, La politización del niño mexicano.
1 42 Bradley A. Levinson, We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican
Secondary School, 1988-1998 (Durham, NC, 2001), found a strong ethic of social
solidarity, nationalism and egalitarianism among secondary-school teachers: 'virtually
all the teachers shared a strong commitment to the integrative goals of the State and
the formation of a national identity' (p. 76). These teachers, born between roughly
1930 and 1965, would have been typical products of official pedagogy during the
classic period. However, their pupils were veering in a quite different direction: they
were ignorant of history, tepid in their displays of patriotism, and concerned to make
good individually in an increasingly competitive market society.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 262 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

even if it is impossible to measure its s

exaggerate its impact.
While surveys did not usually probe historical beliefs and
assumptions, they suggest that the myth of the Revolution had
won converts, even if respondents believed that the politicians of
the day were venal and corrupt. Thus, the Revolution to some
extent emancipated itself from quotidian politics: a reasonable
litmus test of legitimacy. Using James Scott's terminology, we
could say that the myth of the Revolution provided a form of
'public transcript', widely, though far from unanimously,
endorsed, against which citizens - often critical and disgruntled
citizens - judged the regime, its minions and its actions.
Quantitative evidence apart, the oral, impressionistic record sug-
gests that the grand myth had either supplanted, or been grafted
onto, the episodic memories of early participants (a process which
has been referred to as 'encapsulation').143 What is more, by the
1960s, those early participants were fast dwindling in number
(the veterans of the armed revolution were now a small elderly
minority, while those who had lived through the radical days of
the Cárdenas reforms in the 1 930s were well into middle age) . 144
Thus it became easier for the regime to gloss over the awkward
tensions of earlier periods, which, for most Mexicans, were now
part of 'pure' history, detached from personal experience and
'imagined' on the basis of family upbringing, schooling and the
popular media, especially film and radio. Once again, temporal
distance made the heart grow fonder, even as the memory grew
fainter.145

143 Eric Van Young, 'The State as Vampire - Hegemonic Projects, Public Ritual
and Popular Culture in Mexico, 1600-1990', in Beezley, Martin and French (eds.),
Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance, 349. As I have noted above (n. 134), this pro-
cess of twentieth-century 'encapsulation' roughly followed the precedent set by
nineteenth-century 'patriotic liberalism', which involved a similar fusion of local
and national allegiances.
144 With a population growth of 3.5 per cent per year in 1960, Mexico was an
increasingly young society: 45 per cent of Mexicans were under 15, while only 11
per cent were over 50 (that is, born before the Revolution broke out in 1910): Jorge
Martinez Manautou (ed.), The Demographic Revolution in Mexico, 1970-1980 (Mexico
Citv, 1982), 21, 26.
145 Segovia, La politización del niño mexicano, 90, notes that Juárez - the most
popular historical figure - had the advantage (over the revolutionaries of 1910-20)
of being older and more remote. The advantages of age are broadly confirmed by
Beltrán, 'El ranking de los héroes patrios', 94 (Juárez ties for first place with Hidalgo).

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 263

Thus., while the stability and hegemony of the PRI prim

depended on economic and politico-clientelist factors, the
established myth of the Revolution, shared by many, but n
Mexicans, also helped. Compared with most Latin American
countries, therefore, Mexico possessed a fairly well-developed
sense of nationality, historical trajectory and related norms,
which transcended the venal failings of politicians.146 As one
schoolteacher put it: 'history, impelled by the Revolution in a
progressive direction, cannot be held back, even if there are back-
ward groups in Mexico who might try'.147

The Post-Classic Period, 1982 Onwards

But, as today's Mexican policy-makers and opinion-mongers
might respond: 'nous avons changé tout cela'. Since the 1980s,
if not before, the hegemony of the PRI and its 'revolutionary'
ideology have faded: challenges have emerged from civil society,
from the political opposition, and from the changing global
political economy; hence the old model has been progressively
discarded and, in the crucial election of 2000, the PRI surren-
dered power to a PANista president, an ideological descendant of
the political Catholics who had challenged the legitimacy of the
Revolution almost since its inception. This transformation
occurred amid economic crises, armed rebellion and a renewed
bout of magnicidios (low-level assassinations, we should note, had
never ceased, even at the height of the Pax PRIista). The current
post-classic period, like its pre-Columbian counterpart (c.800-
1519), has been a 'time of troubles', following the long stability
and stasis of the classic era.
It is also a complex transformation which, unlike the Revolu-
tion, is too recent to benefit from profound historical analysis.

