Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacan, 1920-1935 9781503619807

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Becoming Campesinos

Becoming Campesinos p o l i t i c s , i d e n t i t y, a n d ag r a r i a n s t ru g g l e i n p o s t r e vo l u t i o n a ry m i c h oac á n , 19 2 0 – 19 3 5

• 

c h r i s to p h e r r . b oy e r

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2003

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boyer, Christopher R. (Christopher Robert) Becoming campesinos : politics, identity, and agrarian struggle in postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935 / Christopher R. Boyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8047-4352-5 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-8047-4356-8 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Peasantry—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo—History—20th century. 2. Peasantry—Mexico—Political activity—History—20th century. 3. Agricultural laborers—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo—History— 20th century. 4. Land reform—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo— History—20th century. 5. Michoacán de Ocampo (Mexico)—Politics and government—20th century. 6. Mexico—Politics and government—1910–1946. I. Title. hd1531.m6 b69 2002 305.5'633'09723709042—dc21 2002012183 Original Printing 2003 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Typeset by James P. Brommer in 10/14 Sabon

For Amy, Partner and Practitioner

Contents

1.

2.

3.

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Becoming Campesinos: From Political Category to Cultural Identity

16

Land, Community, and Memory in Postrevolutionary Michoacán

46

Francisco Múgica and the Making of Agrarian Struggle, 1920–1922

80

4.

Village Revolutionaries

114

5.

Refusing the Revolution: Catholic Nationalism and the Cristero Rebellion

154

6.

Lázaro Cárdenas and the Advent of a Campesino Politics

188

7.

Conclusion: The Politics of Campesino Identity in Twentieth-Century Mexico

223

Appendix: Land Reform in Michoacán, 1917–1940 List of Abbreviations Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

245 246 249 286 289 310

Acknowledgments

I first began writing about the agrarian militants of Michoacán in 1991, in part because I wanted to understand why the rural people of Mexico found themselves in desperate straits despite the nation’s revolutionary heritage. Some tattered remnants of that heritage could still be found in those days, even if in radically altered form. The official party of the revolution (then in its most famous guise as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) was still in power and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had yet to be signed. The land reform still existed, at least on paper. A lot has changed since those days. The PRI has lost the presidency and faces the deepest crisis of its long history. NAFTA has made globalization into a central feature of Mexico’s political economy despite yet another economic crisis that began in late 1994. The redistribution of lands is only a memory, and land reform beneficiaries can privatize their holdings if they wish. It seems that the epitaph can finally be written for the Mexican Revolution. Or can it? On the same day that NAFTA took effect, indigenous people from Chiapas revolted. They called themselves Zapatistas, harking back to the famous revolutionary agrarian of the 1910s. In 2002, a governor by the name of Lázaro Cárdenas took office in Michoacán, three-quarters of a century after his grandfather and namesake did likewise. It seems as if a revolutionary ghost continues to dwell somewhere in the machine. Many people who share my interest in the fate of Mexico’s rural people have encouraged me to write this history. I would like express my gratitude to my teachers at the University of Chicago: John Coatsworth, Paul Friedrich, Claudio Lomnitz, and my dissertation director, Friedrich Katz. Anyone familiar with their extensive contributions to the study of Mexican history will doubtless find echoes of their work in the pages that follow. ix

x

Acknowledgments

Michoacán is fortunate to have two distinguished institutions of higher education whose scholars helped me to orient my research and think about its implications. They have built up a vibrant historiography of Michoacán, and I am pleased to finally add my own contribution to it. At the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, I benefited from the kindness and constant support of Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Napoleón Guzmán, and Eduardo Mijangos. And at the Colegio de Michoacán, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues Álvaro Ochoa Serrano, Verónica Okión Solano, and Martín Sánchez, the latter of whom has been a gracious host on more than one occasion. A number of archivists helped me locate the sources for this book. Thanks to Elva Ruiz Magaña, Alicia Venegas González, Pilar Ortega Varela, and Rita María Hernández Hernández, all of whom worked at the Archivo Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo in Morelia when I was doing my research; to Lic. Luis Prieto Reyes, Arturo Ayala López, Guadalupe Ramos García, Angelica Herrera Arteaga, and Teresa Sánchez Santillán of the Centro de Estudios de la Revolución “Lázaro Cárdenas” in Jiquilpan; to Padre Alberto Burgos of the Seminario de Zamora; and to Juventino González Pimentel and Ignacio Trejo Gutiérrez of the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Mons. Francisco Valencia Ayala allowed me to review the holdings of the Sala Canonical of the Cathedral of Zamora and helped me to make sense of what I had read. Several other individuals allowed me access to documents in their possession, including Fidelmar Gutiérrez, Pilar Ortega, Samuel Ruiz Madrigal, Álvaro Ochoa, and Adonaí Sotelo. And many thanks to the late Salvador Lemus for allowing me to read his memoirs and speak with him about their historical context. When it came time to leave the archives and check my impressions against the memories of people who participated in the events, I found more than fifty people to speak to in 1994, 1995, and 1997. Many of these individuals have passed away since that time, and I can only hope that this book helps in some way to preserve their experiences and thoughts. It is common to refer to the debts one has incurred with other scholars over the course of writing a book. But I do not feel so much indebted as grateful to all of those who at some point or another made specific suggestions to improve the book, or provided moral support, or (as was often the case) did both simultaneously. These include but are not limited

