dictablanda edited by paul gillingham & benjamin t. smith
TRANSCRIPT
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DICTABLANDA||||POLITICS, WORK, AND CULTURE IN MEXICO, 1938 1968 |||||
PAUL GILLINGHAM
and
BENJAMIN T. SMITH,
editors
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Dictablanda
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A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg
This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and resh interpretive
rameworks or scholarship on the history o the imposing global pres-
ence o the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment
and contestation o power, the construction and deconstruction o cul-
tural and political borders, the uid meanings o intercultural encoun-
ters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local.American
Encountersseeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between histo-
rians o U.S. international relations and area studies specialists.
The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical
research. At the same time, it supports a recognition o the representa-
tional character o all stories about the past and promotes critical in-
quiry into issues o subjectivity and narrative. In the process,American
Encountersstrives to understand the context in which meanings related to
nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, chal-
lenged, and reshaped.
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DictablandaPOLITICS, WORK, AND CULTURE IN MEXICO, 19381968
PAUL GILLINGHAM and BENJAMIN T. SMITH, editors
| | | | | | | | | |
Duke University Press Durham and London 2014
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2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Quadraat by Westchester Publishing Services
Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dictablanda : politics, work, and culture in Mexico, 19381968 /
Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith, editors.pages cm(American encounters/global interactions)
Includes bibliographical reerences and index.
978-0-8223-5631-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
978-0-8223-5637-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. MexicoPolitics and government19461970. 2. MexicoHistory
19101946. 3. MexicoHistory19461970. I. Gillingham, Paul, 1973
II. Smith, Benjamin T. III. Series: American encounters/global interactions.
.
972.08'2dc23
Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the support o the University o Pennsylvania,
Department o History, which provided unds toward the publication o this book.
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CONTENTS
vii PREFACE | Paul Gillingham
xv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xvii GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS
1 INTRODUCTION | Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith
The Paradoxes o Revolution
45 HIGH AND LOW POLITICS
47 CHAPTER 1 | Alan Knight
The End o the Mexican Revolution? From Crdenas to Avila Camacho,
19371941
70 CHAPTER 2 | Roberto Blancarte
Intransigence, Anticommunism, and Reconciliation: Church/State
Relations in Transition
89 CHAPTER 3
|
Thomas RathCamouaging the State: The Army and the Limits o Hegemony
in PRIsta Mexico, 19401960
108 CHAPTER 4 | Rogelio Hernndez Rodrguez
Strongmen and State Weakness
126 CHAPTER 5 | Wil G. Pansters
Tropical Passion in the Desert: Gonzalo N. Santos and Local
Elections in Northern San Luis Potos, 19431958
149 CHAPTER 6 | Paul GillinghamWe Dont Have Arms, but We Do Have Balls: Fraud, Violence,
and Popular Agency in Elections
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vi CONTENTS
173 WORK AND RESOURCE REGULATION
175 CHAPTER 7 | Michael Snodgrass
The Golden Age o Charrismo: Workers, Braceros, and the Political
Machinery o Postrevolutionary Mexico
196 CHAPTER 8 | Gladys McCormick
The Forgotten Jaramillo: Building a Social Base o Support or
Authoritarianism in Rural Mexico
217 CHAPTER 9 | Christopher R. Boyer
Community, Crony Capitalism, and Fortress Conservation
in Mexican Forests
236 CHAPTER 10 | Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves
Advocate or Cacica? Guadalupe Urza Flores: Modernizer and Peasant
Political Leader in Jalisco
255 CHAPTER 11 | Benjamin T. Smith
Building a State on the Cheap: Taxation, Social Movements, and Politics
277 CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY
279 CHAPTER 12 | Guillermo de la Pea
The End o Revolutionary Anthropology? Notes on Indigenismo
299 CHAPTER 13 | Andrew Paxman
Cooling to Cinema and Warming to Television: State Mass Media Policy,19401964
321 CHAPTER 14 | Pablo Piccato
Pistoleros, Ley Fuga, and Uncertainty in Public Debates about Murder in
Twentieth-Century Mexico
341 CHAPTER 15 | Tanals Padilla
Rural Education, Political Radicalism, and NormalistaIdentity in Mexico
afer 1940
360 CHAPTER 16 | Jaime M. Pensado
The Rise o a National Student Problem in 1956
379 FINAL COMMENTS | Jeffrey W. Rubin
Contextualizing the Regime: What 19381968 Tells Us about Mexico,
Power, and Latin Americas Twentieth Century
397 Select Bibliography
427 Contributors
429 Index
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This book is about power in a place beyond dichotomies o democracy or dic-
tatorship, namely modern Mexico. The authors come rom distinct disciplines
and different historiographical traditions, have diverse research interests,
and were brought together without any single theoretical diktat. It was in part
the very breadth o interests and approaches that suggested their incorpora-
tion, in a deliberate search or academic biodiversity. We encouraged dis-
agreement. This approach to collaborative work has been dubbed a dogs
breakast.We hoped instead or a cats cradle: a skein o threads that, whendrawn tight, might reveal a pattern.
Initially the only evident common actor was a shared curiosity in the no
mans land o historicizing power in the mid-century, those three decades
between 1938 and 1968 when dominant party rule coalesced and peaked. A
preerence or controlled eclecticism over theoretical monoculture did not,
however, mean the absence o a ramework.We sought contributors whose
work ell into one o three broad categories: high and low politics; work and
resource regulation; and culture and ideology. These thematic choices pre-
supposed an organizing concept: that the relations between rulers and ruled
were characterized by authoritarianism, competitive politics, and resistance,
making Mexico an early variant o a dictablanda, a hybrid regime that com-
bines democratic and authoritarian elements; and that such hybrid regimes
are prooundly complex, dynamic, and ambiguous, demanding heterodox ap-
proaches.They reected a debt to those scholars who have made empirical
cases or the ability o everyday subjects to resist the projects o the powerul,
shaping their lives in constant haggling with authority; or the state as a
masque; and or the causal signicance o popular culture in determining dy-namic political outcomes.They also reected the proposition that this was
not the whole story.
PREFACE | Paul Gillingham
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viii PAUL GILLINGHAM
We posited that cultural and materialist explanations were not so much
dichotomous as complementaryand that struggles or power encompassed
additional phenomena. Some were previously hidden. Cumulative case stud-
ies and once-unobtainable sources, notably declassied intelligence, revealed
the underestimated violence deployed by both rulers and ruled; the relatedsalience o popularpoliticalinputs; the enduringly central role o petty author-
itarianism, also known as caciquismo; and the way that local autonomies and a
ragmented public spheremany Mexicosmight strengthen rather than
weaken central power. Other phenomena were more obvious and as such
might be undervalued by the seductive episteme o the hidden. They should
not be: laws, institutions, and budgets were more than aades under which
deeper causal mechanisms lurked. Moreover, the importance o an economic
model that overtly privileged towns at the expense o countryside was unmis-
takable. Finallyand criticallywe were struck by the ubiquitous phenome-
non o actors who shifed uently along a spectrum o resistance to, tolerance
o, and alliance with the state.
The resulting ramework identies three arenas o power: the political,
the material, and the cultural. It conceptualizes power as the ability to do
things, to get other people to do things, and/or to stop other people rom
doing things. This draws on two resistance-centric denitions: that o Max
Weber, who deemed power an actors capacity to carry out his will despite
resistance, and George Tsebeliss idea o veto players, those individual orcollective actors whose agreement (by majority rule or collective actors) is
required or a change o the status quo.In between the extreme outcomes
o imposition or veto lies negotiation, in itsel both a process and an out-
come: a statement o a balance, albeit skewed, o power.