146 The question of national identity is, of course, analytically distinct from that of
revolutionary allegiance: the Revolution may have sought to inculcate a specific form
of revolutionary nationalism, yoking Nation and Revolution together in a tight two-
some, but there were robust alternative forms of nationalism (for example the clerical
Catholic version); and, I would argue, Mexico's national identity, in its varied and
shifting forms, long antedated the Revolution. The Revolution could capitalize on
existing national sentiments (hence the Independence > Reforma > Revolution
sequence), but it could claim no effective monopoly of nationalism, and allegiance to
the Revolution could fade without any necessary erosion of national identity. Compare
the Russian > Soviet > Russian experience.
Lourdes Arispe, citing maestro Ernesto Romero Sánchez, in 'Prólogo', in Los
maestros y la cultura nacional, iii, 12. See also Levinson, We Are All Equal, 33, 67, 78,
371.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 264 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

The decline and (partial) fall of the PR

causes (the growth of opposition, espe
cities and the prosperous north); to eco
tion of the old import-substituting in
the 1970s and the rush to neo-liberali
crisis of the 1980s); and, it has been a
bankruptcy of the Revolution after
would stress the first two causes over t
both the Mexican and the global polit
maintenance of the old development mo
possible. As a result, by the 1980s Me
experiencing high inflation, and commi
privatization, free trade and North Am
architects of these new policies, presidents De la Madrid
(1982-8) and Salinas (1988-94), decided that a discursive
break had to accompany these changes of policy. For decades,
Mexican governments had parroted revolutionary slogans -
nationalist, reformist, populist - even as their policies promoted
a regressive capitalism and growing inequality. During the 1960s
and 1970s, observers readily noted the great gulf which, since the
1 940s, had opened up between rhetoric and practice, between the
public transcript and public conduct (which the Almond and
Verba data tended to corroborate).149 For decades, too, oppon-
ents of the regime had invoked the myth of the Revolution - the
regime's 'public transcript5 - as a means to challenge its legitim-
acy. Agrarian rebels like Rubén Jaramillo, hunted down and killed
by the army in 1 962, invoked the memory and example of Zapata
(both happened to be natives of Morelos).150 Civilian and
148 The date when the decline of the PRI began is open to debate. The student
movement and repression of 1968 is often cited and, perhaps, exaggerated, given the
two sexenios of PRIísta dominance which followed. However, by the 1980s and 1990s,
decline is unmistakable; and some experts have no hesitation in attributing decline to
discursive bankruptcy: 'myth is a metaphor for society's faith and hope in the nation
and a key subjective element of social cohesion. A chilling component of the NAFTA
period (1992 onwards) is that Mexicans find themselves with no national myth at all.
Revolutionary nationalism has evaporated . . . [and] with the absence of hope in a clear
national project . . . Mexico finds itself mired in the process of disintegration': James F.
Rochlin, cited (approvingly) in Gawronski, 'Revolution Is Dead', 391.
149 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture. Alan Knight, 'México bronco, México manso:
una reflexión sobre la cultura cívica mexicana', Política y gobierno, iii (1996), addresses
this 'schizoid' politics.
150 Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement
and the Myth of the Pax PRIísta, 1940-1962 (Durham, NC, 2008). Zapata was regu-
larly invoked by agrarian rebels and protesters: Armando Bartra, Los herederos de
(cont. on p. 265)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 265

electoral protests, like that associated with Dr Salvador Na

San Luis Potosí, cited the democratic example of Mader
Both the regime and its opponents therefore appealed t
same history and the same heroes. This was a discursive civil
war, fought on the traditional terrain of the Revolution; terrain
which, after decades of assiduous myth-making, was well known
to all Mexicans.
But it was a war the regime won, at least in the sense of com-
fortably retaining power. Jaramillo was killed and Nava was de-
frauded. It is hard to believe that the regime's victory depended on
its superior normative claims: as we have seen, many Mexicans
doubted the regime's fidelity to its 'public transcript' and the
revolutionary myth was looking increasingly 'mythical' (in the
secondary, colloquial sense of false or unconvincing: 'any belief
that has no foundation in fact') . * 52 But the regime could still crack
heads; it controlled the electoral process; and it exercised sub-
stantial influence over the mass media. However, up to, and even
including, the 1970s, the PRI presided over a robust economy, in
which real wages rose and young Mexicans could reasonably
expect to enjoy a better education and life chances than their
parents. If rapid growth provided jobs for Mexico's swelling
population, the PRI, and its allied trade unions, controlled a sig-
nificant slice of the job market, including coveted positions in
government, party and bureaucracy. The regime could withstand
a good deal of structural hypocrisy - spouting revolutionary
rhetoric long after the Revolution had been consigned to history

(n. 150 com.)

