Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution

Abstract

Jürgen Buchenau’s Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution provides a much-needed analysis of the little-understood life of Mexican strongman Plutarco Elías Calles. No monograph to date has placed Calles so squarely at the center of postrevolutionary Mexican analysis. Calles rose from a life of poverty in rural Sonora to become Mexico’s president in 1924 and a principal architect of Mexico’s single-party system that held power until 2000. While Buchenau argues that Calles was Mexico’s first “authoritarian populist” and was instrumental to the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20), he also revises previous scholarship that emphasized Calles’s supreme power. In addition, he refreshingly complicates and humanizes his subject within the broader context of Mexico’s revolution. The author’s methodology not only interrogates Calles’s political acumen, it also revises how many Mexican historians have come to understand the era known as the Maximato.This book is not a traditional biography. Rather, the author eloquently integrates how Calles’s personal experiences, coupled with the tumultuous social and ideological transformations during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876 – 1910), shaped his political ideology. Buchenau skillfully unravels the complex political relationships that emerged from the revolution and the postrevolutionary consolidation in which Calles played a vital role. While Calles was a troubled and rebellious youth born outside Mexico City, he graduated from the Primera Escuela Muncipal and later passed the teacher’s exam. Calles’s positivist education and the influence of the científicos (those who believed that only educated men should make political decisions) informed his authoritarian populism as well as his fierce anticlericalism.Early adulthood brought many changes for the future political leader. Calles’s stint as a schoolteacher, although influential in his life, lasted only a short time and was followed by his involvement in several unsuccessful business ventures. However, the onset of the Mexican Revolution created new opportunities. He opened a small store in Agua Prieta, located on the border of the United States, which became a vital strategic location for trafficking arms. Calles used his advantageous business position to advance his political ambitions. Buchenau’s analysis of the revolutionary years underscores Calles’s political astuteness while also demonstrating how Calles benefited from alliances and relationships with other prominent revolutionary figures. This section illustrates clearly the importance of patronage and clientelism in Mexican society.Although there is much in this book for newcomers to Mexican history, specialists in the region will also benefit. Buchenau culls rich archival sources including the state archive in Sonora and the Plutarco Elías Calles Archive, which enables him to uncover the intricacies of Calles’s relationship with Álvaro Obregón and Adolfo de la Huerta. This is perhaps the most enriching section of the book. Here Buchenau explores the minutiae of their relationships, the power of the “Sonoran Triangle,” and the immense effect Obregón’s assassination in 1928 had on Calles and the future of the Mexican Revolution. Many historians have focused on the authoritarianism and vehement anticlericalism of the Calles years, which led to the bloody Cristero Rebellion (1926 – 29) and the birth of the Maximato in 1928. Between 1928 and 1934, Calles strategically positioned himself as the leader of the “revolutionary family” that began with Francisco Madero. He worked behind the scenes to manipulate heads of state; this activity reached its apex in 1932 with the resignation of President Ortiz Rubio. Yet Buchenau is careful to point out that other factors, such as the economic ramifications of the Depression and Mexico’s relationship with the United States, had far-reaching effects that Calles was not able to control, even at the height of his influence. The author skillfully balances Calles’s political power and the realities of postrevolutionary Mexican society with his personal weaknesses. Calles’s poor health, self-destructive behavior, and occasional political miscalculations, coupled with the changing nature of Mexican politics, gradually eroded his influence. In the end, Calles’s attempt to manipulate President Lázaro Cárdenas after the election of 1934 backfired and led to his exile in 1936.Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution is chronologically organized, clearly written, and easily accessible to an undergraduate audience. The book, however, would have benefited from a clearer definition of “authoritarian populism” and how this applies to Calles, as opposed, for example, to Juan Perón in Argentina. In addition, the author mentions Calles’s marriages and several children yet he does not integrate a gendered analysis. How did machismo inform Calles’s ideas and actions and how did it influence the structuring of postrevolutionary society? Despite these minor omissions, the book is a welcome addition to the newly emerging scholarship on Mexico’s postrevolutionary period.