Twentieth-Century Mexico Research Articles

New Approaches to Political Catholicism and Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Authors from a transnational research group analyze Catholic women’s political mobilizations, acknowledging Catholic women’s heritage of organization to maintain their religious practice in their communities from the colonial era onward. These activities afforded women opportunities for civic experience and leadership roles that continued through Mexico’s nineteenth-century political and social debates. This special issue focuses on how twentieth-century women developed new approaches to address revolutionary policies and projects, radical mobilizations, technological changes, and transformations within the Church following the Second Vatican Council. The authors argue that Catholic women have continued to envision themselves as political actors within the framework of their religion, expanding goals to transform religious and civic practices.

Catholic Women’s Activism for Abortion in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico and Contests over Legitimacy

Building on recent research, this paper recounts the emergence of Catholic women’s activism in favor of the right to abortion in late twentieth-century Mexico. The article argues that contests over legitimacy—specifically, disputes among Catholics about which beliefs are legitimately Catholic—are central to this history. In this case, the article follows Catholic women’s attempts to legitimize their position in favor of the right to abortion and Catholic authorities’ attempts to delegitimize the same idea. The paper concludes with a 1992 episode in Guanajuato that has not received much scholarly attention, when secular and Catholic feminists collaborated. Because these Catholic activists faced opposition from angry protestors, they set up a press conference to dispel any misconceptions and legitimize their own Catholic position in favor of the right to abortion to the Mexican public. The resistance Elvia Neri, a retired Catholic woman and mayordoma for her church, faced led her to share her testimonio, a rare archival source that publicly reconciled a commitment to both the Catholic faith and reproductive rights. Scholarship on feminist mobilization has at least included the work of Catholic activists who advocated the right to abortion. However, these contests over legitimacy have led scholarship on Catholic women’s activism to neglect Catholic perspectives that favor the right to abortion.

Malt Barley in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Brewing Industry, Centralized Knowledge, and the Green Revolution

Abstract This article focuses on how Mexico’s brewers, backed by a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican agronomists and officials who together developed the foundations of the Green Revolution, facilitated the centralization of decision-making over new technologies of production in the malt barley industry in the mid-twentieth century. Brewers developed and enforced an extensive contract farming system dominated by a single company that gave them substantial control over the dissemination of new knowledge about seed varieties, but which created an opportunity for profit-seeking intermediaries to assume a primary role in mediating the transfer of these new technologies to small farmers. In doing so, they enabled the consolidation of a brewing triopoly that, while poised for global expansion by the 1980s, contributed to higher levels of rural inequality as it deployed Green Revolution technologies to serve large industry growth. This article therefore examines a key, though often underexplored dimension of the Green Revolution, in particular how urban industry captured new technologies aimed at ending food insecurity to serve mid-century industrialism.

Colonial agricultural estates and rural development in twentieth-century Mexico

ABSTRACT This study documents that municipalities in central Mexico closer in the past to an agricultural estate (hacienda) are associated with higher literacy and lower poverty throughout the twentieth century than municipalities similar in other respects but farther from a hacienda. The results are robust to various specifications, neighbour matching analyses, and a placebo-type test. The complementarities between late-colonial haciendas in central Mexico and mining and trade appear to have set municipalities close to a hacienda on a distinct development path. The evidence points to local-scale economies in hacienda locations that coordinated new investments away from agriculture and towards the new industrial and commercial sectors. The twentieth-century land reform and the railroad play a small role in explaining hacienda legacy. Our findings highlight the role of landed estates as centres linking rural economic activity to the main colonial economic activities, mining and trade.

Mexican Teachers and the State - Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Tanalís Padilla. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 355. Abbreviations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $104.95 cloth; $28.95 paper.

Mexican Teachers and the State - Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Tanalís Padilla. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 355. Abbreviations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $104.95 cloth; $28.95 paper.

Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth Century Mexico ed. by Wil G. Pansters and Benjamin T. Smith (review)

Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth Century Mexico ed. by Wil G. Pansters and Benjamin T. Smith (review)

Building blocks for a new paradigm? State-making, society and violence in twentieth-century Mexico

– Unrevolutionary Mexico. The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship, by Paul Gillingham, Yale University Press, 2021.
 – Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959-1965, by Elizabeth Henson, University of Arizona Press, 2019.
 – In the Vortex of Violence. Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, by Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, University of California Press, 2020.
 – Unintended Lessons of Revolution. Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, by Tanalís Padilla, Duke University Press, 2021.
 – [Tiempo suspendido]. Una historia de la desaparición forzada en México, 1940-1980, by Camilo Vicente Ovalle, Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2019.

Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

The long political history of the rural normales (teacher training institutions) has been dominated by recent manifestations of student teachers depicted in acts of flagrant resistance to the state and then further obfuscated by the outsize repressive state violence enacted in retaliation. Tanalís Padilla's unparalleled study of the rural normales, spanning the twentieth century, makes revelatory observations about the fraught relationship between these iconic institutions and the state. At the peak of revolutionary reform, the rural normales were the gem of Cardenista educational policy, representing the state's commitment to a social justice orientation and a recognition that rural education had its fortunes tied to agrarian reform.As Cold War concerns about a radicalized countryside sullied ideological commitment to the fate of rural Mexicans, the rural normales became hubs of political energy that drew the suspicion—and armed response—of the increasingly wary state. Unintended Lessons of Revolution draws from declassified intelligence documents, the press, the US State Department, the Mexican Ministry of Education archives, local school archives from across the nation, memoirs of former teachers in training, and oral histories. The scope is national, featuring evidence from most of the nearly three dozen official rural normales, but it homes in on the geographies of resistance in Guerrero and Chihuahua to mount an argument about the entrenched animosity that student teachers (normalistas) experienced in those regions. It provides the much-needed historical context for the events leading up to the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa student teachers and dignifies the struggle of the rural poor for equity in access to education.The book opens with chapters on the institutional history of rural normales, tracing a chronology from their crucible in the missionary spirit of the José Vasconcelos years to their politicization in the socialist education era and the conservative turn of the 1940s. As the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) steadily withdrew resources from the rural normales, citing inefficiencies and moral corruption, student teachers of the mid-twentieth century appealed to the “revolutionary ethos” in which their beloved institutions were founded a generation before (p. 188). The 1950s ushered in a wave of rural and working-class discontent, as strikes from student teachers and railroad workers spurred each other into solidarity and unions shifted from state-dominated institutions of control to hotbeds of subversive activity in the eyes of the PRI. The proximity and suasion of the Cuban Revolution accelerated the political urgency of the normalistas over the decade of the 1960s, a theme drawn out poignantly in the chapter on the ill-fated attack on the Madera military barracks in Chihuahua led by a normalista-campesino guerrilla coalition.If the political zeitgeist of the 1960s politicized youth on the margins, it also prompted a tightening of the authoritarian state. Padilla demonstrates how state officials did not hesitate to wield their military power at the least provocation, but she dedicates even more space to the finer points of bureaucratic violence, chronicling the reforms to the rural normal system that normalistas saw as punitive in the wake of Tlatelolco. Padilla deftly evades a causational argument that would link the student strike of 1968 to the suite of reforms in 1969–71 that effectively disenfranchised the rural normal system, but the legislation enshrined the state's official adversarial position toward rural educators. By the 1970s, the animosity had become so entrenched that an increasingly aggrieved cohort of normalistas resorted to more public, violent, and transgressive ways of calling attention to their historical frustrations and present demands. The book's epilogue hurtles through the neoliberal period, demonstrating how the rural normal system has continued to suffer a slow death by a thousand technocratic cuts.The Mexican Federation of Socialist Campesino Students (FECSM) persisted as an organizing presence that Padilla argues maintained the revolutionary mandate at the time of its foundation (1934) over the course of the twentieth century. The FECSM became the engine of political consciousness-raising for the rural student teachers, often very young and naive, in the dining halls and dormitories. The student condition and national politics became synonymous for those living and studying in these rural outposts, and in the agrarian roots of the students' family histories the FECSM found fertile ground. Through the FECSM's efforts, the spirit of Lázaro Cárdenas stayed alive in the rural normales and allowed the young students to take the state to task for abandoning the revolution's stated aims. Meanwhile, Padilla shows that even when material conditions and official commitment to the revolution deteriorated, the state expected rural schoolteachers to maintain the self-abnegating spirit vaunted by Vasconcelos's generation of cultural missionaries.Unintended Lessons of Revolution does much more than contextualize Ayotzinapa. It shows the profound power that the disenfranchised have, even from a position of dispossession, in occupying the imaginary of the state.