Zapata: movimientos campesinos posrevolucionarios en México, 1920-1980 (Mexico City,
1985), 106-8, 110, 112. Stephen, Zapata Lives/, 126-8, notes the continued invoca-
tion of the symbolism of the Mexican Revolution and Zapata' throughout the 1970s
and 1980s.
151 Wil Pansters, 'Citizens with Dignity: Opposition and Government in San Luis
Potosí, 1938-93', in Rob Aitken et al. (eds.), Dismantling the Mexican State?
(Basingstoke, 1996), 262.
152 Tudor, Political Myth, 13. For some postmodern enragés, of course, all history is
'mythical' (i.e. subjective and unverifiable), hence 'myth' and 'history' are inter-
changeable. However, I would agree with Stocking that 'a distinction between myth
and history, or between more and less mythical views of history is worth attempting in
the practice of historiography'; and, indeed, without such a distinction this article
becomes meaningless. See George W. Stocking, 'Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski:
Archetypes from the Dreamtime of Anthropology', in George W. Stocking Jr (ed.),
Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge
(Madison, 1991), 12-13.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
266 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

- so long as the economy grew, jobs w

standards rose.
By the 1980s, however, the good times were over. The PRI's
pact with the people - a low-budget Mexican variant of François
Guizot's enrichissez-vous - began to fall apart, as unemployment
rose, inflation eroded real wages and state benefits were cut. The
gap between revolutionary rhetoric (or myth), on the one hand,
and 'revolutionary', that is, PRIista, practice, on the other, grew
greater, becoming both more obvious and, to the mass of the
people, more galling. In the 1970s, President Echeverría, chas-
tened by the student protest of 1968, sought, in erratic populist
fashion, to close the gap by reviving land reform, boosting state
spending and indulging in radical 'Third World' nationalist rhet-
oric. The result was sharp political polarization, high inflation,
huge debt, capital flight and the 'delegitimization' of the
presidency.153
The neo-liberal technocrats who came to power in the 1980s
therefore elected to close the discursive gap in a different way: not
by returning to the old policies of agrarian reform and economic
nationalism (as Echeverría had attempted, and as radicals like
Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas and Subcomandante Marcos still advo-
cated),154 but by pitching a new, neo-liberal appeal to the people,
especially to the burgeoning and discontented middle classes of
the teeming cities; an appeal which the multinationals and foreign
banks welcomed, along with powerful elements within the
Mexican private sector.155 It fell to Carlos Salinas (1988-94),
one of Mexico's most clever and inventive presidents, to break
decisively with the discursive past - with the myth of the
Revolution - and to try to shift the PRI's claims to legitimacy

153 Samuel Schmidt, The Deterioration of the Mexican Presidency: The Years of Luis
Echeverría^ ed. and trans. Dan A. Cothran (Tucson, 1991).
154 I do not mean to suggest that Cárdenas, as leader of the PRD (Partido de la
Revolución Democrática), or Marcos, spokesman of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional; Zapatista Army of National Liberation), simply recycled the old
nostrums of the Revolution: both - Marcos especially - also innovated; and the PRD
has evolved since its foundation in 1988. Nevertheless, both defended the 'revolution-
ary' principles of agrarian reform and economic nationalism in the face of the
neo-liberal critique of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
155 The Mexican private sector was divided over the question of economic liberal-
ization: some of the larger, northern businesses, closely linked to the United States,
were in favour; smaller companies, dependent on high tariffs and the domestic market,
were leery.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 267