Negotiation was central to rule in Mexico, but that does not imply the pre-
eminence o a consent-based cultural hegemony because negotiation in hy-
brid regimes involves violence past, violence present, and the ear o violence
in the uture. This is incompatible with one type o Gramscian hegemony,
which opposes hegemony to authority and dictatorship, quarantines it
rom violence, and stresses instead its consensual core.It is compatible with
Gramscis alternative idea o hegemony as the balance (or dual perspective
or dialectical unity) o orce and consent, which, when effective, estab-
lishes a compromise equilibrium between rulers and ruled.Yet advancing
this is (as Michael Taussig observed regarding social construction) nothing
more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation, rather than a conclu-
sion.As Kate Crehan suggests, rather than being a precisely bounded theo-
retical concept, hegemony or Gramsci simply names the problem that ohow the power relations underpinning various orms o inequality are pro-
duced and reproducedthat he is interested in exploring. What in any given
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PREFACE ix
context constitutes hegemony can only be discovered through careul empiri-
cal analysis.The question is not whether Mexican elites achieved stability,
however rudimentary, on a national level through a balance o orce and con-
sent; they did. The questions, rather, are where that balance ell, how it was
struck, and how it swayed rom time to time and rom place to place.We discuss these questions in specic terms in the introduction. In gen-
eral terms, gauging answers to those questions involves all three arenas o
power: the political, the material, and the cultural. There is no single inde-
pendent variable that provides a comprehensive explanation or the pro-
cesses o state ormation and its outcome. The three are, rather, tightly
interwoven. For example, the political unction o any states management o
economic resources is coalition-building, but in Mexico, at all levels, those
resources were leveraged by a cultural phenomenon: the pervasive revolu-
tionary rhetoric that gave the excluded some hope o joining such coalitions
in the uture. Revolutionary nationalism did provide something o a common
language or both hegemonies and counter-hegemonies, but that language
was underpinned by violence. Everyday people were coerced into nationalist
ceremonies by the threats o nes or jailing; archaeological artiacts were ap-
propriated by platoons o soldiers despite village protests; journalists and
Catholic militants, or agraristasand teachers, could ace beatings or assassi-
nation. Briberylunches or marcheswas also salient. Moreover, rulers
and ruled were polyglot, and in addition to the common language o revolu-tionary nationalism (which some reused to speak) there were other com-
mon languages that were tactically adopted as political mores shifed, such
as the rhetorics o democracy and development. To see economic processes
at work shaping culture, cultural orces shaping economies, and politics
both ormal and inormalat the intersection o the two; to posit that causal
primacy varies rom case to case, when it can be pinned down at all; and to
note a high prevalence o equinalitydifferent processes leading to similar
outcomesis not a live-and-let-live conceptual mush. It is a reasonable re-
ection o the case studies we have.
Mexican historiography is highly dependent on case studies or the obvi-
ous epistemological reasons o a large and diverse territory and population.
This should not shut the door on systematic comparison both across and be-
yond Latin America.Deviant case studies, exploring the exceptions that test
the rule, can revise broad generalizations, as regional histories o revolution
demonstrated.Most likely (those where a theory should i anywhere work),
least likely (those that should lie beyond the limits o a theor y), and crucial
case studies can test, extend, and even suggest theories. These may be lessgrand and more middle-range: universal but comparatively narrow pro-
posals o social processes ounded on the concrete, the specic, and the
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x PAUL GILLINGHAM
time-sensitive.Yet such generalizations are particularly apt or Mexico in
the mid-century, with its neither-sh-nor-owl relationships o power. As
Fernando Coronil observed, ragmentation, ambiguity, and disjunctions are
eatures o complex systems; in Mexico and other hybrid regimes the rag-
mentation and the ambiguity are not just down to complexity but also ormpart o the ruling classs strategies o domination: divide, conuse, and rule.
The limitations o methodology are, in other words, perhaps less limiting in
Mexico than elsewhere. At the same time historys strengthsbroad and
deep empiricism, the explanatory richness that creates, and a sophisticated
appreciation o the diverse rhythms and causal effects o timemight allow
historians o Mexico to advance more universal discussions.
It is diffi cult (but not impossible) to generalize about the requency o the
processes o domination and resistance that studies in this eld are starting
to trace. But in identiying and tracing the multiplicity o those processes,
combining case studies, qualitative overviews, and basic cliometrics, we
might come up with a coherent model o mid-century Mexico. That model is
neither o a system based on consensual cultural hegemony nor one o Al-
thussers Repressive State Apparatuses, such as bureaucratic authoritarian-
ism.The essays in this book argue that orce was real, strategically applied,
and successully masked. It also was exercised by both rulers and ruled. It
went hand in hand with a certain degree o consent: one produced by eco-
nomic growth and a coalition-building distribution o resources, by politi-cal accommodation, and by culture. The outcome was not stasis but rather
something like a chemists dynamic equilibrium, in which reactions move
in opposite directions at broadly similar speeds.
This can be described by the term dictablanda: the combination o dictadura
(dictatorship) with the switch o dura(hard) or blanda(sof). This has, as Je-
rey Rubin argues, a powerul, untranslatable resonance. It also enjoys a rec-
ord o some usage inside Mexico, bypassing the more misleading labels o
the democracy with adjectives, the perect dictatorship, or even the sta
state. Dictablanda, in both popular and general terms, is good to think or
mid-century Mexico.In comparative terms, however, Guillermo ODonnell
and Philip Schmitters denition, which denotes liberalizing authoritarian
regimes, without elections, in transition, suggests the need or translation,
or a parallel, more precise, and broadly understood category. Translating
the dictablanda seems particularly relevant given that Mexico shared some
aspects o old Latin American authoritarian states while oreshadowing
the postCold War genus o hybrid regimes, species o which encompass
between a quarter and a third o all contemporary states.In our period Mex-ico was in many ways a competitive authoritarian regime, a type o civilian
regime in which ormal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed
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PREFACE xi
as the primary means o gaining power, but in which incumbents abuse o
the state places them at a signicant advantage vis--vis their opponents.
Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic insti-
tutions to contest seriously or power, but they are not democratic because
the playing eld is heavily skewed in avour o incumbents. Competition isthus real but unair. Some o the characteristics behind the Mexican re-
gimes resiliencethe institutionalized circulation o national elites within a
single party, a powerul national story, and a deliberately ragmented public
sphere, the negotiated nature o rule, the hidden violence, the local elec-
toral contestsmight interest political scientists who apply this histori-
cally contingent theory to places like contemporary Malaysia, Russia, or
Tanzania, extending its ambit beyond the electoral and the elite toward a
model o power that is simultaneously comprehensive and disaggregated,
one that gives ull play to the local and the inormal and the cultural: sof
authoritarianism.
Notes
1. Barrington Moore, cited in James Scott, Foreword, in Everyday Forms o State For-
mation: Revolution and the Negotiation o Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and
Daniel Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), vii.
2. For controlled eclecticism, see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution(2 vols.) (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. I, 84. See also Alexander L. George
and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cam-
bridge, MA: Press, 2004), 310; Terence J. McDonald, Introduction, in The His-
toric Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald, 117 (Ann Arbor: University o
Michigan Press, 1996).
3. Guillermo ODonnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions rom Authoritarian Rule:
Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013); Larry Diamond, Elections without Democracy: Thinking about Hybrid
Regimes,Journal o Democracy13, no. 2 (April 2002): 2135.
4. The classics are Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants,
and Schools in Mexico, 19301940(Tucson: University o Arizona Press, 1997); Jeffrey W.Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitn, Mexico(Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms o State
Formation.
5. Emilia Viotti da Costa, New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Eco-
nomic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionismin Search o Dialectics, in Reclaim-
ing the Political in Latin American History: Essays rom the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph,
1731 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
6. While, as David Nugent points out, It is a curious act that neither o the two
approaches to the state that currently inorm academic debatethe organizational
nor the representationalhas had much to say to each other, scholars have long in-
dicated the potential o such dialogues. David Nugent, Conclusion: Reections on
State Theory Through the Lens o the Mexican Military, in Forced Marches: Soldiers and
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xii PAUL GILLINGHAM
Military Caciques in Modern Mexico, ed. Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (Tucson: Univer-
sity o Arizona Press, 2012), 240; William Roseberry, Marxism and Culture, inAn-
thropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy, 3054 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); William B. Sewell, Logics o History:
Social Theory and Social Transormation (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005);
Richard Biernacki, Method and Metaphor afer the New Cultural History, in Beyond
the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study o Society and Culture , ed. Victoria E. Bonnell
and Lynn Hunt, 6294 (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1999); John Tutino,
Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajo and Spanish North America(Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4748.
7. This identication o loci o power complements Wil Pansters more process-
based model o state ormation, which identies zones o hegemony, zones o coer-
cion, and gray zones in between. Wil G. Pansters, Introduction, in Violence, Coercion
and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Hal o the Centaur, ed. Wil G.
Pansters, 339 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanord University Press, 2012).8. Weber as cited in Alan Knight, The Weight o the State in Modern Mexico, in
Studies in the Formation o the Nation-State in Latin America, ed. James Dunkerley, 21253,
215 (London: , 2002); George Tsebelis, Decision Making in Political Systems:
Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism and Mutiparty-
ism, British Journal o Political Science25 (July 1995): 289325, 289.