Acknowledgments

xi

to Alec Dawson, Heather Fowler Salamini, Enrique Guerra Manzo, Gil Joseph, Florencia Mallon, Erika Pani, Pablo Silva, Mary Kay Vaughan, and John Womack. Several people read and commented on part or all of the manuscript. I would like to thank an anonymous reader and John Tutino, both of whom read the manuscript for Stanford University Press and encouraged me with both insight and sensitivity to expand the book’s scope. Though the final product may not be what they had in mind, their comments were immensely helpful as I made final revisions. Ben Fallaw, Matt Karush, and Álvaro Ochoa also read the entire manuscript and offered penetrating suggestions for its improvement. Jocelyn Olcott and Tim Snyder read chapters at one point or another. Emilio Kourí and Bruce Calder gave me crucial help in the late going. I have tried to respond to the insights of all these colleagues and friends, but I of course take responsibility for the errors of fact and interpretation that still refuse to be stamped out. Writing a book takes time to sit and peck at a keyboard, of course, but it is made immeasurably easier by running ideas and uncooked concepts past perceptive and empathetic colleagues. A fellowship at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies gave me both the time to write and a cohort of peers who were engaged in similar pursuits. The academy also provided funds for a final research trip for this project. Previous funds were provided by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, the University of Chicago Program in Mexican Studies, and a University Small Research Grant from Kansas State University, all of which I gratefully acknowledge. Spencer Throckmorton and Malin Barth of Throckmorton Fine Art in New York City kindly gave permission to reproduce Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle on the cover. Jonathan Wyss of Topaz Maps in Watertown, Massachusetts, worked patiently with me to produce the map of Michoacán. Equally patient were Norris Pope, Stacey Lynn, Mike Mollett, and my other editors at Stanford University Press. Many thanks to them all. Following some sort of unwritten scholarly convention, I have waited until the end to thank those who have sacrificed the most to see this book through. I never could have written this book without the support and encouragement of my family, and in any case I doubt I would have wanted

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Acknowledgments

to. I would like to thank my son, Isaac Boyer, who came along in the middle of this process and has lived his whole life so far with this book always in the background. Unlike Isaac, my compañera Amy Shannon had some choice in the matter. Over the years, she has generously drawn upon her own experiences as an advocate for campesinos in Mexico as she read and appraised these pages. I dedicate this book to her with love and admiration.

Becoming Campesinos

Introduction

• 

Aquí estamos mi General, aquí seguimos. Aquí estamos porque estos gobiernos siguen sin memoria para los indígenas y porque los ricos hacendados, con otros nombres, siguen despojando de su tierra a los campesinos. Here we are, my General, we’re still here. We’re here because these governments still ignore indigenous people and because rich hacienda owners, with different names now, still rob the campesinos of their land. subcomandante marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. Open letter to Emiliano Zapata, April 10, 1997.

rural folk known as campesinos occupy a privileged position in the national consciousness of modern Mexico. Ever since the revolution of 1910–20 made the desperate condition of subsistence farmers and rural wage laborers into a central issue of Mexican political life, the plight of these campesinos has absorbed the attention of the nation’s most celebrated writers, artists, and public intellectuals. Stylized images of country people clad in ghost-white tunics and pitched sombreros appear in the murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco as the bearers of the nation’s cultural heritage, and Octavio Paz, Mexico’s premier essayist, once called campesinos the “most ancient and secret element” of Mexican society.1 The nation’s greatest political leaders of the twentieth century tended to regard campesinos as the rightful heirs of the nation’s revolutionary legacy. Political visionaries such as Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico’s president from 1934 to 1940) have understood campesinos to be the disenfranchised rural 1

