Forced Marches : Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico [1 ed.] 9780816599424, 9780816520428

Citation preview

Forced Marches

Forced Marches Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico Edited by

Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley

tucson

© 2012 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forced marches : soldiers and military caciques in modern Mexico / edited by Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley.    p.  cm.   Includes index.   ISBN 978-0-8165-2042-8 (cloth : alk. paper)  1.  Mexico—History, Military—19th century.  2.  Mexico—History, Military—20th century.  3.  Mexico—Armed Forces—History—19th century.  4.  Mexico—Armed Forces—History—20th century.  5.  Militarism—Social aspects—Mexico.  6.  Militarism—Political aspects— Mexico.  I.  Fallaw, Ben, 1966–  II.  Rugeley, Terry, 1956–   F1227.5.F67  2012   355.00972099094—dc23      2012015966 Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Redrafting History: The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw

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1. An Unsatisfactory Picture of Civil Commotion: Unpopular Militias and Tepid Nationalism in the Mexican Southeast Terry Rugeley

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2. The Mobile National Guard of Guanajuato, 1855–1858: Military Hybridization and Statecraft in Reforma Mexico Daniel S. Haworth

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3. Behaving Badly in Mexico City: Discipline and Identity in the Presidential Guards, 1900–1911 Stephen Neufeld

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4. Heliodoro Charis Castro and the Soldiers of Juchitán: Indigenous Militarism, Local Rule, and the Mexican State Benjamin T. Smith

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5. Eulogio Ortiz: The Army and the Antipolitics of Postrevolutionary State Formation, 1920–1935 Ben Fallaw

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6. Revolutionary Citizenship against Institutional Inertia: Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934–1940 Thomas Rath

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7. Military Caciquismo in the PRIísta State: General Mange’s Command in Veracruz Paul Gillingham

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Conclusion: Reflections on State Theory through the Lens of the Mexican Military David Nugent

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About the Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

The co-editors of this volume would like to thank Ben Huseman of the University of Texas at Arlington Library; Edward Montañez Pérez of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán’s Fototeca Guerra; and Russell Martin, Anne Peterson, and Cynthia Franco of Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library for their invaluable assistance in locating photographs to accompany the text. Finally, special thanks to Patrick Campbell of Colby College for his invaluable research assistance into the intricacies of Mexican military history.

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Forced Marches

Redrafting History The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw

At times historical change takes place as slowly and imperceptibly as the growth of an olive tree. But at other times it lurches forward through what might be called a forced march, when people suddenly find themselves dragged out of cozy domesticity and plunged into conflicts not of their choosing. In the case of Mexico, anyone wanting to understand this land of diverse peoples and their complex past can find few better instances of such marches than the story of its militias and militaries. The topic is confusing and often uncomfortable. Anyone familiar with Mexico knows the historical centrality of such themes as arms, coercion, recruitment, and collective violence. Indeed, when this land began its life as a nation, the military was one of the few cohesive institutions besides the Catholic Church, and yet that cohesion failed to translate into political unity. For the past eighty years, Mexico has been one of the least militarized of Latin American societies in institutional terms, even though the country continues to register high levels of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and criminal assaults. Armed force created the colony of New Spain, and still another surge of armed conflict tore that colony from the mother country three centuries later, but other themes have drawn more attention (ethnohistory, religion, politics, economic imperialism, and popular cultures come to mind). When scholars have explored the role of arms here, it has often been through the prism of the national leadership of generals such as Antonio López de Santa Anna or Álvaro Obregón. We know considerably less about the men who followed them, or of the women they left behind, or of the nature of life in the barracks, or of what 1

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perceptions and skills former soldiers took with them when returning to civilian life. For all intents and purposes, those who shouldered arms remain names on a roster, buried in an archive or else subordinated to some far different story. This volume attempts to fill a long-standing void in our understanding of Mexican history by addressing the multifaceted role of militias and armies as social institutions. For over two hundred years, men stationed with rifles in hand provided the means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding ground for rowdiness and discontent. For generations of Mexicans, and especially following the twin mobilization peaks of 1810–1821 and 1910–1920, service at arms was a shared experience, much in the way that compulsory enlistment during World War II provided a bond for men from the United States. But what did it mean to wear a uniform or fasten a bayonet? Was service simply a matter of fighting, or more an unending exile from home and family? Did conscription mean freedom from routine, or fear and hardship? Arms may have represented different things to Spanish landowners and to Indian and ethnically mixed guerrillas, but whatever the final answers to these questions, understanding the history of forging state and society in Mexico requires coming to terms with that country’s two centuries of forced marches.

A Nation’s History in Military Perspective The importance that the military assumed following 1821 might well have surprised an observer from the early centuries of colonial Mexico—three centuries of Pax Hispánica, in Friedrich Katz’s words.1 Although battles— the fire and sword of so many romantic narratives—certainly mattered in the conquests, even more critical were subtle processes such as the cooptation of native elites and the diversion of seignorial and tributary patterns away from Indian nobility and into the hands of powerful Spaniards and their preferred institutions.2 Much of the subsequent colonial order depended on letting the Indians be Indians. Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars did most of the work of bringing native peoples into the Spanish system of governance, wherein Hapsburg’s global monarchy ruled indirectly though intermediaries.3 For two centuries after the conquest, New Spain gradually gelled into a new society. Spaniards, of course, dominated the social and political order. But while Indian peoples occupied inferior roles, they still enjoyed key rights such as access to legal defense, freedom from slavery and the

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Inquisition, and the indivisible community land grant known as the ejido. Creoles, or the American-born heirs of Spaniards, multiplied in number and came to play critical roles in the society and economy. Increasing even more rapidly were the so-called castas: a broad category of racially and culturally mixed peoples that included Africans, African-Indians, mulattos, and above all, mestizos—the offspring of Spaniard and Indian. While the early years of plunder economy soon ended, New Spain’s economy diversified and enjoyed slow but steady growth.4 In the 1700s, however, new pressures began to affect the colony. Populations grew rapidly as native peoples acquired immunity to the European contagions that had scourged them for so long. A new royal house in Spain, the Bourbons of French pedigree, who aspired to rule as enlightened despots, launched an ambitious program to revive imperial fortunes on the backs of the Americas. The Bourbon reformers liberalized trade restrictions, simplified tax structures, and encouraged investment in mining and agriculture. But they also tightened their administrative grip by expanding and militarizing the peninsular bureaucracy, ratcheting up tax demands, consolidating control of outlying territories (in places such as Texas and California), and building a militia to fend off rival imperialists such as England and France.5 Throughout this heady period, the army and local, part-time provincial militias functioned both as political pillars—providing institutional stability of a crude sort—and launching pads for individual officers’ ambitions. Since 1780, military service provided an avenue of social mobility for those who had no other hope to rise above their station in life, including more than a few Afro-Mexicans and mestizos. It was also one of the few undertakings likely to carry a young man beyond the often claustrophobic confines of the village. The army taught new and rarified knowledge such as mathematics (the international language of the Enlightenment), bookkeeping, and the magic of technology. Bourbon-enlightened despotism fattened fiscal revenues, but offended virtually every strata of colonial society from criollos (or creoles, Americanborn Spaniards) and clergy to caciques (Indian village headmen), casta artisans, and yeomen farmers. By uniting many Americans against Spain, Bourbon administration laid the groundwork for independence. The nascent militias factored prominently in the struggle. Indeed, while leadership of the anticolonial wars of 1810–1821 was varied (if top-heavy with radical clergy), the pro-independence factions included a certain number of creoles who had found status and upward mobility as militia officers, men such as Miguel Allende. When Mexicans finally raised their flag of independence in 1821, the new national army folded together the

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insurgent military leaders, such as Afro-Mexican Vicente Guerrero, and the deeply conservative white officers, such as Agustín de Iturbide and Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had labored for so long to root them out of their highland hideaways.6 Reconciliation came for some, perhaps, but the years after independence proved frustrating as the economy declined, social divisions festered, and political disputes simmered. At least before independence, New Spain’s regiments had kept the peace. In the postcolonial era, however, militia units soaked up what little existed in the way of state budgets, for payrolls and pensions and endless procurement spent virtually every centavo of national revenue and encouraged locales to incur debt. Eleven years of uprising and counterinsurgency had seriously damaged the new nation’s productive base. Travel and communication within the new nation remained maddeningly slow and vulnerable to bandits. The now-sovereign Mexican peoples had little experience with statecraft, particularly of the sort involving democratic participation, representative government, or separation of powers. And beneath the veneer of liberalism lay a society of deeply colonial attitudes. Creoles rejected the idea of equality with Indians, constitutional promises be hanged. Citizenship thus remained fictive for the majority—the poor and people of color. The governing elite split over whether to maintain the quasi-regal Centralism of past centuries or else let power devolve to individual provinces under a Federalist formula.7 Over time, Catholic intransigence and liberal anticlericalism deepened philosophical divisions. Factions thus evolved into the Liberal and Conservative parties. When in power, Conservatives championed centralism: a return to the old colonial order, with its complex social hierarchy and its union of church and state. The opposing Liberals advocated federalism (at least when out of power), unfettered individualist capitalism, disestablishment of the Church and increased secularism, and juridical equality that made no distinction between the former castes.8 These volatile ingredients presented a recipe for conflict, and conflict came. Between 1835 and 1846, Mexico undertook its own forced marches as the country roiled with internal wars over federalism. Various provinces tried to break away from Mexico City’s dominance altogether, either to form independent nations or, more commonly, to pressure Mexico back into the Federalist arrangement. Of these many rebellions, only the increasingly Anglo colony of Texas achieved permanent separation. Elsewhere, in places such as Tabasco and Zacatecas, the campaigns to maintain national unity took many lives, while in Yucatán, then the second-largest province of the republic, the separatist movement spun out of control and in 1847

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turned into a full-blown fifty years of ethnic uprising, the so-called Caste War. Worse still, conflicts over the fate of Texas and California led to a US invasion, ultimately costing Mexico almost half of its national territory. It is hardly surprising that throughout this chaotic period the political center relied heavily on its generals—the only men with experience in largescale administration, planning, and arms—to keep the nation together. For this reason, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a late Bourbon commander from Veracruz who had enjoyed considerable success (on both sides) during and after the independence wars, was often called to power to deal with the nearly impossible situation.9 Conversely, provincials desperate to protect both their rights and their skins often turned to ambitious regional strongmen who alternately allied with and warred against the political center. As a desperate gamble, Santa Anna in 1853 sold to the United States what is today the southernmost strip of Arizona; this, the so-called Gadsden Purchase, detonated a new round of civil wars, as the Conservative core of Mexico (Puebla) struggled to resist a rising wave of liberalism centered in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán. Liberals seized power soon after in the Ayutla Revolt (1854), determined to revitalize their nation and expel an increasingly authoritarian Santa Anna at all costs. They triumphed in the bloody Reform War of 1857–1859, but Mexico’s subsequent insolvency tempted a costly French intervention that claimed six years and another forty thousand souls. The Reform and Imperial wars split Mexico down the middle. In the long struggle, both sides counted on high-ranking officers who in turn mobilized (and often dragooned) men from villages throughout the provinces. The list of names of Mexicans who rose to defend the republic is long indeed, but the collaboration of many Mexicans in the Conservative/ French regime has long been omitted from the historia patria and ignored in historiography. The struggle to expel the French gave Mexico a signal victory over what was then one of the world’s best armies: the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, better known as “Cinco de Mayo.” But that same struggle had another important consequence, in that military service in the seven-year campaign became a touchstone experience for tens of thousands of Mexican citizens. For many of its participants, bearing arms against the Conservative or Imperial cause allowed them to claim some share of the Mexican nation, just as so many soldiers of the Army of the Potomac came to identify with the Union. Numerous scholars have argued that through an emerging “folk liberalism,” a broad band of peasants and small property owners saw themselves as loyal citizens in a Mexico where patriotism rested upon a community’s right to armed self-defense.10

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The long dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880 and 1884– 1911) relied in part on this popular support. Díaz brought in foreign investment, turned peasants off their collective landholdings, fostered the expansion of haciendas, and operated his system through a vast pyramid of corrupt cronies, but his leadership in such glorious battles as May 5 and April 2, 1866, helped legitimize his regime.11 In fractious regional politics, charismatic generals such as Bernardo Reyes and Francisco Cantón Rosado (a rehabilitated conservative imperialist) served as popular counterweights to elitist científicos (“scientific ones,” who admired Europe and positivism) in Nuevo León and Yucatán, respectively. Ironically, much of Díaz’s support came from the fact that he ended the wars and slashed the size of the army. As every mother knew, he sent the boys home, and that was no small boon.12 Of course, it was not Christian charity that motivated el presidente; rather, Díaz understood only too well that the army was an incubator of revolt, and he was determined to pull the ladder up after him. After 1880, he increasingly relied on a smaller and, over time, incompetent and corrupt federal army that the newly created railroads could whisk to hot spots as needed. As François Duvalier of Haiti and Anastasio Somoza García of Nicaragua did, Díaz discouraged mutiny by keeping munitions stockpiles low and frequently rotating regional commanders to prevent brass (military) cacicazgos (chiefdoms). To handle strictly local problems, the whips and pistols of bandits-turned-lawmen known as rurales, in fact a creation of Benito Juárez, usually served to keep the peace, providing a counterbalance to the military proper.13 But demobilization carried a price. Ironically, it was under Díaz that the military lost its popular quality and instead became the kind of national constabulary or Guardia Civil common to late nineteenth-century Latin American societies. Internal repression replaced national defense as a priority. A substantial upgrade of professionalism for the army figured prominently on Díaz’s agenda, but somehow he never quite got around to it. By 1910, the rank and file were more often dragooned criminals, political dissidents, or apathetic indigenous recruits; the officers were aged and unfit; and even the horses were mediocre.14 His military, rotten to the marrow like so many other Porfirian institutions, collapsed when confronted with the relatively amateurish revolutionary challenge organized by northern hacendado (landowner) Francisco Madero and his generales del dedo (selfappointed generals), men such as Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa and, to the south, Emiliano Zapata. Most of the contending forces of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) were anything but regular. The Zapatistas of Morelos,

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Guerrero, and elsewhere fought mainly for land; poorly armed but highly mobile on their short but hardy horses, their guerrilla style of war was virtually unbeatable on home ground. Francisco Villa of Chihuahua mobilized a far grander army, the Division of the North (División del Norte), across the north and center by appealing to the agrarianism of mestizo military colonies; the division’s mastery of rail-born campaigning and core of magnificent cavalry seemed unbeatable. But its over-reliance on cavalry charges, its lack of a first-rate infantry or artillery, and Villa’s inability to fully rein in headstrong generals proved to be fatal flaws.15 The Constitutionalist forces under Venustiano Carranza more closely resembled a regular army with uniforms, a degree of discipline (its core were veterans of Madero’s struggle against Orozco’s uprising in 1911–1912), and a clear chain of command. Still, its officers came primarily from civilian ranks, and professionalization advanced but slowly for decades after the armed phase ended. Significantly, the revolution’s best general, prodigy Álvaro Obregón, who commanded the northwestern state of Sonora, led the only reliable infantry of the entire revolutionary era. His Yaqui and Mayo Indian battalions—seasoned with miners and factory workers— bested Villa’s horsemen.16 Obregón’s mostly indigenous foot soldiers alone among revolutionary fighters represented a force willing to close with the enemy, to take and hold terrain—the sine qua non of armies through history.17 The new Mexican army was born when Obregón and most of the Constitutionalists launched Mexico’s last successful military coup against Venustiano Carranza in April 1920, then defeated or absorbed rival warlords. And its generals (including former Villistas, Zapatistas, Carrancistas, and even Orozquistas such as Juan Andreu Almazán) remained immensely powerful brokers of all things economic and political for decades to come. The largely mythic social memory of the Mexican Revolution helped to legitimize the military’s power. Historia patria remembers the conflict as an incredibly bloody war whose heroic sacrifices—above all by martyred machos Villa and Zapata—sanctified the new nation.18 Corridos, popular ballads whose stanzas resounded at the campfires and in the cantinas, helped forge a new revolutionary nationalism by remembering Villa’s taking of Zacatecas and the lovely Adelita, the soldier’s sweetheart.19 The army liked to boast that they fought not just a popular war but also a fittingly gruesome modern war—based on the presence of planes, machine guns, and trenches at a few battles. Granted, much of this derring-do stretched the truth. The oft-cited million casualties of the Mexican Revolution (a staggering sum considering the prewar population of perhaps twelve million) is a number from nowhere. The best demographic estimates

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attribute the missing million Mexicans probably eliminated from the 1921 census by the revolution mainly to disease and migration—not combat. Revolutionary armies were simply not that lethal, certainly nothing like European armies of World War I. In the revolution as in the conquest, the microbe was mightier than the sword, particularly given the deadly impact of the 1917–1918 influenza pandemic. In fact, outside of a few truly epic clashes—above all Obregón’s defeats of Villa in Guanajuato in early 1915 and the Battle of Ocotlán in which the Sonorans smashed the delahuertista rebels in January 1924—battles of the revolutionary era (1910–1938) differed not all that greatly from nineteenth-century equivalents: mostly long-distance affairs with much maneuver and little attrition.20 Whatever the actual body count, mystification of the revolution certainly served men of the so-called Sonoran Dynasty (Obregón and his partner and sometimes-rival Plutarco Elías Calles), who ruled from 1920 after toppling Carranza until its own demise in 1935. While rhetorically honoring revolutionary democracy, the two governed through a complex and highly flexible system of brokering, selectively backed by force usually administered by the army. They dedicated themselves to restoring order by granting some land to agraristas (recipients of land grants), often on the condition of paramilitary service; expanding the national infrastructure of roads and electricity; incorporating and taming organized labor, while imposing fiscal discipline and protecting foreign and domestic capital; and bringing the rudiments of education to the most remote parts of the republic. But relations with the military remained among the most complicated problems of the new order. Clearly, the army remained indispensable for as long as anyone could foresee, but this dependence carried risks. In December 1923, three powerful warlords—generals Enrique Estrada, Guadalupe Sánchez, and Fortunato Maycotte—tried to seize power with popular Sonoran político Adolfo De la Huerta as a civilian front man. Much of the army backed them. Again in March 1929, a barracks uprising led by General José Gonzalo Escobar garnered the support of much of the army in a failed bid to seize national power. Brushfires of revolt, together with waves of banditry, still plagued the countryside, while in the extreme center-west, the state found itself confronting a full-blown insurgency over matters of religion and land policy in the so-called Cristero War (1926–1929), the last real war fought on Mexican soil. Facing so many foes, the Sonorans needed their generals’ loyalty, and they were happy to look the other way while zone commanders enriched themselves by charging protection to landowners, worked occupied territories as their own personal property, or created their own companies to take advantage of the new potential

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for government contracting. At the same time, ambitious officers were a political plague, especially those who tried to carve out brass cacicazgos. Although it is often said that the De la Huerta and Escobar revolts allowed the Sonorans to purge the military of suspect generals, such “reform” carried risks; so too, Obregón had to promote an almost equal number of officers in order to ensure their loyalty, canceling out the effect of the culling of surplus brass.21 Moreover, the generals’ unreliability and clout forced Obregón and his successor Plutarco Elías Calles to work through a complicated network of allies, some of them far to the left of what the Sonoran entrepreneurs-turned-políticos wanted to include in their new Mexico. Most importantly, the Sonorans’ political calculus required them to re-arm peasant soldiers to fight mutinous militaries and Cristeros. After his break with jefe máximo (national boss) Calles in June 1935, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) retired many generals and vowed to promote a new class consciousness in the barracks, leading some to see a lasting reform and professionalization. But as Thomas Rath’s chapter shows, claims of revolutionary transformations of the army belied a more complicated situation in which conservative interests not only persisted but also prevailed over the long run. Here, as in so much of Mexican history, the experience of the military is exemplary of the entire nation’s. The army circa 1940 was still dominated by cavalry, fought in smaller units (battalions and regiments, as opposed to divisions), lacked heavy weapons and artillery, and did not yet have a national service requirement. In other words, it was not the technological equal of the world’s best armies or deeply ingrained in Mexican society. Those limitations notwithstanding, Sonoran modernizers (above all Joaquín Amaro, the true father of the modern army) and the Cardenista reformers whom Rath chronicles cured some of the worst ills of the army of the Porfiriato. Amaro’s “Mexican Way of War” emphasized austerity, discipline, and respect for civilian authority—historically rare virtues in the military. Cost efficiency also figured into the formula; indeed, Mexican soldiers cost only 1/8th of their North American equivalents.22 Though no longer the quintessence of battle victorious, cavalry was not altogether anachronistic before 1950, provided that it was used in conjunction with adapted “hybrid” tactics (dismounting to fight, mounting up to withdraw or pursue) and was closely coordinated with other arms, especially when infrastructure was lacking and strategic mobility at a premium. Warfare on the eastern front during the two world wars demonstrated this; more recently, Green Berets rode into battle in Afghanistan.23 If future marches were to be forced, they would at least be professional.

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The postrevolutionary army’s composition reflected its missions of the 1920s and 1930s: constabulary work, policing the rapidly growing national capital, and counterinsurgency work against a variety of foes. Among other challenges, the new Mexican military now had to confront Yaqui Indians, the original Cristero rebels of 1926–1929, the so-called Segundos of the second Cristero conflict of the 1930s, and the Vidales brothers’ agraristas in Guerrero’s coasts. Rath, Gillingham, Smith, and Fallaw all show a different dimension of the forced march: the revolutionary army’s ability to obey but not comply with civilian orders. General Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–1946) made certain that many of the same generals whom Cárdenas put out to pasture saddled up once again. During World War II, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) regime funded a modernization of military technology and tactics—but it was still the same old brass calling the shots. Well into the 1940s and 1950s, the Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA, Secretariat of National Defense) still hosted a conclave of moth-eaten cavalry generals from the revolutionary era— a cohort of Artemio Cruzes in the Cold War era. Although Manuel Ávila Camacho was the last president to come from the military, Paul Gillingham argues that powerful generals quietly served as a “senate” capable of checking the power of presidents during the subsequent presidencies of Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–1952) and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958). Still, postwar Mexico was a changed country, one in which getting rich as quickly as possible and the plums of political prebends retired the old dream of power through the well-timed coup. A well-organized party was now firmly entrenched in Los Pinos, ready to reward cooperative allies and punish loose cannons. During the PRI’s Golden Age (1946–1968), the Mexican military became professionalized to an unprecedented degree, but it never entirely gave up political power; rather, it just wielded it differently. During the Cold War, the United States would never support a coup without a plausibly credible threat of Communist takeover—something that never materialized in Mexico. So the generals eschewed risky power-grabs in favor of quietly exercising power behind the scenes, forcing civilians not to meddle in SEDENA and pushing back against Los Pinos should the PRI ignore their counsel. In most instances, the army’s greatest asset was its prestige. In Mexico, the old saw goes, only the Virgin of Guadalupe and the army are beyond criticism. Civilian politicians perhaps feared the generals, but they also needed them. After 1940, the Mexican military carried out internal espionage and domestic security for the emerging one-party state.24 It also became the

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instrument of choice for dealing with major emergencies such as natural disasters and animal epidemics (particularly the 1950s hoof-and-mouth disease, when mass killing of farm animals contained the worst, but won the army few friends among the rural peasantry). As the legitimacy of the PRI deteriorated from 1959 onward, the army was forced into the uncomfortable role of suppressing the discontent that the political system could not constrain: the list of victims initially included campesino activists such as Rubén Jaramillo and too-independent labor leaders.25 But in 1968, student protesters were now numbered among its victims, and after the Tlatelolco massacre, the numerous guerrilla movements that suddenly erupted with such virulence were among its victims as well.

Thinking and Writing about Mexican Military History Armies march into battle and the world changes. But just as much, it is the preparation and not the battle itself that is the instrument of change. Time and again, what matters most are the acts of training officers, socializing soldiers, and supplying them with the tools of their trade. Inadvertently, all of this changes the world as much as the tide of battle does. For that reason, we do not offer a book of what some call “old school military history”: that is, the roll calls of famous regiments and the meticulous analysis of celebrated battles. Rather, the seven essays included here position the military within the bounds of the most recent social, political, and cultural historical research in Mexico. We want to understand how the military and militia reflected and perpetuated social divisions, and in turn how armed power shaped society, altered the economy, affected ethnicity and gender roles, and molded faith in religion and science. In some ways, an army is a world apart. Whatever the century, men at arms have their own hierarchy, rituals, rules, and contradictions. However, larger political, social, and economic forces shape the military and the historical experience of soldiering: how were officers made, and how did they recruit and remake men below them. Perhaps even more fundamental, what sort of material lay at their disposal? Did they march into battle or did they ride trains? Did they wield the best equipment government procurement could buy or were they saddled with the world’s leftover technologies, like the short-range Napoleonic smooth-bore rifles that put Mexican soldiers at the mercy of US invaders in 1846? Tactics too become obsolete, and almost as rapidly as arms. For example, Pancho Villa had failed to recognize the degree to which increasingly powerful and accurate arms,

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together with the development of fortified positions, had rendered the cavalry charge a technique of the past.26 Villa’s storied Dorado cavalry, like the Confederate cavalry, tried to attack entrenched infantry with carbine and pistols from horseback, instead of using cutting-edge “hybrid” cavalry tactics that required dismounting to assault defenses.27 What about the everyday life of the military? Did they fill up the canteen and, if so, with what? How did they eat? The humdrum has more dimensions than one might imagine. In this volume, Stephen Neufeld alerts us to the importance of the military in defining masculinity. The preprofessional Constitutionalist militaries were goaded into battle by officers who could not expect to be obeyed—they appealed to their soldiers’ manly pride by shouting “el que sea hombre que me siga” (“those who are men follow me”).28 The army and militias were clearly gendered male (and helped gender males, as Neufeld shows), but one of their distinctive features from independence through the revolutionary era was the presence of thousands of soldaderas. They foraged, ground the corn and cooked it, and nursed male combatants—the women of Mexico’s militaries were a combination quartermaster corps and MASH unit. Some women famously fought, and in the revolution, a few achieved field grade officer commissions in the Constitutionalist and Zapatista armies.29 The hundreds of child soldiers who fought on all sides were a less-noted part of the armed phase of the revolution; the acting American Consul of Guadalajara during the Constitutionalist occupation, William Daves, saw many boy recruits (one just ten years old), as well as soldaderas as young as twelve or thirteen.30 These generalizations notwithstanding, we still know relatively little about the experience of women and children during Mexico’s wars. One of the most famous women warriors, Zapatista colonel Amelio Robles, was incorporated, along with her unit, into the Constitutionalist army in the 1920s.31 In spite of the generals’ objections, the army probably still relied on the uncompensated labor of women to feed and support male soldiers until the 1920s, given the institution’s poor logistical capacity. While hardly a gender revolution, the events of the war years changed social mores and accelerated the decline in influence of the conservative patriarchal family and the Church. Many observers noted how during the armed phase of the revolution more casual relationships between men and women crossed established social boundaries—as depicted so well in the novel and film Como agua para chocolate. Here as elsewhere, the generals gained the most: Maximino Ávila Camacho fathered over sixty children, Anacleto López over fifty. Zapata and Villa might well have surpassed

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them had not death intervened. But there was a certain level of democratization of martial amorousness. In Guadalajara, diplomat Daves saw cars filled with soldiers “apparently having the time of their lives, along with just any kinds of women, without regard to virtue, race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.”32 The growth of sex work hinted at by Daves led the Constitutionalist government to begin the first systematic attempts to regulate it, a popular subject in Mexican historiography of late. Anxious officials dealt with the growth of commercial sex districts and the spread of venereal diseases by extending military authority over the brothels.33 The Constitutionalists appointed a provost marshal to keep order in Torreón’s famous “zona de tolerancia” and even began regular medical inspection of sex workers in the Coahuilan mining town of Sabinas’s three bordellos.34 We know more about (quite visible) sex work than we do about sexual assaults perpetrated by troops, given the difficulty of historical research into the topic. But we have no reason to think that warfare since independence was exempt from the deplorable practice of rape. Clearly, then, historians cannot study militias and the army as purely military institutions, and one way of expanding the focus is to read the militias and military as key agents of state formation with political, social, economic, and even cultural ramifications. There is a tendency to conflate all history with state formation, and there is danger in confusing the monolithic, all-powerful state Michel Foucault believed he saw in modern Europe with the more-fragile and less-capable Mexican equivalent. In the case of Mexico’s militaries, however, the study of state formation can prove quite productive. Like most of Latin America—and like so many postcolonial societies—Mexico entered its national life with two sets of institutions. A new set of legal and constitutional institutions supposedly defined the new society as “modern” and rational—but proved ineffectual in practice. They were unfamiliar to the mass of people, while their claims and routines often ran counter to custom and mentality. Below them lay the bedrock of older authorities with socially ingrained power: the priest, the landowner, and the officer. Clerics, however, had lost considerable prestige and power during the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, and the War of Independence, in some ways fought to restore what village pastors saw as their rightful place, failed wretchedly in that task. Early national governments often either continued to secularize the society, or else turned to the Church as a cash cow for the seemingly endless wars of mid-century. As for the second set of the established power brokers—landowners—we would never sell their influence short, particularly in a society where the vast majority

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of the population lived by farming. But the independence wars and early national chaos destroyed estates and mines, disrupted trade, and played havoc with the workforce. In the wake of the Hidalgo and Morelos insurgencies, landlords weren’t always what they used to be. Of those institutions that comprised the old triumvirate, then, the military was virtually the only one that actually increased in power and compass between 1810 and 1876. It was the only institution capable of forcibly carrying out the constitution (or more often, of opposing it). It could organize men, move them from one place to another, and force them to carry out complicated tasks. And at peak moments of conflict, the command economy and gunpoint exaction grew even more attractive to violent entrepreneurs as the larger economy declined. And it was not always just a question of booty. Then as now, military procurement formed a hefty part of both local and national economies. Soldiers had to eat; their feet needed boots; and without rifles men were nothing. Carrancista officers manifested such an astounding capacity to loot, pillage, and exploit that a new word entered the Mexican vocabulary: carrancear, linguistic testimony to generalized military corruption.35 A popular twist of words changed the name “constitucionalistas” to “con-sus-uñas-listas” (“with their fingernails ready”). In this volume, Daniel Haworth shows the discretionary fiscal powers that officers could wield. But we must also recognize that military and capital often came to a more-symbiotic, less-parasitical understanding; as Fallaw documents, General Eulogio Ortiz represented the interests of large cotton farmers in return for economic, social, and cultural advantage. Finally, the army offered an education of sorts. Officers learned the practical and strictly secular skills of organization, bookkeeping, mathematics, and literacy. Despite a few signal counterexamples, it was inevitable that officers were far better read than the vastly illiterate public—or their own enlisted men. The generals’ aspirations to power were not merely the vainglorious hoisting of their own flag, as is so often portrayed; rather, their peculiar background and patriotic valor made them a kind of managerial class with a plausible claim to leadership, much like a law degree today has positioned so many hopefuls for the US Congress. As Thomas Rath shows, Cárdenas took schooling of soldiers to heart, though with decidedly uneven results. Generals—and many far lesser officers—thus strove for power in a land where kings and viceroys and hereditary titles had abruptly vanished. Stripes and epaulettes now replaced crowns. But certain nagging questions remain: what sort of power, for what ends, how to grab it, and how to use it? For most of Mexican history, representatives of the center’s authority have clashed

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with defenders of provincial prerogatives. Zone commanders used the military’s social status and raw power to either consolidate national control over a region or conspire with provincials to keep at arm’s length tax collectors, federal requisitions, and the unwanted scrutiny of Mexico City. The method for either approach was the “brass cacicazgo,” or regional power base constructed over lines of patronage and personal loyalty, with jobs and contracts for friends and rude backhands for opponents. So common was this approach that many of the essays in this volume explore the construction of several of the more enduring brass cacicazgos, such as the previously unknown two-decades-long dominance of Veracruz by General Alejandro Mange described in Paul Gillingham’s chapter. Mange, like Eulogio Ortiz, provided a kind of rough security for businessmen in the supposedly revolutionary society. Equally important were the scope and operation of these patrimonial statelets. This, of course, raises the question of the citizen in arms and the common soldier, the soldado razo, whose story is the basis of so many literary and cinematic treatments. How did generals mobilize men across territory? Did soldiers receive something tangible for their hardships? In fact, when we reconstruct the military history of Mexico, we are struck by the weakness of the state outside of Mexico City and the fact that so often the military was the state, and it changed society, politics, and the economy to win battles or preserve its own power. Terry Rugeley describes how, in the nineteenth century, Mexico City dispatched generals to the provinces with little more than franchise rights. They had the power to impose and collect taxes, forcibly draft “volunteers,” and—perhaps most importantly— wield legal impunity and de facto political power. This arrangement boded ill for the professionalization of the military and the establishment of constitutional, civilian rule. How much did the revolution change this? In his exceptionally candid autobiography, Constitutionalist general Donato Bravo Izquierdo describes fighting the delahuertista rebellion across the southeast in a way very similar to the manner in which the federal generals operated over the same battlefields during the mid-nineteenth century. President Obregón authorized Bravo to negotiate “loans” from the wealthy to pay his troops. Bravo had to organize his own spy services, manage touchy volunteer agrarian militia who elected their own officers and decided when to obey orders, and even commission the manufacture of rockets in a railroad repair shop to compensate for the lack of any artillery. In the end, Obregón rewarded him with a new car, and Calles imposed him as governor of his home state of Puebla.36 Challenges and spoils seem remarkably similar before and after the revolution.