9. Antonio Gramsci, Selections rom the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1996), 124, 170, 239. See, or example, Claudio Lomnitzs denition o hege-
mony as an institutionalized structure o interactional rames, localist ideologies,
and intimate cultures which allow or consensus around a particular regime. Claudio
Lomnitz, Exits rom the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space(Berke-ley: University o Caliornia Press, 1992), 40.
10. Gramsci, Selections rom the Prison Notebooks, 124, 161.
11. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History o the Senses (London:
Routledge, 1993), xvi.
12. An analysis that ully recognizes Gramscis intense concern with the materiality
o power; a concern that, Crehan argues, has been largely lost in anthropologists
usage. Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology(Berkeley: University o Caliornia
Press, 2002), 104, 17276.
13. Sandra Rozental, Mobilizing the Monolith: Patrimonio and the Production oMexico through Its Fragments (PhD dissertation, New York University, New York,
2012); Carlos Moncada, Del Mxico violento: periodistas asesinados(Mexico City: Edomex,
1991); Pablo Serrano Alvarez, La batalla del espiritu: el movimiento sinarquista en El Bajio,
19321951(2 vols.) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992),
vol. II, 80; Tanals Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land o Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement
and the Myth o the Pax Prista, 19401962(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
14. For Latin Americanists (largely missed) potential to shape theory in the social
sciences, see the introduction to Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando Lpez-Alves,
eds., The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens o Latin America, 323, 14 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).15. Important works include Luis Gonzlez y Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo(Mexico City:
, 1984); Heather Fowler-Salamini,Agrarian radicalism in Veracruz, 192038(Lincoln:
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PREFACE xiii
University o Nebraska Press, 1978); Romana Falcn, Revolucin y caciquismo: San Luis
Potos, 19101938(Mexico City: Colegio de Mxico, 1984); Thomas Benjamin and Mark
Wasserman, eds., Provinces o the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican History, 19101929
(Albuquerque: University o New Mexico Press, 1990); Barry Carr, Recent Regional
Studies o the Mexican Revolution, Latin American Research Review15, no. 1 (1980): 3
14, 7.
16. Harry Eckstein, Case Studies and Theory in Political Science, in Handbook o
Political Science. Political Science: Scope and Theory, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W.
Polsby, vol. 01.7, 94, 137 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975). For a skeptical consid-
eration o Mexico and grand theory, see Alan Knight, The Modern Mexican State:
Theory and Practice, in Centeno and Lpez-Alves, The Other Mirror, 177218.
17. Fernando Coronil, Foreword, in Close Encounters o Empire: Writing the Cultural
History o U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand,
Ricardo D. Salvatore, viixi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
18. Patrick Joyce, What Is the Social in Social History? Past and Present206, no. 1(2010): 21348, 216.
19. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
an investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. Louis Althusser, 145
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
20. The term was coined to describe Spanish politics under General Berenguer dur-
ing the 1930s and subsequently applied to the last years o the Franco regime. By the
1950s it had been adopted by Mexican intellectuals to describe rst the Porrian and
later the sta state. It lay at the heart o the stormy exchange between Octavio Paz,
Mario Vargas Llosa, and Enrique Krauze o 1990s televised Encuentro Vuelta, in
which Vargas Llosa dubbed modern Mexico the perect dictatorship, Paz reacteduriously, and Krauze suggested the compromise o dictablanda. (Paz abruptly can-
celled the ensuing round table; Vargas Llosa lef the country adducing amily rea-
sons.) William D. Phillips, Carla Rahn Phillips,A Concise History o Spain(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 246; Daniel Coso Villegas quoted in Enrique
Krauze, Mstico de la autoridad: Porrio Daz(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica,
1987), 34; Xavier Rodrguez Ledesma, El pensamiento poltico de Octavio Paz: Las trampas de
la ideologa(Mexico City: Plaza y Valds, 1996), 41418.
21. Guillermo ODonnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions rom Authoritarian
Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 2013), 814.
22. Andreas Schedler, The Logic o Electoral Authoritarianism, in Electoral Author-
itarianism: The Dynamics o Unree Competition, ed. Andreas Schedler, 114, 3 (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 3; Diamond, Elections Without Democracy, 27.
23. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes
Afer the Cold War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5.
24. There are several extant types o what might be called authoritarianism with
adjectives. While cautious to introduce one more, we think it is useul in this instance
to think as splitters rather than lumpers: hegemonic party autocracies, or example,
are generally thought o as noncompetitive, whereas competitive authoritarianismdoes not capture the distinct origins and multiple strategies o domination that char-
acterize mid-century Mexico. Neither does Tocquevilles concept o sof despotism,
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xiv PAUL GILLINGHAM
with its subtle capture o ree agency in the bureaucratic networks o small, com-
plicated rules elaborated by an immense and tutelary power, which ends up secur-
ing servitude o the regular, quiet, and gentle kind; and neither does Joseph Nyes
ormulation o sof power as getting others to want the outcomes that you want.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeves, vol. II, 39293 (Cam-
bridge: Sever and Francis, 1863); Joseph S. Nye Jr., Sof Power: The Means to Success in
World Politics(New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 56.
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This book grew out o a series o panels that led in turn to a two-day interna-
tional conerence at Michigan State University in 2009. We would like to
thank all the departments and individuals who generously supported that
conerence, in particular Mark Kornbluh, Dylan Miner, Elizabeth OBrien,
Antonio Turok, Lapiztola, Zzierra Rrezzia, and Edith Morales Snchez, to-
gether with the Department o History, the Residential College in the Arts
and Humanities, the Center or Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the
Department o Political Science, the School o Journalism, and the School oCriminal Justice. For the next step o turning the resulting papers into a book
we owe warm thanks to Gil Joseph and to Valerie Milholland and Gisela Fo-
sado at Duke University Press, whose backing or this project has been pa-
tient and considerable.
We have incurred substantial proessional and personal debts along the
waysubstantial enough, when combined with those o our contributors, to
dey detailed listing. The archivists, librarians, interviewees, students, col-
leagues, and riends who helped us along the way have been undamental to
our work; they know who they are, and how grateul we are to them. Our au-
thors have been much put upon and have responded with tolerance and mul-
tiple drafs. Other colleagues have contributed as commentators and critical
readers. Heather Fowler-Salamini, Alan Knight, Pablo Piccato, and John
Womack Jr. were the original discussants at Michigan State University; they
went on to read drafs o the manuscript and make valuable observations and
suggestions a second time around, to which Oscar Altamirano, Chris Boyer,
Barry Carr, Ben Fallaw, Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves, Gladys McCormick,
Tanals Padilla, Wil Pansters, Andrew Paxman, Eric Van Young, and Dukesanonymous readers subsequently added. John Womack Jr. asked some
diffi cultand consequently useulquestions, which we greatly appreciated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Above all we would like to thank Jolie Olcott and Jeffrey Rubin or their inci-
sive readings o this book, which have signicantly shaped its nal orm.
Finally we would like to thank our amilies, in particular our wives, who
contributed in ways ranging rom interviews and translations to technology
and contracts.
