https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/13/books/history-out-of-chaos.html
MARCH 13, 1988
History Out of Chaos
REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO<
The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution.
By John Mason Hart. Illustrated. 478 pp.
Berkeley: University of California Press. $35.
By CARLOS FUENTES
The Mexican Revolution of 1910-21 was at least three revolutions. Revolution No. 1 - fixed forever in pop iconography - was the agrarian, small-town movement led by chiefs such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. This was a locally based revolt, intent on restoring village rights to lands, forests and waters. Its project favored a decentralized, self-ruling, communitarian democracy, inspired by shared traditions. It was, in many ways, a conservative revolution.
Revolution No. 2, more blurry in the icons of the mind, was the national, centralizing and modernizing revolution led originally by Francisco Madero, then by Venustiano Carranza after Madero's assassination in 1913, and finally consolidated in power by the two forceful statesmen of 1920's Mexico: Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Elias Calles. Their purpose was to create a modern national state, capable of setting collective goals while promoting private prosperity.
Somewhere between the two, and definitely dim in the collective memory, an incipient proletarian revolution took place, reflecting the displacement of Mexico's traditional artisanal class by modern factory methods. Radicalized by anarcho-syndicalist theories and leaders, the nascent working class staged the two greatest challenges against the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship: the strike of the textile workers in Rio Blanco in 1906 and, a few months later, the miners' strike at Cananea. During the Revolution itself, workers banded in so-called Red Battalions and helped Carranza, but retained their autonomy under the organization called Casa del Obrero Mundial, an alliance of self-governing labor unions. In general, the workers looked down on the peasants as primitives and reactionaries, and looked beyond the middle-class leadership and its respect for private property toward worker control of factories and expulsion of national and foreign capitalists.
Revolution No. 2 finally triumphed over revolutions 1 and 3 and established, between 1920 and 1940, the institutions of modern Mexico. How this came about, and from what social and historical depths modern Mexico has emerged, is the subject of John Mason Hart's probing and passionate inquiry, ''Revolutionary Mexico.'' Mr. Hart, who teaches history at the University of Houston, has published his book at an opportune moment. The United States' relationship with Mexico is, perhaps, second in importance only to its relationship with Moscow, yet the disparity between the attention given to the Soviet Union and that granted to Mexico (and, by extension, to Latin America) is flagrant.
As the power of both the United States and the Soviet Union diminish and a post-Yalta multipolar world emerges, Mexico and Latin America are becoming less dependent on either great power, more closely allied to Western Europe and the countries of the Pacific Basin and more closely knit among themselves, as an Ibero-American community. Relations between the Americas will be vastly restructured in the next decade, and nothing will be gained by mutual ignorance. Mr. Hart's book goes a long way toward dispelling myths and clarifying the process of Mexican history.
Mexico's history is sometimes presented like a layer cake: you can slice it evenly and in well-cut segments. The Indian world was conquered by the Spaniards in 1521, followed by three centuries of colonial rule. Political independence was achieved between 1810 and 1821, and dictatorship, anarchy and the loss of half the national territory to the United States in 1847 ensued. The liberal reform led by Benito Juarez in the 1850's was the first attempt at modernization, but it was interrupted by conservative reaction, French intervention and Maximilian's short-lived empire. Modernization without democracy was the hallmark of the long-lived Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, which began in 1876 and was finally overthrown by the revolution of 1910. The revolution itself went through an armed phase until 1920, and then what has been called a constructive phase until 1940. A stage of growth and equilibrium then seemed to have been reached, until the economic crisis of the 1980's again threw the whole question of Mexican history and its direction into discussion.
As in all layer pastries, nevertheless, beneath the icing lie the real goodies: jams, doughs and chocolate creeks running up and down the cake. Mr. Hart's book is not about the icing or the slicing of the cake, but about the way it is filled. Several strains are immediately perceived. One is the continuity of the social struggle in Mexico: the Mexican Revolution, one could argue from reading Mr. Hart, actually began the day after the fall of the Aztecs to the conquistador Hernando Cortes. The second is the tension, within that continuity, between the dynamics of modernization and the values of tradition. This implies, at every stage of Mexican history, an adjustment between past and present whose most original feature is admitting the presence of the past. Nothing seems to be totally canceled by the future in the Mexican experience: styles of life and legal claims dating from the Aztec or colonial centuries are still relevant in our times.