2

Introduction

folk whom the revolution could “redeem” and integrate into the political nation. Sympathetic as these renderings of the campesino are, however, they end up portraying country folk as the ageless face of the Mexican countryside, as a resolutely traditional people who have stoically endured their lot down through the centuries. At other times, artists and politicians have considered campesinos in a very different light, imagining them to be downtrodden masses prepared to lash out against their oppressors. The muralists painted campesinos not only as the soul of the nation but also as the vengeful instrument of the revolutionary crusade to build a more just society. Paz himself argued that revolutionary violence gave Mexico a rare glimpse into the true temper of the countryside. The image of a unified and potentially revolutionary rural populace also captured the imaginations of major political figures such as Cárdenas and his political mentor, Francisco Múgica. Both men were central players in the creation of the postrevolutionary Mexican state and were, not coincidentally, natives and one-time governors of Michoacán, the western state that is the focus of this book. Like the muralists, Múgica and Cárdenas supposed that campesinos had certain “objective” interests in political and economic terms, although they also believed that rural people could not advance their interests, or even fully recognize them, until they had the cognitive and political means at their disposal to do so. It may seem that there is no way to reconcile the two perceptions of campesinos—as cultural conservatives and as protorevolutionaries—but in fact the two representations share a fundamental similarity. They both take it for granted that campesinos exist as a determinate and virtually unchanging social group. In other words, rather than treat campesino identity as a product of historical processes, these artists, thinkers, and politicians have understood campesino identity as a preconstituted fact, an objective social category produced by extrinsic and relatively stable historical structures such as rural people’s ancient cultural traditions or the fact that they must work the land to make a living. The apparent timelessness of campesinos’ presence in rural Mexico may explain why so few historians have considered campesino identity a fit topic for investigation. After all, if campesino identity is in a sense structurally determined by people’s relationship to the land, then there is no

Introduction

3

real reason for historians to inquire into the specific historical circumstances in which the Mexican campesinaje was constructed as a social entity. It can seem nonsensical to ask what rural people or politicians mean when they refer to “campesinos” because the answer appears to be self-evident. Recently, however, a few pioneering scholars have inquired into the manner in which state makers created an ideology around the “campesino problem” in order to revolutionize and modernize rural society. As Guillermo Palacios has argued, this ideology aimed at nothing less than the reconstruction of the popular mentality, insofar as political leaders hoped to “construct the postrevolutionary campesino” as a vital political actor and economic producer in a new, postrevolutionary Mexican society.2 Nevertheless, by focusing primarily on the ideologies and political discourses of the political class, these scholars have left unanswered the critical question of how rural people came to create, adopt, or reject campesino identity, or indeed what it meant to them to be campesinos in the first place. I argue in this book that campesino identity in twentieth-century Mexico is the outgrowth of popular militancy as interpreted through localized versions of postrevolutionary ideology. As we will see in Chapter 1, this cultural process began when rural people known as agrarians (agraristas) mobilized to request lands made available in the postrevolutionary land reform. The mobilized country people who participated in the land reform came in contact with schoolteachers, local activists, and others, local leaders whom I will call village revolutionaries. Village revolutionaries articulated a radical, class-based discourse that emphasized the values of class struggle and citizenship in what they imagined to be a new, postrevolutionary nation. As agraristas organized politically, solicited lands, and interacted with village revolutionaries, they appropriated some postrevolutionary ideals, but they rejected or transformed others in ways that made sense to them. Eventually, they began to represent themselves as belonging to a social category known as campesinos, that is, as a distinct social group united by a shared set of political and economic interests as well as by a collective history of oppression. The locally intelligible conceptions of class and citizenship that agraristas began to elaborate in the 1920s constituted the fundamental building blocks of campesino identity. But this was not an even process, and variations in the way class and citizenship were experienced and contested in

4

Introduction

the postrevolutionary era help to explain why the campesino seems to be such a protean social category in Mexico. The term has almost no meaning in a strictly economic sense, leading some scholars to insist that it lacks analytical coherence. It applies equally well to villagers who have access to their own land and to those who are wage laborers or sharecroppers or those who earn a living through a combination of subsistence strategies. Sidney Mintz argued more than a quarter-century ago that the solution to this ontological difficulty is to analyze the development of rural class consciousness in historical terms.3 With the notable exception of Jeffrey Gould’s examination of political consciousness among the campesinos in Chinandega, Nicaragua, however, relatively few historians have taken up the challenge.4 Gould demonstrated that rural people’s community-centered political struggles eventually engendered a self-described “campesino movement” in Chinandega. Community allegiances (and rivalries) as well as rural people’s collective experiences of political mobilization will also play a central role in this study, but rural folk in Mexico had an enormous political asset that their Nicaraguan counterparts lacked at the time. Mexico’s Constitution of 1917 was both a product of the revolution and a fundamental pillar of political life in the 1920s and 1930s. It guaranteed that all Mexican citizens would benefit from the “promises of the revolution,” including access to land and education, as well as the ability to unionize. So even though rural people had been negotiating the rights and duties associated with Mexican citizenship since the early nineteenth century,5 the constitution expanded these benefits beyond anything that rural people could have previously aspired to. As we shall see, their efforts to capitalize on these rights set the stage for the decades-long agrarista struggle in Michoacán. The ideology and practice of agrarian mobilization, both of which are captured by the term agrarismo (agrarianism), politicized rural people’s understanding of class and citizenship and began to instill a sense of campesino identity among a radicalized core of peasant militants. However, agrarismo never became a truly mass movement in Michoacán, and that fact poses something of an analytical puzzle. After all, if many rural people rejected the politics of agrarismo, how can we account for the increasingly widespread presence of campesino identity in the postrevolutionary years? The answer is that, although agraristas were the first ones to de-

