The Institute of Geology of Mexico and Its Precedents: History and Legacy

In 2019, the Institute of Geology celebrated its ninetieth anniversary as part of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The main establishment in Mexico for the teaching, research, and dissemination of the geological sciences, it is an institution with a long history and a great scientific legacy. It dates back to the 19th century, since it is the heir to the Geological Institute of Mexico (1888), the first institute in the Mexican republic to carry out research in the geological sciences and to study the country’s territory from three points of view: scientific, technical, and industrial. It was conceived by the mining engineer Antonio del Castillo (1820–1895) to meet the need to scientifically explore the country’s latent mineral wealth, for which reason its functions included: mapping regions whose lithology and resources were unknown, providing specialized services to the public—the analysis and classification of water, rocks, land, fossils, minerals, and oil—and creating a geological and paleontological museum for the nation. From 1888 to 1917, the institution was part of the Ministry of Development, Colonization, Industry, and Commerce (Ministerio de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio). In 1917, the Venustiano Carranza administration promulgated a new constitution, reformed governmental administration, and created the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Labor (Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo), which was responsible for all questions related to industries such as mining and oil. Although it lapsed somewhat between 1917 and 1929, during the armed conflict of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the Institute of Geology of Mexico was assigned to the Department of Geological Studies and Explorations, with the task of carrying out applied science through the study of new and old mining areas and the location of aquifers. A new scenario emerged in 1929 when the administration of President Emilio Portes Gil enacted the Organic Law of the National University, granting the latter university autonomy, which also allowed institutions of a scientific nature such as the National Astronomical Observatory, the National Library, the Department of Biological Studies, and the National Geological Institute to carry out research as one of their substantive activities. On November 16, 1929, the former Department of Geological Studies and Explorations was incorporated in the most important scholarly institution of Mexico under the name of the Institute of Geology.

Unintended Lessons of Revolution

In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations.

Murals as Memory Carriers. Analysis of the Meanings Given to Them and the Attitudes of Their Creators

The phenomenon of wall paintings has been developing in public space since the Mexican Revolution. Murals are used, among other purposes, to capture memories. Moreover, they are one of the most popular forms of representation of the past in public space, commonly called memory carriers. In the discussion of the research being carried out, the opportunities associated with the formation of historical awareness and attitudes towards society’s past through commemorative murals will be highlighted.The research was conducted from July to November 2020. It was based on the analysis of the existing materials – photographs of commemorative murals (significant and marked elements) and interviews with semi-structured memory agents. The first stage of the described research focused on the authors of commemorative murals.The aim of the research was to determine the meaning and values that the creators of murals have given in general and in particular to the commemorative murals made by themselves.The research allowed, among other things, to answer questions concerning the artistic path of the creators (graffiti environment), what factors influenced the process of making mural (family history, one’s own past, finances, social involvement), worldview and values of the declared creators (patriotism) and attitude to the politics of memory.

Do Maya women have the chance to improve their quality of life?

Background: Maya families suffered greatly during the henequen industry in the Yucatan, but the lives of the Maya women at the time were perhaps worse than anywhere in the world. Changes in Maya body height over the 20th century were assessed in order to show secular changes. The use of the sexual dimorphism index (SDI) allowed for the evaluation of the living conditions prevailing during the existence of the henequen haciendas to the Mexican revolution and a gradual improvement of these conditions by the end of the 20th century. Methods: In 1994, 364 men and 320 women aged 20-98 years were studied in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. They were divided into six age groups and by gender: 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69 and 70+ years. Stature for both genders, and age at menarche for women were considered. SDI in stature was calculated to assess living conditions. Results: There were smaller (0.25 cm/10 years) changes in height in men than in women (0.9 cm/10 years) and no significant changes in acceleration of maturation. SDI results showed changes from 9.9 to 7.6, and this may indicate a constant, but very small improvement of living conditions. The age at menarche of women did not show statistically significant acceleration with age. Conclusions: In the colonial period of the late 19th century until the Mexican Revolution, women were worse off than men. Previous research has shown that when living conditions change, men always react faster than women, e.g. by lowering or increasing body height. Our study of the Maya population in the 20th century showed otherwise; female height increased more than male height. This may reflect that the living conditions of Maya men have not changed over the 20th century, but have improved for women.

