Historians of Mexico have long shared a common frustration: that the Revolution of 1910, while viewed as the most significant event in the nation's history and studied accordingly, has not gotten its due outside the nation's borders, neither in the history of the twentieth century nor in regard to its historiography. It was, after all, the century's first comprehensive social revolution—a multi-class uprising that, in overthrowing a stable, modernizing dictatorship, produced not only horrific violence, but also substantial political, social, cultural, and juridical change. As Alan Knight and others have noted, comparative and theoretical works rarely mention it, let alone devote the analysis it deserves. Most scholarly vocabulary on revolution borrows from the French case, and surveys of the twentieth century tend to use Russia and China as their points of reference.
Even in Latin America, the Mexican revolution gets short shrift; Cuba is generally revered as the game-changer. How refreshing, then, that Amelia Kiddle, in her sophisticated treatment of the diplomatic practices of the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and their influence in Latin America, has given us proof that the Mexican Revolution was relevant not only within that country, but also outside it.
By looking at Mexico's relations with the rest of Latin America during the Cárdenas years, we gain a picture of a country exporting its vision of a revolution that was “secular, leftist, nationalist, developmentalist, and popular [in character].” Cárdenas called his hemispheric doctrine the "Política del Buen Amigo,” a clear play on the name of FDR's own Good Neighbor hemispheric policy. As the region's buen amigo, Cárdenas dispatched a generation of relatively young professional diplomats, along with a handful of writers, artists, and intellectuals, to Latin American centers in the hope of establishing a position of regional leadership. The most controversial appointment was that of Palma Guillén, whose status as an unmarried woman provoked suspicion among conservatives in Colombia's government, society, and media.
As she casts the 1910 Revolution in new light, Kiddle discards two longstanding assumptions. First, she refutes the idea that studying diplomacy can only mean studying formal political relations between states, carried out by professional diplomats under the direction of government ministers. Taking a far more expansive view of diplomacy, she demonstrates how “artists, engineers, polo players, movie stars, authors, teachers, aviators, dancers, military cadets, motorcyclists, and track-and-field stars” all played their part in transmitting the buen amigo policy. Her analysis of goodwill missions, especially the cultural voyages of the Navy destroyer ship Durango, demonstrates that revolutionary propaganda came in many forms.
Second, Kiddle proves that specializing in Latin American diplomatic history does not have to mean specializing in US-Latin American relations. To de-emphasize the colossus of the north, she draws on multiple examples of how Cárdenas projected the Revolution's image and influenced the region. To name a few: Cárdenas promoted the 1938 oil expropriation to encourage other Latin American nations to nationalize scale resources; he used the third Conferencia Interamericana de Educación (1936) to promote his country's ambitious socialist education program; he burnished his internationalist reputation by accepting nearly 30,000 refugees as one of the world's few supporters of the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War; he sent technical experts to help the Bolivian government develop its hydraulic resources as part of a larger effort to project a Keynesian-inspired development model; and he hosted the Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano in his home state of Michoacán to promote Mexico's particular version of indigenismo. Each case proved polarizing: while for left-leaning governments, Mexico represented “el faro de América Latina,” for more conservative regimes, the secularism of Cardenismo was anathema to the region's Roman Catholic traditions, and its redistributive policies were tantamount to communism.
Scholars of Mexico have shared another frustration: that the 1910 Revolution—and perhaps most of all the Cárdenas years—have been over-studied. This innovative book proves otherwise. Using a multi-country, multi-archival method, and taking a transnational approach that deliberately de-centers the United States as the dominant lever in hemispheric affairs, Kiddle demonstrates that Cárdenas's efforts ensured that the Mexican Revolution had broad significance not only in its own land but also hacia afuera.