to a new 'First World', economic and technocratic rational

The Salinas project, which was broadly maintained by his
successor, Ernesto Zedillo, embodied several elements. To the
aspiring middle class it promised economic growth, moderniza-
tion, free trade (hence cheap foreign imports) and a democratic
opening, at least to the right - to the business-friendly, discreetly
Catholic PAN. To the poor, Salinas offered PRONASOL (the
National Solidarity Programme), a cleverly updated form of trad-
itional populism, which provided material benefits at the hands of
a casually dressed, folksy, itinerant president.157 To the United
States, Salinas held out the unprecedented proposal of a free
trade zone. But to the parliamentary left, chiefly the nascent
PRD, which still carried the torch of the Revolution and was led
by the son of the great reformist president of the 1930s, Lázaro
Cárdenas, Salinas proved implacably hostile.158
Unlike previous PRI presidents, Salinas was not content
to change policy while retaining - and paying hypocritical lip-
service to - the old myth of the Revolution. He explicitly wound
up the land reform programme, ending redistribution and
enabling ejidatarios to buy the freehold of their plots.159 He
acknowledged the juridical personality of the Catholic Church
and welcomed the pope to Mexico. And, of course, he sacrificed
traditional economic nationalism on the altar of NAFTA. But
he went further: he sought to legitimize his project with a new
label - 'social liberalism' - and a new lineage, that of progres-
sive nineteenth-century liberalism, which was supposedly demo-
cratic, market-friendly, patriotic and socially responsible.160
'Social liberalism5, which was briefly promoted with Orwellian

Miguel Ángel Centeno, Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in

Mexico (University Park, 1994), is the best survey in English.
157 Wayne A. Cornelius, Ann L. Craig and Jonathan Fox (eds.), Transforming State-
Society Relations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy (La Tolla. 1994Ì.
Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
(New York, 2004), 199-204.
The effects have been quite limited: Wayne A. Cornelius and David Myhre
(eds.), The Transformation of Rural Mexico: Reforming the Ejido Sector (La Tolla, 1998).
160 At the PRI's sixteenth National Convention in September 1 993, Salinas obliged
the party to drop 'revolutionary nationalism' in favour of 'social liberalism' in its
Declaration of Principles: Francisco E. González, Dual Transitions from Authori-
tarian Rule: Institutionalized Regimes in Chile and Mexico, 1970-2000 (Baltimore,
2008), 187. On the historiographical question, see Alan Knight, 'Salinas and Social
Liberalism in Historical Context', in Aitken et al. (eds.), Dismantling the Mexican
State?

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
268 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

ingenuity and enthusiasm, was a make

duced history and patently served con
ests. It had the great advantage of vau
of 1910, and seeking historical purchas
teenth century, finding precursors, su
who were reassuringly remote, obsc
was an ersatz myth which probably w
but which at least provided a conven
Salinas's ingenious blend of economic
ical populism. It worked so long as the
In addition, Salinas promoted a reform
riculum which, even more boldly, di
myths in favour of a new, neo-liber
1992 - a year when the quincentenar
the plight of Native Americans - Sal
Ernesto Zedillo, introduced a swathe o
pulsory, free, school textbooks.161 The
because of the way contracts were awa
because of the contents of the books. C
claimed that the books eliminated ol
Canek, El Pipila, Felipe Carrillo Puerto
critical treatment to others (Cuauht
Juárez, Zapata); rehabilitated erstwhile
Anna, Diaz); neglected the post- 1940 s
Indians; and, unlike most previous tex
to the present, giving short shrift to t
era (Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría, López P
length on the wise statesmanship of P
The old themes of revolutionary natio
were excised, in favour of 'economic
meant low tariffs, privatization, state
foreign investment.162
As a result of the ensuing outcry, the
but left to moulder in a Mexico City w
to trash the myth of the Revolution had,
lesson was rammed home with the u
January 1994 and, six years later, with

161 Dennis Gilbert, 'Rewriting History: Salinas

Controversy', Mexican Studies I Estudios Mexicanos,
in English.
162 Ibid., 276-7.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 269

the opposition PAN in the historic presidential election of

2000. In breaking with their discursive past, it seemed, th
contrived to lose power after seventy-one years in office.
There is some truth in this argument, just as there is some tr
in the notion that the long hegemony of the PRI, especially
its classic heyday, was bolstered by a discursive legitimacy,
in the myth of the Revolution. But this truth can easily be
gerated. Just as the old - enduring, successful, revolution
myth depended on favourable politico-economic circumsta
so, too, Salinas's new - short-lived, experimental, 'social lib
- myth was vulnerable to politico-economic vicissitudes. Sa
clearly resolved to relinquish the old norms along with th
policies; he did not want to maintain and exacerbate the st
tural hypocrisy involved in claiming revolutionary - he
nationalist, reformist, redistributionist, agrarian - legitim
while winding up the ejido, cutting tariffs, privatizing state
prises, embracing the pope and joining NAFTA. The wid
gap between discourse and practice threatened to become a
bridgeable chasm, and Salinas decided to effect a closer
ditching the greater part of the old discourse. In so doi
sought a new electoral alliance with the growing urban mi
class, while placating the poor with PRONASOL. For most
presidency, he succeeded. Initially weak, he became a rema
popular president.163 The left opposed his policies, but
couped support on the centre and right. 'Social liberalis
not, I think, win hordes of genuine converts, but it provid
window-dressing for a neo-liberal project which, so lon
brought economic recovery and low inflation, was gen
popular: hence the strong performance of the PRI in the
mid-term elections of 1991 and the victory of the party's candi-
date, Ernesto Zedillo, in the - generally free and fair - elections
ofjulyl994.164
Ditching revolutionary discourse certainly caused offence in
some quarters. The PRD combined elements of the old left,