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The rewards enjoyed by the generals such as Bravo (himself a former Magonista factory worker) point to the military’s contradictory role as protector of the privileged and social leveler. Renowned traveler Alexander von Humboldt set the tone for so many scholars when he labeled Mexico “the land of inequality.” An inescapable question therefore looms: did military service correct these inequalities, however partially, or did it simply preserve the old oligarchic structure? If shouldering a rifle in times of war does not necessarily remove people from their original race and class, it does sometimes give them the right to bargain for better terms, as happened with Afro-Cuban soldiers following the 1895 independence war. To what degree did the same happen in Mexico’s many conflicts? The answer is often. As Rugeley documents for Yucatán, sub-regional caudillos such as Santiago Imán repeatedly raised Indian forces, a practice that persisted in spite of the Caste War well into the 1876 Revolution of Tuxtepec. Ben Smith’s chapter documents how at least one Indian, Oaxacan warrior Heliodoro Charis Castro, managed to parlay support for Obregón, martial prowess, and political acumen into a lifetime cacicazgo— no small feat for a Zapotec who started out as a small-time game poacher. But at the same time, his destiny differed considerably from that of so many Indian peasants dragooned to fight the wars of an earlier century. Charis’s Juchiteco batallions were but the latest in a long series of ethnic soldiers in Mexico. They were not cannon fodder, but like the Sonorans’ Yaquis in the revolution, an elite corps of Mesoamerican Gurkhas. In fact, the best infantry in Mexico, right up through the 1930s, were Indian infantry. The revolution’s best general, Obregón, probably could not have beaten Villa without Yaqui soldiers. A few Yaqui generals emerged: José Amarillas is one of the many indigenous military men awaiting his biographer. More commonly, though, Maya and Mayo, Yaqui and Juchiteco went into battle behind white and mestizo ethnic brokers such as Imán. Their revolutionary heirs were men such as Roberto Cruz, whose own biography calls him “el indio.” Though born wealthy and white, Cruz grew up in Torin playing, riding, and hunting with “yaquecitos.” Until the age of five, he spoke more Yaqui than Spanish, but “un yaqui más” probably never forgot the language or folkways entirely. Consequently, he could raise and command 180 Yaqui volunteers for the Sonoran Constitutionalists, the start of a career that took him to the summit of the army and the brink of political power.37 The fact that so many of the soldiers were Indians fighting for white caudillos suggests that Mexican armies reproduced inequality. For all its multiethnic tenor, the army remained very much a bastion of mestizo culture. Juan the Chamula, Ricardo Pozas’ famous Maya informant, recalled

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that after fighting far from Chiapas for Huerta, then Villa, and then the Constitutionalists for years on end, he never felt Chamula again until he put on his traditional dress.38 And Yaqui general Juan Amarillas started a largely assimilation-oriented school for his Indian soldiers in 1914 (teachers were white officers’ wives), which ran for successive generations of Yaquis until the 1930s.39 But did the lower ranks and Indian officers have any way of making known their needs and concerns? One way of bringing greater sensibility to our understanding of the militias and armies is to see the lower ranks in action. Did they protest? Did they appear to initiate actions, battles, surrenders, and even mortal last stands? Did they somehow organize themselves, like the anarchist dreamers of old so dearly hoped? Like slaves, peasants, and proletarianized workers, perhaps they found means of daily resistance. Indeed, as Terry Rugeley’s analysis of the southeast militias illustrates, desertion remained the people’s choice for dealing with impossible situations where men were torn from their homes and family, were denied pay and provisions, and were thrust into battles they could not conceivably win. Desertion loomed every bit as much a precondition of the art of war as topography and logistics, and generals ignored it to their peril. Many of the questions posed thus far share a philosophical ring. But military participation has other and more concrete consequences for civilian society, and the most important of these consequences was its economic impact. David Weber identified the “business of war” emerging in Mexico as early as the Bourbon era.40 And what was the consequence of drafting so many men in a society that already struggled to put food on the plate? And how exactly did a nation that was so poor manage to pay its soldiers—that is, when it managed to pay them at all? Mexico’s new military history is also a foray into the dismal science of economics, but perhaps made a bit less dismal for the vast collection of anecdotes and colorful case studies. A serious understanding of the emerging Mexican society must therefore address ways and means of recruitment, methods of payment and nonpayment, the role of those omnipresent loan sharks known as agiotistas, and the familiar phenomenon of black markets, which always come into existence when states fail to live up to procurement promises. All this was part and parcel of the business of war. Probably one-half of any respectable brass cacicazgo’s income derived from skimming from the purchase of corn, beef, uniforms, mules, horses, and gunpowder. The construction of cacicazgos was not all about beef contracts. Of course, Eulogio Ortiz and Alejandro Mange were neither the first nor the only generals to reach mutually rewarding understandings with wealthy elites. But however cynical and hardball in operation these mini-states

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may have been, a certain idea lay back of it all. The armed state-builders and social reformers saw themselves as creating something that was to overcome the ills of the past. New military history stakes out intellectual territory as well. Whence these ideas of change? What were they? How widespread was their currency? And how did they evolve when translated into practice? In terms of content, at least, some of the mysteries come clearer in the essays of this book. The postrevolutionary garrison commander from the 1920s to the present saw himself on a mission of guided progress, providing hygiene, health, literacy, and good government, all to be poured onto the people from above, like streamlets from the gardener’s watering can. Indeed, the less popular effervescence on these points, the better, since by 1920 the country had literally overflowed with the benefits of civic action. And behind these changes lurked another great idea: displacing the Catholic Church with its meddlesome priests and preachy beatas (women engaged in charitable works). Given the gender gap between men and women when it came to religion that Terry Rugeley has documented, it was not surprising that the Mexican military since the Bourbon militias to the present has—with a few nineteenth-century exceptions—never cared much for organized religion. Indeed, the most noble brass cacique, revolutionary military proconsul (to use Alan Knight’s words) Salvador Alvarado in Yucatán, encountered his strongest opposition among women angered by anticlerical campaigns. The Catholic Church’s emphasis on social stability and domestic values, its cult of motherhood, plus its ability to provide greater space for women in an otherwise patriarchal society, all made it an institution that the female population was prepared to defend. Here too, the military’s role was bounded by gender. Generalized anticlericalism in the military was, then, equal parts machismo, ideological, and functional. As Ben Fallaw argues, revolutionary officers such as Eulogio Ortiz kept faith with their Bourbon and Liberal forefathers in that they nursed a deep dislike for the Catholic Church and its social pretensions. Mid-nineteenth-century officers tended to work with bishop and priests in an encompassing campaign of pacification, for who but priests could calm the rebellious Indian? Seventy years later, the state believed that clergy were no longer needed to count heads, promulgate decrees, and effect improvements. Obregón-era military cacicazgos evinced nothing but contempt for the clergy. They saw the man in the cassock as a champion of ignorance, a hidden sexual abuser, and a spider laying webs against human progress. Much of the armed cacique’s work, then, was to slay this evil, and much of the conflict spun out of the

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opposition that his heavy-handed policies provoked. How different from the days of the US invasion, when priests prefaced the battles by blessing the Mexican cannons!41 Whatever else militias and armies brought to the civilian population, they brought violence. Evidence (mostly anecdotal and dispersed) concerning the brutalities of the first century of Mexican history attests to how colonial warfare often involved cruel tortures and acts of vengeance against combatants and civilians alike. But no component of civil society existed to document them, and no state took up the obligation to provide a true accounting of the past—and rape probably was but one of many quiet tragedies civilians suffered. A kind of puritanical silence tends to shroud this issue in the official correspondence, usually leaving us to wonder. Nor was all the violence of the extreme variety. Indeed, bloodshed was not limited to war or undeclared civil conflicts. Because so many soldiers were stationed for so long in so many parts of the country, these same men inevitably worked off their boredom through rowdiness, binging, and acts of petty crime against both person and property. Sometimes it was good to have a standing army in your town, but heaven protect once the threat of danger had passed. The conundrum of protecting oneself from the protectors led to complicated issues of how civilian authority was to govern the military— not at the theoretical level debated in sessions of constitutional law, but rather in the villages themselves, where people had to pass their own amendments to control the drunken soldier fond of breaking windows and stealing silverware. As Stephen Neufeld’s essay illustrates, even the most concerted attempts to impose good morals upon the Porfirian military still came up short. How the armed forces interacted with town and regional authorities thus forms a key part of any new military history of Mexico. Any serious new evaluation of the military, its power, and its autonomy has to provide some larger evaluation of its ability to change the course of Mexican history. Moreover, did men (and some women) at arms really manage to change society? And if so, was it the road they chose to take or did their best-laid plans shoal upon unforeseen conditions and leave unintended consequences? Years ago, Crane Britton disdainfully compared revolutions to the flu: the patient (a society) falls ill; enters into the euphoria of high fever (a moment when all reforms seem realizable); then gradually returns to the normality of the old ways, but now bearing scars (minor alteration often unforeseen by the revolutionaries).42 Was this the military’s fate? To give Britton’s metaphor its due, did military occupation spell remedy, or merely mutation of some original virus? The essays of this book suggest varying answers, but most point to conservative forces

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eventually reasserting themselves against change, both within the military and, by extension, in the larger society. Sabers raised, cannons fired, and men charged at their enemies. No one would deny the importance of forced marches, a story repeated so many times in the course of the Mexican nation. But often the more meaningful historical narrative happened off the battlefield, a transcript not hidden as much as ignored by historians who shun the military as an unfashionable subject. The collection presented here is inspired by the idea that rescuing the history of those marches—of the people, the episodes, and the institutions of military life—can tell us something about the larger sweep of Mexican history, and often about the lives of los de abajo (those at the bottom) who helped make it. Notes 1.  Friedrich Katz, “Introduction: Rural Revolt in Mexico,” in Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Resistance: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1988), 7. 2.  Ross Hassig, War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 163–64 and Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (London: Longman, 1994), 146. 3.  A great deal has been written about the Church as an instrument of social and political organization in colonial Mexico. See, for example, John Leddy Phelan, The Milleniarian Kingdom of the Franciscans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956); Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); and William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishoners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially chap. 7. 4.  Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 199–228; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 9–26. 5.  Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1769–1789 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 6.  Christon Archer, “Years of Decision: Félix Calleja and the Strategy to End the Revolution in New Spain,” in Christon Archer, ed., The Birth of Modern Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 125–64; Hugh Hamill Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966); Timothy J. Henderson, The Mexican Wars for Independence (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). 7.  Michael P. Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835–1846: “Hombres de bien” in the Age of Santa Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Timothy J. Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

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1998), 176–209; Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 24–48.   8.  Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Reform, 1856–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876: A Study in Liberal Nation Building (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).   9.  Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 10.  See chap. 1 for a discussion of the issue of nineteenth-century Mexico’s popular militias. 11.  Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz (Harlow, Essex, United Kingdom: Longman, 2001), 70–87, 129, 168–73. 12.  Garner, Porfirio Díaz, 111. 13.  Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). 14.  Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27–29; Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 82–84, 87–89; Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), I:17–19; Francisco Urquizo, Memorias de campaña: De subteniente a general (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1971), 7–16. 15.  Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 295–306. 16.  Amado Aguirre, Mis memorias de campañas (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1985), 365; Francisco Urquizo, Origen del Ejército Constitucionalista (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1964), 20–25. 17.  Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to Vietnam, introduction by John Keegan (Chichester, Sussex, United Kingdom: Antony Bird Publications, 1981), 141. 18.  Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920–1940 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1980), 41–70, 87–112. 19.  Vicente T. Mendoza, El corrido mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984) remains a standard compilation of corridos. On the revolution’s tendency to generate corridos, see Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 132–38. 20.  The claim of one million casualties is a staple of historia patria. See Urquizo, Origen del Ejército Constitucionalista, 25–26. On the relatively non-lethal nature of combat in the revolution, see Robert Gordon Greer, “The Demographic Impact of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1921” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1966); and G-2, “The Mexican Army. Study Made in the Latin American Section,” March 1927, roll 7, no. 951, 35, US Military Intelligence Reports Mexico. 21.  Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 78. 22.  Virginia Prewett, “The Mexican Army,” Foreign Affairs 19, no. 3 (April 1941): 609–20. 23.  Gervase Phillips, “Scapegoat Arm: Twentieth-Century Cavalry in Anglophone Historiography,” The Journal of Military History 71 (January 2007): 37–74.

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24.  Aaron W. Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 25.  David Ronfeldt, Atencingo: The Politics of Agrarian Struggle in a Mexican Ejido (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973); Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 26.  Katz, Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 487–97. 27.  Brent Nosworthy, The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003), 475–76. 28.  Urquizo, Origen del Ejército Constitucionalista, 16. 29.  Andrés Reséndez, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” The Americas 51, no. 4 (April 1995): 525–53; Elizabeth Salas, “The Soldadera in the Mexican Revolution: War and Men’s Illusions,” in Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds., Women in the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990: Creating Spaces, Shaping Transitions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 93–105. 30.  William B. Daves, Experiences and Observations of an American Consular Officer during the Recent Mexican Revolutions (Chula Vista, CA: n.p., 1920), 154–55. 31.  Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution,” in Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, eds., Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 35–36. 32.  Daves, Experiences and Observations, 153. 33.  For recent work on the history of prostitution regulation, see Katherine E. Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Stephanie J. Smith, Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 145–73. 34.  Urquizo, Memorias de campaña, 64–66; Francisco Urquizo, Fui soldad de levita de sos de caballería (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1967), 99–100. 35.  David G. LaFrance, Revolution in Mexico’s Heartland: Politics, War, and State Building in Puebla, 1913–1920 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 116. 36.  Donato Bravo Izquierdo, Un Soldado del Pueblo (Puebla, Puebla, Mexico: Editorial Periodística e Impresora de Puebla, 1964), 151–273. 37.  Julio Scherer García, El indio que mató al Padre Pro (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 10, 27. 38.  Ricardo Pozas, Juan the Chamula: An Ethnological Re-Creation of the Life of a Mexican Indian, trans. Lysander Kemp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 47. 39.  http://www.e-consulta.com/tlaxcala/index/php?option=comcontent&task&id= 2448&Itemid=28, accessed June 18, 2009. 40.  David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 147. 41.  John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846– 1848 (New York: Random House, 1989), 75. 42.  Crane Britton, Anatomy of Revolution (1938; repr., New York: Vintage, 1965).

chapter one

An Unsatisfactory Picture of Civil Commotion Unpopular Militias and Tepid Nationalism in the Mexican Southeast Terry Rugeley

Foreigners who came to Mexico in the years between independence and 1876 consistently remarked upon one feature: the pervasive and seemingly unhealthy role of military service in daily life. The German property owner Carl Sartorius referred to the “unsatisfactory picture of civil commotion” that their presence created and, like many, pointed to what he considered unprincipled leaders, as well as their malleable followers, as the worst problem vexing the early nation.1 Similarly, in 1847 the Austrian botanist Karl Heller painted a dismal picture of Mexican officers and the apparent rabble they raised; as Heller put it, “The heroes of this land always appeared when the enemy had already gone, and availed themselves of what still remained by means of the most shameful and dishonorable scheming.”2 Mexicans themselves often shared these censorious views. National leaders of Liberal vintage saw the suppression of regional strongmen (caudillos), together with what seemed to be their private armies, as a fundamental priority. Porfirio Díaz similarly feared armed men. He had come up through their ranks and had seen the way the institution bred ambition and instability, and after gaining power himself, he was determined to pull the ladder up after him by slashing military size and capability and diverting its officers through assigning plum diplomatic jobs, rotating appointments frequently, or simply allowing them to rot in their own inactivity.3 Finally, the revolutionary family from 1920 onward engaged in 23

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a single-minded campaign to curb military power, and to the degree that they created one of Latin America’s least praetorian and most professional armed services, they succeeded.4 The undesirable nature of the military institution, then, is a view that has proven both persuasive and long lasting. Professional history, oddly enough, has recently broken from this orthodoxy. The latest telling resurrects military service as reflecting a variety of popular sentiments, many of them folk versions of national ideologies more at home in Mexico’s salons and congressional debates than in, say, the cornfields of Milpa Alta. In place of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s doctrinaire laissez-faire capitalism, we have village rights to bear arms, 1830s anticipations of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Instead of a Juárez-style state-building, comes a popular nationalism in which peasants claim citizenship by reason of having picked off French mercenaries in mountain passes.5 Was service in the national army or local militia really the empowering force that it has recently been portrayed to be, and most important to this essay, how do we reconcile the divergent regional experiences of this hydra-headed institution? Why have some found in the community militia the basis of early national political concepts, while others— that is, myself, working in the southeast—have found so little of the same?

A Pocket History of the Mexican Military By way of introduction, it is important to recognize that military service was of fairly recent vintage, at least as far as Mexican colonial institutions went. During most of the colonial period, Spaniards kept the peace by letting the Indians be Indians, allowing vast stretches of the latter’s social and cultural world to continue either above or just beneath the surface of a Europeanized facade. Systematic dismantling of regional indigenous authority, coupled with a surprising vitality of the same institution within the village, reinforced native culture and language but rendered intervillage unity difficult (a fact still true today).6 The eighteenth century, however, witnessed a heightened colonial competition that culminated in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Spain suffered various humiliations that convinced it that more systematic defense was in order. From the 1780s, the Bourbon administration began to construct militias throughout its colonies. In theory peninsular-led and excluding Indian peoples, the units gradually allowed ambitious creoles to work themselves into the officers’ corps and permitted limited mobility for mixed race and even purely Indian peoples.7 Like so much else in Spain’s far-flung empire, policy

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implementation remained inconsistent, and almost all later ambiguities of the institution—Spanish versus Mexican, elite versus popular, control versus mobility—germinated from seeds inadvertently sown at this early date. Adulterated from their original design, the militias became breeding grounds for Jacobinism and dreams of independence. For example, black and mulatto rifleman units known as pardos tiradores provided bastions of Liberal sentiment, preferring Agustín de Iturbide’s color-blind Plan de Iguala to the profoundly racist Spanish constitution.8 Creole officers such as Ignacio Allende plotted independence, while peninsular officers labored to put down his movement.9 By 1815, Mexico had split into regular army and guerrillas, each with a certain degree of support in locally organized units but with the Spanish cause gradually discrediting itself through increasing repression. The compromise solution that was Mexican independence perpetuated earlier hostilities by incorporating former rebels into the national force: from two armies to one divided. The political program of the liberator Agustín de Iturbide solved some problems—Spanish no more, on that most Mexicans agreed—but created others, and those problems included the nature of and proper role for the military. The army folded ex-royalists and former insurgents together.10 Inconsistencies notwithstanding, it remained the one institution that grew in both size and prestige during the course of the independence wars. By mid-century, units of arms-bearing Mexicans outshone the ice-cream parlors in assortment of flavors. At the top stood a national army. This body was lacking in many aspects of the martial sciences but possessed a cavalry that was skilled, ambitious, and, as events of 1847 would show, slightly archaic by the standards of modern warfare. Its top-heavy command structure—thirty-one generals by the 1840s—reflected its role as a path of mobility for ambitious creoles.11 The generals chosen for Mexico’s twenty regional commands enjoyed considerable power, since the national state had limited ability to discipline them. Because their influence in the provinces had few limits, the comandantes became a class of the newly rich possessing homes, estates, and businesses.12 Beneath the officers, however, infantry, artillery, and overall logistics suffered from pronounced weaknesses. The armed forces also shared Mexico’s undercapitalization. Overall size was impressive (larger, in fact, than the US military at the time of the 1846 war), and they had a seemingly limitless capacity to dragoon hapless peasants out of their villages. But these were often paper forces, and size alone failed to gauge either ability or commitment.13 Beneath the national army stood state-level troops organized as the milicias activas. Antonio López de Santa Anna called for their creation in

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his 1823 Plan of Veracruz, the Federalist pronouncement that launched the downfall of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. The motives behind their creation varied. Since in theory they served as reserve units to the national army, they supposedly filled gaps in national defense. But they also created political counterweights to the national army and provided sinecures for the local oligarchs who typically led them—indeed, this was precisely the appeal of the Veracruz manifesto.14 Training and equipment in these units were typically inferior to those of the national level, and their experiences varied tremendously according to the vicissitudes of individual state history. Duty in the milicia activa was perhaps less onerous than its national equivalent, but as events of 1835 onward unfolded, hard-pressed national commanders readily turned to these groups as part of their campaigns to reconquer Texas. In sum, regional milicias activas could readily become the fodder of national campaigns that in the worst case meant death far from home. For all of these reasons, the milicias activas nursed Federalist tendencies that ran counter to the regular army’s marked centralism.15 Somewhat further down from these more official bodies stood armed groups with ends with varying degrees of legitimacy. Squadrons known as cívicos, or more informal civilian units, focused more on policing than anything else.16 Civilian Federalists such as Valentín Gómez Faríás promoted them as a counterweight to the permanent military, and to that end they remained under the direct command of the state governor.17 Like the milicias activas, they provided a certain potential for clientalism, as well as muscle, for local political actors and thus ensured that some of the newly dubbed ciudadanos would be more equal than others. But for whatever reason, the southeast cívicos never assumed the importance of counterparts in places such as Zacatecas, and their gradual abolition under mid-1830s centralists passed virtually unnoticed in Yucatán.18 Beyond the crudely organized auxiliaries stood other highly irregular forces. Then as now, insecure property owners might assemble their own police force as a hedge against rivals and enemies. The practice continued despite (or perhaps because of ) the century’s chronic instability. The Indian repúblicas too had their own enforcers, local gendarmes known as tupiles and trusted with doing minor jobs such as rounding up drunks, returning stolen chickens, and leaning on recalcitrant taxpayers. Finally, bandit gangs were no strangers to the land; some constituted long-standing organizations, while others arose in a rather impromptu nature and dissolved just as effortlessly.19 This layer cake of arms guaranteed dynamics as unique to each region as were the accents and recipes.

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Collectively, these military devoured most of the nation’s meager revenues. Bloated from a decade of war, the federal army consumed some 85 percent of early Mexico’s limited national budget.20 The army’s size—over thirty-five thousand enlisted men in 1823—made it the largest organized body in the country. Officers were virtually the only politically informed individuals with organizational training and national experience. And the army’s monopoly over force placed it far above its only rival institution, the Catholic Church. Early civilian statescraft thus walked a fine line between pampering and somehow controlling the armed forces. Most of early national Mexico’s presidents were generals, but even they recognized the problem and made repeated attempts to introduce both troop reductions and officer professionalization.21 More often than not, these attempts backfired politically.

Yucatán: Militias of a Different Insignia Of all the variables conditioning the military experience, the greatest may well have been province of origin. The Yucatecan case offers a glaring contrast to accounts from Puebla, Veracruz, Guerrero, or any of the central states more closely associated with Mexico’s national wars and invasions.22 No southeastern peasants took up a machete to defend Spain’s mythologized King Ferdinand VII (at that moment prisoner to Napoleon Bonaparte) or, for that matter, to call for his head. Rather than demanding the right to bear arms, Yucatecans typically ran from military recruiters or would-be commanders. Yucatán originally broke from Mexico not over the attempt to curtail local militias following 1835, but over the federal government’s attempt to overwork those militias both within and without the peninsular landscapes. During the brief and gloriously troubled history of the Yucatecan republic (1841–1844, and reprised in 1846–1848), the right to arms occupied a role far distant to control of local politics as the key issue, and even during the failed Mexican invasion of 1842–1843, desertion remained rampant. (Both sides deserted in droves, but the Yucatecan commanders found it easier to dragoon replacements and hence won the war.) Mayas themselves had long experience with arms. During the colonial era, the Spanish had organized indigenous bow-and-arrow units (the socalled flecheros) to guard against coastal pirate attacks as well as raids by the Cehache Maya of what is today southern Campeche state.23 Both threats declined in the eighteenth century, but militia recruiters came to rely on peasants to round out their units. Indeed, late colonial and early national

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militias ran as high as 20 percent Maya inscription and, in a handful of instances, 100 percent: so much for rules and regulations.24 Indigenous peasant participation in national wars expanded dramatically in 1835, when Centralists armed peasants in the Campeche area as part of their overthrow of the 1824 Federalist constitution. But peasants received far more than they had bargained for. The milicias activas suddenly became death traps following the loss of Texas one year later. The levée en masse hurt planter Santiago Imán y Villafaña, who loaned money to the soldiers in his unit and then had them work it off by planting and harvesting corn. Suddenly, the captain had no one to plant his corn.25 Like other prePorfirian caudillos—Santiago Vidaurri of Nuevo León and Manuel Lozada of Nayarit come to mind—his activities really reflected local hurt, not some perverse “ornery” streak.26 In early summer of 1836, Imán learned of General Santa Anna’s capture in faraway Texas and decided the time had come for his own Federalist uprising. His revolt floundered for three years; peasants remained indifferent, and betrayal by one of his recruits landed Imán in jail. When he was released after two years, Imán adopted the better strategy of appealing to popular needs.27 He now promised to abolish the peasant church taxes known as obventions (contrary to frequent accounts, there was no mention of land redistribution). This approach exceeded his wildest expectations, and within the space of a few months, the Imán revolution carried the day. His pop-up victory and the expulsion of Mexico tied Yucatán’s conflictive political dynamics to the new Yucatecan national militias. Units were supposed to elect their own officers, but like the ill-fated municipal elections of the 1820s, local officials typically imposed their favorites over and against popular desires, and the militias themselves became scenes of internal conflict.28 Moreover, the need to defend against Mexico two years later heightened peasant recruitment and brought peasants from the faraway Oriente to protect the peninsula’s west and northwest coasts.29 The Federalist wars created a momentum that no one could control. Under the Yucatecan Republic, the milicias activas ceased to exist, but were replaced by new “national” units more amenable to the needs of a breakaway republic. In some ways service came to share the politicization of the ayuntamientos (town councils), since units were to elect their own leaders now.30 Property requirements (would-be officers had to enjoy $2,000 or a profession) supposedly kept the arrangement suitably oligarchic, but nature took its course, and by 1847 numerous Mayas in the eastern areas, mainly batabs (village caciques) with a bit of land and leadership skill, had racked up experience as recruiters and commanders of small,

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locally based squadrons. As has so often happened throughout history, service in times of war awakened a sharper sense of rights, and a deeper determination to obtain those rights. Batabs had served as the hinge-men between Hispanic and Maya worlds for centuries; they had suffered most with the growing destabilization of the tax system, and the rush to claim public lands put them in an increasingly uncomfortable situation. It was only a matter of time before they applied their new skills to address the social problems afflicting their peasant constituency. The Caste War, an uprising of eastern Maya peasants in reaction to tax burdens, land privatization, and deepening political violence, erupted on July 30, 1847. It quickly divided the peninsula into loosely organized insurgent bands, a state army dedicated to counterinsurgency, and a huge population caught between the two. Yucatecan army duty plummeted to new lows of popularity, and with reason. Service in almost any part of the peninsula, but most particularly in the tropical forests to the south and east, meant a starvation diet of hardtack and roasted palm hearts.31 Rain and constant usage reduced the soldier’s clothing to tatters, while unscrupulous quartermasters and loan sharks manipulated the few centavos available for pay.32 Soldiers also had to worry about the family back home, now reduced to penury by the husband’s absence. For the next forty years, desertion remained the form of daily resistance par excellence, successively undermining the Texas campaigns, the Yucatecan Republic, the struggle against Caste War rebels, the Empire, and finally the Restored Republic. Through desertion the people created a tidal wave, even if they could not control either its course or consequences. What is noteworthy in all these variations is not village demands to be armed, but rather the consistent attempt to escape military service at virtually any cost.33 As in the Puebla sierra and in the mountains of Veracruz, rebellion followed trade lines, and peasant recruitment typically prospered when their strategic locations made indigenous villagers the necessary allies.34 So too, the Caste War gestated among a string of villages that extended from the northeast coast southward to British Honduras. They shared a sub-regional identity with a rowdy nouveau riche elite that battened on sugar planting and contraband smuggling, and resented outside control, be it from Mérida or Mexico City.35 The war grew out of an east Yucatecan plot that will never be fully reconstructed, but that involved an attempt to put their own man (Miguel Barbachano) into state office. But elites panicked, perhaps owing to the growing presence of the US Navy in Tabasco and Carmen, called off the revolt, and omitted to inform their Maya allies, who had multiple grievances of their own, and who were essentially goaded into rebellion.

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Meanwhile, the majority of Maya peasants did not live in this area, did not partake of the dynamics in question, and did not rebel. For them, the war marked an entirely new era. Once initial persecution of Maya headmen had ended (by early 1848), peasants found security in what Yucatecans referred to as hidalguia, a kind of ancillary military service in which participants put up barricades, toted luggage, and roasted up tortillas. Perhaps they shared that sense of self-determination reported among Andeans performing ronda campesina during the height of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso conflict, but if so, they left no discernible evidence of such.36 Rather, hidalguía more closely resembled the patrullas auto-civiles of the Guatemalan civil war—unpaid, time consuming, and menial—but also included active fighting for an undetermined number of Mayas.37 This service began with positive advantages for participants, including tax exemptions and insulation from the harrassment that initially befell Maya town leaders.38 But these advantages eroded over time, and hidalguía became simply one more form of fagina, or unpaid service, laid at the community’s doorstep.39 Still, some villages became staunch Indian fighters, a fact that made them liable for special persecution when the rebels themselves came to call.40 Only men carried rifles, but the sweeping militarization of society carried some harsh consequences for women. Rape has been a serious problem in civil wars from time beyond memory, and there is no reason to think that the Caste War was any exception; however, only fleeting references exist, owing, no doubt, to the somewhat prudish sensibilities (or simple insensitivity) of those who did most of the writing.41 Far more visibly, the war left huge numbers of women abandoned and defenseless while their menfolk were off. Women whom the war separated from their husbands also had to deal with a vast collection of uncertainties: the man’s fate was often unknown, while things like marriage, birth, and death records had suffered considerable destruction in the more intense war zones, leaving marriages and even one’s age in doubt.42 Pleas for relief abound in the war’s early years; thereafter, widows came forward in significant numbers to claim pensions for their fallen or incapacitated husbands.43 The state almost always honored these requests, and the avalanche of pensions was a key factor in keeping mid-century Yucatán in red ink and, by extension, in political chaos. In 1853, the state tried to close the door on new requests, but pension commitments had already ballooned to massive proportions.44 Still, not every woman remained behind. Many accompanied their soldierhusbands, much like the adelitas of revolutionary fame. Documentation on their fortunes and travails is scarce. We have only fleeting references

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to female troop-followers who cooked and washed clothes, and of priests who fumed in exasperation as soldiers, quartered in the churches, audibly made love to camp women in the evenings. Finally, many women joined the exodus to Guatemala, British Honduras, the islands, or even to the densely populated interior. Many of the essays in this book deal with the construction of post-1920 cacicazgos: locally or regionally based political machines that operated around the highly personalistic power of a zone commander. The practice actually had precedent well before the days of Porfirio Díaz (who operated a similar system while military commander of Tehuantepec, beginning in the waning months of the Reform War).45 In 1850, General Rómulo Díaz de la Vega arrived to lead the Caste War counterinsugency. Díaz ran up heavenly deficits and, while imposing control on the south, pushed rebel activity into the northeast, but his momentary gains, together with his system of rotating militia service with releasing men to tend to their homes and fields, won him much personal respect.46 Moreover, he formed a coterie of ambitious officers who quickly perceived the profits to be made on procurements, occupation of towns (zone commanders writ small), and the sale of Maya POWs to Cuba. Díaz allowed Yucatecan politicians to self-destruct, then consolidated military and civilian power in his own hands. He might have made greater gains in his attempt to shore up a conservative, centrally responsive society had he not been recalled to central Mexico to fight the Ayutla Revolt.47 Díaz failed in his later attempts to get back into Yucatecan politics; in fact, civilian statescraft showed remarkable vigor here, and no one succeeded in creating another serious Yucatecan military cacicazgo until General Salvador Alvarado, his coffers brimming with henequen money, attempted to remake the peninsula in the late Carranza years.48 As the Caste War and related civil struggles subsided, the militias gradually evolved into the so-called colonias militares, ill-paid units doing tedious guard duty against the rebel return that became less likely with each passing year. Thus far, no one has bothered to explore the post-1876 history of these units, but in the two decades preceding Porfirio Díaz, the high levels of dissatisfaction among draftees made these units breeding grounds for civil unrest. The terms of their numerous uprisings appear to have had little to do with a citizenry’s right to bear arms, or even to community interests in general. Rather, the colonias had three basic functions in a world no longer at war. They provided the fulcrum for the hacienda system, since estate peons enjoyed freedom from this unpopular responsibility. Hundreds of pages of sad petitions attest to the peasants’ desperate quest for exempt status. Colonias also provided labor pools; commanding

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officers could use them for their own properties and projects, or could rent out their services to local landowners in need of harvest hands, clearers of roads, and so forth. Finally, the vast paperwork of supervising the colonias provided busywork for the jefes políticos, a set of officials whom experience had shown were given to mischief when time hung heavy; after all, the Caste War had grown out of the misdoings of eastern jefes políticos in the 1840s, and there was no need to take additional chances. The colonia system may have had little bearing on what went on among remnant Maya rebel groups, but it remained an indispensable component of the new Porfirian order.

The Other Southeast: Bearing Arms in Tabasco Yucatán shared the lower-right-hand quadrant of the map with another province that has attracted far less attention: Tabasco.49 Virtually unique in Mexican cultural geography, the Tabascans built their lives and culture around a superabundance of water in its many forms: rivers, creeks, inland lagoons, torrential rains, and devastating floods issuing from the highland tributaries in Guatemala and Chiapas. But having enough to drink did not mean having nothing to fight about. The poor and profoundly fragmented landscapes witnessed all sorts of invasions, rebellions, and militia mobilization. And while the massive destruction of the state’s nineteenthcentury archives prevents the sort of fine-grained reconstruction available for Yucatán, it is still possible to venture certain observations about how Tabascans took up arms, and what that experience came to mean. Named for the first Indian chieftain who engaged Hernán Cortés on the field of battle, Tabasco retained some connection to armed service ever after. Cortés himself tried to create a city by stationing soldiers close to what is today Frontera, but with little success.50 Militia service remained important throughout the colonial period for the simple reason that pirates took a liking to the region’s lawless, riverine environment and because there was no significant urban bourgeoisie to offset the prestige of the militia commander, who himself usually performed double duty as hacendado (landowner). Like the Yucatecans, Tabascans did not participate in any meaningful way in the decade of independence struggles, and hence they had only limited investment in the first incarnation of Mexico under Agustín de Iturbide’s modified (read, creole-led) Bourbonism. Rather, service meant scanning the horizon for pirates and raiders, and that talent easily translated to defense against US and French imperialists and,

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unfortunately for the proponents of a precocious nationalism, against agents of Mexico itself. Indeed, virtually everyone who arrived here, whether freebooter or statesman, came from the sea, and they were instantly recognized as outsiders not only for their means of transportation but also for their unfamiliarity with Tabascan culture and folkways, including culinary mysteries such as roasted armadillo, uliche (meat marinated in white sauce), the grilled river fish known as pejelagarto, and the spongy momo leaf that Tabascans loved putting in all their dishes.51 Those who do not eat like us, the inference ran, are not really the same as us after all. Once nationhood came, however, the force of arms took on new importance. The state’s key economic interests, cacao-growing families such as the Maldonado clan, deeply resented Mexican centralism, which they knew brought tariffs and trade restrictions that balanced the national budget over the Tabascan back. Cacao plantations offered a form of power vastly out of proportion to an estate’s actual size, because in this small and fragmented region, a few score of men constituted a formidable force, and a plantation workforce handily supplied the core of that number. The foil of these homegrown militias, meanwhile, was the regular army. Most of the soldiers may have come from the province as well, but their leaders did not. Here, as elsewhere, the comandante militar, a nationally appointed figure, provided professional supervision (something that could hardly be said for local militia commanders) but, perhaps more importantly, also constituted Mexico City’s only fulcrum over refractory provincial politics. With the centralist takeover of the early 1830s, Tabasco’s latent militia power suddenly came to life. The Maldonado brothers, led by patriarch Nicolás, working out of bases in the south (Teapa) and the west (Huimanguillo) quickly formed an alliance with one Juan Pablo Anaya, a hero of the Hidalgo and Morelos movements who nursed deep personal grievances against President Antonio López de Santa Anna.52 Their rebellion floundered until Anaya somehow contacted one Francisco de Sentmanat, Cuban by birth and revolutionary by natural inclination.53 Sentmanat brought to the state a mixture of charisma, ruthlessness, and masculine swank, and within the space of a year, he managed to rout centralist forces and impose a weak civilian government that served as a front for his own power. Sentmanat kept Mexico City at bay until a massive occupational force expelled him in 1843 and captured and executed him when the Cuban filibuster attempted a return the following year.54 For all his cleverness and charm, Sentmanat could never shuck the basic truth that he was a foreign adventurer. Instead, it was three subsequent mobilizations that made Tabasco a land of armed citizens’ militias.

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When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, it prioritized control of ports and maritime access. To this end, the navy occupied Frontera and attempted to use this collection of straw huts and wooden shacks as a base for occupying the entire province. In October 1846, during their first attempt to take Villahermosa (then called San Juan Bautista), the over-confident US forces suffered a pop-up defeat at the hands of better prepared Tabascans, one of the few Mexican victories of the entire war.55 A second attempt nine months later fared better, and sailors disembarking from gunboats shot up the town.56 The Mexican-appointed commander of regular forces during this second engagement, a certain Domingo Echeagaray, decided that guerrilla warfare was the only option and withdrew his soldiers to the countryside, leaving Villahermosa exposed. But more combative Tabascans, following the lead of Sentmanat understudy Miguel Bruno, advocated a direct confrontation. Bruno’s leadership cleansed him of the sin of associating with the filibuster, and while he himself was later tried and executed for repeated rebellions, his alternative leadership gave new life and legitimacy to Tabasco’s locally organized militias.57 It also showed that one did not have to be a linen-suited hacendado to raise militias here, just audacious. Once the bluecoats were out of the picture, a related but strictly internal conflict erupted. The seven-year period between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the coming of the Liberal Party (1855) was peaceful only in the sense that Tabasco’s local rebellions (often stemming from electoral frustrations of caudillos) became only sporadic. But the 1857 Conservative revolt, which succeeded in temporarily forcing Liberals from national power, once more spawned a wave of uprisings that drew men into military service, or at least diverted their service from its original intentions. The Liberal governor at the time of General Félix Zuloaga’s December 1857 counterrevolution, a cautious and often indecisive man named Victorio V. Dueñas, consciously chose to adhere to Zuloaga as a way of combating the Conservatives from within; he hoped that his continued control over the civil bureaucracy of the pueblos would allow him to secretly maintain a Liberal organization.58 But local militia captains were not so constrained, and they pronounced in his place. Their movements drew in a mixture of economic and political clients—Tabascans who somehow fancied both themselves and the Liberals as agents of progress—and even discontented clergy, who, looking at liberalism through the prism of the early 1850s, saw increased private property and political rights as the potential tonics to the region’s endemic poverty.59 But as so often with militias, by the time Dueñas broke with the state’s Conservative

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military apparatus, there were already some three different revolts underway, frequently as much in competition with one another as they were at odds with the people who wanted to roll Mexico back to 1807. Liberal forces had triumphed in Tabasco, but they might never have gained hegemonic legitimacy were it not for yet a third post-Sentmanat threat. The French invasion of 1861 eventually sent ripples into Tabasco— not as red-pants legionnaires, but rather as Conservative Mexican troops under the command of yet another renegade foreigner in Tabasco, Spanishborn Eduardo González Arévalo.60 With an incompetence matched only by his monumental ego, Arévalo ignored orders to sweep up rural resistance and instead headed straight to Villahermosa, which by sheer luck he managed to occupy without bloodshed.61 Arévalo took this fact as prima facie evidence of his own military genius. But the experiences of the past twenty-four years had trained Tabascans well, and the matter of mobilizing grassroots militias, especially for a cause as obvious as the ousting of a foreign-sponsored puppet regime, now happened to be Tabascans’ strongest hand. There was no professional army, only Arévalo’s band of adventurers against popular militias led by men with relatively close connections to those who served under them. Chief among these, small-town store-owner turned militia captain Gregorio Méndez lured Arévalo into a long, narrow road surrounded by swampy ground that the Tabascan irregulars knew intimately. The November 1, 1863, battle of Jahuactal looms large in Tabascan mythology not only because local militias cut imperial forces to ribbons but also because the former’s victory guaranteed that Tabasco, virtually alone of all Mexican provinces, never became imperial territory.62 The enemies may have varied, but certain constants nevertheless underlay the early Tabascan militias. As with Yucatán, Tabascan units formed after 1821 rather than growing out of the epic movements for independence. This limited their effectiveness as a vitamin to nationalist sentiment; instead, Tabascans consistently fought for Tabasco, on Tabascan soil, and usually against non-Tabascans. Their actual number always remained small. Indeed, since total provincial population topped only eighty-three thousand during the Restored Republic (somewhere around 15 percent of pre–Caste War Yucatán’s numbers), relatively tiny bands of eighty or so men constituted a serious force.63 And for that reason, a roll call of peons and economic dependents sufficed to make up a unit. In other words, Tabascan militias remained very much caudillo-directed forces driven by local issues. Post-1844 saw increasingly democratic mobilizations, at least at the level of leadership, as military experience became more widespread.

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Unfortunately, Tabascan militia strength also proved its undoing. The successful momentum of the anti-imperial years perpetuated itself thereafter as a form of electoral-related uprisings of one Liberal caudillo against another. As in so many other episodes of Tabascan history, the combined political-military experience ran counter to national trends. When the Revolt of Tuxtepec brought Porfirio Díaz to power, a nationally appointed military commander, Campeche-born Pedro Sainz de Baranda, had actually succeeded in crushing pro-Díaz forces and seemed to have set the stage for at least the momentary continuation of a more ideologically based liberalism under President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada.64 But one province does not a nation make, and Baranda suffered the frustration of handing over power to men whom he had just defeated on the field of battle.

Decline and Fall of the Provincial Militias The southeast, then, constituted a place where citizen militias and the armed pueblo had only limited democratizing effort and where “right to arms” failed to emerge as a fundamental demand of mid-century Mexican politics. How to explain the regional deviation? One possibility is that Yucatecans liked the idea of bearing arms, but had considerably less enthusiasm for the experience itself, particularly when it entailed prolonged hardship and separation from family. But ideas are notoriously hard to measure, particularly when there is virtually no recorded rhetoric to this effect. Yucatecan self-image to the contrary, the absence of “right to arms” talk had absolutely nothing to do with any supposedly peaceful inner nature of Mayas, still one of the peninsula’s most venerated myths. Lowlevel forms of violence permeated rural society, while the pre-Columbian Maya civilization may well have been one of the most contentious and fratricidal in the history of mankind. Another option is to discount the idea of a deviation altogether and to suggest that the central Mexican popularity of the armed village has in fact been oversold. But discounting this option, certain real factors do appear to have moved peninsulars away from the larger national path. First and most important, the independence wars simply did not happen here. In the southeast, the most shocking political mobilizations of Mexico’s eleven-year birth took place in the years 1812–1814, when the brief Spanish constitution gave Maya peasants a legal footing equal to that of creoles.65 But the moment passed, and despite some coastal preparations and worried correspondence, no independence battles ever took place here.

