Reconciling Modernity: Urban State Formation in 1940s León, México

Abstract

Newcomer, similar to many younger historians of Latin America, delves into local history as a means of elucidating a larger story. This particular story is about the events leading up to a violent confrontation between citizens and the federal army in León, Guanajuato, in the important 1946 presidential campaign year. President Manuel Ávila Camacho, Newcomer argues, dismissed the governor, reprimanded local army commanders, and attempted to distance his administration from these tragic actions. Newcomer seeks to explain the larger setting of local politics leading up to the events, but he goes well beyond political conflict. His broader thesis measures and compares the vision of modernity embraced by the incumbent Party of the Mexican Revolution (antecedent to PRI) with the vision of its equally intransigent opposition, the traditional Catholic Sinarquista movement, which claimed a stronghold in León. He also ventures beyond political rhetoric and traditional understandings of the transitional nature of the early 1940s in Mexico’s national political evolution, making the case that interpretations of national politics have not adequately considered subtle but important differences illustrative of the underlying political complexities. In short, this work relies on a cultural approach to explore two seemingly opposing views of urban development and modernization. In the end, as the author interestingly concludes, conservatives and government elites accepted similar notions of modernity.The strengths of this work are many. Newcomer compiles an enviable record of original and archival sources; indeed, a third of the book is devoted to his sources. Employing an eclectic methodology, he analyzes materials such as city plats and maps published by the government and the opposition to help explain their differing urban visions. A civic offshoot of the Sinarquistas, for example, “sought to map out ‘centers of vice’ and of ‘clandestine women’ in their efforts to promote social progress” (p. 45). Further, he correctly incorporates this case as part of a long history of Mexican church-state conflict, most recently stemming from the postrevolutionary Cristero Rebellion (1926 – 29).The book’s observations include many gems. He notes that various elites “associated visual order, represented by material improvement, with modernity” (p. 48). He further notes that both sides gradually accepted economic modernization, illustrated by their struggles over the educational system in León. Ironically, as part of the larger pattern of democratization whose origins trace back to the nineteenth century, he discovers that both groups of elites are wary of popular political participation. His section on femininity is an imaginative means to draw out some of the basic social principles of the Sinarquista movement, while demonstrating their inability to convert many adherents to the movement’s broader tenets. My favorite example is the Sinarquistas’ reaction to the Party of the Mexican Revolution’s use of the colors of the Mexican flag to present themselves as the sole, legitimate representatives of postrevolutionary Mexico. The Sinarquistas instead describe the three colors in completely unflattering and bizarre terms: red, for example, representing the government’s efforts to rid the country of its 21 million reactionaries.These notable strengths notwithstanding, two smaller weaknesses emerge. Historians need to step away and, if only superficially, take note of some of the long-term consequences of this isolated but influential local context in Mexican political history, which has produced a generation of leaders who perhaps represent the contradictions that Newcomer identifies for the 1940s. Surprisingly, in examining the broader influence of politics in León and exploring the Leonense environment that would shape future leaders, Newcomer does not reference three notable products of this very setting. President Vicente Fox attended the Jesuit Instituto Lux in León with future PAN leaders, which reinforced a stronger presence of the church in public life. Archbishop Samuel Ruiz, graduate of the León Seminary, cast off his conservative beginnings after being assigned to the Chiapas diocese and became a defender of and mediator to the Zapatistas. Most interesting of all, Carlos Abascal Carranza — Fox’s secretary of the interior, leader of the Mexican Institute of Social Christian Doctrine, and son of the book’s key figure, Sinarquista leader Salvador Abascal — represents a new kind of Mexican leadership with its own version of modernization. Finally, while this book is well written and argued, Newcomer’s chapter on his theoretical framework often seems unnecessarily dense and occasionally repetitive.In spite of these caveats, Reconciling Modernity is an imaginative and thorough accounting of local political history as a means of understanding a larger, important context in twentieth-century Mexico.