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

In Oaxaca Resurgent, A. S. Dillingham explores the paradoxes of Mexican indigenista education and development in the Mixteca Alta. Indigenista thought “simultaneously cast the ‘Indian’ as the origin of national identity, a barrier to be overcome, and a source of inspiration for a multicultural future” (4). Indigenismo sought to recognize Native communities, but their resistance defied expectations. Triqui women of San Andrés Chicahuaxtla frowned and stared at the ground in the photographs of anthropologist Frederick Starr. Decades later, an elderly Mixtec man scolded a teacher: “Damn, Ramón. We sent you to Mexico [City] to learn la castilla [Spanish] so you could return and teach it to us. Now it turns out you want to teach us in our own language?” (58). Throughout the mountainous western region, the teachers, agriculturalists, and other promotores bilingües like Ramón joined Indigenous communities to engage, reject, and reshape state initiatives to modernize living standards.Dillingham captures the dissonant voices and visions that indigenistas represented. Early chapters explore economic development and inequality during the sexenios of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58) and Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64), Spanish literacy campaigns, and land and labor systems. Anthropologists of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) Julio de la Fuente and Alejandro Marroquin, and the economist Moisés de la Peña, associated Indigeneity with colonialism. They reported that local mestizo elites, mine owners, forestry officials, merchants, coffee estate coyotes, and parasitic agraristas exploited Mixtecs at the Tlaxiaco market. For its short-wave radio broadcasts in both Spanish and Mixtec, INI hired Ramón Hernández López of San Agustín Tlacotepec and fifty other radio auxiliary teachers (nine were women) to educate Mixtecs over the radio station XEINI. The broadcasts invoked declarations that God or the devil spoke Mixtec. Two-hour daily lessons covered languages, literacy, and math and reached forty-nine schools at a time when children traveled miles to classrooms with a week’s worth of tortillas and no formal sleeping arrangements. In 1963, INI resettlement of Mixtecs to Oaxaca’s Costa Chica erupted into racial violence that required federal intervention.Dillingham devotes later chapters to Third Worldist development strategies, dissident trade unionism, and anti-colonial multiculturalism. The Oaxaca State Institute of Social Research and Integration (IIISEO) adopted anti-colonialist pedagogies during Luís Echeverría’s presidency (1970–76). Leading critics of indigenista policy, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Margarita Nolasco, and Mercedes Olivera deployed INI to politicize Indigenous claims to rights and autonomy. University students seized coordinating centers and demanded professional training. IIISEO director Gloria Ruiz de Bravo Ahuja hired Nolasco and recruited Indigenous children and young adults to promote their culture. IIISEO educators embraced the New Left, formed the Coalición de Promotores Culturales Bilingües (CPCB), and coordinated strikes until the PRI shuttered the organization in 1977. A year later, Santiago Salazar, Eva Ruiz, and the Coalition of Indigenous Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO) occupied the SEP building until President José López Portillo (1976–82) and the national teacher’s union Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) honored their demands. Dillingham argues that Oaxacan teachers who declared their own multicultural visions for rural education, development, and equality predated the critique of neoliberalism and the Zapatista uprising in 1994. The rise of the Pátzcuaro Ethnolinguistic Program, decline of the SIL, and publication of school textbooks in twenty-two Indigenous languages (including Tutu sa’an ñuu savi, my first-grade Mixtec book) further valorized bilingual teachers. CMPIO’s resurgent anti-colonial agenda blossomed into the 2006 Oaxacan social movement, which “drew on decades of teacher activism and the strength of Oaxacan community ties” (187).Dillingham’s research on the Mixteca Alta presents myriad perspectives over decades, granting vast dimensions to a subject difficult to historicize and problematize. With exceptional gifts in interpretation, empathy, and exposition, he might consider producing an authoritative study of nineteenth-century Indigenous Oaxaca.

Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico by Tanalís Padilla

Reviewed by: Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico by Tanalís Padilla Yoly Zentella Padilla, Tanalís. Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. [End Page 235] Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico is based on a study of the rural normales, Mexican teacher training schools with a long tradition of radicalism and struggle for social justice, with origins in the Revolución of 1910. In eight chapters and an epilogue, Padilla succinctly and chronologically unwraps for the reader the role of the maestro, the teacher, as a radical archetype in the history of Mexican education, describing the interrelationship between the local populations, students, and government policies. The study, conducted by Padilla from which the book evolved, is of national scope and based on sources including declassified Mexican government documents from 2002, US Department of State records, local school archives, published memoirs, and more than fifty interviews conducted by the author in rural normales throughout Mexico. The author's intention was to fill a void in the Secretaria de Educación Publica's (Office of Public Education [SEP]) national archives, beyond the 1940s, by telling the story of rural normales from the perspective of student and graduate activists. Unintended Lessons of Revolution is an absorbing read for academics, students, activist scholars, and others interested in Mexican history, the education component, and student radicalism and its relationship with the Mexican state. Padilla is a historian of Latin America and history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her focus is political and agrarian movements of modern Mexico. Among her publications is Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (2008) centering on the history of an agrarian movement turned armed struggle. In 2013, she coedited and contributed to a special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (JILAR), in which the implications for post-revolutionary historiography of Mexico's recently declassified intelligence documents are analyzed. Padilla frequently publishes in Mexican periodicals. Unintended Lessons of Revolution narrates the relationship between student political struggle and the Mexican state. It also describes the progressive possibilities inherent in education and the development of student political consciousness as their identities unfold from campesino, to student, to teacher. Written in a linear, dynamic style, the chapters are chronological in nature, with a clear overlap of content, taking the reader from the revolutionary roots of the rural normales, their early formation during the 1920s, the impact of the liberal policies of president Cardenas (1934–1940) on the rural schools, and the [End Page 236] government's later shift to the political right resulting in a reduction of normales and demonization of activist-teachers during an anti-communist, Cold War climate. Padilla's narrative continues as students engage in agrarian struggle and political protests associated with uprisings leading to the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 during the Ordaz administration (1964–1970), an atrocity that changed the normalista political approach to one of heightened activism. Here, the state accelerated the suppression of student militancy by reducing the number of rural normales and disbanding of the Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de Mexico (Mexican Federation of Rural Student Socialists [FECSM]). The book ends with attempts by rural normales at recovery and the re-establishment of the FECSM during the presidency of Echeveria (1970–1976). However, the rise of guerilla groups tied to the massacre at Tlatelolco, normalista collaboration with the guerrillas, the radical sector's realization of the government's unwillingness to bring about social justice to rural areas, and neoliberal encroachment on education created an explosive conflict between the rural normales students and the state. The state's response was heightened surveillance, infiltration, and horrific retaliation as in the disappearance in 2014 of the Ayotzinapa 43, students of the Ayotzinapa normal. The book is thorough, giving the reader a variety of ways to appreciate the importance of the topic—an appendix, notes, maps, and photos. While Unintended Lessons of Revolution is based on an academic study and...

What Is Latin American History?

What Is Latin American History?

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico by Alan Shane Dillingham

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico by Alan Shane Dillingham

Tanalís Padilla, Unintended Lessons of the Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2022), pp. 376, $28.95 pb.