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Institutions
Agrarian Department Departamento Agraria (19341960); Departamento
de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonizacin (19601974)
Attorney General Procurador General
Department o Agriculture Secretara de Agricultura y Fomento (19171946);
Secretara de Agricultura y Ganadera (19461976)
Department o Deense Secretara de la Deensa Nacional (SEDENA)
Department o Education Secretara de Educacin Pblica (SEP)
Department o Foreign Secretara de Relaciones Exteriores
o Affairs
Department o Health and Secretara de Salubridad y Asistencia
Social Security
Department o the Interior Secretara de Gobernacin
Department o Secretara de Comunicaciones y Obras Pblicas
Public Works (19201959); Secretara de Comunicaciones y
Transportes (1959)
Federal Security Directorate Direccin Federal de Seguridad,(DFS)
General Directorate o Direccin General de Investigaciones Polticas y
Political and Social Sociales (IPS)
Investigations
Offi ce o the State Prosecutor Ministerio Pblico
Treasury Secretara de Hacienda
GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS
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xviii GLOSSARY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACRONYMS
Acronyms
AGN Archivo General de la Nacin
ACPEO Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Oaxaca
AHEV Archivo Histrico del Estado de Veracruz
AHSDN Archivo Histrico de la Secretara de Deensa National
ALM Adolo Lpez Mateos
AMI Archivo Municipal de Ixcateopan
BCCG Biblioteca Carmen Castaeda Garca
CMGUF Coleccin Mara Guadalupe Urza Flores
CNCA Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes
CNTE Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacin
CTM Conederacin de Trabajadores de Mxico
DFS Direccin Federal de SeguridadDGG Direccin General de Gobierno
DGIPS Direccin General de Investigaciones Polticas y Sociales
FCE Fondo Cultura Econmica
FLACSO Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales
FO National Archives, Foreign Offi ce
ILAS Institute o Latin American Studies
INAH Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia
IPN Instituto Politcnico Nacional
LC Presidentes, Lzaro Cardenas
LCA Liga de Comunidades Agrarias
MAC Manuel Avila Camacho
MAV Miguel Alemn Valds
MIDRF Military Intelligence Division Regional Files
MRM Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio
NARA National Archives and Records Administration
NARG National Archives Record Group
ONIR Obra Nacional de Instruccin Religiosa
PAN Partido Accin Nacional
PCM Partido Comunista Mexicana
PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party
PRM Partido de la Revolucin Mexicana
PRO Public Records Offi ce
SCM Secretara de Deensa Nacional
SEP Department o Education
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Revolutions have unintended consequences. In 1910 Mexicans re-
belled against an imperect dictatorship; afer 1940 they ended up
with what some called the perect dictatorship.Mexico was ruled
by a singleadmittedly mutation-proneparty rom 1929 to 2000,
a record o longevity surpassed only by Liberias True Whig Party
(18781980), the Mongolian Peoples Revolutionary Party (19211996),
and the Communist Party o the Soviet Union (19171989).While
everyday people and scholars debated the details o this long-running regime, a compelling story survived the passing o time,
governments, and scholarly ashions. This metanarrative held that
the revolution had evolved rom violent popular upheaval to sweep-
ing social reorm in the 1930s. Mexicos new rulers o the Partido
Revolucionario Institucionalthe had with that reorm signed
a revolutionary social contract to reestablish central control.Peas-
ants traded in their radicalism or land grants; a diverse labor move-
ment mutated into a monolithic servant o government. The new
state delivered economic growth, political stability, and a discourse
partially ullledo social justice. The years between 1940 and
1968 were consequently a golden age.History, in the pejorative sense
o one damn thing afer another, ended in 1940.
Yet this vision o a thirty-yearpax pristadoesnt add up: it drops
history out at every turn.Numerous studies o the revolutionary
period have demonstrated that Mexico was nowhere near this sort
o synchronic stability in 1940. The state that emerged rom Crde-
nass agrarian, labor, and educational reorms was inchoate and ofenineffective. The political class remained ragmented, a loose, hetero-
geneous, and shifing coalition o radicals, reormers, moderates,
INTRODUCTION | Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith
THE PARADOXES OF REVOLUTION
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2 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
opportunists, and veiled reactionaries. The partys peasant corporatist bloc
still supposed to represent (and control) a majority o the populationwas
an umbrella organization o little practical import. Vigorous electoral com-
petition endured, particularly in the provinces; managing the 1940 presi-
dential election required a massacre in the capital.Mexicos state apparatusremained underunded, understaffed, and ill-inormed. Although social
spending increased, bureaucrats complained that they lacked the competent
agronomists, teachers, and indigenous advocates to implement central poli-
cies.Socialist education ailed, Crdenas concluded, not just through con-
servative opposition but also because the Secretara de Educacin Pblica
didnt have enough socialist teachers.Furthermore, political actions can-
nibalized critical government agencies, reorienting them to service local and
rent-seeking goals.Popular groups, rom the Mayo and Tarahumara in the
north, to the Sinarquistas o the Bajo, to the Zapotecs and Triquis o Oaxaca,
resisted state integration.And economic elitesranging rom rural ruffi -
ans like Manuel Parra to industrial heavyweights like the Monterrey group
used the weapons o the strong to press or the reversal o state reorms.
Crdenass ailure to construct a corporatist Rechtsstaatcasts doubt on pre-
vailing interpretations o the succeeding decades and leaves the historian
with two paradoxes. There is the paradox o revolution: how did millions o
Mexicans who made anarchic popular revolution end up as apparently peace-
able subjects in the worlds most successul authoritarian state?And thereis the urther paradox o state capitalism. Transitions rom revolution to
authoritarianism are relatively commonplace; France, Russia, China, and
England all underwent similar shifs.Simultaneous, drastic shifs toward
highly inequitable economic models are less common. Mexico is extraordi-
nary in that a revolutionary movement, which experimented with collectivist
and even socialist modes o production, led to such a deeply inequitable capi-
talist regime. Mexico experienced strong economic growth across the period:
gross domestic product rose at an average rate o 6.4 percent and manuac-
turing output 8.2 percent per annum. Agricultural production more than tre-
bled. Yet urban real wages declined, only regaining 1940 levels in 1967, and
rural wages ell 40 percent.Wage earners, moreover, were not the hardest
hit: peasant household income was statistically not just insuffi cient but ri-
diculous. Government policies o retrenched per capita social spending
and effectively regressive taxation urther increased inequality.In compara-
tive terms, Mexicos Gini coe icient, a compound measure o national in-
equality in the distribution o wealth, averaged 0.55 between 1950 and 1968.
By the end o the 1960s it had risen to 0.58. This outstripped every other LatinAmerican country bar Honduras and Brazil,and was only comparable, out-
side the region, with the economies o sub-Saharan Arica; the countries o
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INTRODUCTION 3
postcolonial Asia and North Arica all developed signicantly more equitable
economies in this period (see table I.1).Even afer the populist reorms o
the 1970s a marked inequality endured, and nutritionists estimated that
nearly a third o the population suffered severe malnutrition.Behind up-beat stories o Mexicos extraordinary political and economic models lay a
more complicated realityone masked, relatively successully, by the cul-
tural managers o the state.
Mechanical Metaphors, Messy Realities
The success story o the revolution made government was written by Mexi-
can politicians, offi cial historians, and social scientists such as Frank Bran-
denburg, whose inuential work was dedicated to the visionaries o the
Revolutionary Family.It was not unanimously accepted in Mexico, where
people across classes, regions, and ideologies bitterly criticized the postrevo-
lutionary state. Politicians struggled under the re o what James Scott called
the weapons o the weak: gossip, slurs, satirical songs, black jokes, and
other means o character assassination. Discourse deemed them vam-
pires; when President Adolo Ruiz Cortines ickered across a cinema screen
his gigantic image met with cries o Dracula!From joke to threat was no
big step. A peasant told his village treasurer that he was a whoreson just like
the other municipal authorities and very soon theyd get ucked up.Even thepresident was not immune to the subversive violence o gossip. In 1948 a spy
inside the miners union reported one worker saying that the President o
TABLE I.1.Income Inequality in Mexico and Nine Comparatives, 19681970
Country Mean Gini Coeffi cient Year
Mexico .
Brazil . Colombia .
Chile .
Turkey .
India .
Taiwan .
Japan .
Tanzania .
Sierra Leone .
Source:Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, A New Data Set Measuring Income Inequality,World Bank Economic Review10 (1996): 56591, restricted to high quality data points.
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4 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
the Republic and the bunch o bandits who surround him were to blame [or
the economic crisis], that they were sick o it and should exercise direct ac-
tion against the Government, and that Chapultepec woods had lots o ne
trees to go and hang every last one o them.The listeners laughed, perhaps
a bit nervously. They might also have laughed at Abel Quezadas cartoons, inwhich bandolier-estooned revolutionaries sliced gol shots, or new elites
wore diamonds on their noses and sported names like Gastn Billetes.In the
theaters and cinemas they could see comedians like Cantinas or Palillo irt-
ing with similar dissidence or hear Rodolo Usiglis bitter denunciations o
revolutionary cant.I they read Carlos Fuentes or Mariano Azuela they could
be shocked by the cynical intermarriages o pre- and postrevolutionary elites,
knowing exchanges skewered as give me class and Ill give you cash.The
government could restrain popular revisionism, but it could not end it.
Across the mid-century, historians including Daniel Coso Villegas, Jess
Silva Herzog, Jorge Vera Estaol, and Moiss Gonzlez Navarro all imported
some o that popular revisionism into the early historiography o the revolu-
tion. Others subsequently reconstructed some o the tricky juggling acts
underlying elite endurance in power.Yet these were exceptions, and until
recently most historians ignored the period afer 1940, leaving interpretation
to anthropologists, sociologists, and, above all, political scientists. The latters
models o state/society relations were ambiguous rom the start: was Mexico
a democracy or a dictatorship? Such incertitude was exemplied in Branden-burgs work, which evolved in the late 1950s rom considering Mexico a one-
party democracy to concluding that it was a liberal authoritarian system.
