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The Boom in Regional Studies of the Mexican Revolution: Where is it Leading?

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REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IN MEXICO: ESSAYS ON POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE, 1880–1940. Edited by RODRÍGUEZ OJAIME E. (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, University of California, 1990. Pp. 331. $35.00.)
ANENECUILCO: MEMORIA Y VIDA DE UN PUEBLO. By CHÁVEZALICIA HERNÁNDEZ. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1991. Pp. 261.)
LOS EMPRESARIOS DE AYER: EL GRUPO DOMINANTE EN LA INDUSTRIA TEXTIL DE PUEBLA, 1906–1929. By OJEDALETICIA GAMBOA. (Puebla: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1985. Pp. 284.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Heather Fowler-Salamini
Heather Fowler-Salamini*
Affiliation:
Bradley University
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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , 1993 , pp. 175 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Carlos Martínez Assad, “Dos versiones de la Revolución Mexicana,” Nexos, no. 167 (Nov. 1991):78-80; and “Presentación,” Eslabones: Revista Semestral de Estudios Regionales, no. 1 (Jan.–June 1991):4.

2. Romana Falcon, “Las regiones en la Revolución: un itinerario historiográfico,” in Balance y perspectivas de los estudios regionales en México, edited by Carlos Martínez Assad (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Humanidades, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990), 69.

3. Thomas Benjamin, “Regionalizing the Revolution: The Many Mexicos in Revolutionary Historiography,” in Provinces of the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican History, 1910–29 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1990), 320. The reviewer was unable to include this work because she was a contributor to the volume.

4. Gilbert M. Joseph, “Introduction: The New Regional Historiography at Mexico's Periphery,” in Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatán: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, edited by Jeffrey T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 2.

5. Carr, “Recent Regional Studies of the Mexican Revolution,” LARR 15, no. 1 (1980): 3–14.

6. See the works already cited by Barry Carr, Romana Falcon, and Thomas Benjamin. For a more extensive discussion of the historiography of regionalism, see Mario Cerutti, “Contribuciones recientes y relevancia de la investigación regional sobre la segunda parte del Siglo XIX,” in Martínez Assad, Balance y perspectivas, 25–59. I am indebted to Carlos Martínez Assad for information concerning the Sociedad Mexicana de Estudios Regionales.

7. Mark Wasserman, “An Introduction,” Provinces of the Revolution, 1.

8. Paul Vanderwood, “Building Blocks But Yet No Building: Regional History and the Mexican Revolution,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 3, no. 2 (Summer 1987):421-32; and Cerutti, “Contribuciones recientes” in Martínez Assad, Balance y perspectivas, 25–59. See also Mario Cerutti, “The Formation and Consolidation of a Regional Bourgeoisie in Northeastern Mexico (Monterrey: From Reform to Revolution),” in Region, State and Capitalism in Mexico: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Wil Pansters and Arij Ouweneel (Amsterdam: Center for Latin American Research and Documentation, 1989), 47–58.

9. Gil Joseph uses the term multivalent in his introduction to Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatán. See also his Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), xi-xii. Also cited in Alma M. García, “Recent Studies in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Regional History,” LARR 22, no. 2 (1987):255-66; Mark T. Gilderhus, “Many Mexicos: Tradition and Innovation in the Recent Historiography,” LARR 22, no. 1 (1987):204-13; and Benjamin, “Regionalizing the Revolution,” 320.

10. Falcón, “Las regiones en la Revolución,” in Martínez Assad, Balance y perspectivas, 74–75, 81, 83–86. This ideological stance has been taken by others like Paul Garner in “Constitutionalist Reconstruction in Oaxaca, 1915–1920,” in Pansters and Ouweneel, Region, State, and Capitalism in Mexico, 79–80.

11. See Simon Miller, “Revisionism in Recent Mexican Historiography,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 4, no. 1 (1988):77–88. See as examples Falcon, Revolución y caciquismo: San Luis Potosí, 1910–1938 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1984); Heather Fowler-Salamini, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 1920–1938 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Jean Meyer, La Cristiada (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973); and Tomás Martínez Saldaña and Leticia Gándara Mendoza, Política y sociedad en México: el caso de los Altos de jalisco (Mexico City: SEP-INAH, 1976).

