Those seeking further insight into the 1910 Mexican Revolution and how it affected rural people in the decades that followed, will treasure Tanalís Padilla’s detailed history of a mid-twentieth-century agrarian mobilization in the Mexican state of Morelos, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata.
By looking at the life of Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962), an agrarian leader from Morelos who fought under Zapata, the author organically connects his mid-century movement to the agrarian armed uprisings of the revolution. Through the use of materials consisting of correspondence between Jaramillistas and government officials; manifestos, pamphlets, and speeches produced by the participants in the struggle; memos reporting on the group’s activities from state agents to the minister of the interior; newspaper articles; and oral histories, the author is able to contextualize the Jaramillistas as part of a broader movement of social protest that transpired during the years of Mexico’s economic miracle (1940–1962) and its corresponding political framework, the Pax Priísta, or what Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has called the “perfect dictatorship”.
Padilla utilizes this rich documentation to show how the Jaramillistas reconstructed Zapatista ideology to address the needs of both workers and peasants in a more urban and modernizing Mexico while interfacing with other national and international movements. By identifying and analyzing the origins of the Jaramillistas in Zapata’s agrarianism that centered on the fight for land and community autonomy and the populism of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), which attempted to fulfill the Zapatista demand of agrarian reform, Padilla is convincing in her portrayal of the Jaramillista mobilization as representative of contemporary and modern social movements. Rather than a mere throwback to Zapata, the author presents evidence that firmly establishes the Jaramillista movement as another generation of agrarian struggle, both strategically and in a tactical sense.
Accordingly, Padilla suggests that, while peasant revolts of the earlier periods focused on the community, in the twentieth century the advances of modern capitalism and urbanization coupled with the increasing power and reach of nation states, served to transform the character of rural uprisings. Unlike the Zapatistas who were composed exclusively of the rural landless and the peasantry, the Jaramillistas incorporated a wide array of social layers that included day laborers, migrants, workers, and rural schoolteachers. Consequently, a wide variety of methods were employed by the Jaramillistas to wage struggles. They ranged from strategically constituted campesino–labor alliances in electoral politics to land invasions and armed struggle.
In the process, the Jaramillistas broadened their demands and strengthened their ties with other groups, developments which according to the author raised political consciousness. Further, in analyzing the transformation of the movement and measuring the corresponding rise in political consciousness, Padilla documents how the Jaramillistas drew inspiration from the Cuban Revolution, an event that rekindled hope for realizing the promised gains resulting from the hard-fought struggles of rural and oppressed peoples in the Mexican Revolution.
Not withstanding the ideological and social diversity of the movement and its adherents, Padilla strongly suggests that the Jaramillistas identified themselves as campesinos, united by political and economic interests as well as a collective history of oppression. Moreover, Padilla asserts that the Jaramillistas were emblematic of much of the massive popular protest during the years of the supposed Pax Priísta.
That protest, she asserts, rather than seeking some radical alternative, challenged the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to fulfill the 1917 constitution, adhere to its own laws and legitimizing discourse, much of which emanated from the notions of justice originating from the social discourse of the Mexican revolution and its underlying ideology, Mexican nationalism. According to the author, it was the Mexican state’s gradual abandonment of social reform which stemmed from its unwillingness to deliver on the social promises that grew out of revolution which produced the ruling party’s political strategy of cooptation and repression as a means to cling to the reins of power.
Ultimately, Padilla maintains, the escalation of state repression precipitated Jaramillista armed struggle against an increasingly exclusionary political regime that refused to consider the needs of the poor and oppressed sectors of society as it attempted to advance its modernization project of capitalist development. In 1962, when the Mexican military murdered Jaramillo and his family, Padilla notes the context of growing social unrest in the country, characterized by the strikes waged by railroad workers and teachers. She asserts that it was the Mexican government’s fear of the Cuban revolution’s supposed influence in Mexico that prompted the state’s brutal repression in these events.
Padilla organizes the book chronologically. The story begins with an overview of the history of Morelos state and the Zapatista movement. In explaining the state’s changing economy during the period of the Jaramillista movement, the author also provides the reader with a political context that analyzes how the triumphant Constitutionalists of the revolution, composed of bourgeois reformers, were forced to heed to the demands of those who tenaciously had fought for broader social reforms and labor rights.
Padilla however, suggests that the price paid for these concessions was high. Exacted through Zapata’s murder, which effectively gave it control over land reform, the Mexican state then proceeded to appropriate Zapata’s image. But when President Plutarco Elías Calles implemented an extensive land reform program in Morelos during the 1920s, the government in effect conceded that it could not pacify the region through force alone. Although the state possessed the advantage of physical force, Padilla asserts that campesinos had the moral legitimacy and the real claim to Zapata’s legacy.
Campesino demands were further legitimized during the 1930s when President Cárdenas implemented the land, labor, and educational reforms incorporated into the articles of the 1917 constitution. Land redistribution gave campesinos ejidos (collective landholdings), credit, and technical support. Additionally, the government started industrial projects such as the Emiliano Zapata sugar refinery at Zacatepec, in which a campesino–worker council, headed by Jaramillo acted as the mill’s highest authority.
In the eyes of the campesinos, these developments legitimized state authority to the point where the Jaramillistas ran Jaramillo for governor of Morelos. Rather than fight for land and community autonomy, this generation of agrarian struggle sought integration of the campesino economy into the broader scheme of Mexican national development and modernization. In doing so, they demanded credit, technical assistance, better prices on their products, and basic state services such as schools and hospitals. The ideological character of Mexico’s most visible campesino movement had clearly shifted to reformism.
After Cárdenas left office, however, it became apparent that the continuation of reforms depended on the good will of the holder of the presidency. Those who succeeded Cárdenas were in general less sympathetic to the needs of the countryside, and they shifted decision-making back to traditional management at the mill. Rather than bow to the dictates of management, in 1942 the Jaramillistas organized a strike. It was during this struggle when Jaramillo first developed a relationship with important labor leaders, some of whom were Marxists. This provided the Jaramillista movement with a socialist coloration as it made common cause with workers, thus broadening its appeal while giving it an ideological shot in the arm. When the Jaramillistas took up arms in self-defense against the thugs and gunmen hired by mill management, local authorities reacted by escalating repression, forcing the movement underground for one year.
In 1943 the government pardoned the group, and in 1946 the Jaramillistas once again ran Jaramillo for the governorship of Morelos. The ruling party reacted to the challenge with what became standard practice throughout the twentieth century: electoral fraud and repression. These developments pushed Jaramillo into clandestine action and initiated the group’s second armed uprising. In 1951, however, the Jaramillistas once again threw down their weapons and joined a new national party made up of disenchanted PRI members. Much larger than its previous electoral effort, it involved the far more visible participation of women. From that point forward, Padilla emphasizes that it was women who sustained both the party and the guerrilla group through the building of extensive social networks.
The government reacted to these developments by ratcheting up repression and expanding electoral fraud, actions that forced the movement underground once again, this time for a period of six years. The Jaramillistas then issued proclamations that rejected both the Mexican legal and political system as it attempted to take control of numerous municipalities by force. After another government pardon, Jaramillo campaigned to settle some vacant land on the Michapa and Guarín plains in western Morelos. Although the government initially conceded these lands, the army soon removed the settlers and afterwards murdered Jaramillo and his family.
While Tanalís Padilla provides great insight into the subject of modern rural resistance movements, her study’s real value is how it connects the state’s crushing of the Jaramillistas to the decline of the Mexican revolution and the corresponding embrace of neo-liberalism and NAFTA by Mexico’s governing classes.