Introduction

5

fine themselves as campesinos in Michoacán, campesino identity quickly surpassed the boundaries of the agrarista movement. Rural people who felt alienated by the politics of agrarismo appropriated the central conceptual components of campesino identity in the late 1920s, and they too began to argue that impoverished rural people had a moral right to possess the land they worked, that subsistence farmers should sustain a degree of political solidarity with each other, and that the promises of the revolution codified in the 1917 constitution redressed a long history of social injustice in the countryside. A cultural identity such as the one rural people adopted in postrevolutionary Michoacán refers to a specific quality or set of values that a given set of people use in order to categorize social groups and codify social difference. Cultural identities are reflected in language and other symbolic systems that refer to attributes such as ethnicity, religion, class, gender, nationality, or some other seemingly innate quality. Cultural identities are not established in a political vacuum, however. As scholars such as Ernesto Laclau and Stewart Hall have demonstrated, they often reflect the values and prejudices that dominant social groups seek to map onto subordinate ones. Yet subordinate peoples typically contest or even reject some of the characteristics that others seek to impute to them, meaning that identity formation often arises out of an interplay between powerful and less powerful groups in society.6 So it should not be surprising that agraristas were not the only ones who eventually came to think of themselves as campesinos in Michoacán. As agrarian activists and political leaders brought campesino identity into existence in the 1920s and 1930s, more and more rural people found that it was a meaningful way to describe their own condition regardless of their attitudes about agrarismo. This should not be taken to imply that rural people who identified themselves as campesinos discarded other cultural identities that were important to them, of course. Rural people often found it possible to locate themselves within a number of different social categories that varied over time and according to context. Humble country folk became campesinos, at least in certain contexts, but they did not cease to have a Catholic identity of some sort, nor did they stop thinking of themselves in gendered terms as men or women, or in ethnic terms as mestizos or indigenous people. Finally, it is important to recognize that

6

Introduction

while the land reform and political organization associated with agrarismo helped to propel the process of campesino identity formation in Michoacán, people in other regions of the nation may have adopted campesino identity through very different processes and in very different contexts. Thus, there necessarily is no reason to assume that campesino identity formation in Michoacán served as the model for the rest of Mexico. On the other hand, Michoacán’s experience of agrarismo does represent an especially significant case of the way that identity politics played out in the postrevolutionary years. There was a truly remarkable degree of political activation of rural people in Michoacán, whether as prorevolutionary agraristas or antirevolutionary Catholic rebels. This popular awakening politicized village life and helped induce Michoacán’s agraristas to think of their solidarity with each other in terms of class and revolutionary citizenship. Moreover, Múgica and Cárdenas were major architects of the postrevolutionary state, and their understanding of rural people’s needs and solidarities derived in large measure from their interaction with the mobilized country people of their home state. Cárdenas was particularly eager to bring the popular classes into the public life of the nation, and his experiences with campesino politics as governor of Michoacán clearly guided some of the policies he followed as president in the mid-1930s. The political organization of Michoacán’s agraristas was thus a particularly conspicuous manifestation of the massive enlargement of the polity that occurred throughout Mexico in the postrevolutionary years. Popularclass groups such as workers, campesinos, indigenes, and (to some extent) women were all incorporated into the political sphere, both because they demanded to have their voices heard and because postrevolutionary leaders sought to build political clienteles.7 This means that the question in the postrevolutionary years was not so much whether popular groups would be allowed to participate in politics but rather under what conditions they would do so. Historians have long recognized that the carefully orchestrated expansion of political participation in the 1920s and 1930s was a critical factor in the formation of the inclusive yet increasingly authoritarian character of the twentieth-century Mexican state. The history of agrarismo in Michoacán can reveal quite a bit about how rural mobilization, campesino identity, and the postrevolutionary state developed in mutually reinforcing ways.