As the 1960s endedwith the landmark student massacre at Tlatelolco and
without alternation in poweruncertainties dwindled. By the 1970s broad
consensus held that Mexico was an authoritarian state, where a powerul cor-
poratist party exercised tight social control through its three class-dened
subentities, which marshaled peasants, workers, and the middle classes in
massive support, part coerced and part ounded on the social compact o
revolutionary reorm.And Mexico was a hyper-presidentialist state in which
a single man and his coterie monopolized national power.
These interpretations and their everyday counterparts drew heavily on
mechanical metaphors: the country was run by el sistema, la maquinaria ocial,
the party machine, a political solar system, in which Mexicans rotated
around the presidential sun and his electoral machinery.Less mechanical
metaphors were similarly sweeping: Mexico was, commonplace held, a Levi-
athan state.Its immediate past, particularly in the poca de orobeore 1968,
was one o static and uncontested domination over an apathetic people.Such ideas were not wholly to the distaste o Mexican elites: the elites
image o invincibility was a key tool or survival.Across the period both
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INTRODUCTION 5
sympathetic and skeptical analyses centered on these two assumptions: that
the postrevolutionary state was powerul, dominating a largely unresisting
population, and as a consequence wasby the standards o both the Mexi-
can past and the Latin American presentexceptionally stable.
Such assumptions begged clear questions o class conict and resistance:how had the state either hidden or bypassed them? These interpretive prob-
lems led historians to reconsider state ormation rom a cultural perspective,
embracing the poststructuralist textual analyses and anthropology-inected
works o European cultural historians. In doing so, they challenged reied
Marxist or Weberian examinations o the state as a material object o study,
preerring Philip Abramss interpretation o the state as an a-historical mask
o legitimating illusion. In the most inuential ormulation o this shif,
Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent leaned selectively on the work o Derek
Sayer and Philip Corrigan to argue that the states power derived not rom
its laws, its institutions, its armed orces, or even its broad capitalist under-
pinnings, but rather rom the centuries-long cultural process which was
embodied in the orms, routines, rituals, and discourses o rule.As state
ormation was nothing less than a cultural revolution, it was estivals,
comic books, education programs, and muralsrather than parties, bureau-
cracies, or systems o land tenurethat created the modern Mexican state.
At the same time, historians drew on the insights o subaltern studies the-
orists to investigate the relationship between these state-building efforts andpopular culture, arguing that peasants neither blithely accepted nor bitterly
rejected revolutionary cultural shifs. Instead, they argued that country
people tactically negotiated, appropriated, and reormulated state discourses
and rituals. Eliding cultural interpretations o the state and a sophisticated
conception o popular responses, scholars concluded that this hegemonic
process o appropriation and negotiation produced a common material and
meaningul ramework or living through, talking about, and acting upon
social orders characterized by domination and that this ramework under-
pinned the postrevolutionary states endurance.It was neither a shared
ideology nor a low-rent alse consciousness but rather a shared language
that led to a consensus on the cultural bases or (and scope o ) political
action.
This approach had several advantages. In analytical terms it reestablished
the sheer messiness o reality, meshing neatly with studies o caciquismo.It
stressed that resistance existed in everyday orms, outside o set-piece bat-
tles, and argued cogently or its impact. In so doing it unearthed multiple
examples o popular inputs to state ormation, corrected earlier concepts opopular passivity, and continued social historians traditional appreciation o
the diffi culty and complexity o achieving order. It urthered Nora Hamiltons
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6 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
pathnding analysis, lowering estimates o elite autonomy and stressing the
imsiness o central power. Finally, it argued that hegemonic discourses
over revolution, nation, and gender both subsumed and were shaped by
counter-hegemonic voices, a process that channeled resistance and hence,
ironically enough, helped to explain the states apparent stability.Yet employing cultural hegemony as an exclusive ramework or under-
standing sta dominance also has constraints because reality is compli-
cated in conceptual terms as well. Reducing the state to a mask and the
process o state ormation to a cultural revolution or a series o discursive
acts can promulgate a model o the state as one-dimensional as earlier rei-
cations. As Mary Kay Vaughan observed, the new cultural history requires
those practicing it [to] combine culturalist approaches with continued at-
tention to economic processes and to layers o political power.Festivals,
rituals, state narratives, and discourses did all play undamental roles in dis-
torting visions o the state, shaping popular opinion and elite policy, and
generating some consensus. But contrary to Abrams original ormulation,
which works best as constructive challenge rather than stand-alone theory,
the stateor all its awsdid exist as a social act; the state, to paraphrase
Alan Knight, had weight. It was a series o political-bureaucratic institu-
tions with dedicated personnel who developed an array o distinct interests,
preerences, and capacities.Some o those bureaucratic institutionsthe
Banco de Mxico, the Secretara de Hacienda, the Departamento Agrariowere considerably more Weberian than others, such as the Secretara de
Communicaciones e Obras Pblicas or the Departamento General de Inves-
tigaciones Polticas y Sociales. The state both reected and regulated eco-
nomic relations. While it was never a simple instrument o bourgeois rule, as
tax collector, investor, and policy-maker it ormed what Bob Jessop terms a
social relation: not just a product, but also a generator o various class strat-
egies.Revolutionary nationalism may have mitigated the political impact o
growing inequality, but state scal and economic policy bankrupted peas-
ants, impoverished the urban poor, and beneted the rich. Circuses were
important; so too was bread; and so too were guns.
The rapidly expanding historiography o the last decade or so tacitly re-
ects this realization. There are our principal themes that have drawn his-
torically minded Mexicanists to this period, namely national and elite politics,
popular politics and violence, religion and the right, and culture. The study o
elites spans individuals; camarillas, such as the Grupo Atlacomulco; critical
analyses o (long-overlooked) institutions such as the Supreme Court and the
Secretaria de Hacienda; and critical conjunctures, such as the Henriquistacampaign o the early 1950s and the textbook conict o the 1960s.Building
on the regional studies o Cardenismo, works on popular politics and vio-
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INTRODUCTION 7
lence comprise analyses o social movements, caciquismo, governorships,
and increasingly guerrilla campaigns and state repression.Scholarship on
religion and the right, which cover Sinarquismo, the Partido Accin
Nacional), and Protestant sects, amply demonstrates how enduring divisions
over state land reorm and anticlericalism shaped the succeeding decades.Finally, works on culture, rom comics to Cantinas to rock n roll, pick apart
the intimate ties between the state and the media industry and suggest the
multiplicity o responses o Mexicos new generation o cinema-going, radio-
owning, record-collecting mass media consumers. Much remains to be
done, and smart, hybrid works, mixing high and low politics, labor and iden-
tity, such as those o Steven Bachelor, Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Ariel Rodr-
guez Kuri, may show the way orward.For the moment, though, despite the
recent urry o publications, undamental questions over sources, approaches,
chronologies, and overarching rameworks remain.
Historicizing Authoritarianism: Problems and Possibilities
In looking or answers there is no shortage o data. Historians o the mid-
century ace a data ood: one driven by archival liberalization (and the new
technology to deal with it), the possibilities o oral histories, the post-war
surge o print production, and a new level o government and international
agency technocratic output. Moreover, these years saw a dramatic expansion
o the social sciences, and Mexico proved an area o positive ascination orboth oreign and domestic scholars. Their work needs to be engaged with: it
provides both irreplaceable data and analyses that ell rom avor yet antici-
pate, in cases, our own. Merely reviewing such a body o sources is one chal-
lenge. Sorting the reliable rom the unreliable is another. This is particularly
the case with the two most positivist groups o sources, namely statistics and
intelligence.
stas relied heavily on the positivist magic o numbers. Governors
claimed to have implemented imaginary land grants and built hypothetical
roads; the statistical blizzards o presidential reports systematically and dra-
matically inated agricultural production gures.Some sneered: the Agri-
culture Secretary, one journalist wrote, knew how to make such marvellous,
eloquent statistics that the hungriest, afer reading them, would be ull up
and burping chicken.(Forty years later the bitter jokes continued: cartoon-
ists invented a statistics ministry called the Secretara de Vericacin Nacio-
nal del Discurso Estatal, or short.)But politicians were right to
bet on a residual popular aith in statistics, and spies eavesdropping in cas
ound that statistics claiming increased production caused the best impres-sion.Historians need to beware the same trap. Quite ofen the state had no
way o counting accurately, or it counted with a pronounced optimism.Yet a
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8 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
rough-and-ready cliometrics remains valuable. Even unbelievable statistics
reveal what rulers wanted the ruled to believe; they are as useul as cultural
artiacts as they are useless or straightorward representation. Furthermore,
grassroots or backdoor statisticsthose assembled by local bean-counting
or inductioncan tell us what the state either didnt want known or couldntitsel know. Chris Boyers chapter, or example, estimates deorestation
through the backdoor o the volume o timber transported by rail. Finally,
some statistics o questionable absolute worth are o great relative worth.