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Tabasco lacked Yucatán’s dense Indian population, but in other regards its own experiences were not much different. Southeasterners therefore lacked the glorious tradition of service that came to define places like the post-1865 American South or the overwhelming presence in Cuba’s wars against Spanish colonialism that allowed Afro-Cubans their claim to citizenship.66 Second, there was the question of whom to fight. For Yucatecans, at no time did military service become a matter of defense against foreign invader except, of course, when those foreigners happened to be Mexicans themselves. In fact, there are only three known instances of popular mobilization of defense against external aggression: the 1839–1840 civil war against Mexican centralism (actually fought against centralism’s peninsular allies); the 1842–1843 war defense against the Mexican invasion; and the 1866 mobilization that small-fry hacendado Buenaventura Martínez y Basto led against the Empire, once more directed principally against other Yucatecans.67 The fact is that Maya involvement in the 1842–1843 mobilization, while certainly real, lacks the documentation that might allow us to sketch out fine-grained particulars.68 What appears clear is that, at least in the cases of the 1839 and 1866 revolts, people took up arms in order to get rid of governments that were forcing them to take up arms and with the express intention of returning to a civilian existence afterwards. Tabascan mobilizations were, admittedly, a more complex issue, since the US and intervention forces did come to call, and Tabascans were arguably more connected to the larger nation. However, the arrival and abrupt evacuation of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1846–1847 ultimately exposed an equally bitter conflict of Federalist vs. pro-Mexico Tabascans. A third and perhaps decisive factor was the top-down dynamics of Yucatecan recruiting. From the very beginning, the southeastern militias remained in the hands of Hispanics. It has long been apparent that ethnic separations remained strong in the peninsula; virtually alone among Mexican Indians, for example, Mayas retained Maya surnames, while even today the language is among the largest homogenous indigenous tongues. Commonly adduced reasons include lack of commercial economy, weak Hispanic presence, and environmental factors militating against anything beyond slash-and-burn agriculture. Racial and class barriers conditioned Yucatecan militia service from the onset and, if anything, became worse following the coming of the civil wars in 1836 and persisting to their conclusion in the late 1870s. Lower-class Tabascan involvement in national struggles was somewhat greater than in Yucatán, but at the same time even more ethnically skewed. Indigenous incorporation remained virtually nil

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here. Instead, fragmented ethnic pockets of Chontales, Zoques, Lacandones, and Nahuatl speakers survived by retreating to inaccessible regions, often swamps or remote southern mountains, and generally ducked the great political controversies that followed independence. If pronounced national identity swept over the Chontales, it certainly failed to register in any of the available documentation. The southeast also differed in both motive and social context from that other Mexican periphery, the far north. Doubtless, situations involved a frontier setting of sorts, but the threat of Guatemalan border spats never generated the alarm of the Indian wars that defined the northern experience for so many centuries. First came the Chichimecan wars, in which ambitious miner-settlers tried to subdue small, semi-nomadic groups that naturally took umbrage to the newcomers’ presence. Thereafter, the northern settlements in places such as Chihuahua and Coahuila or José de Rendón’s quasi-military colony of Nuevo Santander (later Tamaulipas) required homesteaders to serve as militiamen, with the added incentive of tax exemptions.69 These norteño minutemen waxed in responsibility with the Apache and Comanche raids that increased as both Anglo and Hispanic presence intensified in the area. Indeed, the settlers’ ever-readiness molded (some would say warped) their character ever after, leaving a stiffnecked people who did not truckle to southern political interference and who consistently lined up behind regional caudillos—men such as Santiago Vidaurre of Monterrey, who promised to protect local interests— or who remained the angry and embittered highlanders found in Paul Vanderwood’s account of Tomóchic.70 The southeastern militias suffered prolific vices, but they had one redeeming virtue: they never assumed the cult of militarism that has lurked behind so many of the more atrocious human rights abuses of the twentieth century. Examples could fill the page, but some of the more egregious cases include the army of Imperial Japan, the Cold War–era special forces of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the Prussian-inspired militarism of Chile in the days surrounding the fall of Salvador Allende’s ill-fated government (1970–1973).71 Key ingredients in the terrible concoction of military cultism are strict isolation from the civilian population, brutal and unrelenting discipline, long indoctrination into the inferiority of civilian life, and cultivated habituation to the suffering of others. Accounts of requisite hazing, as well as bizarre initiation rites worthy of H. P. Lovecraft, still shock the reader. True, the early Mexican militias did inherit a tendency to execute prisoners of war, a tradition that survived from Santa Anna’s Texas campaign to the Mexican Revolution.72 Moreover, the most

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devoted santannistas, at least, kept faith with other post-1821 Latin American elites in seeing the military as an embodiment of national principle.73 But occult societies they were not. In all these regards, the weakness of Mexico’s pre-revolutionary state also served as its redemption. Officers intent on turning out the perfect killing machine lacked resources equal to the task. Recruiters trained Caste War soldiers far too quickly to create a sense of genuine separation from family, community, or the human race. No remote training camps allowed for some sinister warping of the human psyche. And if exotic anti-civilian ideologies flourished within the middle and lower ranks of Mexico’s nineteenth-century army, they have left no discernible trace. Quite the opposite: enough early national idealism still prevailed even into the terrible years of the 1840s through the 1870s, tinged with a certain Catholic universalism, to keep foot soldiers within the bounds of human decency (at least most of the time). The extreme violence that did crop up appears to have been spontaneous acts of battle-related vengeance. The 1800s may seem less than glorious, but in this regard, at least, they shine in comparison to the succeeding century. The Porfirian southeast has inspired many detailed studies—pathbreaking if at the same time incomplete in their treatment of diverse sectors of society. And few omissions have been more notable than that of the security forces.74 Commonly assumed to have been tools of the henequen planters, the reality at least until the late 1870s was far more complex. The early Porfirian militias appear rather to have reflected key divisions within the society: need for security versus need for labor; estate power versus authority of the jefe político (political chief); and, finally, an unexplored point of convergence for Maya and Hispanic culture. The only places where the armed pueblo did win the status of hallowed ideal were those communities—either opposed to or loosely allied with the state government—where dislocated Maya peasants came to rule themselves. Most obviously this meant Chan Santa Cruz and other rebel satellite/splinter communities.75 But it also applied to the so-called pacífico (peaceful or “pacified”) communities most strongly concentrated in what is today southwestern Quintana Roo and southeastern Campeche states.76 In both areas, communities remained organized on a war footing. These collections of soldier-farmers lingered for decades, until their adherents became a slightly more cosmopolitan version of those Japanese soldiers who defended Pacific Island caves into the late twentieth century. Pacífico communities eventually dissolved altogether, while in the Santa Cruz area, the vocabulary and broad outlines of military organization live

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on in certain civil-religious cargo systems. Neither represented a pristine way of life, and much less the latest installment of “500 years of Maya resistance.” Rather, they grew out of experiences from 1834 onward. To some degree, the armed pueblo also shared bloodlines with Mexico’s other utopia, anarchism. Both dreamed of decapitating the state and handing its prerogatives back to virtuous men of the people from whence, it was assumed, those prerogatives had come. Both anarchism and the martial village espoused a suspiciously generous view of the citizenry (and human nature in general) and declined to press difficult questions regarding governance. But similarities end there. Latin American anarchists usually preferred pamphlets and worker-based culture institutions as the weapons of choice, and as the misadventures of such would-be revolutionaries as Praxedis Guerrero document, the anarchists themselves were neither comfortable nor successful as blood warriors.77 Modern-day military service in the peninsula bears little relationship to its early national ancestor. Appeals to an armed pueblo are virtually absent here. The clandestine arms that do exist are mostly in the hands of peasants forced to poach deer and javelina in order to make ends meet.78 Meanwhile, the national army restricts itself to two basic activities: the logistical sort of public benefit (clearing trash and so forth) and policing against narco-trafficking, which has a well-established if seldom recognized presence in the southeast. Crónica roja (yellow press) headlines to the contrary, relatively few peninsulars even own guns, let alone incline toward yesteryear’s prescription of a self-defended municipio libre (free village). Dreams may die hard, but die they do. Discounting the property owner’s hired milicia blanca, the one group that has managed to convert firepower into some measure of autonomy from government is the narco-cartel, and it may well be that some future historian will point to the right to wholesale narcotics and gun down rivals as expressions of popular citizenship.79 Commonly associated with the northwestern states such as Sinaloa, narco-trafficking has made major inroads into the southeast in recent years. Here as elsewhere, the narcos’ success owes more to cash lubrications applied to the political joints than to any hail of bullets, most of which are directed at industry rivals. Still, few would hold up the cartel as a legatee of the municipio libre, partly because the former is more a business venture, and not an agricultural community linked through kinship networks and a collective identity. And while in some extreme readings the narcos who wield assault rifles may uphold a citizen’s democracy, their activities also detract from national dignity, undermine the validity of civil institutions, and generally disgust law-abiding Mexicans.

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The key factors that separated militia experiences as “molders of youth and citizens” were the circumstances under which militia service took shape, the degree of popular initiative in their construction, the levels of economic support, and the ends to which they were directed. The more gradual evolution of militias in the Mexican center resulted in an institution that, like the storied municipio libre, entailed the hopes and aspirations of a free people. The Yucatecan experiences, however, rendered the militias part of the overall gulag atmosphere tingeing southeastern society from 1847 to the revolution. While some Mexicans therefore came to see arms as the safeguard of political rights, others found them to be little more than another form of fagina, or compulsory labor. Finally, there remains the issue of their overall viability as democratic institutions. Many have shared the vision of the free and armed people, a decentralized confederation of a people somehow more liberated because they bear arms and make decisions regarding their use. This ideology or, perhaps better said, fragment of an ideology, clearly moved hearts and minds during the Mexican Revolution. The Zapatistas of Morelos found something in it; Pancho Villa’s notion of militarized farming and ranching communities like those of colonial Chihuahua also partook of this vision, even if more inclined to accept a greater degree of centralized power.80 The dream persisted over many years and despite ferocious opposition: in part because in 1910 it had become the only way to redress vast injustices, in part because once people have weapons, few surrender them willingly. The armed pueblo in all its frustrating ambiguities has recently made its return in southeastern Chiapas where, in a group given to political theater, adherents brandish worn-out hunting rifles as symbols of a determination to defend local rights. But the problems that Ducey identifies for the early national years of Veracruz turned out to be just as real in the 1920s and 1990s. The armed pueblo’s strength—its ability to provide decentralized resistance—has also consistently been its weakness. The centralizing bureaucracies known to prosper under twentieth-century social revolutions managed to pick the villages off one by one, first subduing village-level armed bands, then eliminating regional, caudillo-affiliated armies such as the one headed by Saturnino Cedillo in San Luis Potosí.81 Nor does contemporary Mexico give much indication of fragmenting into autonomous villages governed by a diversity of ethnically based rights. Clearly, the case for popular nationalism containing armed struggle has been oversold, given the well-documented armed struggles in places such as rural Morelos in the 1940s and 1950s.82 Armed conflict has most recently returned in the form of neo-Zapatismo in

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Chiapas, together with more diffuse movements in the state of Guerrero.83 If the post-1950 experience teaches anything, it is that armed citizenship does not function as some sort of nationalist glue. Rather, peasants throughout the country have turned into guerrillas because of simple desperation over the way that modernization, usually focusing on export-driven agribusiness, has eroded their way of life. In sum, the armed pueblo has yet to materialize as a lasting and widespread factor in modern Mexican life. That may not be altogether regrettable, since widespread personal arms over a far-flung countryside, riven with clientelist politics and profound inequalities, invites diffuse violencias of the Colombian cut. In place of the pueblo armado (armed village) came a national control that, for all its violations of local sovereignty and popular will, has proven to be more adept in state-building and the maintenance of a social control that may or may not have something to do with democracy, whatever that latter term may happen to mean. Notes Author’s note: I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo General de la Nación de México (AGNM); Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán (AGEY); Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Yucatán (AHAY); Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional (AHDN); Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación Histórica de Yucatán (CAIHY). 1.  Carl Sartorius, Mexico about 1850 (1858; repr., Stuttgart: F. A. Brockhaus Komm., 1961), 131. 2.  Terry Rugeley, trans. and ed., Alone in Mexico: The Astonishing Travels of Karl Heller, 1845–1848 Mexico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 212. 3.  Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz (Harlow, Essex, United Kingdom: Longman, 2001), 110–15. 4.  This is the picture that emerges in Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), chaps. 4 and 5; Roderick Ai Camp, Generals in the Palacio: The Military in Modern Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17–35; Roderick Ai Camp, Mexico’s Military on the Democratic Stage (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2005), 21–41. 5.  Key works include Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Guy P. C. Thomson, with David LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Michael T. Ducey, A Nation of Villages: Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Paul Hart, Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins of the

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Zapatista Revolution, 1840–1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); and Patrick J. McNamara, Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).   6.  William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984).   7.  Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977); Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).   8.  Melchor Campos García, Castas, feligresía y ciudadanía en Yucatán: Los afromestizos bejo el régimen constitucional español, 1750–1822 (Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2005), 104–17.   9.  Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez, The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 309–20. 10.  William A. DePalo Jr., The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 29; Timothy E. Anna, The Mexican Empire of Iturbide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 9–10. 11.  Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 53–54. 12.  Michael P. Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835–1846: Hombres de bien in the Age of Santa Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6–8. 13.  Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 65. 14.  Timothy E. Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 104–5; Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 61–65. 15.  For additional perspectives on the milicias activas, see the chapter by Daniel Haworth in this volume. 16.  Stanley C. Green, The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 85. 17.  DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 32–33. 18.  DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 44. 19.  Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Chris Frazer, Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 20.  DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 25. 21.  DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 30–34, 40–43. 22.  My account of the history of Yucatecan armed service is condensed from several studies of my own: Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, 1800–1847 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); and Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 23.  José Manuel A. Chávez Gómez, Intención franciscana de evangelizar entre los Mayas rebeldes (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para las Artes y la Cultura, 2001); Campos García, Castas, feligresía y ciudadanía, 36.

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24.  Manuscripts, caja 12, exp. 32, 22 June 1821, Teya; caja 12, exp. 32, 3 June 1821, Chichanhá; caja 12, exp. 32, misc. dates, 1821–1823, all in CAIHY. See also Poder Ejecutivo, caja 16, Milicia, vol. 3, exp. 24, 27 May 1825; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 19, Milicia, vol. 13, exp. 6, various dates, 1835, both in AGEY. 25.  On the early militia career, and later revolt, of Santiago Imán y Villafaña, see Poder Ejecutivo, caja 18, vol. 12, exp. 25, 5 June 1836, Calotmul, AGEY; Poder Ejecutivo, caja 19, Milicia, vol. 13, exp. 13, 19 April 1836, 6 June 1836, 29 June 1836, Tizimín, AGEY; and the report of Mexico’s consul in Cuba found in xi/481.3/1690, 26 July 1841, ff. 628–38, AHDN. 26.  On Santiago Vidaurri as expression of Nuevo León interests, see Juan Mora Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). Regarding the prolonged Lozada uprising, see Jean Meyer, Breve historia de Nayarit (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 111–13. 27.  Cancelados, “Imán, Santiago,” xi/iii/2–378, 1838–1839, 32–38; 10 June 1850, 26–27, AHDN. 28.  See Poder Ejecutivo, caja 46, Milicia, vol. 2, misc. exp. numbers and dates, 1841; Poder Ejecutivo, caja 46, Milicia, vol. 3, exp. 63, 5 June 1841; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 47, Milicia, vol. 1, exp. 22, 8 March 1842, all AGEY. 29.  The Mexican side of this struggle is concentrated in the papers of the AHDN. Three reports are particularly critical. The first is that of Antonio López de Santa Anna to the Ministro de Guerra y Marina found in xi/481.3/1992, 30 May 1853, AHDN, originally published in the Diario del gobierno de la república Mexicana. The second is the report of General Matías de la Peña y Barragán, also published in the Diario, and found in the same expediente. The third and most complete is by General Manuel María Sandoval, found in xi/481.3/1986, 11 December 1843, AHDN. The most developed source on the Yucatecan version remains Serapio Baqueiro, Ensayo histórico sobre las revoluciones de Yucatán desde el año 1840 hasta 1864 (Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico: Manuel Heredia Argüelles, 1878, 1879), 1:79–120. Regarding Maya mobilizations during this conflict, see Poder Ejecutivo, caja 52, Gobierno, Correspondencia, 20 April 1843, AGEY; Poder Ejecutivo, caja 51, Gobernación, Secretaría General de Gobierno, Jefatura Política of Valladolid, 2 April 1843, AGEY; Heremoteca Pino Suárez (HPS), El independiente, 24 February 1843, 2–3; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 52, Gobernación, Secretaría General de Gobierno, Correspondencia, Campeche, 6 January 1843, AGEY. 30.  Poder Ejecutivo, caja 46, Milicia, vol. 2, exp. 30, 12 May 1841, AGEY. 31.  See report to the Ministro de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/2914, 22 November 1850, AHDN; and xi/481.3/3255, 18 January 1851, AHDN. 32.  See report to the Ministro de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/2914, 28 October 1850; xi/481.3/2914, November 1850; and xi/481.3/2914, 5 August 1850, all AHDN. 33.  Desertion reports were life’s daily bread in the nineteenth-century units; to take one example from thousands, see Poder Ejecutivo, caja 72, Gobernación, Secretaría General de Gobierno, Comandancia General, 2 July 1849, AGEY. 34.  Again, I rely on Thomson’s Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism account of the Puebla sierra, and on Ducey’s A Nation of Villages examination of early national Veracruz. 35.  Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever, chap. 1.

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36.  Orin Starn, “Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in the CentralSouth Andes,” in Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 224–57. 37.  Carol A. Smith, “Destruction of the Material Bases for Indian Culture: Economic Changes in Totonicapán,” in Robert M. Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 226–28; David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 38.  For a variety of cases where peasants attempted to reap the advantages of services rendered, see entries in Poder Ejecutivo, caja 75, “Disposiciones y decretos en respuesta a exposiciones y solicitudes,” 1849, AGEY. 39.  For samples of peasant retreat from military service, see “Disposiciones y decretos en respuesta a exposiciones y solicitudes,” 12 April 1849, 25, Poder Ejecutivo, caja 75, AGEY; 22 March 1850, 107, 17 April 1850, 11; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 103, Gobernación, 2 September 1856, Valladolid, AGEY. 40.  As happened in the small hamlet of Tikuch, where rebels allowed the priest to escape but assassinated the Maya defenders; see Decretos y Oficios, 5 November 1862, Valladolid, AHAY. 41.  See padre José Canuto Vela’s letter to Alonzo Peón in the University of Michigan Clements Library, Yucatecan Papers, 9 November 1849. 42.  For sample cases, see AHAY, Decretos y Oficios, 2 July 1851, Espita; c. 17 August 1851, Motul; and 11 December 1851, Valladolid; 25 April 1852, Calkiní; and 11 December 1865, Cantamayec. 43.  For some representative samples, see Poder Ejecutivo, caja 68, Gobernación, Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, 12 August 1848, AGEY; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 71, Gobernación, Comandancia Militar, various dates, 1849, AGEY. 44.  Manuscripts, 20 May 1853, XLIV, 045, CAIHY. 45.  Garner, Porfirio Díaz, 36–43. 46.  Vega’s report from Mérida, xi/481.3/3150, 8 October 1851, AHDN. Díaz’s original orders appear in xi/481.3/3255, 16 April 1851, AHDN; his first dispatch from Mérida appears in xi/481.3/3256, 8 June 1851, AHDN; see also the anonymous “Fragmento histórico” in the University of Michigan Clements Library, Yucatecan Collection. 47.  See Rómulo Díaz de la Vega’s report to the Ministro de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/3698, 11 and 27 November 1854, AHDN. 48.  Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 49.  The near-total destruction of Tabasco’s pre-1876 archives means that we will probably never achieve the fine-grained reconstruction in text available as a result of Yucatán’s massive paper collections. What does exist on the Tabascan early national period has to be drawn from sources outside the state. 50.  Carlos Enrique Ruiz Abreu, Señores de la tierra y el agua: Propiedad, comercio y trabajo en el Tabasco colonial (Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Tabasco, 1994), 43–52. 51.  These culinary tidbits come from Alvaro Ruiz Abreu, Los ojos del paisaje (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1996), 56–57, 85. 52.  Information on Anaya appears in “Biografía de Juan Pablo de Anaya,” in Manuel Mestre Ghigliazza, ed., Documentos y datos para la historia de Tabasco, vol. 3,

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1840–1843 (1924; repr., Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Tabasco, 1984), 113–27. 53.  The first mention of Sentmanat appears in José Ignacio Gutiérrez to Secretario de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/1575, c. 20 October 1840, ff. 67–71, AHDN. Regarding Sentmanat’s early life, see Vicente Baez, ed., La enciclopedia de Cuba, vol. 4, Historia (Madrid: Enciclopedia y Clásicos Cubanos, 1974), 292–93; Diccionario biográfico cubano (1878), cited in Bernardo del Aguila Figueroa, Tabasco en la geografía y en la historia (Mexico City: Consejo Editorial del Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1980), 15; and James Suchlicki, Historical Dictionary of Cuba (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 10. 54.  Pedro Ampudia to Ministro de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/1633, 20 July 1843, 189–93, AHDN. 55.  The principal account of Juan B. Traconis’s costly victory is his own report to the Ministro de Guerra y Marina, found in xi/481.3/2373, 27 October 1846, ff. 8–9, AHDN. 56.  Domingo Echagaray to Ministro de Guerra y Marina, xi/481.3/2551, 18 June 18 1847, 31–32, AHDN. 57.  The lengthy account of the conflicting defense strategies appears in the military hearing over the actions of General Domingo Echagaray, found in Cancelados, xi/iii/2–838, various dates, AHDN. The three-year investigation (1849–1852) eventually exonerated the general. 58.  León Alejo Torre’s biography of Dueñas gives little idea of how controversial and inconstant the governor really was; Apuntes históricos de Tabasco, o sea, Ojeada sobre el primer período constitucional de la administración de Dn. Victorio V. Dueñas (Mexico City: Consejo Editorial del Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1979). 59.  The first of these was the revolt of commander Lorenzo Prats, detailed in xi/481.3/6287, 31 January 1858, 4, AGNM. Then came the revolt of Lino Merino, discussed in María Eugenia Arias G. et al., Tabasco: Una historia compartida (Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1987), 209. Regarding cases of clerical support of Liberal resistance to the Zuloaga government, see San Juan Bautista, Eduardo Moncada to unknown, 10 March 1858; San Juan Bautista, José María Sastré to José María Guerra, 18 June 1858; and José María Sastré to José María Guerra, San Juan Bautista, 8 April 1859, Decretos y Oficios, AHAY. 60.  José Rogelio Alvarez, ed., Diccionario enciclopédico de Tabasco (Mexico City: Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1994), I:280. 61.  Documentos Misceláneos, I–F, 26 October 1863, Ciudad del Carmen, Genaro García Collection, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas. 62.  For Arévalo’s own rueful account of Jahuactal, see his report to the subsecretary of state, D/481.4/9536, 1 November 1863, 185–87, AHDN; for subsequent (and pessimistic) reports on imperial plans to retake the province, see the report of Gen. Manuel Díaz de la Vega, xi/481.4/9540, 8 May 1864, 293–303, AHDN. 63.  See “Estadística del Estado de Tabasco,” in Manuel Gil y Sáenz, Compendio histórico, geográfico y estadístico del Estado de Tabasco (1872; fac. repr., Mexico City: Consejo Editorial del Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1979), 242. 64.  Arias G. et al., Tabasco, 259–62. 65.  Rugeley, Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry, 40–48.

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66.  Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886– 1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 90; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 157–69; Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 35–39. 67.  Terry Rugeley, “The Forgotten Liberator: Buenaventura Martínez and the Republican Restoration in Yucatán,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19, no. 2 (2003): 331–66. 68.  Information on 1842–1843 Maya mobilizations remains sketchy indeed, in part the result of the highly informal nature of recruiting in the wild and mostly illiterate eastern half of the peninsula. For some of the fleeting recorded references to Maya service, see Poder Ejecutivo, caja 52, Gobierno, Correspondencia, 20 April 1843, AGEY; Poder Ejecutivo, caja 51, Gobernación, Secretaría General de Gobierno, Jefatura Política of Valladolid, 2 April 1843, AGEY; and Poder Ejecutivo, caja 52, Gobernación, Secretaría General de Gobierno, Correspondencia, Campeche, 6 January 1843, AGEY. 69.  Victor Orozco, Las guerras indias en la historia de Chihuahua: Primeras fases (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992); María Elena Santoscoy, Laura Gutiérrez, Martha Rodríguez, and Francisco Cepeda, Breve historia de Coahuila (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Histórico de las Américas; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 76–80, 106–10, 205–6; Octavio Herrera, Breve historia de Tamaulipas (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Histórico de las Américas; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 63–66; Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 74–76; and David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 105–7, 156–59. 70.  Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 36–51; Paul Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 71.  Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1997), 217–18; Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 50; Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 40–44. 72.  Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico, 26–27, 28–29. 73.  Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico, 220. 74.  To take only one example, the theme of security forces is virtually absent from Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph’s otherwise comprehensive Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), but the same is true of Yucatecan Porfirian studies across the board. 75.  As described in Paul Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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76.  Lean Sweeney, La supervivencia de los bandidos: Los Mayas icaichés y la política fronteriza del sureste de la península de Yucatán, 1847–1904 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Nacional de Yucatán, 2006). 77.  James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 26–27, 31–33. 78.  Paul K. Eiss, In Defense of El Pueblo: Community, Politics, and History in Yucatán (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 79.  Too close to the moment for historians, narco-trafficking has nonetheless attracted a wealth of journalistic treatment. For a sample of this genre, see Jorge Fernández Menéndez and Víctor Ronquillo, De los maras a los zetas: Los secretos del narcotráfico, de Colombia a Chicago (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2006). 80.  Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata! Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 428–32. 81.  Dudley Ankerson, Agrarian Warlord: Saturnino Cedillo and the Mexican Revolution in San Luis Potosí (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1984); David Frye, Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 132–47. 82.  Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 83.  Sources abound on the modern-day Zapatistas of Chiapas, not all of them good. Regarding the slow evolution toward armed uprising, see Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), especially chap. 4.

chapter two

The Mobile National Guard of Guanajuato, 1855–1858 Military Hybridization and Statecraft in Reforma Mexico Daniel S. Haworth

By the 1850s, to quote the succinct assessment of statesman Jose María Lafragua, the Mexican military had become a “school of revolutions.” Lafragua lamented that the military had distinguished itself as an intensely politicized and internally divided corporate entity thoroughly embroiled in civilian disagreements exacerbated by Mexico’s humiliation in the US– Mexican War (1846–1848).1 That disaster provoked intense debate over why Mexico had lost and how the country should move forward, with elite diagnoses of the republic’s ills and the corresponding prescriptions for a cure falling into two broadly defined positions. Conservatives believed that Mexico’s experiment with democracy, dating from the foundation of the republic in 1824, had sown discord. What was needed therefore was an authoritarian government that upheld Mexico’s social traditions—grounded in Roman Catholicism and social hierarchy. Liberals countered that Mexico’s nascent democratic institutions should be perfected so as to promote the formation of an individualistic, entrepreneurial society governed by the rule of law and free market principles. The military was thoroughly entangled in the Liberal-Conservative debate and its escalation into open warfare during the Reform (1855–1867), a period associated with the formulation of a new social, political, and economic order based on the precepts of nineteenth-century liberalism.2 Since long before the Reform, both the army and the militia had supplied military muscle to civilian causes in an age that accepted armed 49

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force as one, though not the only, means of pursuing political change. The pronunciamiento, a barracks rebellion by which an element of the armed forces would join with civilian politicians to oppose the government, functioned as a primary medium of political organization and discourse. To Lafragua’s chagrin, pronunciamientos occurred with such frequency as to verge on routine.3 He might have been heartened, therefore, by a military organization that operated altogether differently in the state of Guanajuato one hundred miles northwest of Mexico City. Shortly after taking office in August 1855, the governor of Guanajuato, Manuel Doblado, organized a paramilitary force known as the Mobile National Guard (MNG). In an address to the state legislature delivered two years into his governorship, he proudly proclaimed the MNG to be “so well armed, dressed and supplied, and in a state of such instruction, discipline, and morality, that it could rival the best troops in the army.” This was no mere boast. By that point the MNG had marched with the regular army in five campaigns to suppress violent rebellion in other parts of Mexico.4 The MNG was thus not just an instrument of Doblado’s authority but also an integral part of the federal government’s national military project. To judge from the MNG’s organization, appearance, and equipment, Doblado had mustered something more than an ad hoc home guard. Initially, the MNG’s two thousand soldiers were divided into a light artillery unit, four battalions of light infantry, and three cavalry squadrons. In 1857, Doblado reorganized these forces into two 700-man light infantry battalions, supplemented by artillery and a regiment of lancers. All were outfitted with a uniform: a jacket and pants, a cravat knotted about the neck, a widebrimmed sombrero for the cavalry, and a cap for the artillery and infantry. This smartly attired force was built for rapid deployment and conventional battle. Each artilleryman was armed with a carbine—a short rifle suitable for close-quarters combat and a rare weapon for that time—while the infantryman used a cap-lock musket, perhaps a British 1853 Enfield or a US-made Model 1842 Percussion Musket. Like their counterparts in the leading armies of the day, most of the infantry also carried a bayonet, although the absence of training materials among the documentary record leaves the guardsman’s competence with the bayonet a matter of speculation. The cavalry carried the lance, a weapon more conducive to speed and maneuverability. Interestingly, however, in October 1855 one cavalry squadron possessed carbines just as did their comrades in the artillery. It could be that these were prized firearms issued to the squadron that carried them for a specific mission and thereafter were to be returned to the armory.5 Doblado could justifiably claim that under his leadership Guanajuato’s MNG had taken on the form and function of a unit in the regular army.

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Hence, the MNG contrasted sharply with earlier versions of the National Guard organized there and elsewhere in Mexico. Shortly after the foundation of the republic in 1824, Mexican officials created a three-tiered military consisting of the army and its reserves, and the civic militia. A forerunner of the National Guard, the civic militia was conceived as a volunteer force of part-time “citizen soldiers” to be funded and administered by the governments of their respective states. Civic militias quickly became bastions of local autonomy that provided state officials with the means to resist the encroaching influence of the federal government. The most prominent example of this tendency was Governor Francisco García of Zacatecas, who built up a ten-thousand-man civic militia in the 1830s. His actions, and the federal government’s eventual move to subdue him, helped spark a civil war that contributed to the subsequent suppression of civic militias.6 Congress organized the first national guards in 1846 to reinforce the army in advance of the US–Mexican War. National guards served with distinction in that conflict and thereafter supplanted the civic militia, only to deteriorate as a result of underfunding, low morale, and hostility from the regular army.7 The origin of the forces that would comprise the MNG predated the governorship of Manuel Doblado and lay instead with the dictatorship of General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1853–1855). President of the republic three times since 1832, Santa Anna was returned to the presidency in 1853 by a military coup. Determined to end decades of instability, he folded all military forces into the army and made them subject to his personal control. He then lavished the army with resources to ensure its loyalty.8 Santa Anna’s plan meant little to enlisted men, especially to the conscripts who filled out the army’s lowest ranks, since pay remained meager and the conditions of service harsh. For officers, however, the return of Santa Anna brought a windfall of opportunity and prestige in the form of promotions, decorations, pay raises, and, above all, political authority. To govern the states, which he converted into departments, Santa Anna appointed generals; they in turn named other officers to serve as prefects who administered a collection of municipalities. At every level of administration, from the president to the prefect, an army officer simultaneously held political and military authority over his jurisdiction. It should be noted that civilians continued to staff the judiciary and bureaucracy, meaning that government, aside from its executive offices, was not militarized under Santa Anna. Even so, his policies brought military involvement in civil affairs to an unprecedented level. The immediate precursor of Guanajuato’s MNG came together as an outgrowth of Santa Anna’s determination to eliminate threats to public

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order. In November 1853, he called for army auxiliaries to be organized in Guanajuato, Chiapas, Yucatán, and the northern border states. The auxiliaries were intended to strengthen his government’s response to recent disturbances in each place: incursions by nomadic Indians in the north; tensions in Yucatán arising from the ongoing Caste War; and violent rebellion in Guanajuato’s remote northeastern Sierra Gorda. Ordinarily, the auxiliaries would operate as a constabulary charged with patrolling roads, protecting communities, defending private property, and enforcing government authority. In times of national crisis they could be deployed outside their home states to augment the standing army.9 It was these forces, or rather, an element of them, that Manuel Doblado would designate as the MNG. On September 24, 1855, one month after he became governor, Doblado decreed that auxiliaries in active service would henceforth be called the “Mobile National Guard” and those yet to be mobilized the “Sedentary National Guard.” He later clarified this operational distinction, declaring “all those auxiliary units activated as of January 14, 1854” to be MNG; all others would remain in “passive” service as garrisons in small towns and villages.10 Doblado had seized the governorship and created the MNG in a moment of political flux generated by the sudden collapse of Santanista rule and its replacement by a Liberal regime at the culmination of the Ayutla Revolt (1854–1855). That Liberals mistrusted the military is well documented, so well so that it stands as one of the truisms of nineteenthcentury Mexican historiography, but historians have yet to account for the way in which the military experienced the transition from Santanista to Liberal rule. The creation of the MNG in Guanajuato opens a window onto that transition, through which can be glimpsed a process of adaptation and accommodation whereby an element of the Santanista military establishment was assimilated into the Liberal regime. Doblado assumed control of the Guanajuato auxiliary-cum-mobile guard to gain the armed force by which to assert his local authority and to make himself a player in the configuration of the emerging national order. In so doing, he offered protection to the guardsmen, and especially to the army officers who commanded them, from an uncertain fate as Liberal reformers hastily formed a government in Mexico City. Many of those officers thus readily transferred their loyalty from the deposed Santa Anna to the governor, who had made himself their patron, and, after it accommodated Doblado, to the Liberal administration. Thereafter, the MNG served as a constabulary that projected Doblado’s influence throughout Guanajuato, while it also formed part of a reconstituted military that the Liberal administration deployed to

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suppress internal threats. In other words, the MNG combined attributes of the militia and the regular army. By spanning the divide between the one and the other, it linked the local and the national, becoming vital to the exercise of statecraft on both levels. Three aspects of the Ayutla Revolt facilitated the eventual creation of the MNG. First, Liberal politicians played only a marginal role in the overthrow of Santa Anna. Instead, the dictator succumbed to an insurgency that began in Mexico’s south, then spread to the center and north, and consisted mainly of rural rebels acting under local leadership to destroy the means of their oppression. Liberal intellectuals joined the leadership cadre of Juan Álvarez, who had initiated the revolution from his base in the far south; most of the other insurgent caudillos came to recognize Álvarez’s leadership, so long as he did not meddle in their affairs. With Santa Anna gone, Álvarez claimed the presidency, with Liberals making up his cabinet. But that short-term success forced the new government to confront a longterm problem arising from the proliferation of armed forces over the course of the revolution. To the national army inherited from Santa Anna had been added a collection of locally entrenched insurgents, neither of which the Liberal administration completely controlled nor entirely trusted. Second, the insurgents on whom the Liberals depended during the revolution never dominated Guanajuato, meaning that Guanajuato lay beyond the grasp of Juan Álvarez, and thus that of the Liberal regime he led, at the point he claimed the presidency. Guanajuato, unlike the neighboring states of Michoacán and Jalisco, had not been a hotbed of liberalism or of resistance to Santa Anna. Other than a brief uprising in northeastern Guanajuato led by a landowner named Vicente Vega in April 1854, Guanajuato never produced a local insurgency.11 It did, however, experience repeated incursions across its southern border by insurgents based in Michoacán who kept the settlements in southern Guanajuato in a continual state of alarm. In one instance, 150 michoacano guerrillas raided Salvatierra just after dark and held it for seven hours, during which they seized over five hundred pesos, mostly tax revenue taken from the town’s Santanista administrator. They then piled his records in the street and burned them, to the delight of a cheering crowd of the town’s impoverished underclass.12 This episode attests to the nature of insurgent activity in southern Guanajuato. As in Salvatierra, the insurgents extracted resources from the region to sustain their activities in Michoacán and staged theatrical displays of their disdain for the Santanista regime. But they did not hold territory nor, perhaps surprisingly, did they destabilize Santanista rule in Guanajuato. This may be attributed to the fact that displays like that in Salvatierra hardly

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presented the population, especially the local elite, with an attractive or otherwise viable alternative to the Santanista status quo. Third, Santa Anna’s capitulation on August 12, 1855, created a monthlong vacuum of national power that Doblado exploited to establish his governorship. Juan Álvarez was temporarily blocked from assuming the presidency by armed movements that took hold under different banners in Mexico City and San Luis Potosí, each supported by an army garrison and opposed to Álvarez because of his association with Liberals. In addition, Santiago Vidaurri, the rebel leader who controlled the northeast, refused to accept any outside authority. The impasse left the republic leaderless for more than a month. Guanajuato was meanwhile left to its own devices. There, Doblado made a bid for influence by publicly disavowing Santa Anna (though without recognizing Álvarez) and marching to the state capital at the head of a group of armed followers. In his last official act before resigning, the sitting governor, General Francisco Pacheco, convened a council that on August 19, 1855, named Doblado interim governor. Doblado, then a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer and prominent local politician, had been interim governor once before, on the eve of the US– Mexican War. Returned to that office, he assumed command of the state’s army auxiliary and made ready to negotiate Guanajuato’s incorporation into the emerging national order, setting the stage for the creation of the MNG one month later, following the conclusion of a treaty, known as the Convenios de Lagos, by which Doblado would come to terms with the Álvarez administration. The aforementioned aspects of the Ayutla Revolt converged in the Convenios de Lagos, distinguishing the treaty as a critical juncture that merits detailed consideration because it set in motion the emergence of the MNG as the force described at the beginning of this study. The treaty is noteworthy first and foremost because it cleared the way for Juan Álvarez to take over the presidency and his Liberal advisors to enact their agenda. The Convenios de Lagos arose from an ongoing exchange, begun shortly after Santa Anna’s resignation, between Doblado and two other leaders trying to sway the outcome of the Ayutla Revolt. One was Ignacio Comonfort, Álvarez’s principal lieutenant, who commanded seven thousand mostly insurgent troops based in the western city of Guadalajara within a two-day march of the Guanajuato border; the other was Antonio Haro y Tamariz, leader of the opposition movement based in San Luis Potosí. Doblado and Comonfort shared a political affinity that facilitated their engagement. Each was a moderate whose pragmatism leavened his Liberal sympathies. With Doblado serving as the conduit for relations between Comonfort and

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Haro, the three men laid the groundwork for their subsequent meeting in the town of Lagos, Jalisco, just over the Guanajuato border. They were motivated by a mutual desire to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.13 On September 16, the three gathered to conclude the Convenios de Lagos, by which Doblado and Haro accepted Álvarez as president and promised to obey Comonfort as his representative.14 Four days before, the opposition movement in Mexico City had collapsed, leaving the northeastern rebel Santiago Vidaurri to conclude a separate peace with the new regime. The Convenios de Lagos therefore announced the end of the Ayutla Revolt and the beginning of a postrevolutionary era given over to Liberal state-building. The Convenios de Lagos created a chain of patron-client relations critical to the future of Guanajuato’s MNG within this new political context. The patron in this case was Ignacio Comonfort, who was rapidly becoming the foremost figure in national politics thanks to the patronage of Juan Álvarez who, after being sworn in as president on October 4, named Comonfort minister of war, charged with administering the armed forces. That office confirmed Comonfort’s patronage of Doblado, as spelled out in the Convenios de Lagos. While Antonio Haro resumed his opposition to the Liberal regime, resurfacing in December as the leader of another armed movement, Doblado remained faithful to Comonfort, to become one of his main political and military collaborators. In return, Doblado retained his governorship, so that just as Comonfort sponsored the governor’s entry into the new political order, so too would Doblado for the soldiers he commanded. In agreeing to abide by the Convenios de Lagos, Doblado submitted to an incipient central authority in the name of the auxiliaries who had cast their lot with him, represented by the four light infantry battalions named in a roster of troops he sent to take up a position near Lagos in advance of the treaty signing; these would later comprise the core of the MNG.15 While there is no record of their reaction to the Convenios de Lagos, neither is there any evidence that they resisted it. They had consented, by deed if not in word, to become soldiers of the Liberal order under Doblado’s protection, through his service to Comonfort. Doblado’s patronage of military personnel, with Comonfort’s implicit blessing, continued through drastic changes that would remake the military and the place of the MNG within it, beginning with the Convenios de Lagos. Its third and final article reiterated an earlier promise by Álvarez to “conserve and reform the army so that it might recover its morality . . . ensure public order . . . and respectfully obey whatever government the nation may wish to establish.”16 These words went beyond the narrow matter of securing a dissident’s fealty to the presidential claimant. They spelled