Introduction

7

agrarian mobilization: popular movement or state project? Although historians have studied agrarismo ever since the 1930s, they still do not agree on whether it was primarily a grassroots mobilization of militant villagers or a by-product of government patronage and boss politics. The earliest generation of scholars took the first position. Towering figures in Mexican historiography such as Frank Tannenbaum and Jesús Silva Herzog depicted the revolution as a massive peasant uprising led by social progressives determined to end the quarter-century-long dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz. These populist historians maintained that hacienda owners had acquired vast amounts of village land through fraudulent transactions as well as through various legal devices during the 1876–1911 Díaz regime, a period known as the Porfiriato. The loss of village lands outraged country folk, these scholars argued, leading the rural masses to join the revolutionary armies of the 1910s. Two years after the fighting had ended, the victorious revolutionaries passed a new constitution in 1917 that authorized the redistribution of hacienda lands and thus fulfilled “a promise embedded in the revolution.” Although the presidents of the 1920s were slow to implement land reform, these historians maintained that agraristas continued to press their demands until President Cárdenas brought about the “culminating moment” of the revolution in the mid-1930s by distributing more than 14 million hectares to nearly a million rural people.8 By the 1960s, some historians had begun to reexamine this “populist” narrative of the revolution. Inspired by the growing realization that the revolution had not substantially transformed Mexican society, revisionist historians complained that leaders such as Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, and others never intended to truly empower workers and campesinos, much less to overturn the capitalist system itself. They argued that the leaders of the revolution intended to take the place of the prerevolutionary economic elite and refashion the political system in ways more amenable to the nationalist middle class. The revisionists asserted that peasants and workers had rebelled against the Díaz dictatorship in the hope of forging a more equitable society but that petit bourgeois pseudorevolutionaries and foreign capitalists interrupted the revolutionary process before popular-class militants could achieve their goal.9

8

Introduction

The revisionist thesis soon echoed in historical studies of the postrevolutionary era as well. Scholars began to recognize that relatively few peasant communities in the 1920s and 1930s had spontaneously mobilized in support of the new regime. Instead, historians such as Jean Meyer demonstrated that national leaders and petty politicians often promised land and other benefits to rural folk in a more or less overt effort to pander to the demands of landless villagers and win some degree of support for postrevolutionary state formation. Inverting the populist historians’ argument, Meyer emphasized the popular origins of the counterrevolutionary Cristero revolt of 1926–29 and painted agraristas as opportunistic “clients” of the government. As another author put it, rural people who participated in the land reform found that they had to “recognize the legitimacy of the new social order and to accept their subordinate role” within the postrevolutionary political system.10 Several subsequent studies revealed that the land reform (and the potential for distributing political patronage) appealed more to cadres of relatively well-to-do local politicians and aspiring rural bosses than to average villagers themselves. Some of these historians also contended that Cárdenas’s far-reaching land reform program did not so much liberate rural people as shackle them to an increasingly indifferent agrarian bureaucracy.11 The postrevolutionary project to forge a modern citizenry— through the introduction of public education, through revolutionary leaders’ legislative assault on the Catholic church, and through government-led mobilizations of rural people—began to seem like arbitrary acts of social control, not the movement for popular liberation that revolutionary leaders had promised. As historian Luis González explained, most rural people did not spontaneously embrace postrevolutionary ideology simply because they felt so alienated by the existing social structure. Country people were not inherently revolutionary, in other words, they were “revolutionized” by outsiders.12 The most recent generation of “postrevisionist” historians has recruited Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to help them reconsider the relationship between the postrevolutionary project of state formation and the political consciousness of rural folk. Gramsci and his followers argued that the educational system, the media, and other cultural institutions in capitalist societies promote values that uphold and perpetuate the economic

Introduction

9

elite’s moral authority. As a result, the dominant political culture in capitalist countries makes it seem that disparities between rich and poor are natural and inevitable features of modern social life. To the extent that the popular (or “subaltern”) classes accept these ideals, elites can avoid the use of violence as they strive to perpetuate the existing order.13 Postrevisionists have opened a new avenue of inquiry into postrevolutionary Mexico by deemphasizing Gramsci’s conceptual framework regarding economic structures and focusing mainly on state formation. These historians argue that political elites, together with modernizing intellectuals such as schoolteachers, carried out a hegemonic project that naturalized and perpetuated postrevolutionary ideology. Initiatives such as secularized public education, nationalist radio programming, and carefully orchestrated civic rituals exposed popular groups to a new universe of revolutionary mores. They introduced the ideals of nationalism, reverence for the new pantheon of revolutionary heroes, and respect for the federal government into the consciousness of rural folk in an effort to establish the legitimacy, or perhaps even the inevitability, of the postrevolutionary order.14 Popular groups did not blindly adopt revolutionary precepts, of course, and postrevisionist historians have also emphasized that peasants, workers, and other subordinate groups attempted to negotiate their status within the emerging political system by resisting some aspects of the postrevolutionary project and reconfiguring others. As historian Mary Kay Vaughan has explained, the development of rural people’s political consciousness was not the product of a top-down, state-led project to impose modernizing and revolutionary values on rural people; instead, it derived from “the dialogue between state and society that took place around that project.”15 I propose in this book to expand historians’ understanding of this negotiation by showing just how complicated and multifaceted this hegemonic process was. I have tried to keep from attributing univocality to elite actors or to assume that subordinate social groups have a single cultural identity that trumps all others; it is an analytical stance born out of necessity. Consider the number of mutually antagonistic ideological projects in Michoacán in the postrevolutionary era. Revolutionary leaders, old-line liberals, and Catholic leaders all aspired to transform the consciousness of the popular classes, but none of them had the means to effect a “hegemonic outcome” (to borrow Florencia Mallon’s term) on a regional scale.16

10

Introduction

These elite actors lacked the unity and the institutional resources to realize their ideological vision in any but the most modest terms. Even Michoacán’s political class found it impossible to articulate a unified ideological vision between 1920 and 1935. No fewer than seven governors held office during that period, and their principles and political discourse differed in fundamental ways. To complicate matters further, radical governors in Michoacán and other states occasionally came under fire, both from local power brokers and from increasingly conservative national leaders who rejected their class-based brand of populism. And all of Michoacán’s governors had to contend with the resistance of fractious military commanders and other regional power brokers.17 Because there was not a dominant political ideology in postrevolutionary Michoacán, country people, their leaders, and their schoolteachermentors could choose from a number of different political discourses or even use multiple discourses simultaneously. Aside from the radicalized language of class and citizenship propounded by Múgica, Cárdenas, and the village revolutionaries, rural people had a long-term familiarity with versions of Social Catholicism and liberalism. Indeed, Catholics and liberals had attempted to advance hegemonic projects of their own long before the revolutionaries entered the scene. Catholic leaders had been advancing a well-developed vision of Mexican political culture and nationhood since the late nineteenth century. The movement known as Social Catholicism construed Mexico as one large religious community and promoted a social vision that emphasized social peace over class conflict and paternalism over militancy. Western Mexico provided fertile ground for such a vision because Catholic leaders there were able to draw on the church’s immense moral authority to put their ideals into practice. They established a network of credit unions and labor organizations intended to spiritually and materially improve the lives of the popular classes and, it was hoped, to transform them into modern yet devout citizens of the religious nation.18 A very different form of hegemonic project also existed in Michoacán prior to the advent of postrevolutionary radicalism. Political liberals were no more enamored of social conflict than the Catholics, and they continued to press for popular acceptance of notions of market relations and political individualism well into the twentieth century. Liberalism of this

Introduction

11

sort had sprouted deep roots in political circles and in some parts of the countryside in the nineteenth century, and many landowners and old-line political leaders continued to insist in the postrevolutionary decades that private property and republican values were the defining attributes of Mexican civilization.19 Rural people had no use for ideological orthodoxy, however, and village political cultures typically included some elements of all three of these ideologies. As a result, historians must account for rural people’s capacity to hold multiple and seemingly incongruous cultural identities and political outlooks at the same time. This means avoiding the temptation to ignore the complexity of rural politics by analytically privileging the putatively authentic or historically deep varieties of “campesino” or “indigenous” culture—those associated with Catholicism, say—over other, putatively less “authentic” cultural forms. The tendency to analytically flatten out the complexities of rural people’s political consciousness is visible in some ethnographically inclined studies of peasant identity that proceed from the profoundly moral standpoint that it is wrong for governments, markets, or other extraneous entities to overwhelm existing forms of popular consciousness and community organization. Yet scholars’ healthy distrust of outside intrusions into the cultural life of rural communities should not lead to the reification of seemingly autochthonous folkways or to the underestimation of the permeability and heterogeneity of “peasant culture.” Marjorie Becker, for example, has written that peasants who allied with Cárdenas had to relinquish “their cultural knowledge to outsiders”—a framing of the issue that seems to presume that rural folk cannot simultaneously engage with the state to seek out social change and yet preserve their cultural heritage as they understand it.20 Cultural histories such as Becker’s have the great virtue of demonstrating that peasant attitudes cannot simply be inferred from structural categories, as if rural people’s worldview was somehow governed by their form of land tenure. But it does no good to replace ahistorical structural categories with ahistorical cultural ones, assuming that modern values (such as those the revolutionaries declaimed) are incompatible with “tradition.” As Néstor García Canclini has brilliantly demonstrated, the cognitive frameworks are not in fact incompatible.21 Indeed, I would argue that insofar as rural people’s understanding of postrevolutionary ideology

12

Introduction

was mediated by such factors as family networks, religious practice, and the existing structures of authority, they often found ways to make revolutionary ideologies resonate with their existing political cultures. My goal in this book is to advance the postrevisionist synthesis without abandoning either the ethnographic sensitivity or the theoretical rigor that previous scholars have brought to bear on the countryside. Recognizing the pervasive influence of state formation on local politics and popular identities, my analysis blurs the typical analytic dyads—state / society, elite / popular, dominant / subaltern—through which hegemonic processes unfold.22 While acknowledging the importance of both land and religion in the everyday life of rural people, I try to show that revolutionary and traditional peasant identities were not necessarily incompatible. Perhaps most important, I argue that rural people’s lived experience of multiple ideological projects and multiple forms of power influenced their efforts to come to terms with the unprecedented occurrences of the postrevolutionary years.23 As we will see in the following chapters, the process through which these events were understood on the local level determined how postrevolutionary ideologies were integrated into the political cultures of agrarian communities and the countryside more generally. If campesino identity ultimately surpassed the narrow boundaries of agrarista ideology and discourse, I believe it is because rural people have found the politics of campesino identity to be a useful way to define their political presence in postrevolutionary Mexico. Far from subscribing to a useless artifact of postrevolutionary ideology, rural people have recognized that the adoption of campesino identity offers one avenue through which they can maintain political solidarity and engage in collective action. Perhaps for that reason, mobilized rural people, from the agraristas of postrevolutionary Michoacán to the neo-Zapatistas of twenty-firstcentury Chiapas, have found it meaningful to frame their politics—at least in part—as a campesino struggle. toward a history of campesino identity in michoacán The following chapters trace out the course of the agrarista movement in Michoacán and its impact on rural people’s cultural identity in the

