Dictablanda's publication marks a watershed in the study of postrevolutionary Mexico. Its subtitle, “Politics, Work, and Culture,” acknowledges the New Cultural History of Mexico's significance, but highlights two other “arenas of power”(p. viii). A fourth, violence, receives overdue attention, as well. As Gillingham provocatively posits: “circuses were important, so too was bread; and so too were guns”(p. 6). The collection's theoretical pluralism and thematic diversity defies easy characterization.
That said, Dictablanda's concern with material factors and coercion, combined with careful attention to understudied political processes like elections and overlooked actors like cacicas, soldiers, and gunmen, signals the emergence of a new generation of scholarship on postrevolutionary Mexico. This is the fourth, following the historiographical sequence of populist, revisionist, and neopopulist currents set out by Daniel Nugent and Gilbert Joseph in their now-classic Everday Forms of State Formation (1994). Lacking the space to do justice to all the volume's many contributions, this review focuses on those that may help define this fourth (post-postmodern? re-revisionist?) wave.
Gillingham's preface revives the concept of “soft” (blanda) authoritarianism to characterize the protean postrevolutionary state. The introduction, co-authored with Smith, challenges readings of Gramsci (or his interlocutors) that assume that negotiation between the state and subaltern groups leads to consensus and hegemony (p. xvii). It also identifies a crucial social and spatial dichotomy: while the PRI state co-opted sizable fragments of the urban middle and working classes through negotiation, it generally marginalized the rural poor after 1940. Moreover, it met sporadic peasant revolts with often-brutal repression, a historical reality masked by the myth of a Cardenista pacification of the countryside (pp. 12–13).
Between the Revolution's moderation circa 1938 and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, coercion, not consent, pushed forward the hegemonic process in much of Mexico, as Thomas Rath's pathbreaking chapter on the military and militarized policing underscores. Pistolerismo, the epitome of revolutionary violence, receives its first stand-alone treatment by Pablo Picatto. His chapter explores the symbiotic relationship between these infamous violence workers (to use Helen Delpar's useful term), the PRI, and the grey economy that supported sex work, gambling and the pre-cartel drug trade. Picatto's exploration of the discursive construction of the iconic pistolero in the press coverage of spectacular homicides compellingly connects culture and violence. It also underscores the need for a prosopography of professional shootists, an indispensable category of political specialist in the PRI since its origins in the bloody 1920s.
Tanalís Padilla analyzes SEP normalistas. By creating new rural teachers’ colleges and allowing the left to put down deep roots in them, the Cardenista state carried out a successful cultural revolution in a strategic part of the educational system. Graduates (including Luis Cabañas) forged epic personal narratives as they fought to defend revolutionary social justice in normals like Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. During the 1950s and 1960, normals were pockets of professionalism and democracy in an increasingly authoritarian, patriarchal, and corrupt state.
Taxation, another central yet largely unappreciated facet of postrevolutionary state-making, is the subject of Benjamin Smith's chapter: “Building State on the Cheap.” Smith reminds us that Mexico's regressive and low taxes “limited the state's capacity for authoritarianism, corporatism, or even cultural hegemony. In the most prosaic terms, the state was often unable to fund the necessities of military intervention, party regimentation, political co-option or cultural negotiation” (p. 256). Ironically, urban democratic protests against taxes prompted state authorities to rely more on corruption and to defund rural projects. Smith's chapter reminds us that neither culture nor economics can be studied in isolation.
The New Cultural History of Mexico deserves credit for complicating and expanding definitions of lo politico. Several chapters in this collection use archival research to productively rethink popular participation in postrevolutionary state-making by critiquing familiar concepts like cacicazgo, and by practicing what I term import-substituting theory.
Pansters's contribution on the San Luis Potosí cacicazgo of Gonzalo Santos carefully examines an infamous regional big-man's construction of a political machine beginning in 1943, and its rapid demise in 1958. The archetypical strongman's power was geographically uneven and ultimately fragile. Pressure from dissident factions uniting rival politicos, organized labor, agraristas, and elements of the middle class weakened and eventually humbled Santos through surprisingly autonomous (although not necessarily democratic) municipal elections and the survival of Cardenista, class-conscious, corporatist political practices.
Alan Knight, something of a godfather to many contributors, attributes the Revolution's rightward drift in 1937–41 to political institutionalization and “routinization” (p. 55), economic stress, the Catholic right's revival, and ideological polarization from without. In explaining routinization in agrarian reform, Knight distinguishes between primary (bottom up) and secondary (top down) land grants (p. 57). The former were made only after years of struggle and demands by agraristas during the Revolution's armed phase and the social and political strife of the 1920s; the latter were hastily executed by Cardenista bureaucrats in the mid 1930s.
Michael Snodgrass challenges the trope of the corrupt union boss (charro), long blamed for hollowing out organized labor under the PRI. In the Monterrey steel industry, at least, the charros did discipline labor as part of a corporatist pact with capital and the PRI, but their image as “honorable” and “patriotic” leaders was no mere smokescreen. Workers enjoyed expanded job security, passed on positions to sons and nephews, enjoyed increased chances of upward social mobility, and counted on contractual protections (first fired, first hired) loathed by management.
Gillingham's chapter on elections reveals that even though fraud was widespread elsewhere, many municipal primary (intra-PRI) elections were genuinely contested (if slowly undermined) by the spread of “competitive authoritarianism” in the 1950s. While politically expedient, “pregnant” urns, multiple voting, and violent seizure of polling places delegitimized the PRI, relatively honest local elections were sometimes tolerated by the postrevolutionary state. Gillingham gives readers a detailed, technical, yet highly accessible account of throwing elections, making his chapter required reading for scholars of Mexico's ruling party.
By showing the deep historical connections among political and popular culture, material forces, and state violence, this collection shows that the PRI's long rule was paradoxically both more repressive and more popular than is often assumed. The range and depth of topics covered in the volume are daunting. However, an impressive number of finely crafted chapters (many unmentioned here) and the editors’ irrepressible wit, analytical clarity, and unblinking view of the dark realities of Mexican politics make Dictablanda a rewarding and pleasurable read for students and veteran scholars alike.