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out a determination to fashion the military into an apolitical instrument of national government. Here, however, Liberal idealism deferred to practical necessity. If they were to have any hope of implementing their program, they had to rein in the unruly forces the revolution had unleashed. They also needed to neutralize the army, which had remained loyal to Santa Anna throughout the revolution. The solution to both problems lay in creating a new military structure, as quickly as possible. To that end, on October 31, Comonfort informed state governors that “the auxiliary forces that have been mobilized in your State [sic] as a result of the revolution” would henceforth be denominated national guards, with the governor being authorized to activate as many as he felt necessary. The wording of the order suggests it referred to the thousands of insurgents who had mobilized to fight Santa Anna and not just to the handful of states, including Guanajuato, included in Santa Anna’s 1853 order to form an army auxiliary. Then, on November 4, to further ensure that these newly enfranchised forces would not burden the already overstretched national treasury, Comonfort made the states financially responsible for their national guards. Whether he inspired them or not, both decrees legitimated what Doblado had already done.17 Yet the decrees also asserted Comonfort’s right to regulate Doblado’s use of the MNG of Guanajuato. Comonfort’s orders regarding the MNG came in the midst of a flurry of military reforms enacted by the Álvarez administration in the fall of 1855. Of these, the best known originated not with the Ministry of War but with the Ministry of Justice, headed by former governor and key Liberal strategist Benito Juárez. The Juárez Law of November 22, 1855, set forth the institutional framework of Liberal jurisprudence. Article 42 subjected soldiers to the civilian judicial system in all matters not related to military service, by ending the so-called fuero militar, which had given military courts the exclusive right to determine legal matters pertaining to military personnel. The Juárez Law followed the drastic reduction of the standing army. With the MNG in place throughout the republic, thus redistributing military manpower and expenses among the states and arming local collaborators such as Doblado, Comonfort demobilized the army reserve and cut the total number of active duty troops. The federal budget of December 1855, when Comonfort assumed the presidency, conveys the scale of these reductions. Santa Anna had left behind an army of 40,000; the year-end budget provided for an operational total of 10,638 soldiers. In other words, the standing army had undergone a 75 percent reduction in manpower.18

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Military reconfiguration at the national level coupled with the patronclient network cemented by the Convenios de Lagos made possible the hybridization of Guanajuato’s MNG, beginning with Doblado tapping General Miguel María Echeagaray to be the governor’s military attaché. Echeagaray, a graduate of the national military academy, the Colegio Militar, was a professional soldier whose career was distinguished by a dutybound commitment to the national government, regardless of the political interest that controlled it. Though not a Santanista, he had steadfastly worked to prevent the spread of insurgency into Guanajuato, where his duties included serving as prefect of the city of León. It was in that capacity that he and Doblado likely became acquainted, owing to the prominence of the Doblado family in local affairs. Echeagaray attended the signing of the Convenios de Lagos and oversaw the conversion of the Guanajuato army auxiliary into a national guard thereafter.19 His relationship with Doblado, which ensured his survival of the Ayutla Revolt, initiated a process of hybridization that would continue because the drastic reduction of the army made the MNG an option for those seeking a military position. Personnel from four different sources—the regular army, auxiliary veterans, volunteers, and former insurgents—served side by side in demonstration of the way military reform, molded by the pragmatic approach of Comonfort and Doblado, promoted the MNG’s diversification. Under Doblado, apparently with Comonfort’s blessing, the MNG became a haven for army officers who would otherwise have been displaced, offering them a measure of continuity in a time of uncertainty. Downsizing the army and restricting its freedom of action inevitably alienated many soldiers, more and more of whom would gravitate to a Conservative opposition that presented a grave threat to the Liberal government. Those measures, furthermore, ran counter to the pledge made in the third article of the Convenios de Lagos to “conserve and reform the army.” The author of the pledge, Ignacio Comonfort, strove to honor it in the hope of preserving the fragile peace, though that placed him at odds with his more radical Liberal colleagues. His concern marked him as the lone moderate among the Liberal ruling group brought to power by the Ayutla Revolt. By employing army officers, the MNG realized the postrevolutionary consensus Comonfort sought to promote. Army officers held leadership positions throughout the MNG, starting with its commander, General Echeagaray. Of the five officers who made up Echeagaray’s general staff in the fall of 1855, three came from the army, as did the commanders of at least two of the four infantry battalions and one of the three cavalry squadrons in the MNG.20 Two years later, army

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officers remained a significant presence in what were by definition state forces. A status report compiled by the state government in October 1857 lists army officers as the guard’s principal administrators, with others, as before, commanding individual units within it.21 The preponderance of army officers in senior positions suggests the extent to which Guanajuato offered them shelter from the disruption created by the Ayutla Revolt. Working for the MNG offered an army officer not only job security but also valuable political cover. Hence, Echeagaray could make the transition from serving Santa Anna to serving the Liberals relatively unscathed. So too could Lieutenant Colonel José Joaquín de Herrera, Echeagaray’s second-in-command, who had been stationed in Guanajuato during the summer of 1855.22 He and Echeagaray undoubtedly knew one another, and Doblado may have retained Herrera at the general’s urging. The same appears true of Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Mota Velasco and his kinsman, Commander Salvador Mota Velasco, both of whom appeared among a group Echeagaray listed as army officers in a letter to Doblado in 1857.23 Manuel was Echeagaray’s chief of staff in the fall of 1855. Salvador commanded the MNG’s Second Infantry Battalion, in which capacity he was serving as early as late September 1855, barely a week after the conclusion of the Convenios de Lagos. Colonel Florencio Antillón followed an even more roundabout route to his eventual position as a colonel in the MNG. In the summer of 1855, Antillón served as a captain in a battalion of active-duty reserves from Guanajuato attached to an army brigade based in Guadalajara. After Comonfort captured that city, he absorbed the brigade into his forces and sent it to Lagos ahead of his meeting with Doblado, prompting Antillón to explain himself to the governor. “My situation,” he wrote, “[compelled me] to follow the shortest route to peace . . . I hope, on another occasion, to serve you.”24 The timing and tone of that letter suggests that he, like Echeagaray, had numbered among Doblado’s military contacts. For all of these officers, association with Doblado meant, among other things, protection from hostility on the part of those suspicious of them for their association with the Santanista regime. The official response to criticism of Echeagaray in one periodical clearly illustrates this last point. An October 1855 edition of the broadsheet La Pata de Cabra reported that there was considerable discontent in Guanajuato over Echeagaray’s place on Doblado’s staff. The official newspaper of the state government, La Nacionalidad, which Doblado controlled, issued a terse rebuttal that dismissed the editors of La Pata de Cabra as liars.25 A subsequent edition of La Nacionalidad lauded Echeagaray for the “zeal” he displayed in the “consolidation of order and liberal institutions,”

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presumably a reference to the MNG.26 Thus, official propaganda bestowed on Echeagaray the laurels of a Liberal paladin. This attempt to shape the general’s public image appeared as he was touring the state, meeting with officials and arranging for the organization of local militias.27 Echeagaray had survived the political crisis brought about by the Ayutla Revolt by adopting a civilian patron. His cooperation with Doblado absolved him of the stigma of his Santanista past, while his services would help Doblado to control Guanajuato in the face of a host of challenges, chief among them simmering tensions in the Sierra Gorda, attempts by the insurgent governor of Michoacán to extend his influence into the Bajío, and the imminent threat of armed Conservative opposition.28 Other officers enlisted in the MNG of Guanajuato because it offered them better options than the standing army. Francisco Echagaray, fresh out of the Colegio Militar, solicited a position in December 1855 from General Echeagaray, a fellow alumnus, who appointed the young man as a sublieutenant in the MNG’s First Infantry Battalion. The grenadier Captain Manuel Echeagaray had joined the same unit only four days before. The battalion commander, also an army officer, was Lieutenant Colonel Ignacio Echagaray. Business and politics rested on the foundation of family networks in the corporate society of nineteenth-century Mexico. The military was no different. Families of Basque descent like that of the Echagarays—an alternate spelling of the patronymic Echeagaray—were particularly cohesive, making it all the more likely that Francisco, Manuel, and Ignacio, if not also their commandant general, belonged to the same military clan. If so, Francisco would have found in Guanajuato a measure of security and enhanced prospects for upward mobility unavailable to him in the regular army.29 The MNG was the only option for another Colegio Militar graduate and native of Guanajuato, Sóstenes Rocha. He signed on with the MNG in October 1856, when Florencio Antillón appointed him to a juniorgrade position in the battalion Antillón commanded. The government had banished Rocha from the army for participating in a failed mutiny earlier in the year. The federal authorities might not have known that this former rebel had found his way into the MNG of Guanajuato, or they may have allowed it as a means of rehabilitating him. Either way, the MNG allowed Rocha to resume his military career among the family and friends of his home state and to ingratiate himself with the government he had tried to overthrow.30 Army officers worked alongside veterans of the auxiliary who had made the transition to national guardsmen. Indeed, former auxiliaries formed the backbone of the MNG. Insight into their experience can be gained

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from service records filed with applications for promotion from December 1855. Sergeants Tomás Sustaita and Rito Araiza had both served off and on in the militia for over twenty years. The intermittent nature of their careers fit the pattern for many non-commissioned and junior-grade officers who switched back and forth between different occupations as their prospects in one or the other dictated. Sustaita had enlisted in the Public Safety Battalion of Guanajuato, a paramilitary constabulary, in 1836, rising to the rank of sergeant in that force until he was demobilized in 1844. He retained his rank when he returned to serve in the state militia in August 1851, leaving in November 1851 when he was again demobilized, later to be reactivated in 1853 as a sergeant in the army auxiliary. Araiza, a native of Aguascalientes, followed a similar path. He had enlisted in the army reserve in 1835, rising to the rank of sergeant by the time of his demobilization in 1844. He then relocated to Guanajuato, there to become a sergeant in the same militia unit as Sustaita in 1852. Araiza had served in that capacity for eleven months when he was again demobilized. Two years later he too joined the army auxiliary. What these men did between stints on active duty went unrecorded. Clearly, though, given that they were married and, at forty-four and thirty-eight respectively, entering middle age, Sustaita and Araiza had come to the MNG as experienced and stable non-commissioned officers.31 In other words, they represented exactly the sort the authorities historically wanted to keep in the military, and who now upheld the interests of the Liberal regime. Essential as veterans of the auxiliary had been to establishing the MNG, maintaining its troop strength relied on volunteers, especially after the federal government banned forced conscription in November 1855.32 Sergeant Bonifacio Ramírez enlisted in the MNG in September 1855, lured perhaps by idealism or the chance at a steady income in a time of economic insecurity and the promise that after six months he would rotate out to the Sedentary National Guard. Moreover, with the Ayutla Revolt winding down and the accord between Doblado and Comonfort, Ramírez could be assured of remaining in Guanajuato. However, his initial fourmonth term of service had been indefinitely extended, no doubt because of rampant desertion among the enlisted ranks.33 Despite promotion, two years of duty left him disillusioned, driving him to petition Echeagaray for release. In the time that he served, however, he contributed to the diversification of the MNG. So too did Vicente Vega, the guerrilla leader from northeastern Guanajuato. A small landowner from the district of Victoria, Vega enjoyed a measure of prestige among the communities of the surrounding Sierra

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Gorda. His status as a cabecilla, or informal local leader, carried over into his activities as the commander of a volunteer rural militia during the period of rebellion in the Sierra Gorda prior to the Ayutla Revolt and later into his activities as a rebel. In April 1854, Vega led a group of armed Serranos that attacked and burned the military colony of San Ciro, San Luis Potosí, apparently in protest of burdensome taxes levied by the Santa Anna regime, if not also of its suppression of local authority. After eluding capture for months, Vega linked up with insurgents who menaced the city of Guanajuato in August 1855, and he went on to receive a commission in the MNG as a lieutenant colonel.34 His rank reflected his importance as an insurgent, as did his command of the Second Light Cavalry Squadron, based in San Miguel de Allende near his home. In October 1855, Echeagaray appointed him commandant of the entire district. That office boosted Vega’s already considerable prestige among the rural poor of western Guanajuato. Residents in the hamlet of Cañada de la Virgen, for example, looked to Vega for help in a dispute with Ramón Arteaga, the owner of the hacienda on which they lived and worked. Vega confronted Arteaga with a scathing letter that promised retribution if the complaints from his employees persisted, prompting the villagers to suspend their labor contracts with Arteaga as well as their rent payments. Position and military rank legitimated Vega’s social standing and informal political power. Vicente Vega, once a rebel, was now firmly entrenched in the new regime as a political dependent of Doblado, the man who had sponsored him.35 The case of Vicente Vega enhances our understanding of the connection between insurgency and social mobility in nineteenth-century Mexico. It is well known that with the War of Independence (1810–1821), the formation of an insurgency that through victory became part of the national army provided a path for subaltern groups to improve their social position.36 The extent to which Vega’s leadership of a volunteer militia enhanced his status on the eve of his rebellion suggests that this pattern continued through the early national period. The prestige that accrued to Vega as an individual also accrued to entire groups, such as the ranchero communities of the uplands of Michoacán, whose residents comprised the forces led by the insurgent, then governor and general, Epitacio Huerta; or the indigenous communities of the Sierra Norte of Puebla, who likewise fought under local leaders in support of Juan Álvarez and would go on to form the backbone of the Liberal military in their region.37 With Vicente Vega, therefore, the hybridization of the MNG evinces the social dimension of military reform.

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Combining the former rebel Vega with the former Santanista functionary Echeagaray, and militiamen with regulars, the MNG of Guanajuato manifested a pragmatic approach to military reform that responded to the imperatives of Liberal statecraft. Revolution turned the MNG into an institutional hybrid, one that held an array of formerly antagonistic interests in the postrevolutionary consensus. A key component of that consensus emerges as a common thread in the experience of the soldiers described above. Most, if not all, of them had a prior connection to Guanajuato, either by having been posted there (Echeagaray and his staff officers), or by being natives or long-time residents (Antillón, Sustaita, Ramírez, Rocha, Vega), or by having family connections (Ignacio Echagaray), or some combination of all three. Moreover, Miguel Echeagaray and Florencio Antillón had moved among a social circle linking them to Doblado. In the exigencies of the postrevolutionary moment, with the army paralyzed and the military as a whole thrown into disarray, the soldiers fell back on their regional ties. Region trumped professional identity, reconciling an array of military interests both to one another and to their place in the new political order.38 Imbued with local legitimacy, the MNG co-opted the soldiers. It accommodated them, but it also harnessed them to the state-building projects of Manuel Doblado and Ignacio Comonfort. Of the two projects, we will remain with that of Manuel Doblado for the moment, so as to explore how he used the MNG and how he controlled it. Both aspects of Doblado’s military project reveal how the Ayutla Revolt altered civil-military relations in Guanajuato. Any assessment of Doblado’s military project, however, must begin with explaining why his governorship, even after being ratified by his acquiesence to the Convenios de Lagos, relied on armed force. The explanation is a simple one: he needed the MNG to project his authority within Guanajuato. Recall that Doblado came to his office in a moment of crisis, as the appointee of a committee composed of the state capital’s political elite. Although towns around the state acknowledged his governorship and shored up his otherwise tenuous legitimacy, the fact remained that his authority initially meant little outside the state capital and its immediate environs. Most of Doblado’s fellow governors confronted the same problem. In nearly every state, the Ayutla Revolt led to a new governor displacing his Santanista predecessor. Frequently, the new governor was an insurgent chieftain like Epitacio Huerta in Michoacán, Manuel González in the State of Mexico, or Santiago Vidaurri in Nuevo León. Vidaurri, like Doblado, retained his position even after opposing the presidency of Juan Álvarez, perhaps because Vidaurri, again like Doblado, controlled a sizeable military force

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of his own, which he had used to launch an offensive into central Mexico in the summer of 1855 to hasten the demise of Santa Anna. Though the Liberal government confirmed the governorship of all of these men, they all nevertheless relied on armed force to make their governorship hegemonic at the local level. Manuel Doblado’s use of the MNG provides an instructive example of this otherwise understudied aspect of statecraft at the dawn of the Liberal era. When the MNG deployed as a constabulary, it acted as the blunt instrument of the governor’s office. Where and why detachments were deployed conformed to the political geography of Guanajuato in the wake of the Ayutla Revolt. Unlike other states that had spawned broad-based insurgent movements expressive of general support for the Liberal regime, Guanajuato split. Sympathy for the new national government, if not necessarily for liberalism, characterized the Bajío, the fertile plain that stretched across southern Guanajuato, while anti-government sentiment would develop in the mountainous, poorer northeast. This geographic division was hardly absolute, but it nevertheless accurately contextualizes the MNG’s constabulary activities. For example, in the Bajío, the town of Irapuato challenged Doblado by zealously defending local autonomy long suppressed by Santa Anna and upheld, in principle at least, by the Liberal regime. Unrest erupted that December in response to an effort by the state government to enlist local recruits for the military. Forced levies by Santanista authorities, a deeply unpopular tool of Santa Anna’s authoritarianism, undoubtedly remained fresh in local memory. Whether the recruitment effort that December was intended to provide soldiers for the MNG went unrecorded. Regardless, it so enflamed local passions that angry townspeople took the recruiter hostage and the municipal authorities declared Irapuato in open revolt. Echeagaray, acting on orders from the governor, dispatched Lieutenant Colonel José Herrera and a detachment of the MNG to put down the uprising. An anonymous letter that Herrera received en route warned him to expect resistance from the “armed forces and vecinos [residents]” of Irapuato. Undeterred, his approach put the rebels to flight. They scattered in all directions as he entered Irapuato unopposed. Once in control of the town, the colonel stationed guards at the jail, which in the confusion had been left unattended, and sent a cavalry squadron in pursuit of the retreating gunmen. He then imprisoned Irapuato’s disobedient civil officials. Before his departure for the state capital, Herrera imposed a new city government under the direction of a loyal townsperson and a new ayuntamiento (town council). The MNG, acting on Doblado’s orders, had asserted the primacy

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of the governor’s imperatives over those of the municipality. This was statecraft at its most elemental—the application of armed force to bring political subordinates in line.39 In northeastern Guanajuato, Doblado used the MNG to suppress rebellion that mingled conservatism with anti-government sentiment stirred by earlier rounds of violent unrest in the Sierra Gorda. The precipitating factor seems to be the passage of the Liberal Constitution of 1857, which provoked Conservative resistance throughout Mexico. In late January of that year, Tomás Mejía, a Conservative chieftain from neighboring Querétaro state, stormed into San Miguel de Allende with six hundred armed followers. His arrival, like that of the insurgents who occupied Salvatierra over two years earlier, enflamed local social tensions that in San Miguel entwined with ideological conflict. A crowd, presumably of local plebeians, gathered in the street chanting “Death to the puros” (i.e., Liberals), referring by name to the jefe político (political leader), Manuel González Torres, and others, whose homes the crowd stoned.40 Though too late to apprehend Mejía, Doblado sent a company of the MNG commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Salvador Mota Velasco to San Miguel. The company would remain there through the summer to reinforce the local militia, as assurance to the local elite, to be sure, but above all to demonstrate Doblado’s resolve to combat any future disturbance.41 Deploying the MNG demanded careful attention to command and control to make sure units carried out their task. Local civilian authorities, especially the jefes políticos, played a critical part in that effort. Detachments of the MNG on assignment carried out missions as precisely defined by Echeagaray in conjunction with Doblado, upon completion of which they had to return to base in the state capital. On longer forays they would be stationed in a town under the immediate supervision of the local jefe político. Civil authority in Guanajuato radiated outward from Doblado to the jefes políticos, who under Santa Anna had been known as prefects. Apart from this re-designation, the nature and function of the office remained the same. A jefe político presided over each of the four departments into which Guanajuato was divided and any military activities within it. As the governor’s appointee, the jefe político was first and foremost the governor’s political dependant, and hence his local representative. Within his jurisdiction, however, the jefe político enjoyed broad executive authority. Relations between the jefe político and the communities under his supervision depended on a variety of factors, perhaps the most important of which was his ability to insinuate himself into local social networks, particularly those of the elite.

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Between them, Doblado and his jefes políticos effectively enmeshed the MNG in a web of civilian oversight designed to uphold the sovereignty of the civilian political class and to preserve social peace. Vicente Vega learned this after his confrontation with the hacendado (landowner) Ramón Arteaga. Emboldened by the support of Arteaga’s laborers, one of Vega’s subordinates threatened the administrator of another hacienda for having failed to settle a “debt.” This probably referred to a forced loan Vega had levied, which insurgent leaders commonly did to fund their activities. Of course, Vega was now an official representative of the state government, one who had overstepped his bounds. Francisco Malo, the jefe político of San Miguel de Allende at the time, disapproved of Vega’s alienation of local landowners. So Malo penned a lengthy complaint to Doblado, who assigned Vega to another post outside San Miguel.42 Doblado’s handling of Vega displays the governor’s concern for discipline in the MNG. The governor and his jefes políticos regulated the MNG’s behavior to ensure that it conformed to and upheld the objectives of the civilian order. Recorded breaches of discipline in the MNG were rare, but when they did occur, the governor invariably sided with the jefe político. Here again, events in San Miguel de Allende provide an example. As we have seen, two years after Doblado transferred Vicente Vega away from San Miguel, the governor stationed a company of the MNG there in 1857, at the disposition of the district’s latest jefe político, Manuel González Torres. The monotony of garrison duty and the sundry other discomforts of military life often drove soldiers to look for distraction in the form of alcohol. When he encountered two drunken soldiers in San Miguel, González Torres confronted their superior, Captain Vicente Castañeda, berating him for failing to reprimand his subordinates. Their intoxication obviously compromised their combat readiness at a time of mounting political tensions. Moreover, not unlike Vicente Vega’s aggressive behavior two years earlier, inebriated soldiers discredited both the troops and the interests they represented. The exchange between González Torres and Castañeda degenerated from a heated argument into an exchange of insults, leading the jefe político to jail the captain. Colonel Salvador Mota y Velasco, Castañeda’s commanding officer, wrote directly to the governor in the captain’s defense. Doblado, however, was unmoved. Castañeda, he ordered, was to remain in custody and later to present himself before the governor for a formal reprimand.43 Funding provided another means of maintaining civilian control over the MNG. For that to happen, however, the ability of guardsmen to enrich themselves through fraud had to be curtailed. A month into his tenure as

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commandant general, Echeagaray alluded to the scale of the problem by complaining to Doblado of “men of poor judgment and without valor,” having been chosen by the previous administration to command local garrisons, whose exactions “exasperated the townspeople.”44 In response, Doblado implemented elaborate measures to curtail fiscal impropriety. For example, the state government provided detachments on maneuver with a stipend estimated to be sufficient to accomplish their mission, and not a peso more. If that proved insufficient, or if the mission required the detachment to remain in the field for longer than expected, military units could, with the permission of civil authorities, solicit funds from civilian donors.45 Still, commanders in the MNG exercised little influence over budgetary affairs aside from disbursing those funds allotted them by the state treasury. Civil oversight of the MNG’s expenses extended to the most mundane transactions. For example, the procurement procedure for uniforms involved several bureaucratic steps. A commander would solicit a clothier for a quote on the price he would charge to make the uniforms. The officer would then forward the quote, along with a written statement justifying the expense, to the commandant general, who would then pass the entire file along with his recommendation to Doblado. Upon passing review by the governor and the state treasurer, the amount in question would be released to the commander, who presumably had to submit receipts for the merchandise. Commanders had to have permission from the commandant general before they could spend a single peso, even those moneys already deposited in their unit’s account.46 The degree to which these policies minimized the potential for guardsmen—and jefes políticos, for that matter—to defraud the state and local governments is suggested by the lack of any evidence of such misappropriation encountered in the course of research for this essay. The financial records generated by this fiscal rigor indicate that the MNG cost an enormous sum to operate. Payroll alone consumed thousands of pesos per month. Salaries for just one of the guard’s four infantry battalions in December 1855, the 285-man Hidalgo Battalion, amounted to over four thousand pesos. The payroll for the 715-man Hidalgo Battalion in September 1857, one of two infantry units in the revamped guard, swelled to 10,569 pesos.47 Adjusted for the entire force, payroll for the infantry alone averaged between 16,000 and 20,000 pesos per month, an astronomical sum by the standards of the day. Additional costs for the cavalry squadrons and their horses, uniforms, arms, ammunition, and equipment all compounded the total outlay required of the state treasury. To gain a sense of just how expensive the MNG was to maintain, consider that,

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by Doblado’s own admission, covering the cost compelled the state of Guanajuato to reorganize its finances and contract an international loan, guaranteed by the federal government.48 Doblado also emulated the policy of the federal government, which had accomplished its military reductions in part by requiring states to maintain national guards, by transferring a portion of the funding burden to municipal authorities. Under this arrangement, local authorities resorted to the time-honored practice of borrowing from local notables and worthies to cover administrative expenses, and the MNG came to operate on credit. As outlined above, units would routinely be sent to trouble spots with just enough money to undertake their mission. From that point, their expenses became the responsibility of the unit’s commander working in conjunction with the local authorities. Colonel Calixto Bravo and Captain Rito Razo, for example, marched to San Miguel de Allende in November 1857 to suppress an uprising in the countryside led by a rebellious hacendado. They successfully pacified the district, but soon ran out of funds. The municipal government of San Miguel de Allende, with the permission of the government, negotiated a loan with three moneyed vecinos (residents) to meet the troops’ financial needs. Letters of credit, or libranzas, totaling just over 1,128 pesos, entitled the creditors to reimbursement from the state treasury. The financial interests of wealthy vecinos in places like San Miguel de Allende and others thus depended in part on the continued stability of the regime, for if it fell, there was no guarantee that its successor would honor the debt. By repeatedly having to resort to loans, the MNG securely hitched local elites to the jefe político, and hence to the governor, by their pocketbooks.49 Some elites may have resented this. If so, they would have had to accept the fact, however bitter, that there was no alternative, more fiscally sound regime to support. Any hope of being repaid rested on cooperating with Doblado. Regardless of their ideological orientation, political officials in nineteenthcentury Mexico routinely resorted to impromptu shakedowns of the well heeled. Loans, even if undertaken as an expedient remedy to chronic government insolvency, nevertheless produced an important political windfall for Guanajuato’s new rulers.50 They redoubled the effectiveness of the MNG as an agent of social control that augmented the temporal power of the civilian jefe político. A prime example of this occurred in the town of Pénjamo, an agricultural center in the heart of the Bajío, where jefe político Teodoro Bravo took advantage of the financial straits into which Captain Dario Cruz and his men had fallen to punish a group of recalcitrant hacendados. The state government sent Cruz and a cavalry squadron

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to Pénjamo in late January 1857 to hunt down the Conservative guerrilla Cayetano Villavicencio. Cruz got his man, but in the process ran out of money. After his initial requests for aid from haciendas in the area met with polite refusals and protestations of poverty, the captain appealed to Bravo.51 The jefe político had his own complaint with four of the surrounding haciendas for failing to comply with the state government’s order that every hacienda in the district supply a dragoon for the local defense forces to combat Villavicencio. Seizing the opportunity to solve two problems at once, he collectively fined the owners of the Cueramaro, Tupátaro, Corralejo, and San Igancio haciendas 350 pesos and authorized Cruz to collect the money. Receipts for all but 100 pesos of that total testified to the effectiveness of Bravo’s strategy. Only Cueramaro failed to pay up.52 That the Hacienda Cueramaro held out underscores another aspect of how the MNG maintained a balance of power at the local level. The other three haciendas had settled their accounts with Bravo by February 9. Sometime during the next few days, Cruz again called on Cueramaro, bearing instructions from Bravo that he and his men confiscate a cache of arms hidden there by its chaplain, who also oversaw the hacienda’s mill, and a group of employees hostile to the Liberal government who may also have been collaborating with the guerilla Villavicencio. The hacendado dashed off an angry letter to Doblado denouncing Cruz for abusing his property and offending his family. The governor berated Bravo for the provocation; Bravo responded by claiming that Cruz had overstepped the bounds of his mission and promising a full investigation. Satisfaction for the owner came in the form of two hundred pesos that the state treasury quietly provided Cruz to meet the financial needs of his unit, which more than made up for the original fine.53 Doblado, however, was the ultimate winner in this case. Cruz and his men extended the reach of Bravo into the countryside, opening a rift between a landowner and the jefe político Bravo into which Doblado could assert himself as the sole arbiter. Thus far we have surveyed the formation and administration of the MNG from the perspective of its relation to Manuel Doblado’s governorship. Yet one should not lose sight of the fact that his forging of patron-client ties with displaced members of the standing army, the resulting hybridization of the MNG in terms of its personnel, and the way he wielded those troops all played out under the aegis of Ignacio Comonfort’s effort to fabricate a new military in the wake of the Ayutla Revolt. Comonfort’s time as minister of war (October–December 1855) encapsulated the first phase in the institutionalization of Liberal governance. Through the fall of 1855, a tense peace prevailed despite unease over the threat of violent resistance

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to the Liberal program. Tiring of the burden of the presidency and of dissention in his cabinet, Juan Álvarez stepped down on December 4, 1855, designating Comonfort as his successor. Comonfort would then guide Mexico through the next, equally difficult phase of institutionalization, during which promulgation of a Liberal constitution, eventually issued in 1857, created a flashpoint of controversy that polarized public opinion. As president, Comonfort struggled to maintain consensus among the coalition that emerged out of his pragmatic approach to sorting out the political morass that had attended Santa Anna’s resignation.54 Consisting of Liberal politicians, governors, and the military, the very existence of that coalition, however short lived, would turn out to be in the end testimony to the effectiveness of Comonfort’s leadership. With that in mind, we now turn to examine the military partnership between Comonfort and Doblado. With Doblado’s collaboration, Comonfort forged a military administrative structure dedicated to the Liberal objective of subjecting the military to civilian oversight. The Ayutla Revolt promised to make that dream a reality by paralyzing the army and giving Liberals a chance to remake the military. The route to civilian supremacy began with the Convenios de Lagos, in which Comonfort spelled out the revised terms of the military’s place in the political order. Reform marked the next stage. The dismantling of the army and the buildup of the National Guard, coinciding with the restoration of local civilian authority, created a new context of civil-military relations. Comonfort maintained national oversight of the military both directly and indirectly. He personally supervised the standing army, while allowing governors to do the same for their national guards, with the understanding that they, like their troops, answered to him. How Comonfort wielded his influence will be discussed in more detail below. For his part, Doblado collaborated with Comonfort and showed no inclination to challenge him. Doblado instead concentrated on making his governorship hegemonic in Guanajuato itself, first and foremost through controlling the MNG. Though constabulary duties accounted for most of the MNG’s activities, it remained an army reserve. Its function as such reflected the reconfiguration of the army by Ignacio Comonfort. The army had been considerably reduced by the elimination of its existing reserve in 1855 and defections to the Conservative resistance. To ensure his personal supervision of what remained of the army, Comonfort deployed it around Mexico City. In a time of need, which during the period in question meant an uprising by the government’s opponents, an army column would be sent out under a trustworthy general, who would pick up militia units from the state or states closest to the event to bolster his forces. Comonfort presided over

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an administrative scheme that continued a longstanding policy of assigning the states both civil and military functions that the governor oversaw. Hence, in its civil capacity, a state described a territorial unit of civilian governance, while in its military capacity the state described a military district. From the latter standpoint, the MNG was the state garrison for Guanajuato. But whereas under Santa Anna Guanajuato’s governor had been a general drawn from the army, Doblado was a civilian whose presence announced an end to military rule, though not to authoritarianism. In this way, Comonfort empowered local collaborators such as Doblado, so as to construct a flexible and cost-effective system of military administration and a military attuned to the need to maintain domestic order. Much as Doblado used the MNG to assert himself in Guanajuato, Comonfort used the military—including Guanajuato’s MNG—to rein in obstreperous regional leaders and suppress resistance to the Liberal program. As Doblado proudly pointed out to his state’s legislators in July 1857, the MNG of Guanajuato participated in five such campaigns. Four convey the scope of the MNG’s operations and the way it and other national guards blended with the regular army. The first came in March 1856, when the Hidalgo Battalion, or First Light Infantry, along with Doblado and General Echeagaray, took part in the Battle of Ocotlán, Puebla. There, under Comonfort’s overall command, six thousand troops consisting principally of national guards routed a collection of regular army units whose rebellion posed a grave threat to the Liberal government. Echeagaray included militia from Guanajuato in one of the two brigades he led to Coahuila in November 1856 to subdue Governor Santiago Vidaurri of Nuevo León, who had angrily renounced his allegiance to the Liberal government over its attempts to block his annexation of Coahuila. Echeagaray worked in partnership with Juan José de la Garza, an insurgent leader during the Ayutla Revolt who became the governor of Tamaulipas. De la Garza marched into Coahuila with a brigade composed entirely of militiamen from Tamaulipas.55 On the way back from Coahuila, a portion of Echeagaray’s troops, all from the regular army, rebelled against the Constitution of 1857 and made a brief stand in the state of San Luis Potosí. To ensure that the state capital remained in loyal hands, Comonfort ordered Doblado to detach a battalion from the MNG (fittingly, the “Fieles,” or “Faithful” Battalion) to garrison the city.56 In June 1857, units from the MNG of Guanajuato commanded by colonels Manuel Mota Velasco and Vicente Vega marched with regulars under General Vicente Rosas Landa into the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro to put down the latest rebellion by the Conservative insurgent Tomás Mejía.57

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This catalog of the MNG’s military operations illustrates why it was so heavily armed and modeled after similar elements in the regular army. Out of that description, moreover, emerges a sense of the balance of power between the states and the federal government during the Comonfort presidency. It has been argued that the Liberals in Mexico City sought to empower the states to offset the standing army that heretofore had exercised a preponderant influence in national politics, and whom the Liberals deeply mistrusted. Opposition among the ranks of the army to Liberal policies was considerable, to be sure. But the presence of so many army officers in the MNG of Guanajuato demonstrates that many in the standing army had no trouble making the transition from serving Santa Anna to serving the Liberals who overthrew him. Neither were the Liberals dyed-in-thewool proponents of local autonomy. Their objective was national power, nothing less, so that they might institute their reformist agenda. They had no interest in sacrificing their program on the altar of regional autonomy, and in time, they would centralize administration more completely than anything Santa Anna ever achieved. Ignacio Comonfort’s creative use of command and control made the military instrumental to an entente between the Liberal government and its regional collaborators. The participation of units from Guanajuato in the offensive to counter Vidaurri illustrates an important implication of Comonfort’s decision to distribute military power among the states. If a governor contemplated openly defying the federal government, he had to contend with the fact that the government could bring the forces of neighboring states to bear against him. From that perspective, the MNG of Guanajuato played into a federal initiative that sought to take advantage of rivalries among the states, whether actual or potential, to limit their individual autonomy. In that way and others, the MNG advanced the centralist aims of the Liberal government, and thus embodied the Liberal entente. The military would be preserved and the governors given access to armed force, but only so long as they upheld the supremacy of the Liberal regime. In this way Comonfort, with Doblado’s help and the cooperation of soldiers such as General Echeagaray, bought time for the promulgation of the Constitution of 1857 and the consolidation of Liberal institutions. Hence, the MNG signaled an early success in the ongoing Liberal effort to build up the military capacity necessary to fend off the eventual Conservative challenge.58 However effective either was in the short term, both the MNG and the compromise that sustained it proved transitory. Born out of the Ayutla Revolt, the MNG survived until a violent Conservative reaction to Liberal

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initiatives plunged Mexico into the War of the Reform in 1858. The onset of the War of the Reform, which also marked the demise of the Comon­ fort presidency, caused the MNG to dissolve and so to succumb to the ideological polarization that split the republic’s political and military institutions among rival Liberal and Conservative camps. Veterans of the MNG participated on both sides in the conflict.59 Through the rest of the War of the Reform, the military forces of the states were subsumed into two standing armies, one Liberal and the other Conservative.60 During its brief existence, the MNG of Guanajuato embodied a pragmatic arrangement forged out of political necessity. That this succeeded in Guanajuato owed to the willingness of the three principals involved in the creation and administration of the MNG to work together. Manuel Doblado’s relationship with General Miguel Echeagaray, and the general’s commitment to serving the governor and in time the Liberal administration, opened a space for military personnel to reconcile themselves to new political realities. Ignacio Comonfort recognized this; for that reason, he crafted a structure of military administration that left Doblado, Echeagaray, and the MNG in place, but that also encouraged their cooperation with Comonfort’s designs. Whether similar arrangements prevailed elsewhere in Mexico remains a matter of conjecture. The formation and deployment of paramilitary forces under Governor Santiago Vidaurri in Nuevo León may offer the closest parallel to what transpired in Guanajuato under Doblado. Beginning with his rebellion against Santa Anna in May 1855, Vidaurri used military force to project his authority in the northeast and beyond, and to suppress dissent within his sphere of influence.61 Yet, as we have seen, Vidaurri, unlike Doblado, used his military might to defy Comonfort. Though outwardly similar to Guanajuato, the northeast did not display the same balance of interests. The MNG of Guanajuato may have been unique. As such, the story of the MNG complicates the prevailing image of state militias as avatars of localism in nineteenth-century Mexico. Regional political studies set in Puebla and Guerrero demonstrate that rural people, especially indigenous villagers, embraced the militia and used it to assert local interests and local understandings, a “popular liberalism” that stood in counterpoint to the national vision of Liberal elites. In the well-documented case of the Nahuatl-speaking northern sierra of Puebla, outlying communities would use their participation in the militia to challenge the traditional social, political, and economic dominance of the local towncentered land-owning elite and to press the state and national government to honor their demands for self-rule and agrarian reform.62 By contrast,

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the present study suggests that, under the right conditions, the militia could advance the centralization of power at the cost of municipal autonomy and individual rights. Clearly, the militia in the Liberal era was not cut from whole cloth. Military reform forged the MNG of Guanajuato into an instrument of statecraft, in which “popular liberalism” found no echo, squelched by statist imperatives. Notes Author’s note: I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Secretaría de Gobernación, Archivo General de la Nación, Archivo de Guerra (AGN/Guerra); Archivo Historico del Estado de Guanajuato, Hermeroteca, Colleción de Decretos (AHEG/Decretos); Archivo Historico del Estado de Guanajuato, Fondo Secretaria de Gobierno, Sección Secretaría de Gobierno, Fondo de Guerra (AHEG/G); Archivo Historico del Estado de Guanajuato, Fondo Secretaria de Gobierno, Sección Secretaría de Gobierno, Serie Municipios (AHEG/Municipios); Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, Archivo Histórico Militar de México, Archivo Histórico, Fondo Siglo XIX (AHMM). 1.  José María Lafragua, quoted in Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos imaginarios. Memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apología del vicio triunfante en la República Mexicana: Tratado de moral pública (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Socicológicos, 1992), 169; for another nineteenthcentury critic of the military’s politicization, see José María Luis Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 3 vols. (1836; repr., Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986). For modern scholarship confirming Lafragua’s interpretation, see Günter Kahle, El ejército y la formación del estado en los comienzos de la independencia de México (1969; repr., Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997); and William A. DePalo Jr., The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). 2.  The historiography of the Reform is weighted toward what is popularly referred to in Mexico as the “Great National Decade,” from the promulgation of the Constitution of 1857 through the Liberal triumph over the occupying forces of France and its Mexican Conservative allies in 1867. It is too vast to cite fully. However, for a useful discussion of the historiography of the period, see the introduction in Erika Pani, Para Mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio: El imaginario poítico de los imperialistas (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2001); those unable to read Spanish will find a condensed discussion of the historiography in Pani, “Dreaming of a Mexican Empire: The Political Projects of the Imperialists,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 1–31. Additionally, military historians have yet to engage the Reform, leaving virtually unexamined circumstances that determined the course of the military’s evolution for the rest of the century. Exceptions to this historiographical pattern include Brian R. Hamnett, “The Comonfort Presidency, 1855–1857,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 15, no. 1 (January 1996): 81–100; and Daniel S. Haworth, “Al grito de guerra: War and the Shaping of the Mexican Nation-State, 1854–1861 (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002).