Introduction

13

postrevolutionary decades. My analysis is based on archival sources, oral histories, private correspondence, and the partisan tabloids known as “attack newspapers.” These sources reveal the interdependent relationship between the discourse of major political figures in Michoacán and the idiom that village revolutionaries deployed in their communities. Interspersed with this analysis are narratives of locally significant events in selected peasant villages, haciendas, and cities, which are intended to illustrate how continually evolving postrevolutionary discourses attached politicized meanings to the collective experiences of mobilized country people. The interplay between local histories and political ideology—and between and among villagers, village revolutionaries, clergymen, and politicians—slowly established new bonds of social solidarity in the countryside and eventually defined what it meant to be a campesino. Chapter 1 addresses this interplay in greater detail by investigating the process whereby the concept of the campesino evolved from a political category within the discourse of radical populists into a cultural identity embraced by many people in the countryside. Chapter 2 turns to an explanation of how local histories became embedded in postrevolutionary ideology and molded popular understanding of the Díaz dictatorship in the years following the revolution. As political leaders and village revolutionaries came to remember it, the Porfiriato appeared as the fountainhead of rural injustice in twentieth-century Mexico. Even though widespread dispossession of village land did take place during the three decades before the revolution, this fact alone does not explain why postrevolutionary politicians and village revolutionaries demonized institutions they associated with the old regime, most notably the hacienda and the church. The reason, I argue, is that rural people’s heightened awareness of revolutionary ideology politicized their memories of the Díaz dictatorship and led some of them to reassess their existing, and often ambivalent and complicated, relationships with haciendas in the 1920s. Chapter 3 examines the ill-fated 1920–22 administration of Francisco J. Múgica as governor of Michoacán. Múgica intended to bring revolutionary values to the countryside and encouraged agraristas to mobilize and press for their rights to the land. His efforts succeeded all too well in some cases. Múgica’s policies heightened existing conflicts between communities and landholders, but his tenuous grip on power kept him from

14

Introduction

controlling how these conflicts actually unfolded. By 1922, the rising tide of unrest in Michoacán convinced President Álvaro Obregón to cashier the state’s rogue government. Múgica’s ouster reined in the agrarista movement, but it also decentralized the movement’s leadership and gave village revolutionaries the opportunity to reconfigure the ideals of citizenship and class consciousness in ways consonant with rural people’s expectations and experiences. Chapter 4 examines the rise of these village revolutionaries. Many agrarian leaders had traveled either to the United States or within Mexico and had encountered well-organized labor unions before settling in their home communities. Their personal histories guided their efforts to organize villagers and carve out positions of authority within their communities during the hard years between 1922 and 1926, when antiagrarian governors sought to check the land reform and rural mobilization. Whereas revolutionaries hoped to instill class consciousness and revolutionary citizenship as Mexicans’ core values, Catholic activists regarded Mexicans’ common religious faith as the proper basis of national identity. Catholics argued that respect for private property and paternalistic social relations should form the core of Mexican nationhood. The fundamental incompatibility of revolutionary ideology with Catholic nationalism led nearly all postrevolutionary presidents to restrict the activities of the church. These policies outraged people throughout the nation. In Michoacán, people resisted government anticlericalism throughout the 1920s and 1930s, opposing it most dramatically during the 1926–29 Cristero rebellion that pitted rancheros, priests, and some indigenous people, along with sectors of the middle class, against revolutionary leaders, the federal army, and agrarista militias. Chapter 5 examines the evolution of Catholic ideology, its role in the Cristero rebellion, and agraristas’ response to the politicization of religion. As the Cristero revolt wound to a close, agraristas flocked into a statewide campesino union that Governor Cárdenas created in order to give them a political voice and to channel their support behind his policies. As I argue in Chapter 6, village revolutionaries’ willingness to join with Cárdenas contributed to the institutionalization of the agrarian movement through a statewide peasant union, known as the Revolutionary Labor Confederation of Michoacán (or CRMDT). The confederation gave rural people an organized platform through which they could press for their

Introduction

15

rights as class-conscious citizens, but its dependence on Cárdenas also abridged their political autonomy. This trade-off proved to be costly. The confederation and its successors sought to regiment the empowerment of rural people, but in the long run, as the revisionist historians have so clearly demonstrated, the state lost much of its revolutionary fervor. By the 1940s, the same institutions that Cárdenas had created to give a political voice to rural folk began to work instead as mechanisms to squelch their political demands. Country people, not political leaders, ultimately ensured that campesino identity would be compatible with other peasant identities based around attributes such as religion, gender, and ethnicity. Chapter 7 concludes that most rural people declined to identify themselves as agraristas or rural proletarians but still found that representing themselves as campesinos was a viable way of calling attention to their collective social condition. In the late 1930s, campesino identity moved from the realm of agrarian struggle into the sphere of national politics as a result of Cárdenas’s decision to expand the scope of land reform and to create a national campesinos’ union, known as the Confederación Nacional Campesino. Insofar as Cárdenas conformed to campesino expectations by expanding the scope of land reform and placing rural leaders in positions of authority, his government indeed fulfilled one of the revolution’s covenants with rural folk. By the time he left the presidency in 1940, politically mobilized campesinos had come to understand that they shared a common historical experience as well as collective economic and political interests. In many parts of Mexico, campesino identity (often in a hybrid form alongside other peasant identities) had become a mainstay of peasant political culture and an important element of community survival.

1 Becoming Campesinos: From Political Category to Cultural Identity

• 

early in the dry season of 1921, the members of an indigenous community not far from the town of Zitácuaro in the eastern highlands of Michoacán decided to confront the North American mining company that owned the land surrounding their homes. People in the village of El Asoleadero were outraged that the company had scrapped an arrangement that had proved mutually beneficial for more than a decade. The company had employed most of El Asoleadero’s men as lumberjacks, paying them to cut timber out of the jagged mountainside and deliver it to the sawmill, where it was made into railroad ties and mine shaft stays. In exchange, the villagers earned money to supplement the meager livings they made raising their own crops and herding a small amount of livestock, and they were also granted the right to log as many trees as they needed for their own domestic use. However, a company foreman abruptly fired the villagers that fall and ordered them to keep away from the woodlands. In response, a handful of men from El Asoleadero fortified themselves with alcohol on the afternoon of September 15 and rushed into the sawmill shouting, “Death to the company!” while shooting their guns into the air.1 The mining operation claimed that it had changed its policy because the villagers were overexploiting its woodlots and degrading the forest, but that was not the real crux of the problem. Company administrators primarily intended to discourage the villagers from participating in Mexico’s postrevolutionary land reform program. If the government went ahead with plans to grant a permanent land reform parcel (ejido) to the community of El Asoleadero, the company stood to lose both a valuable source of labor and a sizable portion of its property.2 As it turned out, though, it was too late to stop the villagers from recovering their land. Several months 16

Becoming Campesinos

17

before the incident in the sawmill, a local political activist, in his capacity as the self-described “Delegate and Representative of the community of Indians” at El Asoleadero, had petitioned the government for an ejido, and Francisco J. Múgica, the radical young governor of Michoacán, had ordered that a large tract of the company’s forestland be turned over to the petitioners. The company answered back with a lawsuit challenging the governor’s determination. For good measure, foremen also sent around some hired hands to intimidate anyone who had signed the petition asking for the restitution of El Asoleadero’s property. The scare tactics did not dissuade the villagers, who moved onto their fields soon after they received the governor’s permission. Another eight years passed before all the paperwork came through officially finalizing the villagers’ rights to the land, however, and some members of the agrarian community developed an affinity for revolutionary politics in the interim. In 1924, land reform beneficiaries donated a parcel of land to the village’s federally run elementary school.3 Two years after that, a few residents agreed to join a military expedition against the Catholic-inspired peasant uprising known as the Cristero rebellion. This grassroots support for postrevolutionary policies did have its limits, though. Villagers refused to send their children to school if they felt the teacher did not show the proper respect for religion. And when the army tried to conscript eight men for yet another campaign against the Cristeros in 1929, community leaders complained directly to the president, explaining that they did not “judge it appropriate” to contribute to the war effort a second time. “We have already lent our services once before,” they wrote, “and now we need everyone to prepare for the planting season.”4 Ten years later, a new generation of El Asoleadero’s village leaders met with a dozen or so of their counterparts from other nearby indigenous communities that had also received land grants. The purpose of the meeting was to sign a declaration expressing solidarity with President Lázaro Cárdenas, whose political temperament and personal style they had first experienced when he had served as governor of Michoacán a few years earlier. In their declaration, the community leaders voiced their support for the president’s plan to create what they understood to be “a united front of campesinos.” The document was shot through with spelling errors that betrayed the authors’ untutored backgrounds, but its overall message came

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