Mexico's "Popular Revolution": Mobilization and Myth in Yucatan, 1910-1940

Abstract

Over the course of the past decade at least, historians have debated the essential character of the Mexican revolution with regard to the level of participation of the masses. Two major schools of interpretation have coalesced: (1) the older, orthodox populist interpretation, which has taken its cue from several generations of pro-revolutionary Mexican historians and from distinguished North Americans like Frank Tannenbaum and Ernest Gruening, who were first active in the 1920s and 1930s;1 and (2) a newer revisionist (and hence antipopulist) interpretation based upon the work of a younger generation of Mexican historians (e.g., Arnaldo Cordova and Hector Aguilar Camin) and prominent foreign scholars such as Jean Meyer, Friedrich Katz, and John Womack, which, in the wake of the vocal student movement of 1968 and the national nightmare of the massacre in Tlaltelolco, appears to be gathering momentum and emerging as the new orthodoxy (e.g., J. Meyer, 1976a and 1976b; also see Bailey, 1978). Essentially the positions can be summarized as follows. The populist writers, led by Tannenbaum, their premier spokesman, have argued that Mexico's was an anonymous, almost inarticulate, primarily agrarian revolution,