Introduction

When most people think of revolution in Mexico, they are drawn to the Revolution of 1910, and with good reason. What started as a political rebellion against an aging dictator devolved into a full-blown civil war in 1913, followed by a constitutional convention and two decades of postrevolutionary state and nation building.1 We think of Francisco Madero's quixotic call for electoral democracy, Emiliano Zapata's relentless pursuit of land reform, and the photos of Pancho Villa and Zapata in the National Palace in late 1914, Villa enjoying himself immensely while Zapata looks like a trapped animal, expecting an ambush at any moment.

Mexico's Revolution of 1910 is still regarded as the country's most important single event since independence. But what if Mexicans experienced more meaningful change decades after the Revolution with a capital R?

This book proposes just that. It looks at Mexico's unscripted, unheralded, relatively understudied "revolutions" that have unfolded since 1958. What historians now call the Long 1960s brought generational change as many young Mexicans joined a global rebellion against patriarchy, religion, and government authority. By the late 1970s, Mexico's democratic transition was underway. Initiated by the hegemonic official party, it was pushed forward at crucial moments by ordinary citizens who joined social movements, opposition parties, and even armed insurgencies. Meanwhile, Mexican feminists challenged traditional gender roles. They were propelled forward by economic crises that forced them into the formal workplace as never before. Mexican society was in flux, and some of the ideological assumptions of the postrevolutionary state were challenged and cast aside. Not even the Catholic Church was immune to Mexico's unscripted revolutions, as the faithful increasingly sought alternative religious expressions. By 2000, a tenuous, thin democratic transition seemed complete, but democratic consolidation was hobbled by the persistence of inequality and corruption and a chilling spike in violence. The man who won the presidential election in 2018, populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), promised Mexico's "Fourth Transformation" but attacked the institutions that had presided over the democratic transition. This left some to wonder if, in fact, Mexico risked reverting to its authoritarian past.

The Mexican Revolution in Context

The Revolution of 1910 and the Constitution of 1917 cast long shadows over more recent Mexican history. The Revolution's first major protagonist, Francisco I. Madero, is remembered as the "apostle" of democracy. When he called for a national uprising in November 1910 against President Porfirio Díaz, who had just had himself reelected for a seventh time, he famously unleashed a tiger that he could not control. President Madero was betrayed and murdered by his most important general in 1913, but his antireelectionist crusade against Díaz left its mark. Four years after his demise, delegates at the constitutional convention in Querétaro enshrined his campaign slogan, "effective suffrage, no reelection," into law. Article 83 of the Constitution of 1917 limited presidents to a single four-year term. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) later made a mockery of Madero's legacy by controlling the presidency and every congressional and statewide political post for decades, but antireelectionism prevented any single individual from remaining in power indefinitely.

The 1917 Constitution also had important consequences for peasants and industrial workers and for Church-state relations. Article 27 codified Emiliano Zapata's call for land reform, even though Zapata was not invited to the constitutional convention and was, in fact, later assassinated by the faction that signed the new constitution into law. Article 123 granted workers the right to form unions and go on strike and gave the Mexican state a role in mediating between capital and labor. Articles 3 and 130 limited the Catholic Church's role in education and politics. These two articles, and others, reflected the surprising intensity of anticlerical sentiment in revolutionary Mexico. In the 1920s, President Plutarco Elías Calles brought the long-simmering Church-state conflict to a boil. He declared himself "the enemy of the political priest, the scheming priest, the priest as exploiter, the priest who intends to keep our people in ignorance, the priest who allies with the hacendado (hacienda owner) to exploit the campesino (peasant), and the priest allied with the industrialist to exploit the worker."2 When Calles enforced some of the Constitution's anticlerical provisions, the Catholic Church hierarchy suspended Mass for three years. Catholic guerrillas, meanwhile, fought the armies of the federal government to a draw. In time, the Church learned to coexist with a Mexican state that remained fiercely anticlerical, at least on paper.

Ordinary Mexicans made their greatest gains in the immediate postrevolutionary period during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). Cárdenas lived up to the promise of Article 3 of the Constitution by investing in public education and endorsing a popular curriculum that celebrated revolutionary heroes like Madero, Zapata, and Villa. He put some teeth to the nationalist provisions in Article 27 and nationalized the oil fields operated by U.S. and British companies. His sweeping land reform redistributed nearly fifty million acres to landless peasants. The Cárdenas administration also gave new life to Article 123 by supporting most industrial strikes and grouping together over 3000 unions to form the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, or CTM).

The Cárdenas administration also looked poised to clarify an issue that the Constitution of 1917 had not directly addressed-voting rights for women. In late 1937, after many years of suffragist activism, Cárdenas called on Congress to amend the Constitution to give women the right to vote in federal elections and to hold public office. The proposed constitutional amendment sailed through the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies; statehouses then prepared to ratify the amendment. But legislators found a loophole and failed to publish the vote counts in the Congressional Record. The amendment was stopped in its tracks. Perhaps Cárdenas himself feared that the women's vote might jeopardize his ability to manage the upcoming 1940 elections. In 1958, twenty years after Congress had passed the original amendment, women were finally allowed to cast votes for president.3

After President Cárdenas left office, the one-party state consolidated its control over both workers and peasants and entered a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. By the 1950s, the much-celebrated Revolution of 1910 had lost its punch for ordinary Mexicans. Textbooks continued to celebrate state-sanctioned heroes and urban planners still named streets after Madero and Zapata. But some of the great conquests of the Revolution had not worn well. The pace of land reform slowed, and workers bristled under the control of corrupt union bosses. The PRI-government perfected the pageantry of holding elections regularly while remaining in almost complete control of the results.

When I was in graduate school, in the 1990s, my cohort and I spent many long hours in seminars, libraries, archives, and in informal gatherings discussing the Revolution of 1910 and its immediate aftermath. In part, we were responding to (and inspired by) the pathbreaking work of historians who had published grand narratives of the Mexican Revolution in the 1980s. Alan Knight's monumental two-volume study focused on the internal causes of the Revolution and argued that the process was revolutionary even if the outcome was not; John Hart argued persuasively that the Revolution was largely a nationalist rebellion against foreign (and especially United States) capitalism. Ramón Ruíz, for his part, claimed that the Revolution was not a revolution at all, but rather a "great rebellion."4 Knight's book and articles had the greatest impact on my generation. Many of us wrote dissertations that took regional and state-level approaches to measure the impact of the Revolution on ordinary people. Inspired by the work of Mary Kay Vaughan and Adrian Bantjes,5 among others, we zeroed in on the immediate postrevolutionary period, the 1920s and 1930s.6 Few of us ventured beyond the mid-1940s.

To me, at least, the period after midcentury seemed relatively uninteresting. I dismissed it as a time when the hegemonic party successfully managed an economic "miracle" and kept workers, peasants, and the middle class under its thumb. My ignorance stemmed in part from the fact that the PRI-government restricted access to many important archives, making historical research on more recent decades difficult, if not impossible. Fortunately, graduate students nipping at our heels gained access to newly available archival collections and began to push into the middle decades of the twentieth century, revealing the fascinating complexity and effervescence of this period. Their publications provide the foundation for the early chapters of this book.

Overview of This...