Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940

Abstract

H E N the dust of the battles of the Bajio settled and the victorious Constitutionalists found themselves *\'v7loosely-in control of Mexico's national destiny, they confronted a country bled by civil war, ravaged by disease, and plagued by economic problems.' Reconstruction became the watchword of the new regime, which espoused ostensibly radical means in order to achieve more traditional ends: namely, the achievement of economic development and political stability.2 Hence the revolutionary regime's apparent ambivalence; its contradictory blend of conservative and revolutionary elements, which has created headaches for historians (especially those who want to segregate Mexicans neatly into revolutionary sheep and conservative goats). The picture, as this article will suggest, is more complex. The revolutionaries emulated their Porfirian (old regime) predecessors, hence revisionist historiography shows a fondness for Tocquevillean notions of revolutionary continuity; but they did so in radically changed circumstances, in the wake of a civil war that not only had ravaged the country, but also-and more importantly-had mobilized the masses. With this mobilization came new popular forces, manifested in social banditry, guerrilla and conventional armies, sindicatos and mutualist societies, peasant leagues, and embryonic political parties of both Right and Left. Popular mobilization also brought a genuine shift in popular mentality (or, more likely, it brought into the open popular attitudes that, before the revolu-