The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), one of the leading figures of Latin American populism of the first half of the twentieth century, has long been surrounded by myth and politicized interpretations. To a certain extent this is understandable: under Cárdenas's leadership major and spectacular reforms were carried out that had their roots in claims originally formulated during and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). Moreover, these reforms have had a lasting impact on Mexico's political and socioeconomic development. In state-sanctioned historia oficial the figure of “grandfather” Cárdenas long reached mythical proportions: he carried out huge projects of land reform and thus finally responded to the demands of poor peasants and Indians, stood up against international capital by nationalizing the oil industry, rebuffed the conservative factions of the national bourgeoisie and laid the foundations for the corporatist state and party, that was to rule Mexico for the remaining part of the century, and thus gave institutional voice to the country's working classes. This image has also been influential in scholarly writings, particularly in those that studied cardenismo as a national phenomenon. Recent years, however, have seen important changes. Nationalist populism is drastically reevaluated in the dominant discourse of neoliberal modernity, and scholars have started to break down the phenomenon, thereby trying to overcome politicized interpretations.

Ben Fallaw's book about the Cárdenas years in the southeastern state of Yucatán is an indispensable contribution to this debate. It takes issue with competing interpretations and is remarkably successful in constructing a balanced and sophisticated view of cardenismo. This book takes nothing for granted: frequently used conceptual or methodological shortcuts or oppositions, e.g. about the shifting relations between federal state institutions and regional power groups in the 1930s or the structuralist vs. agency-oriented approaches to social change, are deconstructed by meticulous historical research. By limiting himself to a relatively short period of time (six years) and on the basis of extensive archival work, Fallaw is in a position to analyze the complex interplay between hacendados, peasants, urban labor, the military, bureaucrats and politicians, and institutions operating at different levels. Fallaw's regional focus is particularly interesting since Yucatán was the place of one of the worst exploitative systems in pre-Revolutionary Mexico, that of the henequen plantations. On the eve of the revolution some hundred thousand Maya workers labored on these plantations in debt peonage. Moreover, the Yucatecan elite had always retained a strong grip on regional affairs. The reform of this social and economic system by breaking up the large plantations as well as the political and institutional incorporation of the peninsula into federal power structures constituted huge challenges for the president. It was, as Fallaw writes, “the best place to realize what Cárdenas believed was the promise of the Mexican Revolution (3).” After a tortuous start, Cárdenas went to Yucatán and intervened in the summer of 1937, “bringing the full brunt of federal power to bear on the state (81).” In what was one of the most impressive reform initiatives of his entire presidency, he ordered the execution of all pending land grants in the henequen zone and the creation of a huge amount of henequen ejidos (collective land grants farmed by peasant villages).

However, as the title of this book immediately reveals, the reforms eventually failed and Fallaw's book is an attempt to explain why. Although the author provides the reader with numerous angles on this issue, there are three themes that run through the book that can account for much of the unsuccessful outcome of the reform processes. First there is the complex story of building a popular base for the regime among Yucatán's peasants and workers. The cardenista project never really took hold here. On the countryside existed a profound division between village peasants, who were entitled to obtain ejido-land, and the peons, the rural workers who lived on the haciendas and who were excluded from creating their own ejidos. Instead, the Cárdenas regime encouraged them to form rural unions. However, the rapid increase in the number of henequen ejidos destabilized the social and economic situation in the region, which affected the peons most seriously. The landless peons became under the influence of regional anarcho-syndicalist organizations, that capitalized on the resentment against the emerging agrarian bureaucracy, and eventually under that of the hacienda-owners who saw in the peon's discontent an opportunity to exploit the contradictions the the cardenista reform project and stall agrarian reform. Thus while the ejidos stood under the control of federal institutions, especially the Agrarian Bank, the peons were controlled by regional interest groups. This division was never overcome. Moreover, Cárdenas never succeeded in building a firm alliance with urban labor, let alone one between urban and rural labor. Why? Fallaw points to the historical fragmentation of the working class itself, the strong tradition of anarchism in the region that rejected federal state intervention, but also to the fact that Cárdenas's political and financial priority lay with agrarian reform, which hindered him to dedicate the attention, resources and political will needed to bring urban labor into the cardenista camp. Eventually, workers became enmeshed with elite controlled political factions.

The fact that hacendados were able to exploit the contradictions within the cardenista alliance and mobilize peons and urban workers for their own political ends points to a second key theme in Fallaw's book, the weakness of class-based politics to overcome personalistic political culture and practices. Fallaw uses the concepts of camarilla (informally linked elites) and caciquismo (boss rule) to analyze the limits of the establishment of horizontal alliances. Fallaw repeatedly shows how political calculation and selfishness, camarilla loyalties and clientelistic ties undermine class interests and ideological coherence. This logic also explains alliances with peculiar bedfellows, such as hacendados, radical labor organizations and anarcho-syndicalist peon organizations. The rules of personalistic political culture also explain particular decisions by the president himself and his cronies in Mexico City and Yucatán.

The third factor that accounts for the complex history of the failure of reform in Yucatán is related to the intense rivalry between regional power groups and the central state. After all, any attempt at reform by the Cárdenas regime was framed by its foes as an intervention in regional affairs. In one of the most interesting parts of the book Fallaw analyzes how the intense struggles about the control over the newly founded ejidos eventually ended in 1938 with what he calls the “reregionalization of politics” (129), when the dominant Yucatecan camarilla managed to throw the federal government out of the henequen zone. Fallaw's conclusion about the weakness of the cardenista state to impose it's will on the provinces and to incorporate the masses in federally controlled corporatist institutions is a crucial ingredient in rethinking accepted views of cardenismo.

Cárdenas Compromised is thus a major contribution to our understanding of this crucial period in modern Mexican history. It is a book that demonstrates, once again, the capacity of fine-tuned regional and local research to engage broad issues such as state formation, working class politics, political culture and state-led reform. It deserves widespread reading by historians and political scientists.