163 Schettino, Cien años de confusión, 426, 434; Kathleen Bruhn, Taking on Goliath:
The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico (University
Park, 1997), 272-3.
164 In 1988 the PRI received, according to the official count, 49 per cent of the
presidential vote (the opposition claimed the true figure was nearer 33 per cent); but in
1991 the party bounced back to 61 per cent, while in 1994 it got a (genuine) 49 per
cent, compared with the PAN's 26 per cent: Vikram K. Chand, Mexico's Political
Awakening (Notre Dame, 2001), 47-53.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
270 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

including the Communist Party, with

who resented the technocrats' takeover
Zapatistas rebelled in opposition to Sa
liberalism.166 And, on the narrower but
education, Salinas was forced to withdr
textbooks. (The politics of Mexican education, however, is
notoriously complicated and devious. A good deal of oppos-
ition stemmed from vested interests, protecting jobs and power,
rather than from the disinterested outrage of revolutionary
nationalists: the instrumental use of myth is not a monopoly of
the PRI or the government.) It is crucial to note, however, that all
these challenges - the formation of the PRD, the textbook con-
troversy, the Zapatista revolt - preceded Zedillo's comfortable
election, as PRI presidential candidate, in the summer of 1994.
Salinas left office an apparently successful president; it seemed
that he had successfully subverted both the political economy and
the myth of the Revolution.
The subversion was real, but the success was ephemeral. In
December 1994 a major economic crisis followed on the heels
of Zedillo's inauguration. Mexico entered its third recession in
twelve years, and its worst since 1930. We need not probe the
causes or immediate consequences: suffice to say that the
1994-5 recession, which dashed both hopes of First World afflu-
ence and confidence in neo-liberal economic management, made
possible the dramatic victory of Vicente Fox and the PAN in the
presidential election of 2000. 167 Salinas's calculated dismissal of
the old myth of the Revolution, while it had offended some, had
gratified others; and probably left many indifferent. It did not, of
itself, ruin his reputation or doom the PRI. His fall from grace
derived from economic mismanagement,168 coupled with

165 Bruhn, Taking on Goliath, ch. 3.

166 The Zapatista rebellion attracted more superficial comment than serious schol-
arship. Sound analyses in English are George A. Collier with Elizabeth Lowery
Quaratiello, Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Oakland, 1994);
Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham,
NC, 1998).
167 Throughout the 1990s economic issues were uppermost in voters' minds:
Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, 152-4; Jorge I. Domínguez and James A.
McCann, Democratizing Mexico: Public Opinion and Electoral Choices (Baltimore,
1996), 158.
168 Whether the blame lay with outgoing President Salinas or incoming President
Zedillo is - and will remain - a matter of acrimonious debate; the argument goes
beyond the personal and hinges on the relative weight of structural causes (the whole
(cont. on p. 271)

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 27 1

subsequent revelations of Salinista corruption, not from

majesté against the myth of the Revolution. That myth had
gressively parted company with practical reality since 1940,
when it remained on the lips of every career politician in the
completo, the 'full bus', of the PRI. In Mexico, as in east
Europe,169 myth and reality had diverged, producing a kin
structural hypocrisy on the part of the regime, and a deeply roo
cynicism on the part of many Mexicans. The myth was certa
weaker than it had been in its heyday; but it was not defunct, an
retained an appeal in distinct sectors and regions, as the ele
of 1 988 and the neo-Zapatista movement revealed. 1 70 By the ti
Salinas took the bold decision to repudiate the myth of
Revolution, it had come to serve less as an effective means
legitimizing the regime, than as a rallying cry for opponent
dependent unions who demonstrated en masse in the shadow
the Monument to the Revolution;171 an opposition party w
leader fortunately combined the evocative names of Cuauht
and Cárdenas; 1 72 and masked guerrillas who, denouncing Sa
and NAFTA, raised the banner of Zapata in the remote L
dón forests of Chiapas. By the 1990s, the myth of the R
lution - carefully inculcated during the formative perio
complacently maintained throughout the long classic era - h
been captured by the opposition and turned against the reg
itself. Its function was now more contestatory than legitimi
Salinas's repudiation of the myth was part cause, part c
quence, of this new alignment. But, as the electoral fortun
the party during the 1990s showed, repudiation did not

(n. 168 com.)