Pablo Piccatos offi cial homicide statistics do not believably reect real mur-
der rates (although they may well reect the states systematic massaging o
those rates), but they do believably indicate their long-term decline.
Mexicos intelligence archives pose a similar mixture o problems and pos-
sibilities. They have multiple uses: spies wrestled with the same problems
o the unknown provinces as historians do now, and they enjoyed the ad-
vantage o actually being there in trying to resolve them. They were given
unambiguousunortunately, usually verbalbries: one inspector in San
Luis Potos was asked, Why are there unopposed candidates? Why do they
have overwhelming political power? Through the townsmens ear o the
authorities? Through the indifference o the voting masses? For other rea-
sons?Questions like theseand some o their answersoffer insights
not just into politics, but also into the ederal governments priorities and
mentalit. Some o the raw data collected by agents also are useul or social,cultural, and economic history. Yet the darker corners o the sta state are
now in some ways too accessible, the intelligence archives one-stop shops on
an archival motorway. This poses three problems. One is what psychologists
call the availability heuristic: the tendency to judge the requency or likeli-
hood o an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
Another ollows Hibberts stricture that people who rely excessively on in-
ormation rom secret sources . . . are bound to receive a distorted view o
the world.Finally, these agencies were marked by amateurism, clientelism,
and political bias. For much o the 1940s and 1950s they remained small, ad
hoc, and amateurish agencies. In 1952 the state could only spare feen Gober-
nacin agents to oversee the contested ederal elections throughout the
country; in 1957 the staff o one service seems to have totaled all o twenty-
eight agents.Even in police states, intelligence material demands careul
contextualization, and with a handul o agents, many o whom were incom-
petent, Mexico was no police state.
The host o competing voices in these and other sources demand (and en-
able) creative triangulation and elegant research design. Michael Snodgrass,or example, analyzes the growing subordination o miners and metalwork-
ers in the North beore shifing to rural Jalisco, where he explores one o the
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INTRODUCTION 9
rewards o union acquiescence: privileged entry to the limited good o the
Bracero Program. Piccato uses an unholy mix o tabloid crime reporting
and intelligence to examine murder as an optic ontoand a critical exchange
withthe state. Wil Pansterss least-likely case study selects the most notori-
ously cacicalregion o the period, San Luis Potos, to investigate the balance opower between local actors and state representatives, reasoning that conclu-
sions regarding popular inputs in such unpromising circumstances are gen-
eralizable across the country. Gladys McCormicks most-likely case study o
Zacatepec, one o Mexicos largest peasant cooperatives, reasons that the
processes o domination are most likely to be revealed among those who co-
operated in a zone o endemic rebellion. These and other contributors move
uently rom the micro to the macro and rom detailed case studies to the
broadest sustainable conclusions; their work shares Eric Wol s idea that so-
ciety is a totality o interconnected processes, and [that] inquiries that disas-
semble this totality into bits and then ail to reassemble it alsiy reality.
The combination o local and national, popular and elite realities is com-
plemented by a heterodox approach that strives to avoid cultural or economic
reductionism. Some essays center on culture: Andrew Paxmans analysis o
mass media, Jaime Pensados tracing o student protest, and Guillermo de la
Peas examination o indigenismo. Others seem more political or materialist:
Thom Raths work on the military, Benjamin Smiths analysis o the states
scal impotence, or Roberto Blancartes overview o church/state relations.In reality these and the other authors were characterized by their explorations
o the interstices o culture, economics, and politics. While Raths chapter
demonstrates civilian governments continuing dependence on the military,
it is equally concerned with the causal impact o a linguistic phenomenon:
the mystiying discourse o demilitarization. Paxmans enthusiasm or media
production and consumption is intertwined with the institutional and busi-
ness histories o culture. Snodgrasss work on the political economy o
unionized and transnational labor ends up outlining a culture o migration;
Pansterss history o Gonzalo N. Santoss political reach begins by consider-
ing that literary gunmans textual strategies. Such an integrated scholarship
studying local and national actors in tandem, blending grassroots and elite
sources, considering among others linguistic, institutional, electoral, inrapo-
litical, and economic variablesis particularly indicated or hybrid regimes
like Mexico, where neither Namierite nor subaltern approaches capture the
complexities and subtle dialectics o history.
Toward a ModelMoving rom different starting points, these essays add up to a working
model o sta Mexico. Future debates are oreshadowed in the ollowing
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10 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
chapters. Certain basic agreements also are evident. Some are not startling:
restatements, rediscoveries, or renements o earlier scholars work. Others
are less anticipated. Taken together, they suggest that the diversity, dyna-
mism, and contradictions o mid-century Mexico are best captured in a series
o mid-range theories and an emic label: dictablanda.Perhaps the most basic agreement (unsurprising given the predominance
o historians) was that time mattered. While prior studies were dominated
by more synchronic disciplines, our contributors emphasize what William
Sewell Jr. calls the temporalities o social lie, the understanding that out-
comes are contingent not only upon a wide range o other actions, trends, or
events, but also upon the precise temporal sequence in which these occur.
This reveals how different social processes with diverse temporalitiesrom
long-running trends to sudden individual decisionsaffected the entire pe-
riod, or the decades between 1938 and 1968 were extremely dynamic. Mexi-
cans experienced shifs at all three levels o the annaliste concept o time,
imagined as an ocean marked by the rapid movements o surace otsam, by
the tides o mid-level change, and by the deep, slow-moving currents o the
longue dure.At the surace sexeniosmoved rom lef to right and, to a lesser
extent, back again. The tides o growing industrialization and uctuating
control in the provinces ran ast. Finally, the period witnessed two bursts
o that rarest brand o change, marked shifs in longue dure patterns.
Ater three centuries o stability the population trebled in three decades.People ocked to the growing cities: by 1960 more Mexicans lived in cities
than in the countryside. Simultaneously, in part consequently, people
undamentally reshaped their environments: whether through deorestation,
irrigation canals, land grabs by squatters, or developmentalist macroproj-
ects. Such objective shifs were complemented by shifs in subjective experi-
ences o time. These ranged rom the adoption o mechanical timeby the
1950s a majority o tenement dwellers in downtown Mexico City owned
watchesto the paciying acceleration o time that Paxman tentatively links
to high consumption o mass media. They included the stas adept
management o boom and bust cycles o hope, drip-eeding Mexicans with
politicians who proclaimed renewed political and social reorm. This may
well have delayed popular classication o the state as authoritarian, its econ-
omy inequitable, its revolution past.
Reintroducing time begs the questions o periodization, continuity, and
change. Current schemes end the revolution in 1940 and the golden age in
1968. These traditional watersheds are here to stay, in part because they also
are embedded in popular memory, products o a nostalgia that invoked (andinvokes) Cardenismo as a critique o smo, and the early as a critique
o the later . In analytical terms they need to be qualied. Across the mid-
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INTRODUCTION 11
century there was no steady progression into authoritarianism but rather a
series o lurches in the dynamic balance o power between rulers and ruled
and a series o turning points. The beginning o the end o the revolution
came in 1938, Knight argues; rom a Church perspective, Blancarte demon-
strates that it occurred even earlier. The government o the early 1940s wasmore tight-sted, repressive, and conservative than its predecessor, a shif
that stretched beyond peasant and labor politics to encompass phenomena
as diverse as teacher training and conservation strategy.Pent-up political
demand afer the war, however, shaped the early and lent electoral sub-
stance to its modish rhetoric o democracy. Both mode and substance largely
died across Latin America in the late 1940s, and Mexico was no exception.