It is one of the strengths of Mr. Hart's book that he not only understands the presence of the past in Mexico, but that he organizes the mutual responses of traditionalism and modernization so clearly. He does this by distinguishing, beyond neat chronological slices, Manichaean melodrama (Mexico as a history of heroes and villains), personal theatrics (Mexico as the story of powerful personalities) or even changes of political administrations, a continuity of social groupings whose interests, at times concurrent, at times inimical, truly explain the dynamics of revolutionary Mexico.
I hope that I am not simplifying too much when I single out the four groups that Mr. Hart subjects to intensive study: peasants, urban workers, middle class or petite bourgeoisie and provincial elites. Hovering over them, at times distant and unconcerned, at times intrusive and often repressive, is the central state in all its guises: autocratic Indian empire, Spanish monarchy in its two phases (Hapsburgs from 1521 to 1700 - paternalistic, removed, but extremely wily at undercutting the colonial elites - and Bourbons from 1700 to 1821 -interventionist, modernizing busybodies, convinced that the role of the state was to promote development). This triple tradition - Aztec, Hapsburg and Bourbon -was lost by the independent Republic as, along with the rest of Spanish America, we launched into the extralogical imitation of the laws and institutions of Britain, France and the United States. The Mexican Revolution can, in a way, be seen (in this and many cultural matters) as a return to the source. The modern Mexican state - authoritarian, paternalistic, teleologically geared toward the achievement of the common good and therefore more interested in unity than in pluralism - is nearer to Aquinas than to Montesquieu.
Mr. Hart concentrates on the social and economic movements of Mexican history more than on the development of the national state, and he is right to do so, since his method permits the reader to grasp seldom-understood processes. The peasantry of Mexico, for example, is correctly seen as a traditionalist class, interested in restoring communitarian rights of land tenure and production derived from the preconquest era and later confirmed by the monarchy's own legal vision of eminent domain. The relative equilibrium of the colonial era, as oppressive and as protected as it came to be, was radically destroyed by liberal activism in the 19th century. The liberal laws outlawing communal property led to massive land seizures and dispossession of village lands by local landed elites; from this eventually sprang the latifundia system of the Porfirio Diaz regime, which vastly benefited the Mexican oligarchy and foreign, mainly United States, landowners.
''Revolutionary Mexico'' minutely researches a little-known area, that of United States landed property in Mexico during the Diaz dictatorship. By 1910, it amounted to 100 million acres, including much of the most valuable mining, agricultural and timber land, and representing 22 percent of Mexico's land surface. The complexes owned by William Randolph Hearst alone extended to almost eight million acres. But by 1910, 90 percent of the peasants had become landless.
The Diaz regime began, in 1876, as a dynamic and modernizing administration. Mr. Hart describes it as broadly based in a country of 9.5 million people (Mexico today has 10 times more inhabitants), and enjoying the general support of the middle class and the provincial elites until the end of the 19th century. But as the Porfiriato permitted the development of Mexico to be defined, more and more, from abroad, the middle groups saw themselves cut off as major profits went to foreign companies. These foreign groups had great interest in promoting exports, but little interest in expanding the internal market.
This schema, imposed on a basically agrarian society with a strong landowning class, resulted in a weak bourgeoisie, in crushed peasant and labor movements and, finally, in a failure to incorporate the new groups - businessmen, professionals, administrators, ranchers - that the regime itself had originally fostered. The Diaz Government transformed thousands of traditional peasants and artisans into agrarian and industrial workers. But it also had to establish powerful security forces to see to it that workers stayed deunionized, strikes were broken and labor remained cheap. Repression, lack of opportunities, nationalist sentiments, susceptibility to economic contractions from abroad, claims to the land and new claims to power, finally brought together peasants, workers, the middle class and the provincial elites in revolution. As often happens, the society had outgrown the state and the state did not know it.
The author writes painstakingly on official United States responses to the social and political dynamics in Mexico, and while many of his facts are new, surprising and well researched, I do not think that they add up to his lapidary statement that ''the deeper significance of the Mexican Revolution'' was that of being ''a war of national liberation against the United States.'' Such an affirmation distracts from the overwhelming fact of Mexico as a nation searching for itself through the contradictions and revelations of revolutionary upheaval. The Revolution as self-knowledge, the Revolution as a cultural event, is the most lasting legacy of what went on between 1910 and 1940, and this event would have happened with or without the United States. It continues to nourish the arts, the literature, the collective psyche and the national identity of Mexico more than any other single factor of the Revolution. Yet every other factor includes the cultural perception of self, searching back into precolonial times.