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3.  Juan Ortiz Escamilla, Guerra y gobierno: Los pueblos y la independencia de México (Mexico City: Instituto Mora/El Colegio de México; Seville, Spain: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía/Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), 17. On the pronunciamiento as a discursive medium, see Thomas B. Davis and Amado Ricon Virulegio, eds., The Political Plans of Mexico (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). 4.  “Memoria Leida en la Inauguración del H. Congreso del Estado por el Excmo. Sr. Gobernador Licenciado Don Manuel Doblado, el Dia 31 de Julio de 1857,” 6, AHEG/Decretos. 5.  The organizational structure, uniforms, and armaments of the MNG as of October 1855 are described in “Mayoria de Plaza de Guanajuato, estado que manifiesta la fuerza de todas [las] armas que ecsisten [sic] en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha con espreción de su alta y baja, Guanajuato, 5 October 1855” and “Mayoria de Plaza, estado que manifiesta el armamento, municiones, vestuario, y equipo que tienen los cuerpos que ecsisten en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha, Guanajuato, 19 October 1855,” box 123, folder 1, AHEG/G. See also “Mayoria de Plaza, presupuesto de lo que tiene en los cuerpos que ecsisten [sic] en esta guarnicion, hoy dia de la fecha, ajustado a la revista pasada en 3 de mismo,” 3 December 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. The revamped structure of the MNG is described in “Mayoria de Ordenes, estado que manifiesta la fuerza de todas armas que ecsiste en esta guarnición hoy y en la comprensión de su mando, Guanajuato, 3 July 1857,” box 133, folder 3, AHEG/G; troop strength as of 1857 is cited in Manuel María Echeagaray to Manuel Doblado, Guanajuato, 26 September 1857, box 133, folder 1, AHEG/G. The make and model of firearms the soldiers carried are difficult to pinpoint, insofar as the inventories mentioned above categorized weapons only by type—for example, fusil de pistón (cap-lock musket) or carabina (carbine, also a cap-lock). No conclusive evidence points to the make and model of the carbines. As for the muskets, the British 1853 Enfield is suggested because this musket-rifle was reliable, widely copied, and imported in large quantities to the Americas. An alternate possibility is the US Model 1842 Percussion Musket, a similarly reliable firearm familiar to Mexicans because of its use by US troops in the US–Mexican War. The inventories do not mention pistols. On nineteenth-century British arms industry and small arms exports, see Russell I. Fries, “The British Response to the American System: The Case of the Small Arms Industry after 1850,” Technology and Culture 16, no. 3 (July 1975): 377–403. On the adoption of the Model 1842 Percussion Musket and its use by the US military during the US–Mexican War, see Robert Bruce Winders, Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 96–97. 6.  On the turbulent politics of Mexico through the 1850s, see Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Michael P. Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico: Hombres de bien in the Age of Santa Anna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Torcuato S. Di Tella, National Popular Politics in Early Independent Mexico, 1821–1847 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Will Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821–1853 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998); and Stanley C. Green, The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). For an insightful discussion of the civic militia and its role in tensions between states and the federal government in republican Mexico, see DePalo, The Mexican

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National Army, 24–36; Bryan Edward Vizzini, “State of Siege Republicanism and the Civic Militia in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1823–1837” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1999); and José Antonio Serrano Ortega, El contingente de sangre: Los gobiernos estatales y departamentales y los métodos de reclutamiento del ejército permanente mexicano, 1824–1844 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1993).   7.  DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 92–96, 152–54; Pedro Santoni, “The Failure of Mobilization: The Civic Militia of Mexico in 1846,” Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos 12, no. 2 (1996): 169–94; Santoni, “Where Did the Other Heroes Go? Exhalting the Polko National Guard Battalions in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 4 (2002): 807–44.   8.  For an insightful analysis of the Santa Anna dictatorship, see Carmen Vázquez Montecón, Santa Anna y la encrucijada del estado (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983); and Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 289–316.   9.  Manuel Dublán and José María Lozano, Legislación Mexicana o colección completa de la dispociciones legislativas expedida desde la independencia de la república (Mexico City: Imprenta del Comercio de Dublán y Chávez), 6:773–74. 10.  José Linares to Governor, Celaya, 27 September 1855, box 122, folder 1, AHEG/G; Echeagaray to [Doblado], Guanajuato, 16 October 1855, box 123, folder 1, fols. 1–2, AHEG/G. In name, at least, these categories of national guard harked back to an earlier round of military reorganization in 1848. In that year national guards, created by Congress during the buildup to the US–Mexican War to supplement the regular army, were re-classified as local and mobile militia formations. Local militia served only within the boundaries of their home state. The mobile militia could be deployed elsewhere for up to six months, during which time they transferred to federal command. See DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 149. 11.  On Vega’s 1854 uprising, see Maria del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “Espacio social y crisis política: La Sierra Gorda, 1850–1855,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 9, no. 1 (1993): 65–68. 12.  Gerónimo Calatayud to Governor Celaya, 7 November 1854, Serie Tranquilidad Pública, box 281, folder 21, AHEG/G. 13.  For the exchange between Doblado, Comonfort, and Haro, see the following in Genaro García, ed., Documentos inéditos o muy raros para la historia de Mexico, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1974): Ignacio Comonfort to Manuel Doblado, Guadalajara, 30 August 1855, 193–94; Antonio Haro y Tamariz to Doblado, San Luis Potosí, 5 September 1855, 201–2; and Comonfort to Doblado, Guadalajara, 6 September 1855, 203. 14.  The full text of the Convenios de Lagos appears in Rosaura Hernández Rodríguez, Ignacio Comonfort: Trayectoria política. Documentos (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1967), 144–45. 15.  Echeagaray to Doblado, Guanajuato, 8 September 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. 16.  Hernández Rodríguez, Ignacio Comonfort, 145. 17.  Dublán and Lozano, Legislación Mexicana, 7:592, 593. 18.  The measures listed here can be found in Dublán and Lozano, Legislación Mexicana. Regarding the Juárez Law and the elimination of the fuero militar, see 603;

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on the budgeted size of the army, not including the staff of the national military academy, see 674–81; on the size of the army under Santa Anna, see 638. 19.  Doblado’s uncle served as the secretary of the León municipal council (ayuntammiento) in the 1830s. See, for example, Mariano Huelga and Manuel Doblado to Gov. León, 15 September 1832, box 115, folder 8, AHEG/Municipios. Regarding Echeagaray’s background, see Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México, 6th ed. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1995), s.v., “Echeagaray, Miguel María”; for Echeagaray’s resignation as prefect of León, see Miguel María Echeagaray to Governor and Commandant General, León, 24 August 1855, box 191, folder 1, AHEG/Municipios. One week after the conclusion of the Convenios de Lagos, he submitted a pair of detailed proposals for the organization of the Guanajuato National Guard in Echeagaray to Governor, Guanajuato, 22 September 1855, and 23 September 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. 20.  Army officers were identified by the appellation “Permanente,” listed along with their rank, in monthly status reports that the commandancy compiled. See the following in box 123, folder 1, AHEG/G: “Mayoría de Plaza de Guanajuato. Presupuesto de los haber[es] quen bensen los cuerpos que ecsisten en esta guarnición hoy día de la fecha ajustado a la revista pasada en 3 del mismo, Guanajuato, 5 October 1855”; Batallón Itrubide 2º Móvil, Presupuesto, Guanajuato, 3 October 1855; Exp. 2: Batallón de Hidalgo, 1º Móvil, Presupuesto, Guanajuato, 2 October 1855; and Escuadron Brabo 1er Móvil. Presupuesto, Guanajuato, 4 November 1855. 21.  “Inspecsion [sic] General del Estado. Detalle del mismo. Estado que manifiesta la fuerza de todas [las] armas en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha y en la comprensión de su mando, Guanajuato, 3 October 1857,” box 132, folder 1, fols. 1r–1v, AHEG/G. Echeagaray specifically identified five of the men listed in this status as army officers in [Echeagaray to Gobernador], [draft], [Guanajuato], 21 September 1857, box 132, folder 1, fol. 1r, AHEG/G. 22.  Herrera is listed as “Comandante Principal” of the MNG in its November 1855 budget. “Mayoria de Plaza de Guanajuato. Presupuesto de lo que vensen los cuerpos que existen en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha ajustado a la revista pasada en 3 del mismo, Guanajuato, 3 November 1855,” box 123, folder 1, AHEG/G. His service under Pacheco is mentioned in Francisco Pacheco to Gobernador, Guanajuato, 22 June 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. Herrera may have been related to the president of the same name, General Jose Joaquín de Herrera (president, 1844, 1844–1845, 1848–1851), though no verification of this was uncovered in the course of research for this essay. 23.  “Mayoría de Plaza de Guanajuato. Estado general que manifiesta la fuerza que eciste [sic] en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha, con expresión de su alta y baja, ocurrida en el mes [presente],” Guanajuato, 3 December 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G; Echeagaray to Gobernador, Guanajuato, 26 September 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G; [Echeagaray to Gobernador], [draft], [Guanajuato], September 21, 1857, box 132, folder 1, fol. 1r, AHEG/G. 24.  Francisco de Paula Rodríguez to Doblado, Guadalajara, 8 September 1855; and Florencio Antillón to Doblado, Lagos, 10 September 1855 in García, Documentos inéditos, 221–13, 220–21. 25.  La Nacionalidad (Guanajuato), 21 October 1855, 4. 26.  La Nacionalidad (Guanajuato), 15 November 1855, 4.

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27.  Echeagaray to Gobernador, Guanajuato, 3 November 1855, box 123, folder 1, AHEG/G. 28.  On tensions in the Sierra Gorda, see Echeagaray to Félix Zuloaga [copy], Guanajuato, 27 December 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. On the incursion by forces loyal to Epitacio Huerta, the governor of Michoacán, into southern Guanajuato, see Joaquín Belarca to [Doblado], Valle de Santiago, 30 September 1855, box 122, folder 9, AHEG/G. Comonfort ordered Huerta to pull his forces out of Guanajuato after the Convenios de los Lagos, but they remained a threat. See José Linares to [Doblado], Celaya, 23 September 1855, box 122, folder 1, AHEG/G. Conservative opposition eventually materialized the following year. See, for example, Manuel González Torres to Secretario del Gobierno del Estado, San Miguel de Allende, 12 November 1856, box 125, folder 5, AHEG/G. 29.  Echeagaray to [Doblado], Guanajuato, 8 December 1855, box 123, folder 1, AHEG/G; “Noticia que manifiesta los caudales recibidos y destribuidos en todo el mes de Diciembre de 1855 [para el Batallón Hidalgo del Guardia Nacional Movil de Guanajuato],” Guanajuato, 31 December 1855, box 121, folder 1, fol. 1v, AHEG/G. 30.  Florencio Antillón to Nicolás Medina, Guanajuato, 2 October 1856, box 126, folder 1, fol. 1r, AHEG/G; Diccionario Porrúa, “Rocha, Sóstenes.” 31.  “Guardia Nacional móvil del Estado de Guanajuato. Batallon Ligero de Hidalgo. Hoja de servicios del Sargento Segundo Tomas Sustaita, Guanajuato, 31 December 1855,” and “Guardia Nacional móvil del Estado de Guanajuato. Batallon Ligero de Hidalgo. Hoja de servicios del Sargento Segundo Rito Araiza,” in box 121, folder 1, AHEG/G. 32.  Prohibition of the leva (forced draft) was enacted on 7 November 1855. See Dublán and Lozano, Legislación Mexicana, 595. 33.  Echeagaray to Doblado, Guanajuato, 21 September 1857, box 133, folder 1, fols. 1–2, AHEG/G. Echeagaray estimated that desertion amounted to eight to ten men per day for the entire force. See Echeagaray to Doblado, Guanajuato, 17 November 1855, box 123, folder 1, fol. 2, AHEG/G. 34.  Vázquez Mantecón, “Espacio social y crisis política,” 65–68. Vega’s social connections are discussed in the following communications from the army’s record of Vega’s rebellion, found in XI/481.3/4454, AHMM: Tomás Mejía to Gobernador y Comandante General del Departamento de Querétaro, Campo en Chilcuan [Colorado], 16 May 1854, fol. 157; and Juan J. Pastor to Francisco Pacheco, San Luis de La Paz, 30 April 1854, fol. 284. Vega’s participation in insurgent forces threatening the city of Guanajuato is mentioned in Mariano de la Cuesta to Doblado, Mellado, August 21, 1855, box 283, folder 6, AHEG/G, “Espediente [sic] que contine los documentos relativos a la adhesion al plan proclamado en México el dia 13 de agosto, y al nombramiento de Gobernador del Departamento hecho en el Sor. Lic. Manuel Doblado,” fol. 45. 35.  Vega’s command is listed in “Mayoría de Plaza de Guanajuato. Estado general que manifiesta la fuerza que eciste en esta guarnición hoy dia de la fecha, con expresión de su alta y baja, ocurrida en el mes [presente], Guanajuato, 3 December 1855,” box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. On his appointment as commandant of San Miguel, see Juan J. Pastor to Gobernador, San Miguel de Allende, 11 October 1855, box 120, folder 18, AHEG/G. On Vega’s confrontation with Arteaga, see Francisco J. Malo to Gobernador, San Miguel de Allende, 4 November 1855, box 191, folder 2, fols. 1r–1v,

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AHEG/Municipios. Malo’s communication to the governor is accompanied by Vega to Ramón Arteaga [n.p.], 20 October 1855. 36.  For detailed examples of the social trajectory of insurgents after independence, see Jaime Olveda, Gordiano Guzmán, un cacique en del siglo XIX (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1980); Theodore Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero: Mexico’s First Black President (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001); and the discussion of Juan Álvarez and Nicolas Bravo in Fernando Díaz Díaz, Caudillos y caciques: Antonio López de Santa Anna y Juan Álvarez (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1972). 37.  For background on Epitacio Huerta, see Haworth, “Al grito de guerra,” 76–85. On the military activities of the communities of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, see Guy P. C. Thomson, with David LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), in which Thomson offers a detailed analysis of national guards in the northern sierra of Puebla. 38.  On the importance of region and regionalism in Mexican history, see Eric Van Young, ed., Mexico’s Regions: Comparative History and Development (San Diego: Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1992). For an assessment of the political significance of regions in nineteenth-century Mexico, see Timothy E. Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 39.  Echeagaray to Gobernador, Guanajuato, 24 December 1855, box 123, folder 1, fols. 1r–3r, AHEG/G. 40.  Luis Quitanán to Secretario del Gobierno del Estado, San Miguel de Allende, 12 January 1857, box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G. 41.  The military response to Mejía’s raid on San Miguel de Allende is described in the following documents found in box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G: on the presence of the MNG company, see “Batallon H[idalgo] 1º Ligero, 4ª Comapañia. Lista para la revista de comisario que pasan los individuos de la compañia en la fecha. Sección de Guanajuato en [San Miguel de] Allende”; on the organization of local militia companies, see Manuel González Torres to Secretario del Gobierno, San Miguel de Allende, 27 June 1857. 42.  Malo to Gobernador, San Miguel de Allende, 12 November 1855, box 120, folder 18, AHEG/Municipios. 43.  Salvador Mota Velasco to Doblado, San Miguel de Allende, 4 July 1857, and Salvador Mota Velasco to Manuel Arizmendi, San Miguel de Allende, 8 July 1857, box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G; Manuel González Torres to Secretario del Gobierno del Estado, San Miguel de Allende, 11 July 1857, box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G. 44.  Echeagaray to [Doblado], Guanajuato, 23 September 1855, box 121, folder 2, fol. 4r, AHEG/G. 45.  Dario Cruz to [Doblado], Penjámo, 8 February 1857, box 131, folder 5, fol. 1v, AHEG/G. 46.  Procurement procedures are described in Echeagaray to [Doblado], Guanajuato, 26 September 1855, and 29 September 1855, box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G. 47.  “Batallon Ligero de Hidalgo. Presupuesto de los haberes que vense el expresado en el presente mes segun la revista pasada en 3 del mismo, Guanajuato, 4 December 1855,” box 121, folder 2, AHEG/G; “Presupuesto de los haberes que se designan

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por esta Inspección General al Batallon de Hidalgo 1ª móvil de guardia nacional del Estado,” in Echeagaray to Doblado, 26 September 1857,” box 131, folder 1, AHEG/G. 48.  “Memoria Leida en la Inauguración del H. Congreso, 31 July 1857, 10.” 49.  Manuel González Torres to Secretario del Gobierno del Estado, San Miguel de Allende, 13 November 1857 and 21 December 1857, box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G. For other examples, see Dario Cruz to Gobernador y Comandante General del Estado, Pénjamo, 8 February 1857, box 131, folder 5, AHEG/G; Manuel Doblado to Gobernador de Este Estado, Guanajuato, 3 April 1857, box 133, folder 1, AHEG/G; José M. Bribiesca to Secretario del Supremo Gobierno del Estado, Pénjamo, 4 July 1857, box 131, folder 5, AHEG/G; González Torres to Secretario del Gobierno del Estado, San Miguel de Allende, 6 August 1857, box 131, folder 8, AHEG/G. 50.  For historical perspective on this practice, see Barbara A. Tenenbaum, The Politics of Penury: Debts and Taxes in Mexico, 1821–1856 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). An example of Conservative officials resorting to forced loans is discussed in Daniel S. Haworth, “Civilians and Civil War in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Mexico City and the War of the Reform, 1858–1861” in Pedro Santoni, ed., Daily Lives of Civilians in Latin America from the Wars of Independence to the Drug Wars (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008). 51.  Dario Cruz to Gobernador, Pénjamo, 6 February 1857, and 8 February 1857, both in box 131, folder 5, AHEG/G. 52.  Teodoro Bravo to Secretario del Supremo Gobierno del Estado, Pénjamo, 9 February 1857, and 19 February 1857, both in box 131, folder 5, AHEG/G. 53.  See the following in box 131, folder 5, AHEG/G: Bravo to Secretario, 19 February 1857, fols. 1r–2r; Bravo to Secretario, Pénjamo, 14 February 1857, fols. 1r–1v; and Bravo to Secretario, 19 February 1857, fol. 3r. 54.  This summation of the Comonfort presidency derives from Hamnett, “The Comonfort Presidency.” 55.  “Ejército Mexicana. División Rosas Echeagaray. 14 November 1856,” XI/481. 3/6878, fol. 3r, AHMM. 56.  Manuel Doblado to Gobernador, Guanajuato, 23 May 1857, box 133, folder 2, AHEG/G. 57.  On Guanajuato units operating under General Rosas Landa, see the following in AGN/Guerra, vol. 31, section 255: “Brigada Rosas. Pagaduria. Presupuesto general del vencimiento de la espresada, ajustado a la revista del mes de Junio de 1857” [copy], Querétaro, 15 June 1857, fol. 34r; Manuel Mota y Velasco to Vicente Rosas Landa, Tierra Blanca, 8 August 1857, fol. 39r; and Vega to Rosas [copies], Tierra Blanca, 6 June, 14 June, and 15 June 1857, fols. 36r, 36v, 37r. 58.  The buildup of Liberal military capacity after 1858 is discussed in Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Thomson and LaFrance, Patrotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism. 59.  For example, Vicente Vega fought for the Liberal government. See Vicente de la Vega to Governor, 9 August 1858, box 136, folder 2, AHEG/G. Salvador Mota Velasco and Juan José Herrera fought for the Conservative government. See Francisco Velez to Governor, 9 September 1859, box 141, folder 3, AHEG/G. 60.  The armies of both sides requisitioned troops from the areas in which they operated. For an example, see the following description of Florencio Antillón’s recruitment

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of troops while on the march through western Guanajuato during the War of the Reform: Ignacio Fernández to Secretario del Gobierno del Departamento, Guanajuato, 6 February 1860, box 142, folder 1, AHEG/G. Antillón, like Vega, fought for the Liberal government. 61.  Vidaurri’s activities are discussed in Mario Cerutti, Economía de guerra y poder regional en el siglo XIX: Gastos militares, aduanas y comerciantes en los años de Vidaurri (1855–1864) (Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico: Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 1983). 62.  On popular liberalism, see Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero,1800–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Mallon, Peasant and Nation; Thomson and LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism; and Thomson, “Bulwarks of Patriotic Liberalism: The National Guard Philharmonic Corps and Patriotic Juntas in Mexico, 1847–88,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22, nos. 1–2 (March 1992): 31–68.

c h apter three

Behaving Badly in Mexico City Discipline and Identity in the Presidential Guards, 1900–1911 Stephen Neufeld

At around eleven one morning during March 1902, residents of Mexico City witnessed the unusual spectacle of a presidential guardsman drunkenly careening past parading fellow guardsmen and officers—in a possibly stolen carriage—with a known prostitute.1 This brazen display of disregard for both societal niceties and the disciplinary expectations that surrounded the elite presidential guards of the late Porfirian regime (1900–1911) showcases the profoundly troubling state of this unit. Entirely volunteers, the presidential guards served as contracted professionals in a highly visible and selective honor guard. In contrast to the conscripted troops of the leva (forced draft), these men came from lowermiddle-class families and had to meet strict requirements in order to enter the ranks of the presidential guards. Yet this does not tell the whole story. A surprising number of these volunteers had repeated disciplinary charges, not simply matters of spit-and-polish fastidiousness on the part of overzealous officers but also serious problems of assault, drunkenness, and desertion. Poor conduct, insubordination, ineptitude, cowardice, and a myriad of complaints marred the service records of what should, in theory, have been one of the most decorous and controlled parts of the Mexican military. Drawing from the approach of the New Military History,2 this essay explores the lived experiences of the presidential guards, offering some explanations for how they understood their place in Mexico and how they became a metaphor for the nation itself in an army undergoing profound 81

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transformations. In many senses, the military became a stand-in, the face, of a changing nation as it entered a period of accelerated social and technological changes. The presidential guards, experimental and prominent, revealed new concerns and represented a model for how Mexico was to enter modernity. The regime presented military service as a counterpoint and counterargument to the predations by bandits, Indians, and léperos (urban underclass). The veneer of modern progress, nonetheless, lay uneasily over deep social divides.3 A social history of the presidential guards thus shows how a particular group of men with a particular status came to identify with the frustrations and mentalities of the lower and middle classes in Mexico City under Porfirio Díaz. By looking at their exceptional circumstances as men with unclear social boundaries, it becomes possible to discuss the problems, not of soldiers per se, but of normal people disciplined through encounters with rigid and limiting structures, produced by categorizations that set their roles in the rising middle class, as urban men and as mestizos.4 I argue that officers’ assumptions about civilismo (civilized modern behavior) often contradicted guardsmen’s personal understandings of what was proper for middle-class military men, and broad Porfirian social divisions were thus manifested in the transgressions and punishments of this elite unit. Relative stability and technological advances enabled the Porfirian army to exert itself in unprecedented ways during the years of 1876–1911. Far out of proportion to their size, the armed forces absorbed half the national budget and penetrated every area of society, with military officers making up, among other things, the roster of many of the most important politicians, engineers, and writers. Thousands of young men, often forcibly conscripted, entered a national army that extended the government into regions previously beyond centralized influence or authority. At the same time, the regime’s ostentatious public rituals of parade and maneuver stood in stark contrast to the violent eradication of highwaymen, political dissidents, and indigenous rebels. Hatred of Porfirian brutality has obscured the significant contributions the military made to national development. Díaz brought a new era of progress to the nation and its army, consolidating the Liberal project and harnessing it to the rapidly accelerating technologies and social changes of his time.5 He and his advisors turned to the philosophy of positivism, seeking in science and technology to resolve the persistent problems of the nation. Serious internal opposition repeatedly emerged, including military rebellions and conspiracies in 1877, 1878, 1879, 1886, 1890, and 1893.6 Scattered Indian attacks by Apaches, and larger uprisings by Yaqui, Mayo, and Maya, continued through much of the era.7 Army reform, a priority even under Antonio López de Santa Anna,

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picked up speed. New ordinances and regulations appeared every few years, the General Staff became efficient and expanded in size, education in Colegio Militar (national military college) was updated, and new technologies of arms, tactics, and transport were adopted. Mexico was not alone in efforts to reform and modernize, and the military as an institution was inspired by changes in Europe, the United States, and in other Latin American nations. By the mid-century, Latin America saw the culmination of Liberal oligarchic regimes’ drive for power, eliminating or diminishing Conservative or more democratic options from competition. With their immediate political troubles under control, regimes began the delayed project of modernizing their military forces with new arms, regulations, training, and tasks. European contractors (especially Krupp of Germany and Schneider-Kreusot of France) aided them and made great inroads with a number of militaries across the region, including those in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Efforts by the Germans in Mexico fell short of the advisors’ expectations, due in part to the difficulty recruits had in learning German marching songs.8 Likewise, the army brass watched developments in the United States closely, and the two militaries seemed to co-evolve as they rebuilt their general staffs, federalized regional forces, and installed new military schools. The process of professionalizing the military in Latin America did not preclude its intervention in politics (as in Brazil in 1889) nor did it guarantee success (for example, Argentine victories against indigenous groups versus Mexican attempts to control the Yaqui). By the last decades of the Porfiriato, significant advances in military sophistication still did not remedy the lack of popular enthusiasm for military service, recruitment continued to be an issue in most militaries, and most were still relying on conscription despite Liberal political rhetoric. Yet an important renovation had occurred almost universally across the region as militaries reformed and centralized control and shared their ideas with the international community through military journals. In Mexico, the process of modernizing came with considerable political impact. With the army spread thin, it became reliant on rail and telegraph to face serious threats and on local subordinate forces to put out brushfires; it would never allow any one officer to gain too much authority in one region. Making this more feasible, the federal government began to systematically dismantle the national guard units and regularly transferred all officers to ensure that none gained personal loyalties in any region. The new Liberal nation thus became subject to a centralized and national army structure, without interference from regional powers, and through army service it would ideally instill patriotism in its reformed citizenry.

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The army and its auxiliaries would balance against local governments and strongmen, bringing the federal nation into new prominence across the country.9 Meanwhile, in the capital, army units increasingly functioned as part of state theater, promoting images of stability, legitimacy, and modernity to their varied audiences.10 The Presidential Guard represented a new initiative within the Mexican military, an experiment in extending and including a growing middle class into new areas of social life. A brief look at the daily lives of the Guard raises some questions about the nature of military service as a career and about its incorporation of different classes.11 Caught between conflicting perceptions, the soldier’s experience reveals the fluidity of class identity. At the turn of the century, elite Mexicans were rapidly incorporating middlesector and industrial interests into an older framework and into an urban geography that defined appropriate behavior—an instruction in civilismo. The conflicts that emerge from personnel records offer insights into the clash between personal and institutional expectations, a collision manifested in terms of masculinity, class, and, to a lesser degree, race.12 The perspective of soldiers under punishment emphasizes tensions and contradictions that demonstrate how these men saw their position as men with social status higher than an ordinary soldier and different from a civilian. The regular federal army continued to rely on forcibly, even viciously, recruited men; as many as two hundred thousand Porfirian Mexicans were dragged from homes, farms, and towns to face the brutal discipline of barracks life that sought unsuccessfully to shape recalcitrant Indian peasants into loyal national servants. By contrast, the guards were envisioned and presented as the ideal of the modern, European-like soldier, but in quotidian practices proved little different from their “less-civilized” counterparts in the normal army. As a solution to the perceived vices of the indigenous and mestizo lower classes, they failed; as a lens to examine the normative expectations of subjectivity, they excel. The arena of conflict between elite project and personal experience illuminates the idea of the Guard as a new and experimental institution and one where vastly different imaginings of social order, and of contrasting notions of properly civil behaviors, manifested as violent clashes of will.

A View Inside—The Origins of the Presidential Guard Warding the highest echelons of the nation was the least of duties for the Guard. The idea of a unit devoted to escorting and protecting the head

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of the republic was far from new, yet between 1867 and 1900 the guards surrounding the president came from a less-select choice of men taken from the assorted battalions on service in Mexico City. The oficial de ordenes (officer of orders) selected a handful of soldiers from a variety of units, with some apparent preference for engineers (to 1895), turning more to sappers (1896–1900), and drawing the rest from cavalry units.13 For the most part, these soldiers represented the outer shell of security, visible deterrence, while plainclothes bodyguard details handled the practical task of preventing assassinations. The troops, therefore, held a far more ceremonial role as honor guards and sentinels, appearing with the president in public outings as symbols of military and state power. Furthermore, their presence added to the president’s own military credentials by association.14 Having risen to power in the guise of a national war hero, Díaz sought constantly to reinforce this image. His public persona was basically a military one, and he wore his uniform to most formal state occasions. This especially proved true during the large martial ceremonies, whether annual such as April 2 (for the 1867 retaking of Puebla), May 5, or September 15, or at special events such as public troop reviews, military college graduations, or large-scale maneuvers. At the same time, he strategically assumed civilian garb when it better suited the audience, as with inaugurations of monuments or railways. While they were, most often, armed doormen and parade accoutrements, there was at least one serious assassination attempt on Díaz that publicly justified their presence. In 1897, a desperate Arnulfo Arroyo attempted to kill the president during the September 16 Independence Day Parade through Alameda Park.15 Captured in the ensuing moments, due to the quick action of Lieutenant Colonel Ángel Ortiz Monasterio, the man “suspiciously” died thereafter in custody when a lynch mob of some twenty off-duty police managed to enter his cell and stab him nine times.16 Nonetheless, this incident, and others less publicized, did not provide sufficient reason to radically overhaul the honor guard, who were not in any case expected to deal with such problems. For a number of reasons, the ad hoc system of selecting guards no longer satisfied the military brass by the turn of the century. During the tenure of the reform-minded General Bernardo Reyes as secretary of war (1900–1902), he ordered the formation of a new and more selective detachment. Decreed into existence on July 25, 1900, the unit was to consist of troops drawn permanently from the “best soldiers and classes of the army’s regiments” who met certain physical and moral characteristics.17 The company numbered fifty soldiers with five officers and a picador (standard bearer), with thirty

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to forty typically accompanying presidential excursions as escort.18 The guards’ duties specifically entailed barracks service, escort detail, providing orderlies (to General Staff members and in the Presidential Salon), and servicio de parejas. The latter duty seems to have meant simply that paired units, with the more senior soldier responsible for the junior, would undertake miscellaneous errands and guarding, yet oddly appears under the service regulations for the unit.19 At all high state functions such as funerals, receptions, inaugurations, and parades, the guards took part as a stiff and silent presence surrounding Díaz. In addition to their official escort duties, which were restricted to the president, guards also drove and maintained the few automobiles used by Díaz and seem to have also been responsible for grooming their own stable of horses. Several of the guards also provided security and service for select members of the General Staff as orderlies.20 The recently overhauled General Staff, a European measure first adopted by the United States and Mexico in the 1830s, offered the corporate framework into which the new unit would fit. In addition to these administrative details, the guards embodied a modern face for the public to witness. Being in the public eye more often than most soldiers, and especially noted by high-ranking diplomats and foreign guests, these men also represented their national military as exemplars of the finest soldiers available—at least in theory. A number of motivations justified the rather expensive re-creation of an honor guard for the regime: the rise of a modern and theatrical performance of nationalism, the personal ambitions and needs within a professionalizing military, and the opportunity for an experiment in class-based voluntary recruitment. First among these, Díaz’s government became increasingly reliant upon public ceremonies to recreate a sense of nation, history, and heroism, which tended to reinforce the seeming legitimacy of the regime. From enormous state funerals, for example that of Manual Romero Rubio, to ritual inaugurations that set Cuauhtémoc and Benito Juárez monumentally at the center of the nation, the Porfirians worked incessantly to present their own vision of Mexico, and to dictate the terms in which it might be discussed.21 Beyond the great state funerals, the aging cohorts of the Porfirian officer corps also meant an ever-increasing number of smaller funerals with military honors, to the point that in the 1890s these deaths actually stretched the manpower of units in Mexico City.22 The creation of a new and updated guards unit with modern arms and uniforms, trained and drilled in European fashion, to accompany the visual spectacle that surrounded Díaz’s swelling cult of personality should not surprise. Rather, one wonders that it took so long to appear.

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The second rationale stems from the internal politicking of the military administration. Reducing contact between certain local generals and the national palace doubtless had political implications, if not necessarily motives. Reyes, a popular general and former governor, understood maneuver better than many of his colleagues. Providing this unit presumably impressed his president with his concern and care for making Díaz look good. Nevertheless, this played a far less important role in motivating Reyes than did the opportunity to attempt something a bit radical by nineteenth-century standards.23 The creation of the Presidential Guard mere months after his taking power should not be dismissed as coincidental to Reyes’s reformist ambitions. Before entering the position of secretary of war and marine in 1900, he wrote a beautifully illuminated volume of military history for General Vicente Riva Palacios’s series on Mexican political and social evolution.24 Complete with a respectful nod to the outgoing General Felipe Berriozábal, the tome represents nothing less than a declaration of Reyes’s intention to have the military elite replace the more modernist científicos (scientists) in advising the government.25 The Presidential Guard represents on a smaller scale what he hoped to accomplish more widely, namely, the establishment of a voluntary and motivated army of literate and middle-class soldiers. As a wider concept, this type of service would serve to mitigate new tensions between industrial and working classes and, it was hoped, bring a more unified sense of nationalism to the fore. Concurrent with this smaller project, Reyes simultaneously created the Second Reserve concept.26 This short-lived, but quite popular, experiment in voluntary middle-class military service saw immediate results, with some three thousand recruits drilling in Mexico City and thousands more signing up in the countryside. Seemingly filling a void in a middle class nostalgia for the National Guard (diminished in the past few decades) and eager for more inclusion into national life, the Second Reserve could not survive the quite-justified fears of Díaz that these classes might one day resent and overthrow him. In 1903, after Reyes’s retirement, the regime disbanded the Second Reserve in the face of vocal public opposition. Nonetheless, the smaller experiment in the Presidential Guard continued. The unit provided an opportunity for the General Staff, who continued to command the Guard, to undertake something of an experiment in expanding the social composition for, and changing the conditions of, military service. With at least eight different universal recruitment and service programs in serious consideration, it becomes evident that the General Staff envisioned this as an effort to deviate from the usual pattern

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of conscripting lower-class soldiery, although they conspicuously avoided mentioning the racial “problem.”27 By framing the “recruitment problem” in terms of class, new solutions to professionalizing might be sought; race was beyond reforming in the regular army, which entailed up to half its numbers in indigenous recruits. It may not be surprising then that the Guard Reyes called into being consisted primarily of men from middleclass and upper-lower-class backgrounds. Furthermore, once selected and vetted, these men were not to be treated with the usual disdain and disregard that generally accompanied service in the ranks. For the most part, the General Staff succeeded in finding precisely the type of men they sought for the Presidential Guard, at least on paper. Around 30 percent of the recruits came from a family background of small business owners (comerciantes), and over 50 percent came from trades including tailors, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, cobblers, and the like. A small number filled specific functions in the unit, such as the talabartero (harness-maker). Only a very few came from such lowly professions as porters or day workers, and a handful of older veterans from the rurales, or gendarmes, filled out the rosters. Overwhelmingly, this remained a troop with higher than average socioeconomic background throughout its lifetime. The officers maintained this standard by strictly adhering to the regulations for acceptance in the Guard. Upon applying, recruits had to provide three character references and two medical checks, they had to be between twenty-five and forty-five years old, and they had to be at least 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm), although they averaged about 5 feet 7 inches (170 cm).28 Assuming they had robust health and sound references, they further had to prove their ability to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, and display their equestrian skills. They finally had to enter into a twoyear contract, agreeing to a bond of one hundred pesos for equipment and mount deducted from their pay at a rate of twenty-five centavos daily. The majority of guardsmen recruited hailed from Mexico City and State, the Bajío, and Jalisco, and none at all came from important (to Díaz and Reyes) states such as Oaxaca or Nuevo León. More pointedly, none at all came from troubled regions of the nation, such as the Yucatán, Sonora, or Chihuahua, where various insurrections and uprisings plagued the regime well into the twentieth century. It may then have been an issue of loyalty, as well as pragmatic hiring, that limited recruitment geographically. Questions of loyalties also played a role in the decision to hire younger men who had fewer clientalistic ties and no memory of, or connection to, old political debates of the Restoration era (1867–1876).

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Aside from occasionally taking old grizzled veterans, the vast majority of new guards had barely been born when Díaz first took office in 1876. The young new face of the volunteer military had an average age of 25.6 years at entry, although years of physical work, childhood diseases, and rough lifestyles were evident in the presence of scarring on some 30 percent of those faces. Here aesthetics also had a part. Perhaps rugged good looks, perhaps the norm of the day, the Guard was also informally screened to include better-looking men than usual, and newspapers discouraged the less-handsome public from applying.29 The record further shows that guards with more European features did not appear regularly, listing only 6 of the 316 as having green or blue eyes, and these few only remained in service a year or so.30 Nevertheless, photographs indicate that they were at least presentable, if not necessarily a showcase of military polish.