The 1950 end to party primaries restricted competitive politics; 1952 proved
the last threatening presidential election or thirty yearsyet also marked the
end o the armys overt meddling in presidential politics. The year 1959 saw
not just the repression o the railroad workers strike but also a mass extinc-
tion o the biggest regional caciques, a purge o the armys top regional
commanders anda year laterthe nationalization o the Jenkins lm mo-
nopoly. The early 1960s combined increasing antisystemic revolt and in-
creasing authoritarianism with increased land grants and increased avenues
or limited electoral pluralism; a modicum o proportional representation in
1963, a brie ing with primaries in 1965. Such ambiguitiesa dening char-
acteristic o a dictablandaleave room or debate over the signicance oeach shif. One argument is clear and runs across several chapters: 1968 was
a turning point more in perception than in reality.Military repression had
never lef the countryside and urban protests had never ended. As Pensado
demonstrates, multiple pro-democracy student movementscountered with
soldiersstretched back over a decade. Imagining the golden age as a clearly
bounded period is as much a unction o the ideological remembering o time
as o dramatic historical rupture.
The most revision-proo aspect o the golden age is macroeconomic. Be-
tween 1940 and 1970 the state implemented protectionist and investment
policies designed to develop key industries and stimulate the economy. This
projectImport Substitution Industrialization ()generated impressive
growth and one o the lowest import coeffi cients in Latin America. Quality o
lie indicators such as literacy and longevity rose alongside the economy.
Yet the ormer originated in the 1930s and the latter was in part a product o
global medical advances. Mid-century economic growth was quantitatively
strong but qualitatively weak. Government investment channeled growth to-
ward two sectors: manuacturing and export agriculture.Development alsowas geographically concentrated: between 1940 and 1955 more than three
quarters o industrial value added occurred in the north or Mexico City.In
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12 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
northern cities wages were more than double the national average.Yet huge
swathes o the urban population remained outside the countrys explosive
economic growth, orced to earn low wages in a (largely unmeasured) inor-
mal economy; urban women remained particularly marginalized. Rural
workers, above all, paid the bills or . Population growth was not matchedwith land or credit; the agrarian reorm was curtailed amid accusations o
congenital low productivity. The role o agriculture was to supply export
crops to the north and cheap ood to the cities, permitting the low urban
wages that enabled industrialization. The state supported agribusiness
through massive irrigation projects and tax breaks and credits, policies
thatcombined with price controlsundermined ejidatariosand smallhold-
ers.Between 1939 and 1947 the purchasing power o agricultural workers
declined 47 percent; corn prices, adjusted or ination, ell 33 percent be-
tween 1957 and 1973.Meanwhile scal policy ailed to redistribute wealth
rom richer urban to poorer rural zones. The Mexican miracle presup-
posed, in short, a systematic transer o resources rom countryside to city
and rom south and center to north.
Why did peasants accept this? The second clear consensus o this volume
is that many did not. Rural communities across Mexico protested vigorously
and at times violently against stolen elections; against crooked politicians,
tax collectors, alcohol inspectors, or orestry wardens; and against enduring
poverty. Insurgencies did not begin in the 1960s: they were a constant duringthe earlier period.The state consequently relied on violence, exercised by
pistoleros, policemen, and soldiers, ar more than is traditionally appreciated.
The petty undeclared counterinsurgencies o the 1940s gave way in the 1950s
to repression o peasant movements linked to Henriquismoor the Unin Gen-
eral de Obreros y Campesinos de Mxico (), peaking with the crush-
ing o the 1961 Gasca rebellion. Evenperhaps especiallypetty local
rebellions or jacqueries could be met with extreme, perormative violence. In
1955 villagers rom La Trinitaria, Chiapas, rebelled, citing high corn prices
and local corruption; an army captain beheaded ve o them in the main
square.In 1956 Triquis rom northwest Oaxaca murdered a lieutenant and
two soldiers who had raped a local woman; the army called in planes to bomb
the village. In 1957 soldiers in Cuaxocota, Puebla, countered plans or an
ejidowith beatings, mass arrests, and the threat to burn the village.This was
all in the mid-1950s, generally considered to be the most peaceul stretch o
the mid-century. Such unequivocal object lessons in state terror were, as one
soldier told a spy, standard (i secretive) practice. The army was critical to
rural order: in the early 1950s, Rath nds, some 20 percent o municipiosheldsmall garrisons, and conict zones ofen were ruled by unelected councils
headed by an offi cer. State violence was careully maskeddeployments
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INTRODUCTION 13
ofen began by night, soldiers killed while dressed as peasantsand careully
targeted. It continued the tradition o decapitating social movements by se-
lectively killing their cadres.
Yet there was more to violence than draconian repression, and popular vi-
olence sometimes secured popular demands. A Mexican variant o what EricHobsbawm dubbed collective bargaining by riot obtained, as rulers and ruled
haggled through choreographed low-intensity violence, which ranged rom
street ghts to riots to simulacra o rebellion.Collective bargaining by riot
characterized both electoral and economic protests, and even the most radi-
cal, antisystemic mobilizations ofen led to concessions once they had been
repressed. The 1965 guerrilla attack on an army base in Ciudad Madera, Chi-
huahua, led to the army hunting down and killing the attackers, but it also led
to a tour o inspection by ex-president Crdenas, which in turn generated a
major redistribution o land. When local agrarian protests threatened to
spread across regions o high-yield agricultural production the government
would sometimes revive the agrarista largesse o the 1930s. In 1957 Jacinto
Lpez and the invaded the sugar latiundiaso Los Mochis, Sinaloa,
and the lands o the U.S.-owned Cananea Cattle Company in Sonora, inva-
sions that spread to the Yaqui and Mayo valleys, the Laguna, Colima, and
Nayarit. Although soldiers arrested Lpez, President Lpez Mateos re-
sponded by expropriating the Cananea lands and creating seven ejidos cov-
ering a quarter o a million hectares. Collective bargaining by riot wastime-honored practice: it was obtained in resource regulation and in the local
elections, and it was salient in the s retreat rom power in the 1990s. It
applied to both policy and personnel choices, was partially protected by revo-
lutionary rhetoric, and underlay much co-option by the state.
The main mass beneciaries o state co-option were workers. As Kevin
Middlebrook details, the state largely subordinated labor by engineering
union cacicazgosbetween 1949 and 1951. Yet although that subordination held
down real wages, it was offset by new social benets: subsidized ood staples,
housing, health care, and eventually worker prot-sharing.As Snodgrass
demonstrates, the sheer range o those benets outweighed, in popular mem-
ory, the high costs o repression; it wasagain paradoxicallya golden age
o charrismo. Moreover, economic co-option stretched ar beyond own-
ership o the means o production or benet packages. One o the hallmarks
o the period was the dramatic expansion o state control over the access
points to a mixed economy, epitomized in legislation such as the 1950 Law on
Federal Executive Powers in Economic Matters. Governments could buy
consent by direct and indirect means; both involved rigging the competitionor limited resources, broadly dened as any generator, whether tangible or
intangible, o wealth. Intensive direct incentives to cooperationstate benets,
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14 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
development undingrewarded relatively narrow sectors, above all unionized
labor, bureaucrats, and soldiers. Yet government revenues were exiguous,
and such benets were perorce limited: the state had to pay market price (in
cash) or the Cananea expropriation. As Boyer, Snodgrass, Paxman, and
McCormick all show, less tangible resources were many and ranged rom thenaturalwater, orestry, grazingto the institutional, such as licenses or
transport businesses, cantinas, television and radio stations, actories, im-
ports and exports, street vendors, bureaucratic sinecures, or braceropermits.
Government permits were ubiquitous: one cartoonist drew a policeman de-
manding that the three kings produce their permit to distribute Christmas
presents.Regulating such a wide range o resources cost the state relatively
little, while tactically ceding access to local, national, and export markets
purchased support across classes, spanning the unemployed who got street
vendors permits, the workers and peasants who were granted bracero per-
mits, the middle classes who received transport concessions or taxis, buses,
trucks, and drugs plazas,and the major industrialists who won avorable
shares o national import and export quotas.(Permit-givers at all levels
rom crony capitalist presidents like Rodrguez or Alemn down to the lowest
bureaucratalso personally proted rom controlling entry to the broadest
range o economic activity.) Failure to support the government could be pun-
ished by blocking that entry: Azcrraga waited a decade or his concession
afer backing Almazn.This regulation o resources was critical in buildingcoalitions o consenters on the cheap because it lent Mexico one o the main
advantages o a gatekeeper state: the counteracting o state weakness by
the stabilizing, coalition-building tool o controlling access to capitalist
markets.