Tanalís Padilla, Unintended Lessons of the Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2022), pp. 376, $28.95 pb. - Volume 54 Issue 4

Review: En tela de juicio: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX), by Elisa Speckman Guerra

Review: <i>En tela de juicio: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX)</i>, by Elisa Speckman Guerra

Development and Indigenismo in Oaxaca - Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By A. S. Dillingham. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 254. Abbreviations. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.

Development and Indigenismo in Oaxaca - Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By A. S. Dillingham. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 254. Abbreviations. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 30.00 paper. - Volume 79 Issue 4

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico by A. S. Dillingham

In the face of more than a century of scholarship that has made Oaxaca and its peoples an object of inquiry—in archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and other fields—this wide-ranging study instead demonstrates the many ways that Oaxacans have made themselves the subjects of their own history. Indigenous youth, in particular, drive this interdisciplinary analysis, which relies on local, state, and national archives, as well as interviews with key figures, to highlight the contested nature of state-directed modernization efforts. By closely examining agricultural and educational programs led by state agencies from the 1950s through the 1980s, Dillingham demonstrates the contradictory and complicated nature of indigenismo in Mexico in the decades after World War II. State agencies created to promote official Indigenous uplift in Mexico sought to solve problems that they associated with indigeneity, simultaneously understanding the country’s Indigenous populations as “the origin of national identity, a barrier to be overcome, and a source of inspiration for a multicultural future” (4). In so doing, officials tried to educate speakers of Indigenous languages, to relocate residents of supposedly “overpopulated” highlands to coastal areas, and to incorporate Indigenous trade-union members into the national political project of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri).In each case, however, the subjects of these development efforts reappropriated the rhetoric and machinery of reform to their own ends. Dillingham finds, for example, that the reason for the failure of a state resettlement program that attempted to move residents of the Mixteca Alta highlands to low-lying coastal areas long inhabited by Afro-Mexican residents was not the refusal of Mixtec people to migrate. In fact, highlanders frequently undertook seasonal migration to northern Mexico and eventually to the United States to work as agricultural laborers before returning home, integrating themselves into “an increasingly interconnected economy, both nationally and internationally” while maintaining their ties to their communities (91). In detailing this disjuncture between state plans and local practices, Dillingham highlights the radical, Indigenous-led projects that emerged in the wake of the failure of such government-led programs, particularly as teachers and students criticized those programs’ paternalism and neocolonialism and fought for autonomy and dignity. Indigenous people, he argues, shaped Oaxaca’s postwar history through the “quotidian struggles to determine the terms of one’s incorporation into state structures” (116).A key chapter details how young people educated in indigenista state programs in Oaxaca City during the 1970s pushed against the institutional limits of their training when they returned home, fighting for educational programs that “articulated new theories of liberation that centered Indigenous peoples’ unique cultural and historical experiences” (95). This militancy set the foundations for a new vision of multicultural inclusion to which the state, under presidents Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo, was forced to respond. Crucial to Dillingham’s argument is the assertion that this multiculturalism was not merely an identity-based strategy of the state to incorporate Indigenous Mexicans into an increasingly austere, neoliberal economy. He shows instead that the struggle for multicultural recognition maintained its class character, serving as a source of organizing power especially for the dissident teachers-union movement that flourished in Oaxaca and directly challenged the hegemony of the ruling party. In developing a praxis of comunalidad, communality, these militants mobilized “a form of historical thinking, drawing on histories of exclusion to explain and make visible an unequal present” (181).In centering these young people’s voices and experiences, Dillingham offers an important revision to histories of development in Mexico, showing how Indigenous Oaxacans appropriated and refashioned attempts to “modernize” their communities. In so doing, they shaped not only their own futures but also the contours of the Mexican post-revolutionary state.

Intra-Christian Violence and the Problematisation of the World Christian Paradigm

Violence is a crucial lens for inquiring historically into Christianity worldwide. The field of World Christianity, however, has been oriented by a paradigm of growth, success and Christian converts’ creative agency. This article establishes the need for a historiographical intervention in the literature on World Christianity through a critical analysis of texts that have formed the field, followed by examinations of anti-Evangelical violence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico, and Catholic-Protestant conflicts in colonial East Africa. These case studies identify lacunae in the field and suggest that violence has often been a constitutive part of the contextual formation of World Christianity.