But Mr. Hart is correct in saying that Mexico's claim to revolution is justified by the transformation of property ownership that took place, from absentee to local control and from foreign to national ownership. The story of the political and economic transformation of institutions is told on simultaneous national and international planes. What the middle class and provincial elites of Mexico, engaged in revolution, finally faced was a campesino-and-worker-led revolution that could establish a radical state based on popular power. The workers in the Casa del Obrero Mundial, over 100,000 strong, in 1916 defied a Government that had just triumphed on the battlefield by staging the largest general strikes in Mexican history. Their aim was workers' self-government, a program that continues to send shudders down the spines of capitalists and totalitarians alike, since it shuns them both. Villa and Zapata were adamant in demanding wholesale land redistribution and direct self-government for the agrarian communities. As Mr. Hart describes it, ''In the Villistas' wake, dozens of pueblos seized nearby estates and established collectives.'' Villa emancipated peasants, promulgated land distribution; in his name, thousands of lower-class rebels assaulted United States- and Mexican-owned haciendas.
Zapatismo proved to be incorruptible and undefeatable, and it constantly demonstrated its ''capacity to replace the state with decentralized self-government'' through a federation of free municipalities. And both the middle-class modernizing and centralizing leaders (Madero, Carranza, Obregon) and the United States saw in these movements the ultimate threat to their own interests. They tacitly banded against them, but naturally their respective sets of options were different. For the Wilson Administration, revolution in Mexico came to represent an unwanted choice between two extremes. Washington had to accept the triumph of a collectivist, anti-United States, radical and experimental but also confusingly traditionalist peasant and workers' revolution on the southern border - or it had to accede to demands from powerful United States factions that intervention against Mexico, and even annexation of Mexican territories, become Washington's official response to revolution.
These were no idle threats. Between March and September of 1913, the United States made enormous shipments of arms to the dictator Victoriano Huerta, in the hope of stopping the Carranza, Villa and Zapata revolts and of giving Huerta a chance to re-establish those two gringo fetishes, order and stability. The Wilson Administration, Mr. Hart points out, repeatedly signed exceptions to President Taft's previous embargo on arms to Mexico and only admitted the prohibition when it became obvious that Huerta, an incompetent and bloody tyrant, could not restore order.
The frontier was then opened to arms purchases by rebels, and this influx assured the recovery of central Mexico by the revolutionaries and the overthrow of Huerta. Along with this, the Wilson Government occupied the port city of Veracruz in 1913 and there amassed a huge arsenal of weapons. But as it faced a popular revolution it could neither understand nor control, the Wilson Presidency also faced the pressure of United States interests affected by the Revolution and impatient to intervene. Foremost among these were the above-mentioned Hearst, William F. Buckley Sr. of the Texas Oil Company and Senator Albert B. Fall, who asked for outright seizure and annexation of Mexico.
These extremes beheld their own imaginable catastrophes - not only a fear of lower-class collectivism, but a pre-Vietnam intuition of endless war, already foreseen by two generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, in 1847, when they withdrew from the heavily populated regions of central Mexico they had conquered, against the advice of those other two noted interventionists, Marx and Engels, who believed, like Buckley and Fall, that the only good Mexico was a Mexico ruled by the United States.
Engels, writing in The German Gazette of Brussels in 1848, greeted ''with due satisfaction, the defeat of Mexico by the United States. This too represents progress. For when a country until then perpetually embroiled in its own conflicts, perpetually torn by civil wars and with no way out for its development. . . . is forcibly dragged to historical progress, we have no alternative but to consider it as a step forward. In the interests of its own development, it was convenient that Mexico should fall under the tutelage of the United States. The evolution of all the American continent will lose nothing with this.'' The right to intervention that the two superpowers have taken unto themselves in our time (the so-called Brezhnev and Reagan doctrines) has deep historical roots in the 19th century.
Poised between pressures, Wilson chose the lesser evil: the middle-class and provincial elites led by Carranza. The arsenal at Veracruz (artillery, carbines, bayonets, machine guns, rifles, pistols, cartridges, grenades, barbed wire, poison gas and dynamite) was turned over by the Marines to Carranza. United States ships supporting the Carranza faction entered the ports of Mazatlan, Manzanillo, Acapulco, Salina Cruz and Guaymas, assuring the flow of supplies. Villa and Zapata were thus defeated. And so is, reading Mr. Hart, the myth of an immaculate Mexican Revolution that never received armed support from abroad.