The third consensus o this books case studies is that rowdy mass politics
never ended in the cities, where in between large-scale, set-piece conronta-
tions and everyday orms o resistance a mid-range rumbling o dissent
and mobilization persisted. During the early 1940s protests ocused on the
combination o spiraling ood costs and ostentatious corruption. The
harvest crisis o 1943 precipitated bread riots in Mexico City and Monterrey;
two years later, dissidents blockaded downtown Xalapa to protest the price
o bread.In the later 1940s urban grievances turned toward taxes, and
social movementssome nominally attached to y-by-night parties or
unionsemerged to veto scal increases.During the 1950s and 1960s the
ocus o urban discontent shifed to student organizations rom Puebla, Mi-
choacn, Sonora, and San Luis Potos. Throughout the period, squatter
(paracaidsta) organizations invaded private lands, demanded services and eji-dos, and rejected state regulation. Governments were orced to respond, im-
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INTRODUCTION 15
porting grain, desperately attempting to control ood prices, punishing
high-taxing state offi cials, titling lands, and dishing out water and electricity.
These measures were costly and ofen ineffective. Lasting alliances between
the state and single-issue movements were slow to build and unreliable. It
took twenty years o repeated ad hoc concessions to co-opt the marketwomen o Oaxaca City into the offi cial apparatus o the Conederacin Nacio-
nal de Organizaciones Populares (), and even then they occasionally
held the government to ransom.Although Ernesto Uruchurtu built thou-
sands o market stalls or traders, in 1966 they turned on the mayor and
helped topple him when he tried to dislodge paracaidsta groups. Some
researchers conducting eldwork in the 1970s observed a well-regimented
party, lording it over a populace committed to conormity to the rules rather
than manipulation o them and avoiding violent or clearly illegal orms o
political action.Others, slightly earlier, did not: in the late 1960s, or ex-
ample, Carlos Vlez-Ibaez witnessed groups o viejas chingonas burning
down mortgage offi ces and throwing managers into sewage ditches in Ciu-
dad Nezahualcyotl.Collective bargaining by riot was not conned to the
countryside.
As the last example suggests, and several o our contributors demonstrate,
these movements also saw women enter the political sphere with increased
orce. The revolution ushered in a new wave o eminists, who linked de-
mands or voting rights with broader social claims. Some sought to workwithin the system, exchanging conditional loyalty or economic benets,
orming their own unions, and supporting state-linked cacicazgos.Others
joined the Partido Comunista Mexicano ( and harassed the government
or emale suffrage rom the outside.At the other end o the ideological
spectrum, Catholic womens groups mobilized against government anticleri-
calism, especially socialist schools.Improving church-state relations, the
co-option o leaders, and the political demobilization o World War II proba-
bly combined to suffocate more radical demands.But, during the succeed-
ing decades, these lef- and right-wing discourses and organizational structures
percolated down to the urban and rural poor. In the process, peasants, work-
ers, street vendors, and paracaidsta housewives blended and recongured
previously polarized ideals and redirected them toward immediate goals.
In Morelos, women provided oot soldiers or Rubn Jaramillos radical
agrarismo. In the 1940s in Oaxaca City women harnessed the organiza-
tional power o the Accin Catlica Mexicana ( to press the government
to cut taxes and ulll its promise o greater democracy, which they dened
as having their newly granted vote actually count. By the 1960s, womenalso embraced the new biopolitics o ertility. Despite Catholic opprobrium,
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16 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
Mexican women overwhelmingly accepted the use o contraception, which
they adopted in soaring numbers across the 1970s, in some cases whether
their husbands liked it or not.
Elites were orced to react to this new level o power and treated women as
a distinct political category. They established emale branches o the ,publicly endorsing a handul o emale deputies and cacicas, and channeled
social spending toward womens organizations. Mexican women devel-
oped longer school careers than women in countries o comparable wealth,
which translated into signicantly lower inant mortality. The Secretara
de Salubridad y Asistencia concentrated its paltry unds on constructing
hospitals, kindergartens, and education centers or poor working moth-
ers.Throughout the country community organizers, such as Celia Ramrez,
head o the Unin de Mujeres de las Colonias 20 in the Federal District, and
Guadalupe Urza Flores, the advocate o the outcasts o Jalisco, gained gov-
ernment support.Offers o state largesse and political leadership brought
results. As Mara Teresa Fernndez Aceves argues, second-generation emale
leaders,by securing unevenly distributed social services, assured widespread
emale backing or the afer ull suffrage was granted in 1952. Women
could also be, as Heather Fowler-Salamini points out, caciques o much the
same stripe as their male counterparts: the leaders o the Veracruz coffee
sorters negotiated notable benets or their constituents while simultane-
ously grafing and getting seats on the Crdoba town council.Some istas brokered similar deals. Genoveva Medina, cacica o the Oaxaca City
stallholders association, drafed her union into the afer accepting a seat
in congress.By the mid-1950s, the growing numbers o working women,
suffragettes, aspirant caciques, and militant Catholics all offered conditional
support to the . As a result, women voters in general, Blancarte reminds
us, lef sta ears o their generic opposition unullled.
sta hopes or cultural engineering through education, on the other
hand, generated ambiguous results. Raael Segovia ound the schoolhouse to
be the main space or political discussion.However, the contents o many
such discussions were ofen critical o the state. As Tanals Padilla notes, by
the 1960s the very schools the revolutionary government had once designed
to create a loyal citizenry were now producing its most militant oes. Guer-
rilla leaders rom Chihuahua and Guerrero were teachers; Subcomandante
Marcoss parents were maestros rurales.The cities were the most educated
zones, where the state lavished its greatest efforts in controlling the public
sphere. Yet city-dwellers seemed skeptical rom the start. Ca gossip was
virulent and all-encompassing: presidential untouchability did not obtainover a coffee or a beer.That gossip translated into political opposition is
clear not just in inormal politics but also in election results. Unmanipulated
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INTRODUCTION 17
gures show Alemn winning a mere 59 percent in Mexico City in 1946; more
manicured numbers still showed the acing consistent and substantial
opposition in both the center-west and north.Cultural production and re-
ception reected, in short, the double-edged legacy o revolutionary dis-
course, an instrument o both control and contestation.Various authors question the states control o the public sphere and o
mass media in particular. Some were overtly controlled by the government: El
Nacionalbilled itsel as the offi cial organ o the government (in sales pitches
pressuring town councils to subscribe).The government credit agency Na-
cional Financiera () owned 51 percent o the shares in Clasa Films
Mundiales , which made many o the newsreels.From 1955 on there was
only one television provider, (later Televisa), whose owner declared the
network part o the governmental system and the President his boss.
Wartime censorship agencies endured, supposedly controlling everything
rom newsreels to comics. The censors work was supplemented by an array
o covert control strategies that targeted the mainstream, offi cially pluralist
press. The government used advertising contracts, sof loans, and its control
o newsprint through a state monopoly supplier, , to induce compli-
ance. Most o the time this worked.Survey data rom the 1940s to the 1970s
suggest a certain core belie in the national statein abstractthat may be
causally linked to this virtual world o state-approved mass media.As Pax-
man argues, however, that world was not just a product o dominant partysocial engineering but also straightorward prot-maximizing; in ceding
much control to the private sector the state also bet on the controlling effect
o sheer quantity rather than on hegemonic quality alone.
Media control was also a lot more partial than generally thought. Censor-
ship agencies enjoyed mixed results: newsreel and lm censorship was dy-
namic and effective, while comics ourished despite the best efforts o the
cultural bureaucrats.There were backdoors to effective social commentary,
as Piccatos analysis o the national crime pages demonstrates. There was a
muckraking oppositional press en provincia. Newspapers such as La Verdad de
Acapulco, El Diario de Xalapa, El Chapulnin Oaxaca, El Inormadorin Guadalajara,
El Sol del Centroin Aguascalientes, and Tampicos El Mundoand Apizacos Don
Paco all managed, at times at least, to ollow prooundly critical editorial
lines. They constituted a ourth estate. They were joined by traveling corrido
sellers, modern-day troubadours equipped with thin sheets o popular songs,
which were read out and sung in markets, cantinas, and town squares. Many
such Mexican samizdatexplicitly criticized the state, rom the Corrido del bra-
cero, which decried the brutal taxes/the nes and donations/the vile mo-nopolies/o repulsive individuals, to the Corrido de Jaramillo, which warned
prospective peasant leaders that presidential hugs might be ollowed by a
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18 PAUL GILLINGHAM AND BENJAMIN T. SMITH
jaramillazo: a bullet and a coffi n.They were, the U.S. embassy concluded,
truly a mass medium.Furthermore, even when bureaucrats could control
the medium, they were unable to regiment reception. Vlez-Ibaez described
the atmosphere at a cinema in