Salinista neo-liberal project) as against contingent decisions (the so-called 'er
December [1994]') taken by the Zedillo administration.
1 69 See Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Re
in Eastern Euroùe and Latin America (Cambridge. 1991"). 2.
170
For example, in the Laguna region of northern Mexico and, mutatis mutandis,
the southern state of Chiapas: Bruhn, Taking On Goliath, 129-30; Stephen, Zapata
Lives!, 126-7, 147-9.
171 Benjamin, La Revolución, 161-2, lists examples: railwaymen in 1959, electri-
cians in 1975, university workers in 1979. When, in 1958, the schoolteachers formed
an independent union, the Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio, they pro-
claimed that it 'has faith in the Mexican Revolution and its emancipatory task and
declares each of its members a soldier in that Revolution': Aurora Loyo Brambila, El
movimiento magisterial de 1958 en México (Mexico City, 1979), 87.
Cuauhtemoc being the Aztec prince who died resisting the Spaniards (and
whose bones had supposedly been discovered at Ixcateopan: see n. 49 above); and
(Lázaro) Cárdenas being the radical reforming president of the 1930s.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 272 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 209

defeat; a neo-liberal, technocratic PRI c

counter-constituency to whom the myt
never appealed (political Catholics, big
tive middle class) or for whom it had
PRI fell not so much because its discursi
but because, having claimed technocra
mismanaged the economy, or was see
electorate then turned to a supposedly
Coca-Cola executive and a representat
anti-revolutionary constituency, Vice
Fox barnstormed his way to the preside
official party's seventy-one-year tenure of
he would govern in these unprecedented
he be able to to create an alternative
on the incongruent symbols of Coca-Co
The question assumed that the PRI lost
lapsed and that regimes, like nations or
without myths.173 Nearly a decade on,
answer: Fox, a much better candidate th
proved hesitant and indecisive; he squan
capital; and he certainly failed to cr
Catholic, Coca-Cola? - myth in place
this is a question mal posée. Like its coun
Union, the Mexican revolutionary myth
tinct historical circumstances; it never
Mexican minds; thus its hegemony was
holes - a 'Swiss-cheese' hegemony, it
been painstakingly built up over decade
vided the mythical carapace for a regim
depended a great deal on the workings
economy. While the latter functioned (r

173 William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essa

vances this odd and rather obscurantist thesis. Since
society ... in the absence of believable myths, publ
sustain'; therefore, 'discrediting old myths without
erodes the basis for common action'.
174 This seems to reflect a contemporary syndrome whereby good - which means
glib, well-financed, telegenic - candidates turn into poor presidents (or prime
ministers) .
Wayne A. Cornelius, 'Subnational Politics and Democratization: lensions be-
tween Center and Periphery in the Mexican Political System', in Wayne A. Cornelius,
Todd A. Eisenstadt and Jane Hindley (eds.), Subnational Politics and Democratization in
Mexico (La Jolla, 1999), 4. Credit for this trope (or même?) goes to Jeffrey Rubin.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE MYTH OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION 273

period, ¿'1950-c.l980), the myth helped. But the myth increa

ingly parted company with a contrasting reality; and when
economy foundered after 1980, the myth could not save
regime; indeed, it had increasingly become a critical and conte
tory myth, deployed against the regime by its opponents. In
form, it still survives and may even receive some refurbishm
from the aniversary of 2010. But Salinas's 'social liberal' gam
nearly paid off; and had the economy not succumbed in 1994
the PRI might well have survived several more years,176 notw
standing its discursive apostasy, its repudiation of the Revolu
in favour of 'social liberalism', and its promotion of Poncian
Arriaga over the old caudillos of the Revolution.

St Antony's College, Oxford Alan Knight

176 Miguel Basáñez, El pulso de los sexenios: 20 años de crisis en México (Mexico City,
1990), charts a progressive loss of support for the PRI throughout the 1970s and
1980s, a trend which clearly indicated that, at some future point, the PRI would
lose power. But the how, when (precisely), and why of the denouement remained
open, subject to a range of contingent factors.

This content downloaded from

194.94.133.193 on Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:34:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms