Ben Fallaw,Cárdenas Compromised:The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. London: Duke University Press, 2001. 222 pp.

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 211-213
Author(s):  
Wil G. Pansters
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
International Capital ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Corporatist State ◽  
National Bourgeoisie ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas

The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), one of the leading figures of Latin American populism of the first half of the twentieth century, has long been surrounded by myth and politicized interpretations. To a certain extent this is understandable: under Cárdenas's leadership major and spectacular reforms were carried out that had their roots in claims originally formulated during and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). Moreover, these reforms have had a lasting impact on Mexico's political and socioeconomic development. In state-sanctioned historia oficial the figure of “grandfather” Cárdenas long reached mythical proportions: he carried out huge projects of land reform and thus finally responded to the demands of poor peasants and Indians, stood up against international capital by nationalizing the oil industry, rebuffed the conservative factions of the national bourgeoisie and laid the foundations for the corporatist state and party, that was to rule Mexico for the remaining part of the century, and thus gave institutional voice to the country's working classes. This image has also been influential in scholarly writings, particularly in those that studied cardenismo as a national phenomenon. Recent years, however, have seen important changes. Nationalist populism is drastically reevaluated in the dominant discourse of neoliberal modernity, and scholars have started to break down the phenomenon, thereby trying to overcome politicized interpretations.

Calculating Pragmatism:The High Politics of the Banco Ejidal in Twentieth-century Mexico

2017 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-363
Author(s):  
Nicole Mottier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Agricultural Growth ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas ◽  
High Politics ◽  
The Revolution

The battles that peasants waged during the Mexican Revolution translated into a series of agrarian and agricultural institutions, and one of these was the Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal, created in 1926. Histories deeply engrained in both the popular imagination of Mexico and scholarly historiography have offered a generic classic narrative of ejidal credit, beginning with Lázaro Cárdenas. He and his cabinet sought to transform theejidointo the engine of agricultural growth for the nation and carried out a sweeping and (in qualified ways) successful land reform, thereby bringing the revolution to the fullest fruition many Mexicans would ever know. It is assumed that ejidal credit peaked during Cárdenas's administration in two major ways: first, it was in this period that ejidal credit societies received the most loans from the Banco Nacional del Crédito Ejidal, and second, it was during the same period that the bank clearly and unanimously embraced social reform goals over orthodox banking goals.

scholarly journals Lost and Found: Bourgeois Dependency Theory and the Forgotten Roots of Neodevelopmentalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 0094582X2110373
Author(s):  
Felipe Antunes de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Washington Consensus ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
International Capital ◽  
Dependency Theory ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
National Bourgeoisie ◽  
First Time

Neodevelopmentalism emerged in Brazil and Argentina in the aftermath of the demoralization of the Washington Consensus. Although its intellectual proponents place it within the long tradition of Latin American developmentalism, an important theoretical origin of neodevelopmentalism—dependency theory—has so far been ignored. The term appeared for the first time in 1978 as an expletive in the heated controversy between Ruy Mauro Marini and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and José Serra in the Revista Mexicana de Sociología. Breaking with the supposition that underdevelopment could be overcome only through social revolution, Cardoso and Serra embraced a perspective of long-term social transformation based on class alliances with fractions of the national bourgeoisie and international capital. This perspective was gradually weakened and finally abandoned in favor of full-fledged neoliberalism when Cardoso became president of Brazil in 1994, only to be resuscitated by so-called pink-tide administrations after 2002. O neodesenvolvimentismo surgiu no Brasil e na Argentina após a desmoralização do Consenso de Washington. Embora seus proponentes intelectuais o coloquem dentro da longa tradição do desenvolvimentismo latino-americano, uma importante origem teórica do neodesenvolvimentismo - a teoria da dependência - até agora foi ignorado. O termo apareceu pela primeira vez em 1978 como um palavrão na polêmica acalorada entre Ruy Mauro Marini e Fernando Henrique Cardoso e José Serra na Revista Mexicana de Sociología. Rompendo com a suposição de que o subdesenvolvimento só poderia ser superado por meio da revolução social, Cardoso e Serra abraçaram uma perspectiva de transformação social de longo prazo baseada em alianças de classe com frações da burguesia nacional e do capital internacional. Essa perspectiva foi gradualmente enfraquecida e finalmente abandonada em favor do neoliberalismo completo quando Cardoso se tornou presidente do Brasil em 1994, apenas para ser ressuscitada por administrações da chamada maré rosa após 2002.

Emiliano Zapata and Revolutionary Mexico, 1910–1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hart
Keyword(s):  
Land Reform ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Judicial Reform ◽  
Agricultural Producers ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
Land Redistribution ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas ◽  
The Revolution

Emiliano Zapata led the Liberating Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution. Zapata’s movement began with a demand for land reform, and his beliefs are most often captured by reference to the Plan de Ayala, which he promulgated in 1911. It was largely because of the Zapatistas (Zapata and his adherents) that land reform was written into the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Later, especially under President Lázaro Cárdenas, (1934–1940), the Mexican government carried out major land redistribution, which helped earn the post-revolutionary state legitimacy in the countryside. Over the course of nearly a decade fighting in the revolution, Zapata’s vision for remaking Mexico extended far beyond the Plan de Ayala and land reform to include judicial reform, decentralization of power, political democracy, the redistribution of wealth, and the promotion of the interests of rural workers and small agricultural producers while protecting Mexican sovereignty against powerful foreign interests. Zapata, however, led the most poorly armed of the main factions in the revolution and was unable to realize his goals. His enemies received large amounts of foreign military supplies, while he received no assistance from abroad. The inability of his poorly equipped volunteer army, mostly peasants and hacienda workers, to carry out large pitched battles dictated that they had to fight a grueling guerilla war. Zapata was unable to win on the battlefield, but was never totally defeated. He was assassinated in 1919. Although his larger vision for the future of Mexico did not prevail, his fight for land reform helped shape modern Mexico.

scholarly journals Voices of Mexican history in Sophia Segovia's novel «The Murmur of Bees»

2021 ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Liudmila Okuneva
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mexican History

The article examines the novel by the Mexican writer Sofia Segovia «The Murmur of Bees», published in Russian in 2021. The novel, written in the genre of Latin American "magical realism", describes the dramatic events of the period of "revolutionary caudillism" that followed the Mexican revolution of 1910—1917. The novel, which is a literary discovery of the year, provides an interpretation of revolutionary events that is unusual for official historiography.

From Desamortization to Agrarian Reform in Mexico, 1856–1940

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Agrarian Reform ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Land Redistribution ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas

The first phase of the development of land tenure in Mexico, from the desamortization laws in 1856 to agrarian reform, was completed in 1940 by the Lázaro Cárdenas administration. While between 1856 and 1910 property reforms served to concentrate land and stimulate latifundio, from the violent Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 until 1992 a policy of social justice was implemented that sought to give land to peasant families, thereby generating a better distribution of land, though without improving its productivity. This signifies that if postrevolutionary modernity assumed, echoing neo-institutionalism or old trends such as positivism or regeneracionismo, that land redistribution was a necessary condition to generate economic growth, in reality it was the social dimension and not the economic that gave character to Mexican agrarian reform between 1920 and 1992. As a backdrop to this, the analysis of literature and history shows a truncated and limited agrarian reform in which traditional figures such as the cacique persisted. The traditional and official vision of the agrarian reform is misguided, in which it is understood as a product of restitutive justice, the result of peasants regaining the lands from which they had been evicted due to the desamortization laws and the greed of landowners hungry for land who had annexed the land of the pueblos. To the contrary, agrarian reform is distributive, allocating land to peasants who requested it, while the hacienda was not the source of all the evils that gave rise to the revolution. Nor can the situation of the Mexican countryside be portrayed as the fight of the peones against the hacendados or caciques hungry for land. This erroneous vision of the Mexican countryside should be demystified, because it does not take into account that agrarian reform became the touchstone to give an agrarian nature to a very diversified Mexican Revolution and convert it into an instrument for the postrevolutionary governments to champion the peasant struggle in 20th-century Mexico, becoming the key to economic growth and social justice in the rural Mexican world.

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