12. Friedrich Katz, “Introduction: Rural Revolts in Mexico,” in his Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 16; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); and Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

13. See Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2:517–27.

14. Barry Carr hinted at this direction in 1980 in “Recent Regional Studies of the Mexican Revolution,” LARR 15, no. 1 (1980): 11. See also Martínez Assad's preface to Balance y perspectivas, 7–8; Falcon, “Las regiones en la Revolución,” in the same work, 71; and Gamboa Ojeda, Los empresarios de ayer, 13. Enrique Florescano has suggested three new trends: interaction between historical and anthropological methods, analysis examining peasant groups within a regional and national context, and attempts to submit the study of rebellion and its causes to more rigorous analytical and explicative approach. See Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1991), 97.

15. Eric Van Young, “Are Regions Good to Think? Space, Class, and State in Mexican History.” Paper presented at the Seminario Permanente de Historia Regional at the Facultad de Economía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Feb. 1991, 6–10.

16. See Pansters and Ouweneel, “Capitalist Development and Political Centralization before and after the Revolution: An Introduction,” in their edited collection Region, State, and Capitalism in Mexico, 2, 5, 24–25. Because this outstanding collection of essays has already been reviewed in LARR, I will refer only to its salient arguments in my discussion of regional studies.

17. Falcon suggests a synthetic approach at the end of her article on regionalism, “Las regiones en la Revolución,” 89. Wasserman also believes that regionalism can help resolve the ideological civil war between revisionism and new anti-revisionism. See Wasserman's introduction to Provinces of the Revolution, 1.

18. Cerutti, “Formation and Consolidation of the Regional Bourgeoisie,” 47–58.

19. See Florencia E. Mallon, “Peasants and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Morelos, 1848–1858,” in Political Power and Social Theory 7, no. 3 (1988):1–54. For a fine alternative perspective stressing the importance of leadership skills and ideology to the success of the Liberals in mobilizing the Indian communities of the Sierra Norte, see Guy Thomson's “Montaña and Llanura in the Politics of Central Mexico: The Case of Puebla, 1820–1920,” in Pansters and Ouweneel, Region, State, and Capitalism in Mexico, 59–77. Hernandez Chavez has designed five outstanding maps showing land-tenure patterns in Morelos for 1910 and 1921–1929 based on maps and archival materials from the Secretaría de Reforma Agraria. These maps reveal a lopsided land-tenure system in 1910 in which haciendas had squeezed out village lands as well as small properties. Equally important is Hernandez Chavez's reconstruction of the massive land expropriation between 1921 and 1929, which effectively eliminated the hacienda system in Morelos.

20. Simon Miller, “Revisionism,” quoted by Garner in “Constitutionalist Reconstruction,” in Pansters and Ouweneel, Region, State, and Capitalism in Mexico, 80.

21. Pansters and Ouweneel, Region, State, and Capitalism in Mexico, 16.

22. “Tlaxcala and San Luis Potosí under the Sonorenses (1920-1934): Regional Revolutionary Power Groups and the National State,” in ibid., 110–33.

23. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Rural Women's Literacy in the Mexican Revolution: The Case of Tecamachalco, Puebla,” paper delivered at the Reunión de Historiadores Mexicanos y Norteamericanos in San Diego, 18–20 Oct. 1990; Marjorie Becker, “Torching La Purísma, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacán, 1934–1940,” paper presented at the conference “Popular Culture, State Formation, and the Revolution,” 27 Feb.-2 Mar. 1991, San Diego. The role of rural women in the revolutionary process was explored in greater detail at the recent conference “Crossing Boundaries, Creating Spaces: Mexican and Chicana Women, 1848–1992,” held at the University of Illinois, Chicago, 9–11 Apr. 1992. The papers on Mexico are presently being edited for publication by Mary Kay Vaughan and Heather Fowler-Salamini.