Reinventing the Mexican Revolution: The Competing Paradigms of Alan Knight and John Mason Hart

Abstract

Future generations will regard 1994 as a watershed year in the history of Mexico. In January, in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, a guerrilla insurgency of indigenous people shook the complacency of the Mexican state just as it was congratulating itself on the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the United States Congress (the collapse of the peso at the end of the year raised further doubts about the the future of the economy). In March, the ruling party received a second shock when its candidate for president, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated after giving a campaign speech in a poor neighborhood in Tijuana. Both these events evoke the legacy of the Mexican Revolution in powerful ways, drawing attention to its unfinished, or ongoing, character from 1910 to the present day: The Chiapas rebels called themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and the last assassination of a high-ranking political figure was the 1928 murder of the revolutionary general Alvaro Obregon shortly after his winning a second term in office. The governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary party-PRI) itself dates from a first incarnation, the Partido Revolucionario Nacional (National Revolutionary party-PNR), established in 1929, and has ruled in unbroken succession for over 60 years. These events pose the question: Is Mexico's revolution finished, or is Mexico on the verge of a second great revolution? The answers lie not only in understanding present trends but in carefully sifting through the past. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was a complex, multisided process subject to a great many possible interpretations. Some have called it a bourgeois revolution that overthrew feudalism, while others see it as a failed socialist (or working-class) revolution. The labels peasant, popular, democratic, and anti-imperialist have all been attached to