The decade of the 1920s receives far less attention in the larger historiography of the Mexican Revolution than does the military phase from 1910 to 1920. Although several excellent studies over the last few decades have shown that the revolution's radically varied promises and possibilities collided with Mexico's social and political reality during the 1920s, ultimately giving rise to the institutional revolution, the scholarship still generally portrays the 1920s as an epilogue to the military phase, or as a transition to Lázaro Cárdenas's presidency in the 1930s. As a result, many basic questions about the period remain unanswered or ignored.
Fortunately, Sarah Osten has gone a long way in the present volume to answer one such lingering question: that is, how did the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) and Mexico's one-party political system come about? Conventional portrayals of the party's genesis under President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28), she points out, suggest that the PNR appeared from thin air. Osten corrects this misunderstanding by focusing on the evolution of socialist parties in southeastern Mexico (Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán) and their leaders (Ramón Félix Flores, Carlos A. Vidal, Tomás Garrido Canabal, and Felipe Carillo Puerto, respectively). During the 1920s, she argues, these organizations strongly influenced Calles's desire to create a national political party.
Although distinct from one another in important ways, southeastern Mexico's socialist parties shared two common characteristics that Calles would later incorporate into the PNR's blueprint. First, they cultivated grassroots support among workers and peasants, especially in the form of ligas de resistencia (except in Chiapas), giving themselves a backbone of democratic credibility. While other 1920s political parties brokered candidates and policy among elite politicians and military officials, the socialists in the southeast, pioneered by Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán, built massive popular support and influence over local and regional politics that enabled them to introduce significant reforms. Second, these parties’ organizational structures were nevertheless intensely hierarchical, featuring middle-class and elite leaderships that dabbled in quasi-authoritarianism. Osten demonstrates how these dominant features became hallmarks of Calles's PNR, based on his close relationship with the various southeastern socialist organizations and their leaders and rivalries, which were both numerous and violent.
Osten makes no methodological pretenses here. She has produced a straightforward, political history with the intent to fill a major hole in the existent historiography. Perhaps surprisingly for such a rich regional history, she bases her archival work mainly in Mexico City, though she does add significant material from Chiapas, Yucatán, and Sonora. The book is well organized, beautifully written, and features many strengths. For one, it provides arguably the best overview available for this period of southeastern socialism in its own right. The author does a remarkable job of producing a coherent narrative out of disparate and often outwardly contradictory events, as well as the various socialist platforms. She further demonstrates the southeast's ties to national political figures and how the major rebellions of the period (de la Huerta's, for example) influenced the dynamics of both regional and national affairs.
Osten carefully makes a convincing argument without overstating her case. She demonstrates that, although heavily influenced by it, the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM) was no mere carbon copy of the southeast's socialism, whose various parties were likewise not identical to one another. She also shows that Calles's national party featured other influences, most notably Luis Morones and the Laborista Party (PLM). In fact, this volume might have benefited from a chapter on the PLM's influence on the early PRM, which would have enabled the author to further round out the examination of the PRM's various influences without straying too far from the book's emphasis on the southeast.
Conversely, material taken from Tabasco archives might have added to the study's strong regional emphasis. As it stands, this volume easily represents the best treatment of the PRM's origins available, and Osten should be commended for producing such a well researched, accessible, and useful study.