The Life and Duties of a Guardsman Once inducted, guards received reasonable pay of one and a half pesos daily, with small bonuses for promotions or re-upping after five years of service, and they also had a small common trust fund upon which they could withdraw money for emergencies and save for an eventual pension of seventy-five centavos a day.31 They were provided with health care, basic food and shelter, the use of a horse (officers had to purchase these themselves), and most of their clothing and uniforms, for which they were responsible.32 Guards had relatively little time off, a day a week at best, and infrequently granted leaves, but they could and did find acceptable reasons to resign from service if they wished, and they had most evenings to themselves. Being an elite unit also meant different expectations for both the men and their officers. Upon acceptance, all guards received the equivalent rank to first sergeant in the regular army, a promotion of five grades.33 As these men were volunteers, a sharp distinction from the majority of the conscript army, opportunities for them to improve their skills and move up through the ranks were explicitly ordered in the regulations. Officers were enjoined by regulations not only to provide training in military skills but also “to inculcate in them the desire to distinguish themselves for their faultless [intachable] conduct [by] giving them the best example.”34 They seem to have been quite well trained, particularly warranting praise in their swordsmanship, drill maneuvers, and use of technology; they had a telephone and several cars.35 Indeed, the regulations go on to demand special treatment for the unit: “As this company is made up of volunteers and

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distinguished soldiers, they should enjoy the broadest of freedoms, compatible with their good service, and their officers will always treat them well.”36 Nevertheless, despite this easygoing treatment many guards eventually ran afoul of Article 44, which allowed the dismissal of any deemed “for their bad conduct” unworthy of belonging to the detachment. Unlike common soldiers, about one in five guardsmen was formally married, and it may be assumed that many more had the sort of informal relationships with soldaderas (female camp followers) that observers remarked upon.37 Among regular units, it was quite common and legally recognized for men to have amasias (unmarried lovers or partners), and these women appear regularly in records for the Comandancia Militar (military command). For those married, or with regular partners, they could even bring the women (mujeres de tropa) into the barracks, although known prostitutes (mujeres de mala vida) remained officially prohibited.38 These relationships represent an intriguing element of the intimate yet public lives of the soldiers. In general, the army continued to rely upon soldaderas for a garrison’s quality of life, to thus prevent desertions over hardship, and to provide an adequate diet; officially, this practice ended in 1925. For that matter, the overlap between mujeres de tropa, amasias, and legal wives tended to obscure an unenforceable ban on soldaderas and could also display a merely pragmatic policy regarding official marriage and its paperwork.39 In any case, guards originally from Mexico City were no more likely to be married than their colleagues were, and the married ones proved no less likely to get into trouble—single or not, drinking and disorderly conduct were evenly distributed. When soldiers returned to the barracks at night, their women, and sometimes children, did as well. In other barracks or with other units on campaign, women not only were permitted entrance but also were considered absolutely necessary to the daily functions of the military, undertaking childcare, foraging, sewing, and even some elements of health care, in addition to sexual relations. In this sense, the guard experience too can only be fully understood as an identity formed in the context of family life. Specifically, the types of macho or hypermasculine behaviors they exhibited were exacerbated by the spectatorship of the opposite sex—posturing, drinking, and fighting became honor-bound performances and undermined discipline in ways largely controllable in homo-social barracks abroad. Relationships with outside family members continued also, and in particular, mothers appear in the record from time to time as the beneficiaries of guards’ back pay or pensions, often drawn on the dismissal or death of an unmarried soldier.40 While it is entirely possible that these men had

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informally supported a mujer de tropa previously, there seems to have been no question of whether or not to send owed money to the mother, and no hesitation in denying a disgraced soldier the right to keep his own pay. Family also intervened in certain legal cases, especially in applying for injunctions, as well as bringing food and supplies to guards held in military prisons when it was feasible.

The Unstable Experiment of an Unstable Nation In all then, the Presidential Guard represents a relatively well-treated group of professional career soldiers. The average guard could look forward to decent pay, nice clothes, some leisure, fancy parties, palatial surroundings, and moderate opportunity for advancement—one would expect to find a relatively well-behaved and stable force. Their barracks, compared to regular forces around the city, were considerably better appointed and more hygienic, with decent lighting, flooring, and ventilation. Nonetheless, the records proved quite surprising. The rate of turnover among the guards was extremely high: an annual average of twenty new men entered service, and the turnover rate reached over 50 percent each year despite official incentives for guards to re-sign their contracts.41 The reason lies in the conflict between the guards’ expectations on one hand and those of officers and elite society on the other. Instability did not rise from attrition due to officials firing guardsmen. Outright and criminal discharges, with reasons entered into the record, averaged twelve each year.42 Of the total discharges, 43 percent were “honorable” and resulted from requested transfers (14 percent), old age (4 percent), family matters (3 percent), medical problems (15 percent), and contract expiration (7 percent). For the remaining 56 percent, desertion accounted for 12 percent and charges of mala conducta (bad conduct) justified 44 percent. Taken as a whole then, officers only dismissed a handful of men each year for their poor behavior, which does not explain the highly unstable roster. The records likewise do not account for an unusual amount of stress or hardship on the part of the guards. In addition to the minor arrests, it is remarkable that officers generally punished troops very lightly, relative to the more draconian penalties available in the Military Penal Law. Charges of insubordination, for instance, warranted six months to two years in prison, yet the records show most cases of this type yielded a far lighter sentence. Muttering complaints, likewise, could bear a punishment of up

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to a year in prison, and the charge appears not to have been formally levelled despite numerous opportunities to do so.43 Nevertheless, in the guards’ quotidian experiences, weekly, if not daily, minor arrests were punished with confinement to the barracks and represented the normal state of affairs, according to the partes de novedades (duty reports). The charge of falta de lista, referring to missing roll call, emerges as the most prevalent of all faults ascribed to guardsmen, and missing two days subsequently warranted “incorrigible” status with dismissal, while three or more subsequent absences was considered desertion. For the basic falta, guards received a punishment of one to thirty days’ arrest in barracks as a “disciplinary correction.”44 Men arriving late or absent for parade thus paid the price of spending time away from the barracks, for being part of a civilian society while subjected to the restrictions of a military institution. Minor arrests do not appear to correlate directly to the recorded discharge of soldiers. Indeed, in the case of Leandro Balderas, he had twentythree arrests in a single month yet still attained a promotion to cabo (corporal).45 In a broader example, only five men were discharged in 1906 and four in 1907, and yet the daily records for these years yield a total of 173 and 230 minor charges to the guardsmen, with punishments ranging from twenty-four hours to forty-five days in confinement. In December 1905 alone, officers arrested thirty-six men with an average of nine days’ confinement each, with a slight increase appearing during holiday weekends. The unstable nature of the guard roster, therefore, relates to the many minor arrests rather than to more serious disciplinary issues. Not forced to quit what appears to have been a respectable occupation, most guards still decided to abandon the force rather than re-sign after two years’ time.46 This seems to suggest that when disappointed officers set limits to behavior, they nonetheless offended these young guardsmen to the extent that relatively few chose to remain in the service, and those that did were the ones most skilled at hiding or avoiding the worst infractions. As an old saying in the US Army had it, the only crime was getting caught. Those discharged for mala conducta demonstrate this, as 68 percent of them were in service for less than two years; perhaps their officers caught them before they learned better. For the majority of soldiers, endemic boredom and petty punishments soon overcame the benefits of belonging to this high-profile detachment. Given its instabilities, did Reyes’s and the General Staff’s experiment in middle-class recruitment succeed? It did create a professional mentality and offer for a very few middle-class Mexicans an honorable military

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option, yet in terms of building a professional and loyal cadre, it seems to have fallen short. To the eyes of some officers, the unit’s rampant alcoholism, consistent absenteeism, and rapid turnover proved symptomatic of questionable work ethic and marginal loyalty to the institutions of the military and president. Mobility within the ranks also lagged behind expectations, and with little apparent difference in recruits from middle or lower classes, hopes to reform recruitment faded.47 The General Staff’s project of building a disciplined professional force, drawn from what they deemed superior middle-class stock, fell short of their expectations. In essence, their broader concerns for genuinely reforming society and recruitment would be shaped, at least in part, from their experience with this relatively unpromising middle-class unit. By 1908, Colonel Angel Bougracet summed up the collective frustration of the officers in his reference to one particular soldier: “That the aptitude and military spirit of [Elizarras], . . . are generally very mediocre, [and] his conduct is also below average, given that during his short service, he has been given many punishments and reprimands, as much for his lack of energy as for his loss of his regulation kit.”48

Drinking, Fighting, and Other Diversions of Men in the Guard Dismissals from the Guard often revealed a pattern of transgressions as the soldiers negotiated between official and personal understandings of proper civilismo, of appropriate roles for middle-class military men. Attempts to discipline the Guard hinged on officers’ assumptions about modern masculinity, racial stereotypes, and class ideals. These conflicts are not entirely unrelated: class often informs masculine norms or racial identity, and vice versa. Because the segments of identity are contingent, these broad frames overlap and clash within social structures. In less-abstract terms, individual and collective understandings of how one is to live, work, and play are built around interactions with authorities and rules. No less the case for presidential guards than for factory workers or wealthy merchants, change came slowly and manifested most clearly during conflicts. In combination, these elements represent how processes of social reproduction and composition worked, combined, and articulated—how experience became relatively fixed gendered and class roles. Neither cohesive nor monolithic, the nascent middle sectors in Porfirian Mexico City inhabited an enormously diverse field of class relations.

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The powerful draw toward the elite and their ways appealed to many among the nouveau riche, as evidenced by their rampant conspicuous consumption. As business owners and factory managers, many of this group embraced the Porfirian repression of organized labor. Nonetheless, many also would eventually find an appeal in Francisco Madero’s promise of democratic reforms and repudiation of foreign economic domination. On their coattails rode smaller comerciantes and the new bureaucrats, whose less-abundant incomes necessitated they spend less time emulating the elite and more effort distancing themselves from the lower class. This they accomplished in part through the cultivation of affordable new leisure activities, like bicycling, and expressing themselves in the burgeoning middle-class presses.49 From this element, in particular, would come many of the Second Reservists and, similarly, many guardsmen. For these troops, class played an important role as they learned to become men of the nation. These soldiers were from largely middle-class families; they observed high-class worlds and even participated in them to a very limited degree; and they were, nonetheless, punished as if they were from lower classes and often took their leisure in poorer quarters. They worked with, and interacted with, officers of the highest status as a matter of course, and they seem to have expected that this would accord them some privilege in society and some respect from their own superiors. The long tradition of military fueros (codes of law), officially defunct but practically functional, meant that soldiers with rank saw themselves as apart from civil society and, in many ways, superior to normal laws and expectations. The guards also had reason to believe that they would move up through the ranks and attain better careers and even officer status; after all, the regulations officially called for this opportunity in recognition of the detachment’s special status. The guards thus held an unusual and fluid position among these diverse middle-class sectors. They reacted strongly against menial tasks, setting themselves above servants or working class, yet they did not receive an income sufficient to truly claim middle-class status. Caught between commoner and officer, they instead maintained a unique middle standing, and if they had few class enmities, they also had no genuine social allies. They therefore represent a grouping quite socially isolated from officer castes, gentes decentes (respectable individuals), and ordinary léperos alike. From their records, the guards recognized at least that they had moved up in social position, if not into a clearly demarcated class identity, and they cultivated the desire for greater societal respect. Yet most of these hopes fell far short of fulfillment. Accordingly, it is in these unshared expectations

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that the worst contradictions arise, particularly in recorded instances of discharge for mala conducta. The first set of incidences supporting this contention comes from cases where officers had distinctly different notions of their relationship with the Guard, tasking them with the menial jobs of a common soldier. Lowerranked General Staff officers may, in this instance, have been asserting the superiority of their service branch, as in regular units few officers below lieutenant colonel warranted a personal servant. Not surprisingly, officers generally supported complaints against their reluctant soldiers with the language of insubordination, implying or accusing drunkenness as well. The military elite understood alcohol abuse, a common enough problem, in terms of class. In most cases they assumed that lower classes had a predisposition for alcoholism, and the efforts to regulate pulque establishments, for example, corresponded with the perceived need to morally reform the lower classes within the city.50 Within the military, drunkenness of common soldiers did not warrant a mention in regulations; rather, officials assumed that it could not be avoided with simple rules. Noncommissioned ranks, however, were explicitly warned against habitual drinking, on pain of dismissal. Thus for the guards (who ranked as first sergeants), the elite implied that middle-class alcoholism represented an avoidable penchant as opposed to an inherent debility. Officers, on the other hand, did not suffer the same condescending regulation, but were strictly prohibited from drinking in uniform while in public places (subject to three to six months of arrest). Given the harsh penalty, no officers of the General Staff were charged under Article 238 outright, but instead were cited for wearing uniforms to public events (like weddings), a minor offense, and the probable alcohol use was ignored.51 The conflict between guards’ self-perceptions and officers’ demands often entailed these allegations of lower-class alcoholism. When ordered to clean an officer’s horse, for example, Guardsman Luis García reacted by giving him “malas miradas” (dirty looks), to which officials added a consideration of past drinking, leading to a discharge.52 Similarly, Guardsman Enrique Domínguez, sent to do chores at his captain’s home, faced accusations of getting drunk and, worse still, showing disrespect to the man’s wife, leading to his discharge a month later.53 A similar case in 1902 saw a guard named Pedro Salazar assigned, while on leave, to housesit for his captain and serve his wife. During this chore, he spoke loudly, treated some people “improperly,” threatened others, said that the regulations made him an assistant not a “mozo” (servant), and, according to the captain, he generally lacked the “respect that my house and my wife deserve.” Although

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defending his class and masculinity, Salazar nevertheless met punishment and discharge.54 A second kind of incident saw the guardsman offend against societal expectations, particularly coming into direct and often bloody conflict with the relatively new policing institutions of the nation.55 This sort of clash appears to have been common enough to require a specific ordinance within the Military Penal Law, and soldiers insulting police faced up to eleven months in prison, or one to three years in the event of an assault.56 The officers seem to have had more patience for this type of offense in most cases, themselves not too fond of police.57 This attitude is clear in a 1900 instance when a police agent on a train temporarily arrested an officer, causing him delay, which then led to a fistfight. Everyone involved wrote vehement letters to their superiors, and ultimately the authorities exonerated both the General Staff officer and the gendarme.58 Two years later, Guardsman Francisco Hernández brawled with police officers, an offense warranting eleven months to ten years in the regulations, and received only eight days’ arrest in quarters and a ten-peso fine.59 In 1907, another guard, during an arrest for drunk and disorderly behavior, fought off several arresting policemen but had his charges dropped for “lack of evidence.”60 Rather more serious, in 1903 a trolley policeman fought with Guardsman Federico Heredia, who alleged that the ticket man did not give him change. Consequently, the commandante ordered the Guard transferred to a unit in the Yucatán for two years where he would likely contract malaria and have to fight against the Maya. While Heredia avoided this fate through a medical excuse, he nonetheless spent an undisclosed time in the Military Prison of Santiago.61 Commonly, and perhaps ironically, the penalty for mala conducta often saw troops forcibly transferred to either the Sixth or Ninth Cavalry regiments, essentially using the poor conditions of the regular army as a punishment for incorrigible volunteers. Equally telling, in a number of cases guardsmen exploited a constitutional loophole (the injunction, or amparo) to choose the military prison over active service in the pestiferous Yucatán. In any case, officers generally overlooked most fighting with police, although the loss of one’s sabre in a fracas could lead to some rather embarrassed letters to the local police magistrate.62

The Geography of Guards Gone Wild By the turn of the century, the Mexico City that the guards inhabited was in the throes of dramatic changes with the advent of rapid urbanization

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and new technologies. The city had swollen to nearly four hundred thousand inhabitants, many of its streets were newly paved, and electricity had transformed the night. Proper drainage, green parks, and monumental architecture contributed to higher quality of living, while urban crowding and lack of consistent zoning mixed the urban poor into even the most luxurious of areas.63 The guards, stationed in the National Palace by the Zócalo and in Chapultepec Castle some miles to the west, constantly moved between the two and found their entertainment in nearby areas. East of the palace and slightly to the north near Santiago Tlatelolco, the guards would find their cheap entertainments and less-hygienic taverns. But in clusters near the center, and along the way to Chapultepec, were also the cafés and establishments of the better classes. Like many others in the changing city, the guards needed to carefully negotiate their way through this landscape to avoid offending the standards of their expected class decorum. Within the modernizing urban space of Mexico City, proper behavior, civilismo, was constrained by a sense of place—each class had realms where they could do as they saw fit with relatively little interference. The lowest cantinas created and reinforced class and racial difference no less than did the Presidential Salons or the Jockey Club. Only in circumstances where guards’ public misdemeanors impinged on the better public spaces were these offenses deemed problems, as when they occurred in cafés rather than in pulquerías (pulque bars). As an example of this, a guardsman insulting police was discharged from service in 1903, but only because of his previous arrest for drunkenness in the Teatro Hidalgo a couple of months earlier.64 His dismissal stemmed as much from his indiscretion as from his behavior. It does seem to matter where things happened; a café or cantina where middle-class patrons might complain or where the soldier maybe should not be led to discharges, while there are no recorded instances of a visit to the lower-class pulquerías ever exciting any reaction from officers. The Porfirian regime had set out to redefine communities and classes through a new geography of power, where modern penology could counteract the inherent criminality and violence of lower-class residents.65 By contrast, crime itself forged new urban senses of community, tying together disparate elements of society in public opinion and mediation of violence.66 From this perspective, the transgressions of guardsmen had as much to do with violations of the spatial boundaries on behavior as with any disorderly activity. Passing by numerous older pulquerías clustered around Calle Santa Clara (near present-day Bellas Artes), the soldiers who ran into trouble moved south of the Centro to Calle San Juan. There they drank in newer cafés such as the Café Puerto Arthur, from pricy crystal ware.67 Guardsmen

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favoring this area figure in a number of noteworthy complaints, as did any who appeared drunk too close to the National Palace buildings.68 Outside of the well-policed areas, guards could, and presumably did, undertake whatever dubiously moral activities they found necessary. Other types of “expected” behaviors similarly raised no official ire, as no record of punishment for offenses such as marijuana use or domestic violence emerges in the files despite the near certainty that they occurred.69 The message appears to have been that drinking, fighting, and using prostitutes was acceptable, so long as it occurred in one’s proper place within the official mapping of class and power. Notions of bourgeois propriety articulated neatly with ideas of military honor.70 The expectations of the military man reveal a degree of ambivalence on the part of elites and wider society, but the obligations of honor among military classes were highly coherent. The honorable military man demonstrated hygiene and posture, dressed and spoke well, and treated women and superiors with due respect. From an increasingly narrow field of acceptable behaviors, ideas about military honor and urbane propriety clashed within a discourse bookended by claims of tradition or modernity. Framed in this way, ever-more complex prescriptions on how to behave in the “modern” world fell heavily upon the presidential guards. Upholding class standards meant maintaining one’s appearance, clothing, gear, and, above all, being a conscientious horseman. The visible markers of class—including posture, hygiene, and tailoring—became, to some degree, the raison d’être of disciplinary reviews for the guards. Accordingly, officers treated offenses pertaining to loss of uniforms or gear quite seriously. It was acceptable to enter service without even having your own shoes, but once in, losing any part of the forty pesos’ worth of equipment could lead to immediate discharge, especially if one was drunk and therefore assumed to be either completely inebriated or gambling away his belongings.71 The assumption rings particularly true in the case of Sergeant Macano Avila, who attended the 1901 Buffalo Exposition as part of the honor guard, during which time he claimed to have lost his pistol. The opportunity to attend and participate in the rash of world’s fairs, expositions, exhibitions, and international conferences was a crucial part of foreign relations for the modernizing and investment-hungry Porfirian regime. Military delegations, especially presidential guards and rurales, attended all the large events, and many smaller ones, even if at times this simply meant sending an attaché and a band.72 At Buffalo, the suspicion of Captain Samuel García Cuellar, and probably a well-founded one, was that the sergeant

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had gambled away his expensive Colt pistol and should pay for a new one himself.73 For one less-than-astute guard, the solution to having lost his own things gambling was to steal from his colleagues. Seen wearing the trumpeter’s shoes the next day, officers searched his bunk and discovered accoutrements belonging to at least seven others among his gear, whereupon they charged and dismissed the thief.74 While guards were enjoined to wear their uniforms correctly, officers too could be charged if found out of proper attire.75 In their case, however, the language became very specifically military class oriented; both the highly decorated Captain Federico Dávalos and Sub-Lieutenant Pablo Jayas Jarero faced charges for dressing like a civilian.76 Beyond merely maintaining your kit, equestrian skills were high on the list of requirements. While a good seat might allow renewal of contract, inability to ride well led to quick discharge regardless of reason, and timidity around horses especially so.77 Mistreating horses, whipping and the like, was an extremely quick way to end one’s career and one of the few infractions where discharge did not entail a mere transfer to the Sixth or Ninth Cavalry.78 The important message was that the horses, which often cost over three hundred pesos, were actually worth far more than their occasional riders were.79 Further supporting this are reports that frequently named sick horses and their care, but less often bothered to report the names of ill guards.80 Much more paperwork accumulated on the various illnesses of Gringo, Yanque, Mausser, or Feo than for the average guard. Good comportment was also important, and for many discharges, the reason given was simply “desaseado” (being unkempt).81 The very vague “lack of military spirit” was also commonly invoked, alone or with other reasons, as a justification for ridding the unit of the lackadaisical or troublemakers.82 On at least one occasion, the “manly” use of unseemly profanities lost a guardsman his position, as he “committed the offense of proffering obscenities.”83 Fuentes, sent to a mountain artillery regiment, nevertheless could have been cited with murmuraciones (gossip; punishable by up to eleven months in prison), but one doubts that he felt himself fortunate. Profanity, vulgarity, and masculine behavior go hand in hand. The need to express masculinity through invectives represents a primary identifier of class, especially as people understand it in gendered ways.84 The association between language, education, and machismo calls into attention the social gap between sounding like a dandy and swearing like a soldier. That presidential guards constantly moving between high-class receptions and low-class pulquerías might not always keep a civil tongue was simply unavoidable.

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This prohibition of bad language extended also to racism, although this presents less documentation. One case where this emerged saw Guardsman Francisco Guevara clash with his sergeant, Rafael Gallardo y Puga, a native of Veracruz with presumably some African ancestry. He began with racial taunting of the sergeant as “Marques de Cuba” and “Conde de Africa” and foolishly followed with comments about Gallardo’s mother and a punch to the nose. As a result, Guevara enjoyed a prompt voyage to Quintana Roo to fight Mayas.85 While the offender offered officers any number of potential reasons for dismissal, it is notable that the recording clerk saw fit to include all the racial comments and details, possibly because racism was frowned on or possibly because he found the epithets too amusing to let pass. Being a guardsman and a soldier also seems to have entailed a high degree of what might loosely be termed hyper-masculine pursuits, often in contradiction both with their image as dandies and with the dictates of the regulations.86 These activities entailed an exaggerated degree of violence, of substance abuse, of misogyny, and of insubordination that reflected a sense of macho normality. This is not to imply that these comprise masculine norms per se, but rather that these men deemed them such.87 The great danger of relatively little time off, a bit of money, and firearms appears to have been the proclivity of guardsmen to spend free time drinking to the point of public disturbance and gunplay. For the officers presiding over them, this gave proof of the soldier’s inability to adhere to civilismo, or properly civilized behavior. Class assumptions and gender expectations came together in this ascription of normality, prescribed by disciplinary regulations and unspoken upper-class norms, which not only described lower class behavior but also created an expectative stereotyping of soldiers’ vices and crimes. For example, when his superiors demoted Ausencia Heredia to the Sixth Cavalry for shooting in public areas, it was not because he was especially dangerous as such, but rather because he was not “prepared for civil life.”88 Similarly, alcohol fuelled public embarrassments such as drunken shooting and disorderly rampages in the Plaza Mayor. The desire to reach the cantina also led to insubordination in the form of lying to officers. Discovered in a weak lie, Guardsman Arturo Herrera lost his position when officers discovered that he had used an unneeded wisdom tooth extraction as an excuse to leave barracks, and went drinking instead.89 A different and pointedly class-centered conflict rose around conceptions of properly defending masculine honor within a system that constrained traditionally violent solutions. At the heart of the issue lay sanctioned fights: duelling was both required and forbidden to officers by regulations,

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yet commonplace nonetheless, but for common soldiers this lay in far more forbidden territory. Essentially, if a person had no pretension to gentlemanly class, he had no recourse to sanctioned violence, and any attempt at a duel would, by authorities’ definitions, be simply a criminal assault.90 One case of this sort appears in the Presidential Guard record, although it may be safely assumed that some other complaints of assault also pertained to male honor. In this instance, a guardsman named Juan Sánchez reportedly beat a civilian man for not wanting to “sostener relaciones” (maintain a relationship) with his sister, Luz Sánchez. The civilian may have been in a sexual relationship with the understanding of marriage or in a pre-marital courtship; either way, he was held accountable. Had Juan been an officer, his actions likely would not warrant a complaint; indeed, the civilian would not likely have complained to police. Had Sánchez been a common soldier, such an attack would have led to a year in prison and a tour in the Yucatán afterwards. For a presidential guard, neither fish nor fowl, this relatively acceptable behavior required his officers to cite past drinking exploits in order to justify his dismissal from service, and no incarceration seems to have been considered.91

Conclusion As the other works in this volume argue, the role of the military in the nation and in political culture was an object of deep concern to various regimes and institutional elites. The Porfiriato was consistent with the general movement away from reliance on regional militias in favor of a centralized, federal army. Yet at the same time, a sense of the patria chica, the local fatherland, continued to simmer below the surface of nationstate–level efforts to make a coherent armed service. Fissures between the local and national ideals, as between officers and troops, informed institutional policies that attempted to reconcile vastly disparate visions of Mexican modernity. The army in the “new” nation that emerged from the Restoration era strived to reconcile broad changes in society with a desperate need to demonstrate the nation’s stability, progress, and order. As an institution connected to the heights of technology and with close connection to international counterparts, the military reflected the ideological and discursive agendas of a regime dedicated to positivist philosophies and social Darwinism. In this context, the exhibition of military might on display with the president was an argument in favor of Mexico having arrived at a particular point of historical trajectory where race and class

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were subsumed into a broader homogenous nationalism. Nonetheless, the weakness of that particular aspiration comes into focus with closer examination of the regime’s showpiece. The presidential guards’ ambiguous social position contributed to a record rife with serious disciplinary issues and clashes with authorities. They tried to live within significant contradictions—part of the modern yet traditional military, holding rank without prestige, and inhabiting a world spanning pulquerías and salons alike. As favored volunteers, they enjoyed privileges unknown to most conscripted recruits, but still fell short of moving upward into the world of the military elite they served. They were the honor guards of a regime of doubtful honor—men presented as a male ideal and punished for attempts to express personal masculinity. The complexity of their lived experiences and frustrated aspirations highlights social constructions and the geography of power in Porfirian Mexico City. Founded primarily to facilitate the performance of Porfirian theater as honor guards in public spectacles, the unit also provided an opportunity for an experiment in class-based voluntary recruitment. The Presidential Guard trial had unsettling results for the General Staff planners. The imposition of disciplinary structures inconsistent with the soldiers’ expectations led inexorably to a highly unstable roster of personnel. With an extraordinary annual rate of replacement, the institution lacked basic continuity, and incoming recruits, not understanding how to properly circumvent rules, were more likely to receive dishonorable discharges, especially in their first year of service. For officers concerned with reinforcing their own social status, these middle-classed guards merely confirmed stereotypes of drunken and debauched lower-classed predispositions. For the guards, boredom and petty punishments pushed them to resent authorities and to seek escape, whether that meant desertion, resignation, or inebriation. Their experiences indicate, as well, the very real conflicts involved with occupying an uneasy position between different aspects of the new middle class and changing masculine behaviors in a society refashioning itself as modern. Regulated in dress, language, leisure, and family, the guards faced new rules of civilismo that predictably conflicted with how they perceived themselves. Demanding recognition of their position as soldiers and men, they clashed with police, officers, and society more generally. Ultimately, this frontier position between various and conflicting expectations of representing Mexico, being soldiers, and being men proved untenable. A metaphor for the modernizing drive of the nation, the belligerence and insubordination of the guardsman exposed the underlying contradictions between the rhetorical veneer of modernity and the deeper reality of societal

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divisions. Perhaps in this sense, guards behaving badly truly represented both the nation they fronted and the president they decorated. Notes Author’s Note: This paper was written with the financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the intellectual support of Robert Scott, Kevin Gosner, and Jadwiga Pieper—my sincere thanks to all. All translations are my own unless noted. I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo de Guerra y Marina. Estado Mayor y Guardias Presidenciales, Expedientes Personales (EMP Exp.); Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo de Guerra y Marina, Partes de Novedades (Novedades); Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Reglamento para la Compañía de Guardias de la Presidencia (Reglamentos). 1.  Exp. personal de Francisco Gargallo, caja 93, EMP Exp. 2.  This is a social-historical approach that utilizes the military, and in particular soldiers’ experiences, as a lens to analyze larger questions such as gender, nationalism, and race; see especially “Introdução” in Celso Castro, Vitor Izecksohn, and Hendrik Kraay, eds., Nova historia militar brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bom Texto, 2004); and Peter M. Beattie, Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). John Keegan is also considered by some to be a New Military Historian; see John Keegan and Richard Holmes, eds., Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books, 1986). 3.  On these divisions over progress, see Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development, rev. and enlarged ed. (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992). 4.  On masculinity in Porfirian Mexico, see Robert McKee Irwin et al., The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, c. 1901 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Stephen Neufeld, “Performing the Masculine Nation: Soldiers of the Mexican Army, 1876–1910,” in Hendrik Kraay, ed., Negotiating Identities in Modern Latin America (Calgary, Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2007). 5.  On Porfiriato generally, see Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz (Harlow, Essex, United Kingdom: Longman, 2001); and Daniel Cosío Villegas et al., Historia moderna de México (Mexico City: Editorial Hermes, 1955). 6.  Guillermo Cota Soto, Historia militar de México (Mexico City: n.p., 1947), 87–90. 7.  See Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); and Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–1910 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 8.  See, for example, Warren Schiff, “German Military Penetration into Mexico during the Late Díaz Period,” Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1959): 568–79. 9.  Robert M. Alexius, “The Army and Politics in Porfirian Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1976); James R. Kelley, “Professionalism in the Porfirian Army

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Corps” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1971); Mílada Bazant de Saldaña et al., La evolución de la educacíon militar De México, 1st ed. (Mexico City: Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, 1997); Daniel Gutiérrez Santos, Historia militar de Mexico, 1876–1914 (Mexico City: Ateneo Press, 1955); Alicia Hernández Chávez, “Origen y ocaso del Ejercito Porfiriano,” Historia mexicana 39, no. 1 (1989): 257–96. 10.  On Porfirian political ritual and ceremony, see Victor Macías González, “Presidential Ritual in Porfirian Mexico,” in Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw, eds., Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 83–107. 11.  A similar set of ideas framed the early history of policing in Mexico; see Laurence J. Rohlfes, Police and Penal Correction in Mexico City (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1983). 12.  Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Estado Mayor, and Bernardo Reyes. Ley organica del Ejército Nacional, Decreto 225, México, 1900; Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Ley de organización, 1899; 18 July 1900, Reglamentos; EMP Exp. cajas 92–98 and Novedades, cajas 99–102. 13.  Ley de organización, 1899—Article 33 redefines zapadores’s (sappers’) duties; Novedades, caja 100 describes transitions to new units. Antonio López de Santa Anna created a presidential guard called the Lancers of the Supreme Power; they lasted through the presidency of Benito Juárez and were disbanded by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejado. Between 1870 and 1900, no formally constituted unit was assigned specifically to this detail. 14.  See Victor Macías-Gonzalez, “The Lagartijo at the High Life,” in Irwin et al., The Famous 41, 41, 230. 15.  Melodramatically recounted in “Un loco pega una puñada al Presidente de la Republica,” El Nacional, 17 September 1897, 2, and “Arnulfo Arroyo Lynchado” on same page; James Garza, The Imagined Underworld (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 155–78. 16.  On the autopsy results, see “Arroyo,” El Foro, 21 September 1897, 3. 17.  Reglamentos, cap. 2, art. 4; General Samuel Pezo to Samuel García Cuellar re: official creation of Guards, 6/25/1900, caja 98, exp. de Samuel García Cuellar, EMP. 18.  Reglamentos, art. 12 specifies one major, one captain (1st), two lieutenants, one sub-lieutenant, fifty guards, one sergeant major, and one picador. 19.  Reglamentos, cap. V, art. 20, “servicio de cuartel, escoltas, ordenanzas y parejas”; art. 25, only to offer “escolta a presidente de republica”; art. 29, two guards to serve as orderlies in the Presidential Salon. 20.  One older guard orderly was allowed to re-enlist at age forty-nine in 1909 because he had “always been in service with Gen. Fernando González” and “not actually in service,” EMP Exp., caja 97, Cerrardo Barragán. 21.  See Matthew D. Esposito, “Death and Disorder in Mexico City: The State Funeral of Manuel Romero Rubio” in William Beezley and Linda Ann Curcio Nagy, eds., Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 87–103; Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Claudia Agostini, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910 (Calgary, Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2003); and Macías González, “Presidential Ritual in Porfirian Mexico.”

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22.  The records for the Comandancía Militar de DF (Federal District military commandant) show a marked rise in these events by the 1890s, with funerals that required honor guards from twenty to six hundred men depending on the rank of the deceased. 23.  See CARSO, Condumex, Fondo de Bernardo Reyes: Correspondence in Volumes 1–30, which cover his career and aspirations through to 1900. In numerous letters to Porfirio Díaz, Reyes lays out his ideals for the army. See also Bernardo Reyes, “Ensayos sobre reclutamiento,” published in the Revista militar mexicano between April and June 1889, and as a separate pamphlet. 24.  Bernardo Reyes, El Ejército Mexicano (Mexico City: J. Ballescá y Ca., 1901). 25.  On these politics, see Juan Pedro Didapp, Gobiernos militares de México: Los ataques al ejército y las maquinaciones políticas del partido científico para regir los destinos nacionales (Mexico City: Tip. de J. I. Guerrero y Comp., 1904). 26.  Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Estado Mayor, and Bernardo Reyes, Ley orgánico del Ejército Nacional, Nov. 1, 1900, art. 234 [p. 809], re: Second Reserve. 27.  Eduardo Paz, A dónde debemos llegar: Estudios sociológico militar (Mexico City: Tipografía Mercantil, 1910). 28.  Reglamentos, art. 5; this requirement has changed only slightly since, and current presidential guards hopefuls are required to be 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches). 29.  “Los guardias de la presidencia,” El Imparcial, 4, no. 1386, 6 July 1900, 1 calls for only men featuring a “complexión robusta” to apply for the positions. 30.  EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de José Mariana Pérez; EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de Miguel Quinto; EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Frederico Koelig; EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Guillermo Gray; EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Guillermo Albarrán; EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Juan G. Bango; EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de José Cabrera. 31.  Reglamentos, arts. 8 and 37; see EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Gruiano Alcala, re: fianzas. In contrast, regular conscripts earned less than fifteen centavos daily after obligatory deductions for gastos (expenses). 32.  EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Rodolfo Cejudo; EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Vicente Lopez (includes invoice as he lacked shoes on service). 33.  Reglamentos, cap. IX, art. 48. 34.  Reglamentos, cap. VIII, art. 43, “Premios y Castigos” and art. 47 on required skill training. 35.  See Novedades, caja 100–101, which notes maintenance and reception of phones and cars. 36.  Reglamentos, cap. IX, art. 46. 37.  Heriberto Frías, Tomochic, 5th ed. (Mexico City: Librería de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1911); Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” The Americas 51, no. 4 (April 1995): 530; Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 38.  Mexico, Secretaría de Guerra, Ordenanza general para el ejército de la republica de México (Mexico City: Imprenta de I. Cumplido, 1882), art. 2440, p. 274; and EMP Exp., caja 97, anonymous note, n.d., stating that while mujeres de la tropa were not to be listed in the pliego de consignas (sign-in sheet), salesmen most definitely were.

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39.  See Stephen Neufeld, chap. 2, in “Servants of the Nation: The Military in the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2009). 40.  Three such cases in Novedades, caja 101 Herrera Adalberto; idem. 93, Placido Yzurida; idem. 95, Eugenio Velásquez. 41.  Dismissal was not due to an aging force; average age on discharge was 24.4, actually younger than regulations allowed for recruitment and skewed by a number of underage recruits and the tendency of older veterans to stay out of official trouble. 42.  Unrecorded discharges amounted to about eight a year, assuming the Presidential Guard maintained its number. 43.  Ley penal militar, 30 August 1897, tit. VI, cap. II, art. 56–60 arrests “mayor y menor” warrant one to thirty days and thirty days to eleven months; Ley penal military, 1897, cap. VI, art. 137–39, re: murmuraciones receive one to eleven months arrest; Ley penal militar, 1897, cap. VII, art. 140–41, re: insubordination receives six months to two years in prison, if in face of an enemy automatically ten years. Given manpower shortages, it was very common that troops and officers sentenced to prison time would receive indultos (pardons) that reduced their incarceration, in exchange for service in less desirable units. 44.  Ley penal militar, 1897, tit. 1, cap. II, art. 114 describes incorrigible conduct and faltas de lista (includes two misses in row as incorrigible); punishment is “destitución de empleo” (dismissal). Tit. 1, cap. 15, art. 196 defines desertion as “faltan 3 días o mas” (missing three or more days). Tit. V, cap. Unico, states men with misses were to receive one to thirty days for “disciplinara corrección” (corrective discipline). 45.  EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Leandro Balderas. 46.  The high turnover and lack of prestige are very similar to the patterns emerging in the gendarmes of the city, and not coincidentally, they shared a number of the same officers, including Felix Díaz; see Rohlfes, Police and Penal Correction, 38–48. 47.  As a signal that the experiment had perhaps succeeded, the corps retained its institutional purpose through the governmental transitions of 1911 and 1913. When Leon de la Barra and Francisco Madero gained the presidency, they both retained the majority of the Presidential Guard on duty. After a dramatic coup where many guards died, Victoriana Huerta renamed the survivors the Lancers of the Supreme Power, promoted many, and cleansed records of previous misdeeds. Able to retain only about a dozen reluctant volunteers, he lowered recruiting standards and hired about forty new men to bolster his ranks. Ultimately, a number of long-time guards remained in service until well after the Porfiriato. For these men, including some who rose to general in the revolution (such as Francisco Luis Urquizo), the institutional experience of the Guard would echo into reforms of the 1920s. 48.  Coronel A. Bougracet to Teniente Coronel Samuel García Cuellar, 8/24/1908, EMP Exp., caja 96, Expediente de Jesús Elizarraras. 49.  William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), passim. 50.  See Robert Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), passim; Rohlfes, Police and Penal Correction, 35–48; and María Áurea Toxqui Garay, “ ‘El recreo de los amigos’: Mexico City’s pulquerías during the Liberal Republic, 1856–1911” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2008). 51.  Ley penal militar, 1897, tit. 2, cap. 1, on “embriagues”; art. 236–40, on drinking; art. 238, officers in uniform to get three to six months’ arrest; art. 239, sergeants or corporals

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with habitual drinking sentenced with “destitución de empleo” (dismissal). Nonetheless, alcoholism proved a rampant problem in officer classes throughout the army. 52.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Luis García. 53.  EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de Enrique Domínguez (1912). 54.  EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de Pedro Salazar (1902). 55.  Pablo Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-theCentury Mexico,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 2 (1999): 4. 56.  Ley penal militar, 1897, cap. VI, art. 286 charges “ultrajes” (insults) against civil police with eleven months, with assault going up to one to three years. 57.  Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 43–46, 48; an extremely common offense in the records of the Comandancia Militar DF, including cases against officers ranking all the way to colonel. 58.  Novedades, caja 101, note on Capt. (2) Alfonso Fernandez in 1900. 59.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Francisco Hernández (1/21/1902). 60.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de José Francisco Hernández; a common evasión. 61.  Letter #13, 9/4/1903, 485 Justicia Sección to Commanding Officer, “Juicios de amparo interpuesto por F. Heredia” finds against his remission to the Yucatán (10th Zona)—stating the cause of the fight was anger that the ticket-taker on the trolley “no quiso darme lo vuelto de un peso que le di para pagar” (he did not want to return me the change for a peso I gave him in payment). 62.  EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de Ernesto Bretón. 63.  On the changes to the city and its milieu, see Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996): 75–104; Claudia Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910 (Calgary, Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2003), 104–10; Barbara A. Tennenbaum, “Streetwise History: The Paseo de la Reforma and the Porfirian State, 1876–1910,” in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994); and, especially, Pablo Picatto, City of Suspect: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 64.  EMP Exp., caja 96, Expediente de Leopoldo Palacios. 65.  On this see especially James A. Garza, Tales from the Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Roxanne Michelle Dávila, “Mexico City as Urban Imaginary and Real City” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1998). 66.  Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 215. 67.  Julio Popper Ferry, Plano del perímetro central, directorio comercial de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: Debray Sucs., 1883); Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 34; Café Puerto Arthur was presumably named subsequent to the RussoJapanese War. EMP Exp., caja 96, Expediente de Heriberto Molina: broke two pesos of crystal at Café Puerto Arturo on Calle San Juan #18. See also Toxqui Garay, “ ‘El recreo de los amigos,’ ” 119, which shows the clustering of pulquerías around both the National Palace and the later site of the guards barracks near Chapultepec. 68.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Aurelio V. Farfán; EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de José Arevalo; EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Eugenio Velásquez;

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EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Porfirio Enciso; EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Ysidrio R Flores; EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Francisco Gargallo. 69.  In contrast, records for regular units include numerous cases of abuse against wives and amasias, even to the point of murder, and soldiers provided the marijuana for inmates at Belem and Santiago prisons. On marijuana use also see Isaac CamposCostero, “Marijuana, Madness, and Modernity in Global Mexico, 1545–1920” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006), 222, 237. 70.  See Carlos Monsivais, “The 41 and the Gran Redada,” in Irwin et al., The Famous 41 (esp. 155–58) on legal changes; and William E. French, “Prostitutes and Guardian Angels,” HAHR 72, no. 4 (Nov. 1992): 529–53, on inculcating the middleclass morality. 71.  EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Rodolfo Cejudo (thirty days for gambling); EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Jesús del Aguila (1902); Novedades, caja 102 (12/16/1905), Ricardo Quesada receives thirty days for gambling. 72.  To list only a few destinations they visited: 1882–1883, Paris; 1884, Cuba and New Orleans; 1892, Madrid; 1893, Chicago and Washington; 1895, United States and Paris; 1897, Russia; 1898, Paris; 1900, Paris; 1901, Buffalo; 1904, St. Louis; 1906, San Antonio; and 1907, Jamestown. 73.  Commanding Officer to Cuellar, 15 August 1901, EMP Exp., caja 98, Expediente de Samuel García Cuellar. 74.  EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Manuel M. Arrioja; this also indicated the exceptional quality of these horses, as rurales’ mounts generally only cost around forty pesos; see Archivo General de la Nación, Gobernación, Rurales, passim. 75.  Novedades, caja 92, Fiacro Badillo gets forty-eight hours for not wearing his uniform correctly. 76.  EMP Exp., caja 96, Expediente de Cpt. (2nd) Federico G. Dávalos and EMP Exp., caja 96, Expediente de Subtnt. Pablo Jayas Jarero. 77.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Alberto García (4/26/1907)—“has demonstrated in all exercises, above all with horses, a great pusillanimity”; c.f. EMP Exp., caja 95, Expediente de Prisciliano García, who gains re-enlistment because “he rides horses very well.” 78.  EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Leandro Balderas; Novedades, caja 102, Ausencia Martínez (3/5/1907). 79.  EMP Exp., caja 94, Expediente de Manuel M. Bridad. 80.  Found throughout the Partes de Novedades; also in early Periodica Militar (uncatalogued cajas, Periodicos Militares 1881–82, Fondo de Guerra y Marina, AGN): 12/16/82, an unknown author gives standards for horses’ health and col­ ours; see also “Caracteres en el edad de caballo,” Revista militar mexicano, 1907, 123–32, etc. 81.  For one of many examples, Novedades, caja 102 (4/10/1905), Evariste Jimenez given four days for “desaseado” (lack of cleanliness, or unkempt). 82.  EMP Exp., caja 97, Expediente de Luis Camargo. 83.  EMP Exp., caja 94, Expediente de Ignacio Fuentes. 84.  A recent work on this topic is Javier Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); see also Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities, Cultural Studies of the Americas 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii.