But if Wilson had a problem, so had the middle-class leaders of the second revolution. They faced the double threat of a radical, self-governing lower-class movement making it to power and, if Buckley, Hearst and Fall were to be heard, partition, annexation or at least the creation of a United States protectorate over Mexico. The middle-class leaders had to reformulate, in contemporary terms, yet another strand running through the Mexican cake like chocolate syrup through a Sacher torte. This issue was nationalism, and even Diaz, who gave so much to the North Americans, felt toward the end of his regime that he had some redressing to do. He went out of his way to help the Nicaraguan nationalist president, Jose Santos Zelaya, against President Taft's interventionism, and, much to the chagrin of Standard Oil, Texaco and sundry Harriman and Stillman interests, he gave the British the upper hand in what until 1907 had been United States preserves in the Mexican economy: oil and railroads.
President Taft was not pleased. The United States then backed Madero against Diaz. But as Madero had to assure his own nationalist legitimacy, United States backing, as noted, shifted to Huerta and then to Carranza against the Villa-Zapata revolutionaries. But Carranza, who was forced to admit Brig. Gen. John J. (Black Jack) Pershing's punitive expedition against Villa in 1917, also had to balance that act with blushing coquetry towards Kaiser Wilhelm and with refusals to reassure United States banking, mining and oil interests of continued concessions in the future. Again, Senator Fall (who was to fall indeed as President Harding's Secretary of the Interior during the Teapot Dome scandal) was not pleased. The Obregon Government, while more radical ideologically than the preceding Carranza Administration, nevertheless reassured North American companies of their place in Mexico. The so-called Bucareli Accords of 1923 went so far as to guarantee the United States that Mexico would not apply its Constitution retroactively in matters regarding property of the subsoil. Yet again, in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas fully restored the constitutional mandate and went on to nationalize all foreign oil holdings.
The conflicting class interests made apparent by the Mexican Revolution did not come to an end with the defeat of Villa and Zapata and the assimilation of their surviving leadership, as well as that of the Casa unions, into the second revolution. The Constitution of 1917 was indeed, as Mr. Hart indicates, a result of the solidarity between provincial elites and rising middle class. Yet that document had to make concessions to all social classes. The Mexican Revolution then went on to consolidate itself in government or, as a revolutionary general famously remarked at the time, ''This revolution has now degenerated into a government.''
Out of necessity, or through sheer political genius, President Obregon, in the early 20's, gave the triumphant elite the chance to prove themselves as state builders, creating political institutions that would incorporate the defeated peasant and proletarian groups with the victorious middle groups. The new Government needed to continue its alliance with peasants and workers because it continued to face challenges left and right, from restless campesinos, from the church, from army dissidents, from the remnants of the ancien regime, from the United States and from the foreign companies. Throughout the administrations of Elias Calles and Lazaro Cardenas, between 1925 and 1940, the army and the church were brought under control, the central Government established its authority over rebellious military leaders, enormous advances were made in health, education and communications, a modus vivendi was reached with the United States during the Roosevelt Administration, and the former Villa, Zapata and Casa leaders were given a say in the umbrella organization that survives under its present title: P.R.I., or Party of Revolutionary Institutions. What would have happened in Mexico if Villa and Zapata had overcome? What if the workers in the Casa had achieved their ends? What if the Revolution, indeed, had not occurred, and Mexico had been left to its own tides of evolution? Indeed, what if the United States had continued as a British colony into the 20th century, or Russia had evolved under the czars? The questions are tantalizing but finally useless. As Mr. Hart comments, through the Revolution ''the masses made striking gains, eliminating most of the vestiges of caste and archaic social relations that still plague much of Latin America and opening society for public education and individual mobility.''
Nearly 70 years after the death of Zapata, Mexico again faces crisis and the need for change. An enormous development has taken place, along with great injustice. Again, as Mexico searches for solutions in economic modernization, it must also find them in political modernization. The society, as in 1910, has outstripped the institutions. But, once more, modernization cannot be achieved at the expense of the small agrarian communities, the forgotten world of Villa and Zapata. ''Revolutionary Mexico'' is a timely reminder that if Mexico is to achieve lasting growth, it must, at last, permit the strong central state to meet the peaceful challenge of self-government from below. The cultural element again becomes paramount, since the continuity of Mexican history implies an effort to admit the presence of the past, joining tradition with development.
Carlos Fuentes is the Robert F. Kennedy Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University.