It has become clear that what we refer to as the Mexican Revolution was not a linear, homogenous process. Rather it was a variegated mosaic in which diverse social groups with various political agendas converged. Often these groups had markedly different, antagonistic goals. There were sharp regional contrasts and different levels of mobilization.
Felipe Arturo Avila Espinosa, 2007122
Just as was the case with the Conquest of Mexico, the first accounts of the Revolution were written by its victorious participants. These Constitutionalist narrators portrayed the Revolution as a broad, popular movement, strongly agrarian in terms of both social composition and political agenda. They justified the Revolution as a movement that replaced an elitist, authoritarian, inegalitarian, xenophile Porfiriato with a progressive, egalitarian, nationalist society.
By the 1930s, the historiography of the Revolution reflected the structure of the official party. This view stressed the unity of the Revolution, not its various factions. The thesis of the Revolution being a popular, progressive, nationalist revolution against an exploitative regime remained dominant through the 1950s.123
This Mexican view of the Revolution was closely mirrored in the United States, the principal source of early foreign studies of the Revolution. Two books written by Americans, Ernest Gruening’s Mexico and its Heritage (1928) and Frank Tannenbaum’s The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (1929) presented U. S. readers with the image of a nationalist, populist revolution carrying out agrarian reform. The following generation of American historians, such as Stanley R. Ross and Charles C. Cumberland presented much the same view to American readers.124
During the 1950s and 1960s, this consensus on the Mexican Revolution began to dissolve. Critiques of the Mexican government, such as Daniel Cosio Villegas’ 1947 article “La crisis de Mexico” raised the question “How could a society with so much injustice emerge from one that only a generation earlier represented social justice?”
Regional studies also undermined the old consensus. These studies of the Revolution as it occurred within a single state or region found that disputes among land owners and the rise of new caciques were the dominant events. It raised the question “If the Revolution did not occur in this region, just where did it occur?”125
The Cuban Revolution also led to a reevaluation of the Mexican one. The rapid dispossession of the old elite in Cuba caused many to view the Mexican Revolution as being far less revolutionary than it had been portrayed. Similarly, the massacre during the 1968 student movement raised the question “How could a government born out of a popular revolution murder its own children?” The 1968 student movement also launched a generation of scholars who reappraised the Revolution, not as citizens who trusted government but as citizens who distrusted it. The 1960s also had an impact on U. S. scholarship. John Womack’s now classic book on Zapata, published in 1969, was the first to emphasize division and conflict among the revolutionary elite.126
These events produced a new vision of the Revolution. The revisionists interpret it as a struggle in which the middle class, marginalized by the Porfirian oligarchy, allied with workers and peasants to topple a personalistic, ossified, regime. These revisionists claim the regime emerging from the Revolution crushed local autonomy and established a centralist, elitist state, a la Porfiriato. The similarities between pre - and post-Revolutionary society led essayist Jose Emilio Pacheco to write, “Our Revolution was the longest, most painful road leading from the Porfiriato to the Porfiriato.”127
This shifting perception of the Revolution has not been unanimous. Some historians, such as Alan Knight, continue to emphasize the agrarian character of a genuine social revolution that changed the mentality and increased the autonomy of the masses, thereby altering the balance of power in Mexican society.128
World History
