The Mexican Revolution's Wake
The Making of a Political System, 1920–1929

A social and political history of Mexico's first political system after the Revolution that demonstrates the critical influence of regional socialist parties.

Sarah Osten (Author)

9781108415989, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 February 2018

302 pages, 8 b/w illus. 2 maps
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'… It is a truly brilliant book on local political history. Reading this work is therefore highly recommended. It not only explores the local characteristics of the different movements in the southeast, but also how some of them, particularly that of Tabasco, influenced, although in a more moderate version, the formation of the PNR (predecessor of the current Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) in 1929. And it is in these movements that we find, very clearly, some of the characteristics of that party created at the national level, not so much to come to power, but to keep it and to make Mexican political life a little more 'decent,' the cult of the Mexican Revolution, caciquismo, anti-catholicism, the formation of a national culture and an electoral machine that would become invincible. I emphasize with full conviction: this book must be read.' Herminio Sánchez de la Barquera Arroyo, Iberoamericana

Throughout the 1920s Mexico was rocked by attempted coups, assassinations, and popular revolts. Yet by the mid-1930s, the country boasted one of the most stable and durable political systems in Latin America. In the first book on party formation conducted at the regional level after the Mexican Revolution, Sarah Osten examines processes of political and social change that eventually gave rise to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated Mexico's politics for the rest of the twentieth century. In analyzing the history of socialist parties in the southeastern states of Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán, Osten demonstrates that these 'laboratories of revolution' constituted a highly influential testing ground for new political traditions and institutional structures. The Mexican Revolution's Wake shows how the southeastern socialists provided a blueprint for a new kind of party that struck calculated balances between the objectives of elite and popular forces, and between centralized authority and local autonomy.

Introduction: Mexico's search for peace and postrevolutionary political institutions
1. The socialist crucible: Yucatán, 1915–1922
2. Revolutionary laboratories: the spread of socialism across the Southeast, 1915–1923
3. Putting the system to the test: The de la Huerta rebellion in the Southeast, 1923–4
4. A harder line: socialist tabasco, 1920–27
5. The forgotten revolution: socialist Chiapas, 1924–7
6. Closing ranks: socialism and anti-reelectionism, 1925–27
7. A nation of parties
Conclusion: hard lessons.

Subject Areas: Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4], History of the Americas [HBJK]