Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940 – 1962

Abstract

This important book shows how a regional study can change our understanding of a larger national story. It opens when scores of Mexican soldiers pulled up to the house of 62-year-old agrarian leader, social activist, previous gubernatorial candidate, and former Zapatista Rubén Jaramillo. They abducted him, his wife, and three of their sons in broad daylight on May 23, 1962, and drove them to the outskirts of the Aztec ruins of Xochicalco, Morelos. They machine-gunned them all, leaving their bullet-riddled bodies behind, not even bothering to conceal their crime. The assassinations were meant to silence Jaramillo, crush the larger Jaramillista movement, and send a message to others who would challenge the government. This history of the Jaramillistas tells us a lot about mid-twentieth-century Mexico, shattering images of the “Pax-Priísta” and providing a sobering view of society during the “Mexican Miracle.”Shaped by the revolution in Morelos, Jaramillo carried forward the age-old demands of Zapatismo for land, local political autonomy, and community control of resources. During a period of intense consolidation of state control under President Lázaro Cárde-nas (1936 – 40) Jaramillo blended revolutionary Zapatismo with Cardenismo, which was “an institutionalized agrarian ideology that encouraged peaceful reformist demands for change.” Jaramillo supported Cárdenas, who sought to institutionalize the revolution by including workers and peasants in a revamped ruling party, the Partido Revolucio-nario Mexicano (PRM), known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) since 1946. That was intended to provide them a voice in government. Ultimately, though, they were controlled by the state through official labor unions, peasant confederations, and dependence on government patronage of various forms. The Emiliano Zapata sugar refinery at Zacatepec, Morelos, reflected the trajectory of the Cardenista effort. Intended as a worker-run cooperative benefiting both ejidatarios in the fields and workers in the mill, the arrangement quickly deteriorated once Cárdenas left office. Less enthusiastic social reformers took power after 1940, while federally appointed bureaucrats at Zacate-pec corrupted the co-op. Administrators began lining their own pockets, ripping off the cane growers at the cane weighing stations, and alienating the refinery workers by denying shared control over the shop floor, rigging union votes, and hiring company thugs to intimidate people. The story is convincingly told, and reads as if the Mob ran Zacatepec.Jaramillo worked at Zacatepec. He first challenged the situation by appealing to local, then regional, and finally national authorities. As he moved further along he liked what he found less and less. What started off looking like local corruption permeated the state and federal bureaucracy. At that point, Jaramillo, a believer in the Constitution of 1917, moved from petitioning the state government to trying to take it over. He never called for an overthrow of the federal government though, insisting instead that it live up to its constitutional obligations. Jaramillo’s initial labor organizing at the mill grew to include broader efforts for political change that would favor peasants and rural workers in general. When he could find no official candidate with the same platform, he ran for governor himself. His activism resulted in several attempts on his life. He got into shoot-outs with hired assassins, killing a couple of them who tried to assassinate him when he was in the middle of a speech. After suffering electoral defeat marred by fraud, he resorted to armed rebellion. The government hunted, and then eventually pardoned, him. He did not go away. His last effort was to create a model rural community that would reflect what he and his supporters thought Zacatepec should have been. The effort got him killed.Padilla’s work advances the study of post – World War II Mexico considerably. It introduces new archival sources for others to investigate, including recently declassified documents, as well as the author’s own interviews with people who would otherwise be lost to history. Conceptually, it redirects the existing conversation about the negotiated processes of identity and state formation toward Mexico’s remarkable postrevolutionary history of sustained social struggle. The process of crushing opposition that the author cites (students, railway workers, peasants, teachers’ unions, Jaramillistas, etc.) allowed for the imposition of unpopular reforms that have resulted in the deterioration of the standard of living of the Mexican working class. Viewed from this angle, the period under study looks like modernization built on the rollback of revolutionary social reforms, the defeat of popular groups pushing for them, and the creation of an increasingly repressive political regime to carry it out. That is not the end of the story, however, because popular groups of all sorts refuse to disappear. Well written and well researched, this book is a model of how to approach recent history. Reading it will benefit anyone interested in the making of modern Mexico.