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85.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Francisco Guevara; ironically, Gallardo y Puga was likely immune to the malarial disease which probably shortened Guevara’s life. 86.  Notably, none of the guards were charged with homosexual crimes, and there is no evidence that the eight men discharged without explanations in 1901 were present at the Famous 41 Ball (for which few names were ever published); nonetheless, it remains a possible area of misconduct. 87.  On performed gender see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xiv–xvi; Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Robert Buffington, “Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class, 1900–1910,” in Irwin et al., The Famous 41, 196–206. 88.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Ausencia Heredia. 89.  EMP Exp., caja 93, Expediente de Arturo Herrera. 90.  See, for example, Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor”; and Ángel Escudero, El duelo en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Mundial, 1936). 91.  EMP Exp., caja 92, Expediente de Samuel Juan Sánchez.

chapter four

Heliodoro Charis Castro and the Soldiers of Juchitán Indigenous Militarism, Local Rule, and the Mexican State Benjamin T. Smith Ask inhabitants of Juchitán about the postrevolutionary local leader, General Heliodoro Charis Castro, and they avoid tales of military expertise or heroic endeavor and instead respond with a joke. A typical gag goes as follows: “After the Cristero war, the president decided to offer Charis a gift. He sent a car down from Mexico City. When Charis received the car, he read the words ‘General Motors’ on the back. He immediately phoned the authorities and explained that the car should have read ‘General Charis,’ not ‘General Motors.’ ”1 Other yarns concern Charis’s Juchiteco troops. For example, Claudio Toledo recounts that the Juchitecos used to receive military instruction from a revered Mexican officer. Once, a Juchiteco raised his arm to inquire what the commander meant by the word “disciplina”? Charis interjected that it meant if the Juchiteco didn’t obey he would “fuck him up.”2 Humor or joke-work, as Sigmund Freud termed it, often “structures anxieties,” masking uncomfortable social or political realities, and the jokes about Juchiteco militarism are no exception.3 By laughing at the alleged linguistic misunderstandings of Zapotec troops, informants not only lay claim to a more educated bilingual sophistication but also reveal the historically ambivalent position of local, indigenous soldiers within the national army. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican military gradually spurned the employment of locally oriented forces and increasingly cracked down on free-wheeling armed groups. But, concurrently, Zapotec-speaking men from the provincial town of Juchitán not only forged their own ethnically coherent battalion but also used the threat 110

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of force, their military contacts, and their reputation for martial prowess to forge a self-sufficient local political culture that largely remained resistant to state interference until the late 1960s. By examining how Juchiteco soldiers tacked between national expectations and local political desires, this article questions monolithic interpretations of the Mexican military and the relationship between indigenous groups and the state. Most scholars of modern Mexico have viewed the relationship between peasant, and particularly indigenous, groups and the military in terms of conflict. On the one hand, historians of the nineteenth century have followed Mariano Otero’s contemporary thesis that most indigenous soldiers were unwillingly shanghaied into the army “without any interest in the conservation of order” to operate as cannon fodder and “beasts of burden.”4 Similarly, historians of the Porfiriato have highlighted the forced draft, or leva, to explain indigenous animosity to the increasingly invasive central state.5 Even revisionist scholars of the Mexican Revolution, like Luis González y González, have countered populist presumptions of peasant enthusiasm for revolutionary soldiering and emphasized how revolutionary groups often coerced lower-class men to fight.6 On the other hand, numerous historians have also identified the military’s role in the repression of indigenous demands for land and local autonomy. Leticia Reina, Marcelo Carmagnani, and Jean Meyer argue that military intervention precipitated a “second conquest” of indigenous groups during the nineteenth century as Liberal, Conservative, and Porfirian governments employed the armed forces to put down rebellions of Yaqui, Maya, Huichol, Cora, Mixtec, Triqui, and Otomi Indians.7 Historians of the postrevolutionary period have assumed an equally condemnatory appreciation of the military’s social and political role. Hans Werner Tobler argues that “socially neutral” combatants from northern Mexico gradually “lost their local and regional ties” and formed a new postrevolutionary army, which was both “resentful of ” and “hostile to peasant land reform.”8 These soldiers increasingly eschewed their revolutionary roles as what President Lázaro Cárdenas hopefully termed “armed auxiliaries organized from the humble classes” and instead allied with local landowners, protected private properties, and persecuted agraristas (recipients of land grants). Furthermore, as the state gradually molded the army into a broadly counter-revolutionary force, it also used the institution to suppress local, autonomous, armed groups. Indigenous soldiers—from the Yaqui regions, San Luis Potosí, and the Sierra Norte de Puebla, who had fought for the Constitutionalists during the revolution— were offered a stark choice: submission, obedience, and the surrender of local political rule, or rebellion and violent subjugation.9

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Despite this overwhelmingly negative vision of the Mexican Army’s role, a new generation of scholars has started to highlight how some peasant groups used military service to extract concessions from the state. As Keith Brewster argues, “indigenous militarism” should be viewed not only as aversion, coercion, and exploitation but also “as a form of rural resistance.”10 During the early nineteenth century, Guerrero’s indigenous and AfroMexican Federalists joined the civic militia in order to push for more decentralized municipal rule.11 Decades later, during the Liberal-Conservative conflict of the 1850s and 1860s, Nahuatl-speaking Indians from the Sierra Norte de Puebla joined the militia, created a local, indigenous battalion, and took advantage of the region’s strategic importance to press regional leaders for political autonomy.12 Similarly, Zapotecs from the Sierra Juárez also joined the Liberal army, fought Conservative and foreign opponents, and used military contacts, the retention of weapons, and even the threat of violence to bargain with the Liberal and Porfirian states.13 Perhaps less surprisingly, the more ideologically malleable military of the revolutionary era often employed indigenous groups, like the Yaquis and Nahuas of the Sierra Norte, en masse. Subsequently, caciques representing these groups extracted notable favors from the postrevolutionary governments, including schools, infrastructure, and land reform.14 In many ways, the Juchiteco soldiers of the postrevolutionary era, like their Nahua and Yaqui peers, pursued a strategy of military service in return for local concessions. They made initial alliances with the Constitutionalist coalition, artfully negotiated the shifts in revolutionary leadership, and took a stand against out-of-favor revolutionary factions during the 1920s. In return, they received schools, irrigation projects, a military colony, and the eventual control of the political district of Juchitán. Yet, unlike other opportunist indigenous alliances, the pact between Juchitecos and the state outlasted immediate martial needs. Even as Mexico’s leaders gradually retreated from offering special consideration to most armed indigenous groups, Juchitán’s soldiers maintained a strong presence in the national military and used this presence to preserve local rule. This essay examines how and why Juchitán’s Zapotec (and Huave) fighters resisted the general decline in indigenous militarism. First, I argue that during the 1920s Juchiteco soldiers under the savvy leadership of General Heliodoro Charis followed national policy, dutifully sacrificed local concerns, and, as a result, penetrated all levels of the military hierarchy. When many soldiers returned to Juchitán in 1930, they were sufficiently well connected to powerful national bosses and well versed in the rules of regional politics to resist the temptation for armed intervention, lever an unpopular local

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camarilla from power, and secure local supremacy. Second, during the 1930s, a growing group of Juchitán’s local intellectuals sustained this position by developing a discourse of traditional Zapotec militarism, which manipulated fears of indigenous bellicosity to defend continued military rule. Third, over the next two decades, Charis strategically combined armed force, elite politicking, electoral fraud, and thinly veiled threats of Zapotec defiance to resist federal, state, and regional political intervention.

Juchitán: An Introduction Juchitán lies on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a dry, windswept region between Oaxaca and Chiapas. There have been tensions between the Zapotecs and non-indigenous groups in the area since the seventeenth century, but during the late nineteenth century, these divisions increased. During the period, the Isthmus attracted an array of government agents, hacendados (landowners), capitalist speculators, and commercial monopolists. They established large landholdings, alienated indigenous lands, attempted to privatize Juchitán’s communal salt flats, prohibited the textile trade with Guatemala, and appropriated land for colonization schemes.15 The opening of the Isthmus railway in 1894 increased the rhythm of Mexican and foreign capitalization. Coffee and rubber plantations now supplemented those devoted to sugar and livestock. According to Karl Kaerger, “The North Americans arrived en masse and planted . . . millions of coffee trees on the lowest slopes of the mountain chain which encircles the Isthmus.”16 By 1901, companies such as the Mexican Land and Coffee Company and the Mexican Tropical Planters Company held enormous landholdings within the district of Juchitán.17 Commercial agriculture attracted peasants and workers from outside. Despite the creation of a resilient Zapotec culture during the Porfiriato and the exodus of foreign investors during the revolution, the influx of capital and workers delineated a new geography of ethnic tensions. On the one hand, new towns, such as Matias Romero, Ciudad Ixtepec, and Unión Hidalgo, which bordered the Isthmus railway, were predominantly mestizo. In the census of 1940, 93 percent of Ciudad Ixtepec’s and 99 percent of Matias Romero’s populations could speak Spanish. On the other hand, other towns and villages such as Santa María Xadani, Santa María Petepa, and Juchitán de Zaragoza itself maintained a sizeable indigenous population. In the same census, 65 percent of the residents of Santa María Xadani and 50 percent of the inhabitants of Juchitán de Zaragoza claimed

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to speak Zapotec exclusively.18 Regional politics followed the contours of ethnic division. The Red Party consisted predominantly of mestizos from the region’s new towns and allied to the neighboring mestizo center of Tehuantepec. Meanwhile, the Green Party dominated in areas where there was a high proportion of Zapotecs and allied to the predominantly Zapotec town of Juchitán. During the nineteenth century, successive Liberal governments, allied to the mestizo Red Party, had tried to bring the Juchitecos under tighter state control. Like many other indigenous groups, the Zapotecs suffered repeated military attacks throughout the period. In 1850, Benito Juárez sent troops to assassinate the autonomous Juchiteco leader, Che Gorio Melendre, razed Juchitán to the ground, and left seventy dead.19 In 1882, soldiers occupied Juchitán after another rebellion and enacted harsh reprisals for the mistaken murder of the local priest.20 Even in the postrevolutionary era, the Mexican state often used brutal military tactics to silence supposed defiance in the region. In 1929, General Alejandro Mange, head of the military zone, ordered his soldiers to round up all the armed male villagers of the nearby village of Chihuitán believed to support a local rebel. His forces dragged in thirty-three suspects, including eleven children under the age of eighteen, who had been playing with bows and arrows in the street. Despite the entreaties of relatives, friends, and local politicians, Mange marched the suspects to the graveyard of San Jerónimo Ixtepec, where they were all shot and emptied into unmarked graves.21 State repression was accompanied by a sustained discourse, repeated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments, that sought to portray the Juchitecos as armed, brutal, uncivilized, and threatening to state stability. In 1850, Juárez claimed that Juchitecos were prone to “great excesses,” lived in a state of “immorality and disorder,” and caused “scenes of blood and horror.”22 The contemporary German traveler G. F. Von Tempsky echoed Juárez’s words, claiming Juchitecos had the “reputation of being a very unruly set, turbulent politicians and revolutionaries.”23 Even General Mange defended his atrocities by claiming that the Juchitecos were “dangerous,” “uncivilized,” and “distrustful of outsiders.”24 Juchitán’s history of recent development, ethnic and political division, state despotism, and imputed barbarism bode ill for relations between the resident Zapotecs and the postrevolutionary state. In other regions, similar historical patterns of relations precipitated an eventual state crackdown on indigenous militarism. Yet during the 1920s, Juchiteco soldiers cleverly negotiated postrevolutionary expectations to build and maintain influence within the Mexican military. As a result, they managed to retain control over Juchitán during the succeeding decades.

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Juchiteco Soldiers in the National Army, 1920–1930 During the 1920s, the Sonoran revolutionary leaders attempted to eliminate powerful caudillos and their local military forces from regional influence. In 1925, Plutarco Elías Calles precipitated the fall of the governor of Oaxaca, the former leader of the predominantly indigenous Sovereignty movement.25 A year later, Álvaro Obregón crushed his former Yaqui soldiers, who had become rapidly disenchanted with the state’s slow pace of reform.26 In the late 1920s, the Puebla elite started to recast the soldiers of Sierra Norte as pernicious semi-savages and eventually ordered Nahua battalions to leave their local bases.27 Yet at the same time, despite a pervasive institutional mistrust of armed Indians, some indigenous groups survived and even prospered within the Mexican national army. During the first decade of postrevolutionary rule, Juchitecos carved out a distinct space within the armed forces, sacrificing short-term local goals and insularity for enduring political capital and the hope of future gain. For ten years Charis’s Juchiteco battalion traipsed the central and northern provinces of Mexico, acting as the state’s frontline troops in conflicts against the delahuertistas, Cristeros, and Yaquis. In doing so, they suffered considerable losses, surrendered some elements of their ethnic identity, and allowed the triumph of the local Red Party. But, they also gradually learnt to speak a modified “language of the state,” which sustained a difficult balance between incorporation and resistance. Thus, as they cemented relationships with prominent caudillos, exercised required displays of moderation and restraint, and gradually cannibalized important military institutions, they also shaped an alternative, cohesive ethnic identity and kept their eyes on the eventual objective of local rule. In late 1919, Heliodoro Charis Castro, a poor, illiterate, Juchiteco iguana hunter, led a small, local rebellion against the ruling Carrancistas. After a series of victories, the rebel Juchitecos allied with Álvaro Obregón’s Plan de Agua Prieta, and they were made a formal battalion of the national army. Over a thousand Juchiteco troops left the security of the Isthmus to operate under the command of General Joaquín Amaro in Coahuila and then Nuevo León. In 1923, they remained loyal to Obregón and fought against the delahuertista army in the bloody Battle of Ocotlán. Here Juchitecos distinguished themselves as reliable, obedient, and unlikely to flee. A year later, allegiance, bravery, and a bullet through the neck earned Charis the position of brigadier general. After a series of interim posts in Tlaxcala, Oaxaca City, and Tabasco, the Juchiteco Thirteenth Battalion was moved to combat the Yaqui rebellion in 1926. The successful campaign

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and Charis’s loyalty during the Serrano revolt merited a promotion to head of the military zone of Colima, which he reached in 1928. Over the next few years, Juchiteco troops combated Cristero rebels, culminating in the bloody siege of Manzanillo. Finally, Charis was appointed to the military zone of Querétaro, which he commanded from 1929 to 1930.28 During the 1920s, Charis’s influence precipitated a veritable explosion of Juchiteco militarism. By 1933, the US embassy estimated that there were around four thousand Juchitecos in the army.29 While this may have been an overexaggeration, Charis undoubtedly actively recruited Juchitecos for his battalion. Every year Charis sent a letter to his patron, General Joaquín Amaro, that demanded new local troops. He started his campaign to draft Juchitecos in 1922, when he asked Amaro for more troops. He specified that “the recruitment must be done in the Isthmus.”30 In 1925, he asked for advice on how to approach the army’s department of accounts and administration to start a “campaign of recruitment in Juchitán.”31 After the battle of Manzanillo, Charis sent one of his staff sergeants to comb the Isthmus for more prospective soldiers.32 Furthermore, as Juchitecos gradually climbed the military hierarchy, they in turn looked to enlist eager “paisanos” (fellow countrymen). Jeremias López Chinas, a former follower of Charis, was made head of the national military college, Colegio Militar, and sought local recruits. Fernando Saavedra Marín remembers accompanying his friend, Manuel Arenas China, to his interview at the school. López Chinas declared that he helped “all my paisanos enter the college as long as they pass the exams” and tried to persuade an unwilling Saavedra to join. Once Juchitecos joined the army, Charis also actively sought their advancement.33 During 1925 alone he asked Amaro to promote eight of his fellow Zapotecs to important positions. For example, in March 1925 he requested that Cutberto Chagoya, a lawyer and soldier from Juchitán, be appointed as military representative in “some plaza of the republic.” By the 1950s, the Juchiteco intellectual Benigno V. Jiménez could proudly declare that Juchitán had produced two division generals, two brigadier generals, a major, and “numerous forgotten soldiers” since the revolution. He claimed that there was not “a graveyard in the republic that did not contain the remains of a Juchiteco soldier.”34 As Charis and other Juchitecos rose up the military hierarchy under the tutelage of General Amaro, they were forced to sacrifice both elements of the battalion’s ethnic coherence and their dreams of local rule. As undersecretary and then minister of war, Amaro sought the unification and the “moralization” of Mexico’s armed forces. In 1926, he introduced four laws designed to curtail the rhythm of local uprisings, large-scale rebellions, and

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corruption that afflicted the army. In essence, these laws aimed to uproot the personalism and parochialism of many military units. Thus, the first article read, “The service of arms demands that the service member carry out the fulfillment of his duty to the point of sacrifice, and that he puts before personal interest, the sovereignty of the nation, loyalty to its institutions, and the honor of the Army and the Navy.”35 As Amaro’s protégé, Charis realized that any future political aspirations depended on his fulfillment of these broader duties. First, Charis started to integrate necessary professions of duty, fealty, and moral integrity into his correspondence with Amaro. Thus, in May 1924, he asserted that he had “always followed the road laid out by you that leads to perfection” and that “your spirit of progress and advancement has always motivated my career.”36 A year later, he claimed that “the principles that you as head of my division placed in me while we fought in the north for the moralization of the army have never left my mind.”37 As military commander of Querétaro, he maintained that he had “forged patriotism, honor and obedience without servility” in his battalion.38 Second, although he refused to prohibit the speaking of Zapotec in his battalion (as Amaro requested), he did instigate an educational program to teach his troops Spanish.39 At first he ordered bilingual soldiers to teach their monolingual peers the linguistic basics. However, by the mid-1920s he had recruited professional teachers to the battalion to train the Juchitecos in speaking, reading, and writing the national language. In January 1925, he boasted to Amaro that he had employed a Spanish teacher as head of the battalion’s school. Although his troops were “from the humble classes,” they were loyal, obedient, and self-sacrificing, and they used their free time to take classes in the institution.40 Third, despite Charis’s clear desire to return to Juchitán and uproot the unpopular ruling Red Party, he always obeyed Amaro’s orders to remain uninvolved. As early as 1921, Charis explained to Amaro that the Red forces had attacked the village of Unión Hidalgo and asked to return to bring peace. Amaro refused to let the Thirteenth Battalion leave their station in Coahuila, and Charis grudgingly complied.41 This pattern of request to intervene, refusal, and reluctant obedience repeated itself during the 1920s. In 1926, he requested leave to start a campaign for governor, in 1928 he asked to return to put down a local rebellion, and in the same year he asked to protect his paisanos in Niltepec and Zanatepec.42 Yet, in spite of repeated attacks on their local supporters, Juchiteco soldiers, unlike other indigenous groups involved in the military, never personally intervened. As Amaro constantly reminded Charis, this spirit of abnegation “complied with our sacred duty” and “led to a solid reputation.”43

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This “solid reputation” allowed the Thirteenth Battalion to maintain a degree of ethnic integrity. Although Juchiteco soldiers were expected to become bilingual, they continued to operate in Zapotec within the battalion. When Amaro asked Charis to ban the indigenous dialect in the early 1920s, he replied: “Our language suckled us, I cannot get rid of it; it suckled us and we grew up with it and it is everything to my men, so I cannot prohibit it.”44 As a result, Juchiteco soldiers continued to give orders, discuss tactics, and converse on the battlefield in Zapotec. Alberto Ramírez de Aguilar, a journalist reporting on the Battle of Ocotlán, wrote that the members of the Thirteenth Battalion “talked in a sweet dialect . . . they are Juchiteco soldiers who speak the language of the great and magnanimous Cosi Joeza, the emperor of my race.” Juchiteco women also accompanied and served the Thirteenth Battalion throughout the 1920s. According to Ramírez de Aguilar, they continued to wear “black petticoats of linen. . . . with huipiles embroidered with bright roses and leaves . . . with their heads uncovered and crowned with color.”45 They not only visibly displayed their ethnic identity but also presumably prevented a high degree of intermarriage between the Juchiteco soldiers and surrounding female population. Furthermore, Charis and the Thirteenth Battalion’s reliability and obedience also precipitated the formation of strong links between Juchiteco soldiers and Mexico’s military leaders, especially Álvaro Obregón and Joaquín Amaro. Although Amaro advised Charis against direct intervention in the Isthmus, he was happy to aid his client’s less controversial schemes. In particular, Amaro interceded repeatedly on Charis’s behalf to build Juchitán’s educational infrastructure. For example, in October 1925, Amaro forwarded Charis’s plea for a secondary school to the Secretaría de Educacion Pública (SEP, Secretariat of Public Education) with the express orders that the ministry “t[ook] the request seriously.”46 When Charis returned to the Isthmus in 1930, his educational reforms had already established a reputation for philanthropy. The establishment of these relations served Charis well during the following decades. Although Obregón died in 1928 and Amaro was gradually levered from power during the early 1930s, Charis was well trained in the postrevolutionary politics of patronage and adapted his rhetoric of national patriotism, government loyalty, and Juchiteco selfgovernance to presidents Calles, Rodríguez, Cárdenas, and Ávila Camacho. Furthermore, when Amaro returned to a position of power during the 1940s, he utilized his former rapport to defend his local power base against a hostile regional governor. During the 1920s, thousands of Juchitecos joined the national army. Most served in Charis’s Thirteenth Battalion. Here they were forced to fight

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the battles of their Sonoran allies, sacrifice their monolingual integrity, and delay their desire for local rule. In many ways, Juchiteco militarism was exceptional. In 1933, there were over thirteen thousand indigenous soldiers in the Mexican army. There were nearly six thousand Yaquis from Sonora, four thousand Juchitecos, and around one thousand soldiers each from the Mixteca, Chamula, and the Yucatán (see chart).47 In general, few agreed to fight outside their region. Enlisting was “not altogether voluntary,” regimentation was difficult, and desertion was common.48 At first, the Juchitecos were described in similar ways to other ethnically coherent units. During the Battle of Ocotlán, journalists and even government observers had confused Juchitecos with Yaqui and Mayo soldiers.49 But by 1932, their service record had brought a particular reputation for loyalty, obedience, and efficiency. The American ambassador, not the most discerning observer of ethnic variations, claimed that the Juchitecos were “respectful, deferent, assimilate knowledge rapidly and receive military training with enthusiasm. He is communicative, that is to say . . . he does not reject soldiers that do not belong to his tribe, as happens with the Yaquis.”50 The question remains—why? Why did Zapotecs from Juchitán, more than any other ethnic group, willingly endure years of violence, hunger, poor food, and long enforced absences? It seems that Juchiteco leaders such as Charis and López Chinas persuaded their troops to view the advantages of military service over the long term. Historians of the peasantry have often overlooked self-conscious abnegation as an effective popular political tactic. Observers view the gradual decay of political autonomy and ethnic coherence as the logical outcome of aggressive, modernizing states, to be met by anomie or violence. Yet Juchitecos knowingly adopted self-sacrifice as a means to maintain some ethnic coherence, extract limited local favors, build a reputation for loyalty and patriotism, and aim for eventual self-rule. As early as 1924, the men of the Thirteenth Battalion expressed this to Amaro, claiming that “after a long lapse of time, during which the blood of our brothers has soaked the soil of our beloved country . . . it is painful to say that we have only achieved a little with our almost superhuman efforts.” They continued, “We have marched through the entire republic and our Juchiteco blood has scattered the ground up to Suchiate [a municipality of Chiapas], from the Gulf to the Pacific coast, hundreds of Juchitecos have died on the fields of the revolution.”51 By cultivating this clear-eyed ethos of sacrifice underpinned by the expressed expectation of government reward, Charis and his men gradually forged an alternative to the threatening stereotype of the armed Indian: the obedient, loyal, self-sacrificing Juchiteco.

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Indian Personnel in the Military, 1932

From National Influence to Local Power This reputation not only maintained Juchiteco influence within the national army but also allowed Charis and many of his soldiers to make the difficult transition to local rule. While many indigenous groups gradually ceded control of local government to the mestizo-dominated party machinery during the 1930s, the Zapotecs managed to forge an autonomous region of political influence. First, Charis finally returned and asserted control

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over the region by establishing a military colony of loyal soldiers from the Juchiteco battalion. Second, he allied with Juchitán’s growing community of ex-patriot intellectuals to formulate a cohesive narrative of Juchiteco patriotism, militarism, and local rule. Third, he displayed his revolutionary credentials by leading the drive for socialist education in the region. Together, these strategies permitted the sustained dominance of the indigenous section of the local population, in open opposition to not only the surrounding mestizo elite but also the labor unions and the national party. During the postrevolutionary period, the predominantly mestizo Reds under governors Genaro Vásquez and Francisco López Cortés had dominated Juchitán and almost succeeded in moving the district capital to the more mestizo city of San Jerónimo Ixtepec. But in 1930, Heliodoro Charis was released from his position in Querétaro and finally returned home together with hundreds of retiring Juchiteco soldiers. Over the next decade he established a fairly autonomous cacicazgo (personalist power base) with the support of Zapotecs, Greens, and his former troops. His first move was to establish a military colony for members of the Thirteenth Battalion. The previous year, Governor López Cortes had tried to gain the support of Green peasants by promising ejidos (common lands donated by the state) to the villagers of Santa María Xadani, San Blas, and El Espinal. But in May 1930, Charis marched his troops and four hundred Green colonists onto the six thousand hectares Governor López Cortes planned to distribute and established the Colonia Militar Álvaro Obregón.52 Although the move was unsanctioned by state, agrarian, or national authorities, Charis presented the effective land grab as a systematic, authorized affair, just reward for blood spilt. He informed Amaro that the lands were his own, the zone commander was informed well in advance, and the settlement occurred “in good order.” He opined that it was “a truly moving moment when our friends received land” and commented that the grateful soldiers had broken out “with vivas to the president and to General Amaro as a means of thanks.”53 The military colony would form the cornerstone of Charis’s local power. The armed men, stationed a few kilometers from the city of Juchitán, provided the local boss with the realistic threat of armed force if opposition politicians sought to take control of the district. Former soldiers also formed a cabal of competent and well-regimented local politicians, willing to populate the ranks of regional and municipal governments.54 Some troops also doubled as extra-legal pistoleros (gunmen), ordered to assassinate or intimidate particularly recalcitrant enemies.55 Finally, the former members of the Thirteenth Battalion regularly provided Charis with a group of mobile and willing voters. Over the next

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three decades, political opponents regularly complained that Charis stationed “three or four trucks” outside the military colony, picked up his former soldiers, offered them food and drink, and then bussed them to conflictive plebiscites where they would vote for his chosen candidate.56 By establishing a military colony, Charis was playing a dangerous game, tempting accusations of untamed indigenous savagery.57 But he offset these charges by allying with Juchiteco intellectuals to formulate a historical defense of local militarism, formalizing and publicizing the argument that Juchitecos were not only superb soldiers but also intrinsically obedient, loyal, and patriotic. Juchitecos developed this discourse during the revolutionary period to support their insubordination to the Carrancista state. In 1916, intellectuals and military leaders created a society to celebrate local history. They held cultural programs with Zapotec music and verse and commemorations of their victory over the French on September 5, 1866.58 This triumph became Juchitán’s paradigmatic historical event, overshadowing other, more controversial displays of indigenous militarism. When Benigno V. Jiménez founded the Sociedad de Estudiantes Juchitecos (Society of Juchiteco Students) in 1923, they started their effort to promote Juchitán by holding a traditional fiesta on September 5 in the national teacher training school.59 During the 1930s, this defense of Juchitán’s nationalist past reached its high point with the publication of the magazine Neza by a mix of Mexico City–based intellectuals led by the poet Andrés Henestrosa and aspiring military men including Jeremias López Chiñas and Genaro López Miro.60 On the one hand, the publication maintained the reputation of Juchitecos’ military ability. Authors wrote of their people’s “belligerent attitude,” “warlike blood,” pre-Hispanic precedents, and contemporary expressions.61 In the most cogent article on the subject, entitled “The Zapotec Military Life,” López Chinas argued that Zapotecs had always had a proclivity for armed defense. During the Aztec Empire, “every Zapotec had to carry arms and use them if war approached.” Centuries later, Juchitán’s leaders Binu Gada and Mexu Chele, “the bellicose heirs of [Zapotec hero] Zaachila II,” defeated not only the French army but also the forces of Miguel Lerdo de Tejeda. In fact, so expert were the Zapotecs in the practice of warfare that they had developed a specialist variant of their language to describe military tactics.62 On the other hand, the local writers also stressed Juchitán’s profound loyalty to the nation-state. In differentiating between Juchitán and the neighboring town of Tehuantepec, Tomas López Vera argued that the former had “a history of firmness and loyalty,” expressed by the defeat of the French, while the latter “remained in darkness,” “capitulated to the invaders,” and acted

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like “a traitor to the country.” In fact, he even linked Juchitán’s preservation of Zapotec language and culture to this superior nationalism, inverting the popular trope connecting patriotism to a Spanish-speaking mestizo tradition.63 Over the following decades, this discourse, which balanced the threat of force with the profession of obedience, became the constant refrain in Juchitán’s bargaining with the state, wheeled out again and again by soldiers, intellectuals, and politicians to defend local political autonomy. However, Charis’s push to retain local rule was not based simply on military force and its attendant discursive defense. A decade of military subordination had not only proffered an array of military contacts but also instructed Charis in the political importance of noticeably reflecting the desires of his superiors. Consequently, during the 1930s, Charis became a visible instigator of President Cárdenas’s policy of socialist education. During Cárdenas’s visit to Juchitán, the future president suggested that the only way to end the perpetual conflict between Reds and Greens was to establish “a cultural center and sufficient schools” to teach local children to avoid the bitter animosities of their parents.64 The idea seemed to have gained wider acceptance, and on the advice of General Joaquín Amaro, Charis began to present himself as the region’s representative of the state education program.65 In May 1935, Charis contacted the SEP and proposed the creation of an industrial school in Juchitán de Zaragoza.66 Over the next two years, he supervised the construction of the school with the ready support of state and federal authorities. Despite the petitions of members of the local Catholic society, he was able to locate the school in the atrium of the municipal church.67 By October 1937, the local newspaper announced that “because of the valiant gestures of the revolutionary general Charis, a school building of great dimensions and beautiful characteristics has been constructed.”68 On August 1, 1938, the “Revolución” industrial school opened its doors to prospective Isthmus students.69 At the same time, Charis pushed for other improvements in the town, including the construction of a new federal hospital and an increase in the number of medics sent from Mexico City. Charis’s support for Juchitán’s industrial school clearly impressed the Cardenista authorities, who designated Charis federal deputy for the region in 1937.70 As the teacher, Feliciano López Felix, complained, “With the construction of the school building with which the government has entrusted him, General Charis has been converted into a true Jefe Político, he is now omnipotent in his power over the whole district.”71 The appropriation of the government program of education helped Charis gain the support of the national government; also, his pursuit of educational and healthcare

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facilities for the local Juchitecos cemented the backing of his traditional supporters and drew former Reds into his faction. On the one hand, many started to see tangible benefits in Charis’s rule. On the other hand, the figure of their ill-educated Zapotec representative haranguing the federal government in broken Spanish for local improvements appealed to a general sense of ethnic identity.72 By establishing a military colony, defending the continuation of local armed rule, and developing a popular educational program, Charis slowly eroded Red control of the region. By 1934, Greens dominated the municipal presidencies of Juchitán. Over the next six years, they preserved this control against a growing alliance of mestizo Reds, workers, and teachers attached to the national party. In many regions similar coalitions uprooted indigenous governments and took power. But in the Isthmus, Zapotec rule held firm. In May 1936, unionized teachers went on strike in the Isthmus to force the state government to retract the sacking of two teachers, who were attempting to unionize workers in the port of Salina Cruz.73 As the dispute over the employment of the teachers dragged on, Charis sided with a rival teachers’ union and regional merchants frightened by some of the teachers’ more radical rhetoric and attempted to dislodge the obstreperous educators. Feliciano López Felix, the leader of the Juchitán teachers, complained in March 1937 that he and his colleagues lived under a “reign of terror” imposed by General Charis.74 Finally, in May 1938, Charis persuaded the SEP’s director general of education to dismiss the original tutors and impose twenty-one new teachers fresh from the training colleges of Mexico City.75 Charis not only confronted the region’s teachers but also came into conflict with Juchitán’s nascent union movement. In August 1937, teacher López Felix called together nine unions from the municipality of Juchitán de Zaragoza to form the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers; CTM)–affiliated Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de Juchitán Sole (Union of Juchitán Workers).76 By 1938, it claimed to represent 1,500 members.77 Although Charis attempted to persuade the labor board not to recognize the new group, persisted in intimidating its members, and formed a white union in league with several salt merchants, López Felix’s union became the center of opposition to Charis in the municipality of Juchitán de Zaragoza.78 In the elections of 1937 and 1938, it put forward candidates for the municipal presidency and unsuccessfully claimed victory over the candidates imposed by Charis.79 In the region’s other towns, a similar pattern of conflict between Charistas and CTM-linked unions emerged. In Unión Hidalgo, the Sindicato de

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Salineros del Istmo (Union of Salt Miners of the Isthmus) was also harassed for its support of an anti-Charista candidate for the municipal presidency.80 In the municipal agency of Santo Domingo, the same authorities harassed the union of workers of the recently nationalized sugar factory throughout the late 1930s.81 The deal struck between Cárdenas and Charis not only disrupted the corporative organization of teachers and workers but also undermined the construction of the national party. During the late 1930s, the former politicians from the Red Party maintained the contacts with teachers and workers forged during the rise of Cardenismo. Together, they managed to take control of the emerging party system in the Isthmus. In 1937, perhaps as a means to balance Charis’s power, a Red politician was made local deputy. The following year, he was appointed to the executive council of the newly formed state council of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM, Party of the Mexican Revolution).82 Municipal elections, especially in large mestizo communities, now pitted Charistas against the local representatives of the national party. In December 1937, Charistas beat a party-backed alliance of CTM workers and teachers for the municipal presidency of Unión Hidalgo.83 Although the state government ordered that the Charista candidate stand down in April 1938 for attacking the head of the local union, he remained in place for the duration of the year.84 In late 1939, this pattern of electoral dispute spread throughout the isthmus as both groups jostled for position before the presidential candidate, Manuel Ávila Camacho. In Unión Hidalgo and Reforma, Charista candidates beat the candidates of the local PRM. Attempts to block the impositions were halted by Charis’s control of the local judge.85 In Matias Romero, the Charista candidate, Arnulfo Rivas, claimed victory over the PRM-backed group. Although government officials arrived in the town to overturn the election in favor of a Red candidate, the attempt failed. Rivas took the municipal building by force on January 1, 1940, and retained power despite the complaints of the opposition.86

Maintaining Local Rule, 1940–1964 During the 1940s and 1950s, the federal state increasingly singled out remaining pockets of independent rule, imposed compliant authorities, and disarmed or crushed opponents. In Morelos, successive presidents sought to undermine peasant sugar cooperatives established during the 1930s, eventually murdering their leader, Rubén Jaramillo.87 In Veracruz,

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the death squads of La Mano Negra eradicated the remaining groups of armed ejidatarios (communal landowners).88 In Guerrero, the ranchero elite stamped out incipient attempts at indigenous self-rule.89 Yet during the same period, the Zapotecs of Juchitán maintained power despite constant attempts by state governments and rival mestizo politicians to usurp regional control. In many ways, Charis learned to adapt his political style to the demands of a more-mannered Mexican state. He retreated from his attempts at wider regional influence in the neighboring districts and his aspirations to the governorship of Oaxaca. After remaining outside and even in conflict with the party apparatus for over two decades, he eventually asserted control over the regional branch of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) in the late 1940s.90 He even adjusted his deliberately unsophisticated peasant persona to the demands of civilismo (non- or anti-militarism). During Miguel Alemán Valdés’ sexenio, he regularly sent his wife to Los Pinos “with trays of little delicacies” for the epicurean president.91 Yet, Charis’s relations with extraregional authorities still remained predicated on military contacts, the threat of armed force, and the ambivalent discourse of Juchiteco militarism. For example, during the early 1940s, Governor Vicente González Fernández (1940–1944) attempted to rid Oaxaca of its provincial caciques. In Juchitán, he tried to use political imposition and the prevention of agrarian reform to oust Charis. But by 1940, Charis was senator of Oaxaca. He now used his national prominence to popularize this discourse of tamed Juchiteco militarism, arguing that if the governor refused to cease intervention, he risked the danger of armed revolt. On November 4, 1941, Charis stood up in the Senate chamber and charged González Fernández of presiding over a state dictatorship that had so far ordered the murder of forty-seven Oaxaca peasants. Over the next fortnight, he defended and extended his charges in a series of newspaper articles. In El Universal Gráfico of November 12, he claimed that the governor was responsible for 175 deaths and had forced many of his fellow countrymen to flee to the mountains. During the interview, he played with the Juchitecos’ reputation for unruliness and martial prowess and the state’s ambivalence to this perceived element of the indigenous psyche. He insinuated that, as a poacher turned gamekeeper, he was the only man capable of taming these belligerent and obstreperous Indians. In so doing, he also inadvertently defended the politics of Cardenismo, the series of deals brokered between armed local groups and the central state. “There is so much discontent among the indigenous Juchitecos, they are on the point of rebelling . . . I know my paisanos and they are perfectly armed. At any time they could

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launch a revolt that could only be compared to the Yaqui rebellion. The Juchitecos are very fond of their weapons. There is not one that does not have a Mauser and cartridges in abundance.”92 Charis’s appropriation of Juchitán’s history was endorsed in February 1942 by his ally General Rubin García’s series of articles in El Universal documenting nineteenth-century plans to run a canal through the Isthmus. Although the pieces were apparently innocuous, they included copious mention of the revolt of Che Gorio Melendre and were dotted with references to Juchitán’s “separatist tendencies” and “rebellious spirit.” García’s exposition of ethnic difference struck at the heart of González Fernández’s project of state centralization and set off a wave of sententious official historiography. The government was so sensitive to these imputations of Juchiteco autonomy that the state’s official newspaper ran articles accusing Rubin García of academic apostasy. Under the headline “The Isthmus Is Not Separatist,” a government journalist argued that there had never been a popular separatist movement in the Isthmus and that the region had been renowned for its love not only of the “Patria Mexicana” but also its “Patria Chica,” Oaxaca. While García had portrayed Che Gorio Melendre as a democratic representative of Juchiteco sovereignty and an incarnation of indigenous independence, the state historian claimed that Che Gorio Melendre was the leader of a ragged, unpopular band of unpatriotic bandits.93 As the situation in Juchitán threatened to escalate beyond barbed historical debates, Charis’s close connections to the military hierarchy prevailed over the state governor’s efforts at centralization. On September 21, 1942, Joaquín Amaro was appointed the third regional military commander in charge of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.94 He immediately started to negotiate between the governor and the displaced Zapotec cacique. A cancelled drainage project was restarted and political impositions reversed. In the elections of late 1942, Amaro’s soldiers kept the peace as Charis’s candidates again dominated elections in Juchitán and the surrounding villages.95 A year later, the governor, also a former military man, was forced to admit that there was “a great coming together between the inhabitants of the Isthmus and the inhabitants of the rest of the state.”96 Despite these hopeful words, conflicts between Charis and state governors continued over the next two decades. Governors Edmundo Sánchez Cano (1944– 1947) and Manuel Mayoral Heredia (1950–1952) tried to extend central control over Juchitán. However, on both occasions Charis used this pattern of threats, politicking, and occasional armed force to maintain local control.