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Tanalís Padilla

<i>Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico</i>. By Tanalís Padilla

Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico

This thorough and pathbreaking book upends the ways historians have traditionally understood Mexico's revolutionary agrarian reform. Helga Baitenmann sheds new light on the foundational institutions and early trajectory of the twentieth-century ejido. The book shows that, far from being reluctant to distribute land, Carrancista officials and villagers actively participated in the early implementation of agrarian reform. It also argues that Emiliano Zapata and the Zapatista movement were not, in fact, rebelling against capitalism, but against the unprecedented ways its intrusions threatened villagers in Morelos.The book demonstrates that Arturo Warman's dichotomy, which informed generations of historians—land restitutions as a form of autonomy and land grants as a form of co-optation—was ultimately a false one. Indeed, Baitenmann finds some unexpected similarities when comparing the Zapatista and constitutionalist land reforms. Among these are that both created temporary methods for local administrators to manage restitution and grant lands. Although the Zapatista agrarian reform ultimately remained unfulfilled, the “accidental permanence” of the Carrancista temporary agrarian reforms became the origin of the twentieth-century ejido. Equally important, the book also traces the role of the judiciary in the process involved in the shift from restitution of pueblo lands to granting expropriated lands to villages, and it showcases villagers' agency in promoting and shaping that process of revolutionary land reform.The first chapter shows the litigious tradition of pueblos' filing land restitutions that stretched back to the nineteenth century. While hundreds of pueblo representatives filed restitutions in court (far more than previously acknowledged in the scholarship), it was difficult for them to win because of corruption, favoritism, or lack of legal documentation. These difficulties continued into the twentieth century (something discussed at length in chapter 6), but Baitenmann's focus is on the agency of pueblo representatives. Despite the many challenges they faced, they actively engaged in litigation and strategically pitted branches of government against one another.Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that the early phase of the Mexican Revolution witnessed not only armed battles but also legal ones, as pueblos continued exerting pressure on various levels of government to resolve land and water claims and fight over territorial boundaries with haciendas. Focusing on the localized Zapatista agrarian reform, a process that remains understudied, Baitenmann finds that Zapatista leadership resolved conflicts in the form of temporary repartos in their attempts to deal with the problem of vague or nonexistent documents. They intended to finalize these temporary repartos once the revolution was complete.In chapter 4, Baitenmann broadens her scope to the national level by examining the Carrancista land reform at a time when the Supreme Court was disbanded. Finding that the reform was more substantial than previous scholars claimed, she shows that José Venustiano Carranza's regime set the main procedures for land reform. These amounted to a shift in power from courts to commissions, and from the judiciary to the executive branch.Chapter 5 expands on Timothy M. James's work by showing that the Supreme Court was not more interventionist in resolving land and water issues during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it prioritized redistributing land over restricting the power of the executive branch. This, Baitenmann explains, is one of the reasons sitting presidents have had so much jurisdiction over the agrarian question throughout the twentieth century.Chapter 6 delves into the 1920s land reform in Morelos, arguing against the “revolution betrayed” thesis that has characterized so much of the historiography of twentieth-century Mexico. Baitenmann shows that the reason for so many land grants, and so few land restitutions, was that all the players—the National Agrarian Commission, the interim governor of Morelos, and the Supreme Court—prioritized their commitment to create agrarian reform in Morelos as quickly as possible. Furthermore, they gambled that inter-village conflicts over land and water would be resolved most effectively through land grants and not through restitutions.By deftly analyzing how neither reform intended to create what became the modern ejido, Baitenmann offers an excellent example of how to historicize the lasting consequences of unintentionality. In sum, this is a well-organized, dense, and clearly argued book to be appreciated by all historians of agrarian Mexico.