Chiapas moderno y mexicano: normalizar el deporte tras la Revolución mexicana, 1910-1940 = Modern and Mexican Chiapas: Normalizing sport after the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940

A partir de la Revolución mexicana, las instituciones creadas o reorganizadas por los gobiernos posrevolucionarios tienen, entre otros muchos retos, extenderse en lugares físicamente alejados de la capital del poder político, la Ciudad de México. Otro de sus objetivos era construir el discurso sobre la nueva nación que rompía con el pasado y que, entre cuyos objetivos, se encontraba la normalización de la ciudadanía a través de su regeneración física y moral. Normalización donde la educación física y el deporte se convertían en parte de las campañas de higienización social desplegadas por todo el país. De esta manera, el territorio chiapaneco se incorporó a la institucionalización de la Revolución mexicana y, dentro de ese proceso, las actividades físicas se impulsaron e incrementaron desde los gobiernos posrevolucionarios chiapanecos y, también, desde las élites de la sociedad civil, muchas de ellas partícipes de los nuevos gobiernos e instituciones locales chiapanecas. AbstractSince the Mexican Revolution, the institutions created or reorganized by the post-revolutionary governments have, among many other challenges, spread in places physically far from the capital of political power, Mexico City. Another of its objectives was to build the discourse on the new nation that broke with the past and that, among its objectives, was the normalization of citizenship through its physical and moral regeneration. Standardization where physical education and sport became part of the social sanitation campaigns deployed throughout the country. In this way, the territory of Chiapas was incorporated into the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution and, within that process, physical activities were promoted and increased from the post-revolutionary governments of Chiapas and also, from the elites of civil society, many of them participants of the new governments and local institutions.

From Desamortization to Agrarian Reform in Mexico, 1856–1940

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.

Los de abajo. Mitificación y metalepsis

The study of narrative resources such as free indirect discourse and narrated monologue, in Los de abajo, although it has been clearly pointed out by critics such as Mansour, Escalante and St. Ours, is scarce in comparison with the works on the Mexican Revolution and the controversy over the ideological position of its author, Mariano Azuela. In the present work, an approach to these resources is made, following the precepts of narratology, starting from the relationship between the narrative voice and the figural discourse, and between the discourses of the characters; that is, from the citation processes. Specifically, an approach is made to the way in which Demetrio Macías recounts his exploits by repeating the speech of Alberto Solís, shaped, in turn, by other anonymous speeches. The relevance of self-narrating in this way is such that it implies a radical change in the personality and destiny of Demetrio Macías.

Los [dos] cartuchos de Nellie Campobello

In 1931, Nellie Campobello published Cartucho. Nine years later, in 1940, a second edition appeared, about which not much has been said. With the exception that it is usually mentioned to assert that Campobello modified it under the influence of the author of El águila y la serpiente, the 1940 edition was left somewhat erased by the third edition (1960), in the same way that each edition’s corresponding characteristics were also erased. This piece reviews some of the features that characterize both editions, with the intention of showing what was already present in the first edition, and what the author added or enhanced afterward. It also presents the context in which the second edition emerged (Campobello’s interest in history, her relationship with Austreberta Rentería, the publication of her book Las manos de mamá), and it questions the author’s motives to propose Cartucho (1940) as a set of “true tales” in opposition to the revolutionary “legend” stated in official history. In the conducted analysis, we can appreciate the expansion of some of the literary strategies present in the first edition (the multiplicity of testimonial voices and the contribution of women as witnesses to the facts) and the permanence of others that appeared in 1931 (the infantile narrative voice, the poetic images associated to the war and to the infantilization of the men that fought in the Mexican Revolution). The premise in this article is that both editions defy the concepts of truth, history, and fiction, in the way we usually conceive them, but that in 1940, Campobello expanded some of the literary strategies that she used in 1931 as a function of the emphasis that she put in the testimonials of a multitude of women and men that lived the civil war in the North and to whom, in the process of officialization and institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution, the truth of their own history had been denied, according to the author.