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Conclusion This narrative of Juchiteco militarism is a useful corrective to traditional appreciations of the Mexican Army and the state. Scholars have argued that in Mexico, unlike in many other Latin American countries, civilian rule triumphed over military control. According to Roderic Ai Camp and Edwin Lieuwen, “the official party and the civilian bureaucracy” gradually subsumed the initial political role of the postrevolutionary military, defeating or co-opting unruly local caudillos and their armed support. At the same time, men such as Joaquín Amaro created a new professional army, which “concentrated its energies upon the exercise of military functions and eschewed politics.”97 In many ways, the careers of Charis and many of his Juchiteco troops followed this pattern. Generals, officers, and soldiers learned Spanish and pledged loyalty to the revolutionary government, and they were dissuaded from direct political intervention. Yet military professionalization was a double-edged sword, adapted and modified by malleable local leaders.98 Although it prevented the rise of an openly political military caste, it also permitted self-declared “disciplined” and “obedient” indigenous military forces to play on ingrained fears of Indian revolt, operate as what Adrian Bantjes has termed “political wild cards,” and carve out distinct spaces of local control.99 Successive presidents offered “tame battalions” of Yaquis important political roles.100 At the same time, Mayos declared that military service was “one of the few ways open to improve his lot and remain a Mayo.”101 During the postrevolutionary era, these deals shaped the state. As Jeffrey Rubin argues, in Juchitán Zapotecs forged a distinct “domain of sovereignty,” a “realm of autonomy, self-definition and control,” which paved the way for the radical anti-PRI campaigns of the 1970s.102 Like other enduring regional caciques, Charis presented himself externally as a rational, bureaucratic servant of the state. This allowed his cacicazgo to operate internally on more traditional strategies of “friendship, kinship . . . personal loyalty” and force.103 These Janus-faced caciques dotted the Mexican political landscape even after the 1930s. Some, like Charis or the Yaqui leaders, relied on contacts in the military, others on relations with the educational, agrarian, or labor administrations.104 For example, Zapotecs from Sierra Juárez dominated positions in the state branch of the SEP.105 Although this facade gave the impression that the state power operated through a series of bureaucratic chains of command (an assumption reiterated by revisionist theorists of the corporatist state), in fact, as the “the organs of the central government [were] cannibalized by local elites and interests,” power remained with local brokers.106

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In some ways the persistence of the Juchiteco battalion reflected a colonial military tradition going back to the days of conquest, when “loyal Indians” had aided Spanish soldiers to suppress other indigenous groups.107 In the succeeding centuries, military communities, often drawn from more central indigenous groups, had formed New Spain’s frontier defenses in the face of “Apache” attack.108 During the nineteenth century, Nahuatland Zapotec-speaking soldiers proved key members of the Liberal National Guard during the civil wars of the 1850s and 1860s.109 On each occasion, service brought some reward, whether it was in the form of arms, political autonomy, or the preservation of communal lands. Standing back still further and looking at Mexico in comparative terms, the country’s tradition of indigenous militarism finds little echo in other twentieth-century Latin American countries, where stark racial divisions have dissuaded elites from arming ethnic groups. Instead, it is tempting to draw parallels with the great empires of Europe, which sought to employ colonized subjects as frontline soldiers in return for limited benefits. Like the Juchitecos of Mexico, British sepoys and French West African troops often took advantage of imperial needs to test the boundaries of racial discourse and political flexibility.110 At the same time, indigenous groups in broad multi-ethnic nations like the United States and Russia have done the same.111 When the communist regime fell, aspirant Cossack soldiers, like their postrevolutionary Juchiteco counterparts, sought to harness their military tradition, join the national army, and use their newfound status to exact political demands.112 Notes Author’s note: I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo General de la Nación, Dirección General de Gobierno (AGN, DGG); Archivo General de la Nación, Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (AGN, IPS); Archivo General de la Nación, Lazaro Cárdenas del Rio (AGN, LCR); Archivo General de la Nación, Miguel Alemán Valdés, (AGN, MAV); Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo de Oaxaca (AGPEO); Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (AHSDN); Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Educación Pública (AHSEP); Archivo Joaquín Amaro (AJA); Archivo Judicial del Estado de Oaxaca (AJEO); Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (FAPECFT); US Military Intelligence Reports (USMIR). 1.  Interview with Antonio Toledo, December 2008. 2.  Interview with Claudio Toledo, December 2008. 3.  Sigmund Freud, quoted in Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),

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173. See also Donna M. Goldstein, Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).   4.  Mariano Otero, Consideraciones sobre la situación política y social de la Republica Mexicana en el año 1847 (Mexico City: Valdes y Redondas, 1848). See Andrés Lira, Comunidades indigenas frente a la Ciudad de México, Tenoctitlan y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–1919 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1983), 183; and William A. DePalo Jr., The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1997), 31–32.   5.  Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development, rev. and enlarged ed. (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992); Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 128.   6.  Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition, trans. John Upton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); Ricardo Pozas, Juan the Chamula: An Ethnographical Re-creation of the Life of a Mexican Indian, trans. Lysander Kemp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 22–23.   7.  Leticia Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas en México, 1819–1906 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1980); Jean Meyer, Problemas campesinos y revueltas agrarias (1821–1910) (Mexico City: SEP, 1973); Marcelo Carmagnani, El regreso de los dioses: El proceso de reconstitución de la identidad étnica en Oaxaca, siglos XVII y XVIII (Mexico City: Fondo de la Cultura Económica, 1998); Jean Meyer, Esperando a Lozada (Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1984).   8.  Hans Werner Tobler, “Peasants and the Shaping of the Revolutionary State, 1910–1940” in Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 487–581.   9.  Edward H. Spicer, Potam, A Yaqui Village in Sonora (Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association, 1954), 35; Dudley Ankerson, Agrarian Warlord: Saturnino Cedillo and the Mexican Revolution in San Luis Potosí (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984); Keith Brewster, “Militarism and Ethnicity in the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico,” The Americas 56, no. 2 (1999): 253–75. 10.  Keith Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917–1930 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003); Brewster, “Militarism,” 255. 11.  Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 12.  Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Guy P. C. Thomson, with David G. LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Guy Thomson, “Bulwarks of Patriotic Liberalism: The National Guard, Philharmonic Corps and Patriotic Juntas in Mexico, 1847–1888,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22 (1990): 31–68. 13.  Patrick J. McNamara, Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 14.  Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), II:25–26. 15.  John Tutino, “Ethnic Resistance, Juchitán in Mexican History,” in Howard Campbell, ed., Zapotec Struggles; Histories, Politics, and Representations from Juchitán, Oaxaca (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 41–62.

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16.  Karl Kaerger, Agricultura y colonización en México en 1900 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1986), 78. 17.  Francie R. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, 1867–1911 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 104. 18.  Dirección General de Estadistica, Sexto censo general de población, 1940 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Economia, 1946). 19.  Colby Ristow, “Identity Politics, Cultural Mediation, and Popular Revolution in Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1910–1920” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008), 2. 20.  Gonzalo Jiménez López, Juchitán: Testimonios de un pasado mágico (Oaxaca, Mexico: CONACULTA, 2005), 66. 21.  René Rueda Ruiz, Bixhahui, Chihuitán. Un relato (N.p.: n.p., 2006), 72–84. 22.  “The Juchitecos as Seen by Benito Juárez: Excerpts from a Speech, July 2, 1850,” in Howard Campbell, Leigh Binford, Miguel Bartolomé, and Alicia Barabas, eds., Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representations from Juchitán, Oaxaca (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 123. 23.  Ristow, “Identity Politics,” 1. 24.  Cancelados, Alejandro Mange, tomo V, AHSDN. 25.  Anselmo Arellanes Meixueiro, “La Confederación de Partidos Socialistas en Oaxaca,” in Victor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, ed., La Revolución en Oaxaca 1900–1930 (Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico: Instituto de Administración Pública de Oaxaca, 1985), 374–406. 26.  Spicer, Potam, 35. 27.  Brewster, Militarism, 272. 28.  For a summary of Charis’s life and military career, see Victor de la Cruz, El general Charis y la pacificación del México postrevolucionario (Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico: CIESAS, 1993). 29.  De la Cruz, El general Charis, 125. 30.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 29 January 1922, caja 010100, exp. 10, inv. 10, 1921–2, AJA. 31.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 17 June 1925, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 32.  Helidioro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 11 March 1928, caja 0301, leg. 3/6, 1928–9, AJA. 33.  Jiménez López, Juchitán, 127–30. 34.  Maria de José de Chopitea, Guieshuba, Jazmín del Istmo (Mexico City: Libro Mex Editores, 1960), 112. 35.  Robert Carriedo, “The Man Who Tamed Mexico’s Tiger: General Joaquín Amaro and the Professionalization of Mexico’s Revolutionary Army” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2005), 120; Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968); Martha Beatriz Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro y el proceso de institucionalización del Ejército Mexicano, 1917–1931 (Mexico City: UNAM, 2003). 36.  Helidioro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 9 April 1924, caja 0310, leg. 1/3, AJA. 37.  Helidoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 15 January 1925, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 38.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 4 May 1930, caja 0301, leg. 5/6, 1930, AJA.

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39.  Victor de la Cruz, Relatos sobre el general Charis (Mexico City: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1989), 13. 40.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 15 January 1925, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 41.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 29 August 1921, caja 010100, exp. 10, inv. 10, 1921–2, AJA. 42.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 25 December 1926, caja 0301, leg. 2/6, 1926–7, AJA; Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 24 May 1928, 0301, leg. 3/6, 1928–9, AJA. 43.  Joaquín Amaro to Heliodoro Charis Castro, 13 December 1924, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 44.  De la Cruz, Relatos, 13. 45.  Alberto Ramírez de Aguilar, Desde el tren amarillo, cronicas de guerra (Mexico City: A. Betas y Sucs, 1924), 82. 46.  Joaquín Amaro to SEP, 1 November 1925, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 47.  “Personnel-Indians,” 20 January 1933, reel 8, USMIR: Mexico, 1919–1941. 48.  “Report on Mexican Military,” 28 January 1928, reel 8, USMIR: Mexico, 1919–1941, National Archives, Washington. Most historians have assumed that after Obregón’s crushing of the Yaqui rebellion in 1926, few units remained loyal. Yet, by 1933, many seemed to have returned to military service. Their experiences remain unexplored and would make an interesting comparison with the soldiers of Juchitán. 49.  Estudio de las Operaciones Militares sobre Ocotlán, fondo 13, serie 010213, exp. 15, f. 89–91, Archivo Fernando Torreblanca, FAPECFT. 50.  De la Cruz, El general Charis, 128. 51.  Men of 13th battalion to Joaquín Amaro, 3 December 1924, caja 0301, 1924–5, AJA. 52.  Francisco López Cortes to Plutarco Elías Calles, 3 July 1929, Gobernación, AGPEO. 53.  Heliodoro Charis Castro to Joaquín Amaro, 30 May 1930, 0301, leg. 5/6, 1930, AJA. 54.  For example, Rosalino Matus, the head of the agrarian commission of the Colonia Militar Álvaro Obregón. He often served in councils around the Isthmus. Heliodoro Charis Castro to Manuel Avila Camacho, 5 February 1943, Gobernación, 1942, AGPEO. 55.  For example, Rafael Gómez, who was accused of multiple crimes by Reds. Sección Criminal, Juchitán, 1936, exp. 3, AJEO. 56.  Feliciano López Felix to Constantino Chapital, 2 December 1940, Gobernación, Elecciones, 1940, AGPEO. 57.  Informe del Gobernador Francisco López Cortés, September 1930, Gobernación, AGPEO. 58.  Jiménez López, Juchitán, 58–63. 59.  Andres Henestrosa, “Introducción” to Neza, Organo Mensual de la Sociedad Nueva de Estudiantes Juchitecos. 60.  De la Cruz, El general Charis, 1. 61.  Neza, September 1935. 62.  Neza, February 1936.

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63.  Neza, July 1935. 64.  Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras (Mexico City: UNAM, 1972), I:251. 65.  Joaquín Amaro to General Charis, 15 December 1942, 0607, AJA. 66.  General Charis to Director of SEP, 9 August 1935, 101.2, AHSEP. 67.  Fernando Marín to President Cárdenas, 17 September 1935, LCR, 562.5/60, AGN; Diario Oficial, 95.21, 25 March 1936. 68.  Oaxaca en México (revista), October 1937. 69.  Oaxaca Nuevo, 14 July 1938. 70.  Oaxaca Nuevo, 6 November 1937; De la Cruz, El general Charis, 70. 71.  Feliciano López Felix to President Cárdenas, 2 May 1937, XI/III/1–425, AHSDN. 72.  Jeffrey W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 43. 73.  El Oaxaqueño, 15 May 1936; El Oaxaqueño, 26 October 1936; Secretario del Despacho to Secretaría de Gobierno, 23 May 1936, Educación, 1936, AGPEO; Emancipación, 18 December 1936. 74.  Feliciano López Felix to President Cárdenas, 8 March 1937, caja 39, exp. 21086, DGG, 2.311 M (17), AGN. 75.  Oaxaca Nuevo, 8 June 1938. 76.  Feliciano López Felix to Presidente de la Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje, 3 August 1937, Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje, 127.12, AGPEO. 77.  Jacinto Guerra to President Cárdenas, 3 March 1938, caja 40, exp. 34185, DGG, 2.311 M (17), AGN. 78.  Oaxaca Nuevo, 21 August 1937; Feliciano López Felix to President Cárdenas, 24 February 1938, LCR, 525/209, AGN. 79.  Feliciano López Felix to Secretaría de Gobierno, 10 November 1938, Dirección General de Gobierno, 2.311 M (17), caja 40, exp. 34185, AGN; Jacinto Guerra to President Cárdenas, 12 December 1937, Dirección General de Gobierno 2.311 M (17) caja 39, exp. 28212, AGN. 80.  Comité Estatal de la CTM to Governor Chapital, 21 November 1937, Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, 1937, AGPEO. 81.  Comité Estatal de la CTM to Governor Chapital, 4 November 1940, Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, AGPEO. 82.  El Oaxaqueño, 29 April 1936; Oaxaca Nuevo, 22 May 1938; Oaxaca Revolucionario, 1 June 1938. 83.  Tomás Pineda to Governor Chapital, 8 December 1937; Francisco Enríquez to Governor Chapital, 1 January 1938, both Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, 1937, AGPEO. 84.  Juez de la Primera Instancia de Salina Cruz to Governor Chapital, 20 April 1938; Mario E. Vallejo to Governor Chapital, 28 December 1938, both Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, 1937, AGPEO. 85.  Jesús Jiménez to Secretario del Despacho, 3 December 1939, Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, 1940, AGPEO. 86.  Comité de Propaganda Electoral Pro–Ávila Camacho to Secretario del Despacho, 4 December 1939; Eliseo Matus to Governor Chapital, 24 December 1939; Arnulfo Rivas to Governor Chapital, 4 January 1940, all Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, 1940, AGPEO.

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  87.  Tanalis Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (Duke, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).   88.  Antonio Santoyo, La Mano Negra: Poder regional y estado en México: Veracruz, 1928–1943 (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995).   89.  Paul Gillingham, “Force and Consent in Mexican Provincial Politics: Guerrero and Veracruz, 1945–1953” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2005).   90.  Agent J.R.R. to Lamberto Ortega Peregrina, 7 January 1949, IPS, caja 801, AGN; Centro Orientador Político de Chahuites to President Alemán, 13 September 1950, MAV, 252.82, AGN.   91.  Jacienta L. de Charis to President Alemán, 18 January 1949, MAV, 557 136.2 213, AGN.   92.  El Universal Gráfico, 12 November 1941.   93.  El Universal, 24 February 1942; El Universal, 25 February 1942; Oaxaca Nuevo, 26 February 1942; Oaxaca Nuevo, 27 February 1942; Oaxaca Nuevo, 28 February 1942.   94.  Luis Garfias Magaña, “El General Joaquín Amaro, El Istmo de Tehuantepec y la soberanía nacional,” Boletín de Fideicomiso Archivos 38 (2002): 1–13.   95.  Margarita Altamirano, comp., Heliodoro Charis Castro: Recuento de una historia (Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico: Instituto Estatal de Educación Pública de Oaxaca, 2003), 82–3; Gobernación, Elecciones Municipales, Juchitán 1942, AGPEO.   96.  Antequera, 7 November 1943.   97.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism; Roderic Ai Camp, Generals in the Palacio: The Military in Modern Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).   98.  For a similar appreciation of the military in the nineteenth century, see Guy Thomson, “Los indios y el servicio militar en el México decimonónico. ¿Leva o ciudadanía?” in Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ed., Indio, nación y comunidad en el México del siglo XIX (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 1993), 207–52.   99.  Adrian Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked the Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 144. 100.  Spicer, Potam, 35; Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked the Earth, 146–47. 101.  N. Ross Crumrine, The Mayo Indians of Sonora: A People Who Refuse to Die (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 44. 102.  Rubin, Decentering the Regime. Rubin takes the term from Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 103.  Claudio Lomnitz, Exits from the Labyrinth, Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 296–309. 104.  See Benjamin Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), chaps. 5 and 6. 105.  Benjamin Smith, “Defending “ ‘Our Beautiful Freedom’: State Formation and Local Autonomy in Oaxaca, 1930–1940,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 23, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 125–53. 106.  Alan Knight, “State Power and Political Stability in Mexico,” in Neil Harvey, ed., Mexico: Dilemmas of Transition (London: ILAS, 1993), 29–63.

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107.  Michel R. Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 108.  María del Carmen Velázquez, Colotlán: Doble frontera contra los bárbaros (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1961); Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 39–56. 109.  Thomson and LaFrance, Patriotism; Thomson, “Indios”; Mallon, Peasant; McNamara, Sons of the Sierra. 110.  David Killingray, Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1999). 111.  Paul C. Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 112.  Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski, “The Integration of the Cossacks within the Russian Army: Political and Military Implications,” in Stephen L. Webber and Jennifer G. Mathers, eds., Military and Society in Post-Soviet Russia (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2006), 241–56.

chapter five

Eulogio Ortiz The Army and the Antipolitics of Postrevolutionary State Formation, 1920–1935 Ben Fallaw Between 1920 and 1935, Mexico’s postrevolutionary state weathered coups, the Cristiada, challenges from the left and right, and finally, Plutarco Elías Calles’s displacement by Lázaro Cárdenas. General Eulogio Ortiz played a crucial but underappreciated role in strengthening the revolutionary state during these critical years. He helped Joaquín Amaro modernize the military and mastered counterinsurgency warfare in the Cristiada. Ortiz also forcibly silenced Calles’s domestic opponents. Without Ortiz and a cohort of second-tier generals, the celebrated “soft” side of state formation (schooling, patriotic ceremonies, and negotiations) could not have taken place. As an ardent iconoclast, quasi-populist, and landowner, Ortiz tried to mold society to conform to Calles’s revolutionary ideals and project the power of revolutionary institutions into everyday life; he would make civilians into disciplined citizens just as he made recruits into disciplined soldiers. Anticlericalism aside, Ortiz’s brand of revolutionary ideology resembles that of South American Cold War antipolitics described by Loveman and Davies. Rejecting civilian authority, Ortiz would “depoliticize” governance by repressing labor, the press, and opposition politicians perceived as subversive.1 Ortiz and the military mattered for postrevolutionary state formation: they coerced resistors (real or imagined) and modeled one brand of revolutionary ideology. Socially and culturally, military officers made up a key component of the revolutionary middle class identified by Michael Ervin. This critical yet generally overlooked group often mediated between revolutionary elites and subalterns. Their actions and values helped form 136

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(and deform) the postrevolutionary state.2 In this chapter, I draw on Ortiz’s correspondence with Calles and Amaro, and other primary documents, as well as a few, mostly fragmentary, secondary sources to reconstruct Ortiz’s kinetic career.3 Ortiz Reyes was born in 1892 to a middling family in Chihuahua. Though not privileged, he enjoyed some social advantages: he was notably light-skinned (“el güero Eus”) and had enough primary schooling to write well. Still, he shared much of the hard rural lifestyle of country folk; he always loved thick, Chihuahua-style corn tortillas (gordas), not citified wheat bread. Apprenticed as a cobbler, he later worked as a mechanic in the mines of Parral, Chihuahua.4 In person, he made a strong impression, not so much for his size (he was of average height and wiry) as for his hard, withering gaze and his blistering tongue. Ortiz’s trademark expletives— exceptional even in the army—earned him the sobriquet “Pico de Oro.”5 Ortiz joined the Maderista movement in Chihuahua in late 1910. After the Huertista coup, he remobilized to fight in Villa’s Division of the North, eventually joining the Dorados, Villa’s elite cavalry corps. A colonel by 1914, he distinguished himself administratively by serving as a staff officer for Villa and Manuel Chao and publishing a newspaper in Villa’s hometown of Parral in 1914. When he accepted the rank of brigadier (one-star general) from Venustiano Carranza in 1916, Chao had him beaten and jailed. Although freed by Villa, hard feelings remained; Ortiz deserted and fled to the United States. Some sources accuse him of cooperating with Villista war profiteer Federico de la Garza in exile; others claim he worked as a bracero. In any event, he learned English well during his exile. After backing the Sonorans’ Agua Prieta coup against Carranza in 1919, he came home with a second general’s star (general de brigada).6 In fall 1920, then–secretary of government Calles dispatched Ortiz to Chiapas to try to negotiate an end to the revanchist Mapache revolt headed by Chiapan landowners. Though Ortiz’s mission failed, it enabled him to cultivate Calles (he volunteered to build schools for soldiers’ children).7 During the Battle of Ocotlán, Ortiz helped defeat the delahuertista revolt, blocked rebel Enrique Estrada’s retreat, and then energetically pursued rebel remnants in the north. His exploits greatly impressed two key Sonoran generals, Joaquín Amaro and Roberto Cruz.8 Amaro’s institutionalization of the army proceeded unevenly; consequently, his dealings with his generals like Ortiz were by necessity personal as well as professional. Further complicating matters, Amaro’s generals had to accommodate Calles’s and Obregón’s political preferences. During Calles’s presidency (1924–1928), Ortiz was one of the few generals favored

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by both of the Sonorans.9 Unlike many of his peers, Ortiz was steadfastly loyal and relatively honest, and he never tried to carve out a regional fiefdom or “brass cacicazgo.”10 Jean Meyer ranks Ortiz as among the eleven most important generals during the 1920s.11 Over time, Ortiz was accepted into the inner circle of the revolutionary family, becoming Amaro’s friend and protégé and Calles’s trusted enforcer.12 The thick folders of correspondence to and from Ortiz in Amaro’s personal archives speak to Amaro’s esteem for the Chihuahuan. Amaro carefully tutored Ortiz, praising his successes and gently reprimanding him for shortcomings like mistreating civilian politicians in Zacatecas.13 Because Ortiz and Amaro never put the most sensitive information on paper, correspondence only tells us so much. For instance, upon arriving in Zacatecas to assume his command of the XXVIth zone, Ortiz asked to come to Mexico City to personally discuss matters of “transcendental importance” with Amaro.14 Nevertheless, Amaro’s letters after their meetings served as a kind of memorandum of understanding, reinforcing Amaro’s oral instructions for Ortiz, and so leaving a historical paper trail attesting to the military’s role in statemaking. Amaro relied on Ortiz, Alejandro Mange (see chap. 7), and Andrés Figueroa to professionalize an army marked by indiscipline, corruption, and politicization. An exacting, meticulous instructor of men and trainer of horses, Ortiz excelled in Amaro’s new army. Amaro sent to Ortiz for reorganization units led by less-competent generals.15 Like Amaro, Ortiz ran a tight ship with no room for misconduct or even a hint of disloyalty. In an age where some generals drank and gambled to excess (Obregón famously paid off Secretary of War Francisco Serrano’s huge gambling debt), Ortiz was abstemious and exacting. He stripped a lieutenant colonel of his commission in 1925 for becoming inebriated and insulting Amaro and Calles at a formal military dinner. “Believe me my General,” he assured Amaro, “I am incapable of conspiring against anyone.”16 Still, Ortiz was not a martinet, but a consummate horse soldier. Cavalry was the prestige branch of the army, just as fighter pilots dominate the US Navy.17 Ortiz knew horseflesh, bought replacement mounts for the army in the United States, and picked up Amaro’s favorite game of polo. Amaro’s military transformation required adopting better weapons and mastering small-unit tactics. Here, too, Ortiz excelled. In fact, he was among the first to employ the Thompson submachine gun. Little wonder then that Amaro and Calles selected Ortiz to command one of the two sides in the prestigious 1928 Blue vs. Red war games.18 But Ortiz earned his third star (divisionario, Mexico’s highest rank) in 1929 not on the training field but on the battlefields of the Cristero War.

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Ortiz’s Counter-Cristiada In December 1924, Amaro named Ortiz to serve as jefe de operaciones militares (chief of military operations; JOM) of Zone XXVI (the west-central state of Zacatecas). When scattered Cristero uprisings mushroomed in July and August 1926, Ortiz’s men scoured the state for suspected insurgent cells. On August 3, 1926, a detachment of his prized Sixth Cavalry Regiment raided the western town of Chalchuihuites, seizing Father Luis Batis and several members of the local Asociacion Catolica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM, Catholic Association of Mexican Youth).19 When local Catholics tried to free the men, his soldiers panicked and executed Batis and three lay activists in cold blood not far from town. The atrocities inflamed popular opinion against Ortiz and the federal government, and Cristero attacks multiplied. By September, rebel bands numbering in the hundreds controlled much of southern Zacatecas, and federal troops huddled in larger towns like Juchipila, fearing to venture too far into the hostile countryside. Terrified federal teachers, labor inspectors, tax collectors, and agrarian engineers could not travel without large armed escorts. Consequently, the revolutionary state all but vanished in much of rural Zacatecas. To make matters worse for the government, geography favored the rebels. Southern Zacatecas, bisected by a series of canyons, had only a few roads and lacked railroads. The federal army moved at a snail’s pace, because the lack of logistical support forced camp followers to forage to feed the troops.20 Zacatecas’s rich soil and temperate climate meant rebels could live off the land, and sympathetic civilians supplied the Cristeros and relayed information about the movement of army detachments.21 The government feared that even one decisive victory in a pitched battle would allow the Cristeros to attract enough men to besiege larger towns. But by November 1926, Ortiz had turned the tables, and Calles and Amaro extended his operational jurisdiction to neighboring Aguascalientes and parts of Jalisco in recognition of his talents.22 Ortiz cornered and killed Cristero chieftains Guillermo Solís in Sombrerete and Prisciliano González in the south. In early January 1927, Ortiz hammered and then scattered a significant Cristero force in the strategic canyon of Juchipila, the key to southern Zacatecas. With Zacatecas’s strategic towns, large haciendas, and mines now safe from Cristeros, he moved to the Altos in neighboring Jalisco. On September 4, 1927, he waged a second, successful campaign to lift the Cristero siege of Huejuquilla, Jalisco, that turned the tide in Los Altos, the decisive theater in the Cristero War.23

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Ortiz’s tenacious counterattacks in Zacatecas helped to turn a potential disaster into a (costly) victory in 1927. Still, the war would drag on for almost two years longer. Ortiz realized that the Cristeros could not be defeated through a war of attrition. When confronted by a sizeable federal force, they preferred to break down into smaller bands and slip away. In response, Ortiz crafted a three-pronged counterinsurgency strategy: he armed and protected civilian auxiliaries; he parleyed with Cristero chieftains to convince them to surrender; and he deprived Cristeros of civilian support through forced resettlement (reconcentration), torture, and hostage-taking. The success of Ortiz’s counter-Cristiada would hinge on reliable intelligence; Ortiz had no alternative but to seek out civilian collaborators. Only reliable information from the local population allowed the federales to separate guerrilla combatants from the civilians who supplied them with intelligence and food. Only reliable guides could lead flying columns of cavalry and spot ambushes in the canyons and high scrub. Ortiz sought out civilian scouts, spies, and informers and tried to flip Cristero deserters and prisoners into collaborators. This was hardly revolutionary; Caesar cultivated the same intelligence sources two millennia earlier.24 Yet intelligence was historically neglected by the Mexican military; most commanders used haphazard methods with uneven results.25 Nevertheless, most Zacatecans viewed his troops as an army of occupation, so the general had a tough time finding “trustworthy subjects” (elementos de confianza). Ortiz found enough to name jefes de defensa civil (chiefs of civil defense) in many towns, counting on them to collect information, supply him with exploradores (mounted scouts), and raise rondas (patrols of armed civilians) to garrison strategic points. Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM, Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) unions and agraristas (recipients of land grants) in Zacatecas should have been his natural allies against the Cristeros, but Ortiz favored landowners and mistrusted labor. Nevertheless, Zacatecan agraristas from Fresnillo, Valparaíso, Arroyo, and Enmedio did fight under Ortiz in numerous skirmishes and the decisive battles for Huejuquilla in neighboring Jalisco. Ortiz’s fierce protection of his auxiliaries earned their loyalty. For years, he tried unsuccessfully to get Amaro to pay a pension to the widow of an officer in his irregulars in Colima.26 Ortiz defended local civilian subordinates who raised irregular units for the revolutionary regime, and as long as they fought well, he turned a blind eye to their shortcomings. In the strategic southern town of Juchipila, Ortiz appointed Espiridion Rodríguez his civil defense chief. Established town notables in Juchipila complained this “completely rustic man” was

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unsuitable for the job. Rodríguez leveraged his militia rank to become mayor. In the name of keeping the peace, he disarmed his local rivals. When Rodríguez requisitioned burros for the war effort, he kept some for himself for his trouble. Although Rodríguez closed the church, he attended clandestine Masses in private houses. When the mayor’s foes complained, Ortiz dismissed the charges as pure petty politics. Besides, Ortiz philosophized, even if these allegations were true, most public functionaries had done the same or worse.27 The second part of Ortiz’s contra-Cristero strategy consisted of negotiating the surrender of Cristero leaders. Ortiz, an ardent anticlerical, was pragmatic when it came to parleying with his Catholic foes, as long as they lived up to his own code of honor.28 Ortiz grudgingly admired Cristero military leaders he deemed worthy, treating them with respect. In September 1926, he toured the Altos of Jalisco and persuaded many rebels to come down from the hills and peacefully return home in return for amnesty.29 Fighting Cristeros in Colima in 1929, he shot a group of captured combatants who cringed before him, but he spared their commander and offered him a federal commission because the rebel officer said his only regret was not killing Ortiz.30 Ortiz’s careful negotiations with Duranguense Cristero leader Juan Galindo showed that Ortiz could neutralize rebel leaders through diplomacy. Ortiz located a reliable intermediary, a Lebanese-Mexican merchant who fenced spoils for Galindo, and the general exploited rifts and demoralization in Galindo’s band to convince him that his cause was lost. Ortiz expressed his high opinion of both Galindo and his wife, creating a personal bond. Most likely Galindo surrendered only after Ortiz extended personal guarantees of protection against vengeful relatives of the insurgent’s former victims.31 In other words, Ortiz pacified by understanding and exploiting the complex web of social relations and old grudges surrounding Cristero chieftains. His greatest Cristero nemesis, Pedro Quintanar, however, defied Ortiz’s repeated entreaties to surrender even after the Arreglos ended the conflict. Outraged by Father Batis’s brutal execution, the former federal colonel and “serio charro” (real cowboy) became a feared guerrillero, widely admired by locals. Quintanar repeatedly eluded capture in western Zacatecas and the Altos of Jalisco, and feared betrayal and murder should he surrender.32 To corner his quarry, Ortiz identified and manipulated potential middlemen to seek out Quintanar. Ortiz selected as his chief negotiator “a friend of mine, civilian and trustworthy” and reached out to operatives in the Cristero support networks that stretched all the way to Mexico City to try

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and persuade Quintanar to surrender.33 After a year of frustration, Quintanar disarmed, accepted amnesty, and retired to his ranch. The Cristero chieftain, apparently fearing for his life, joined Ortiz’s entourage when the general was transferred to Chihuahua.34 Quintanar was shot dead on June 14, 1930, while bathing in Ojinaga, Chihuahua. Many blamed Ortiz, who had vouched for Quintanar’s safety and was responsible for maintaining order in the state.35 Through canny use of information, intermediaries, and sheer guile, Ortiz neutralized insurgent leaders such as Galindo and Quintanar. During the conflict, he tried to isolate Cristero bands from the populace via forced removal of the inhabitants of ranches and villages. Those who stayed behind in free-fire zones could be killed.36 Amaro applied the controversial reconcentration policy in Los Altos in mid-1927, but rescinded it because it actually increased support for Cristeros.37 Ortiz’s exact role in implementing the policy in Los Altos is unclear, but as commander of Durango he gave communities the choice of either helping to hunt Galindo and other Cristeros or moving to refugee centers. Resisters were starved out.38 In a revealing letter to Amaro in 1929, he compared Cristeros to the Zapatistas; he or his subordinates might well have imitated Constitutionalist counterinsurgency tactics used against the Zapatistas during the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution that also relied on reconcentration.39 During the Cristiada, Ortiz frequently brutalized civilians. Scouring Zacatecas City in 1926 for two priests in hiding, he took a man’s son hostage to force him to cooperate in the search.40 In Durango, he reportedly killed so many suspects in his custody that his own comrades nicknamed him “matamarrados” (killer of bound men).41 True or not, this black legend jibes with Ortiz’s well-documented treatment of civilians: he ended attacks on the railroads in Durango by forcing relatives of suspected Cristeros to act as human shields for trains, and he took family members as hostages to force combatants to surrender.42 To try to extract information about the whereabouts of Cristero chieftains, Ortiz tortured their families in Durango City’s ex-seminary and state police headquarters.43 Civilians repeatedly complained of Ortiz’s extortions during the Cristiada. The general ransomed twenty prominent Catholics in Zacatecas and Aguascalientes by bringing rather flimsy charges of conspiracy with the rebels against them, and then releasing them from jail after his intermediary collected between 500 and 2,500 pesos a head from them in exchange for their freedom.44 Of course, funds extracted from prominent Catholics did not necessarily line the general’s pockets. They probably served as a slush fund to pay scouts and informers and secure much-needed war

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materials.45 Given the federal treasury’s parsimony, extra-legal extraction was standard operating procedure. This practice did not preclude personal gain by commanders and ensured most of Zacatecas’s population hated the army. While Ortiz was a brutal wartime commander, his friend Maximino Ávila Camacho was even worse. When he replaced Ortiz as commander of southern Zacatecas, Ávila Camacho’s men looted, killed, and rustled entire herds of cattle. To the outrage of Catholics, Ávila Camacho shod his regiment’s horses with the metal from Nochistlán’s church. When Espiridión Rodríguez, leader of Juchipila’s scouts, complained about the rape of his daughter, Ávila Camacho had him killed.46 Ortiz’s ability to mobilize auxiliaries and his relative honesty sets him apart from other military and civilian leaders fighting the Cristiada in Zacatecas. Consider Zacatecas’s fate after Ortiz’s transfer. Isolated Cristero bands continued to operate in the south, and few federal troops could be spared to contain them. Because Ávila Camacho had so thoroughly antagonized the populace, the national government preferred to work through local Callista políticos to mobilize much-needed auxiliaries to scour the southern canyons. In February 1929, Mexico City forwarded Zacatecan state congressman Luis R. Reyes sixty thousand pesos to create a seven hundred–man militia (Defensa Social). However, Reyes pocketed most of the money himself.47 Ortiz’s Zacatecas campaign showcased his military capabilities, and Amaro tasked Ortiz to help finish off the major Cristero redoubt in Colima, the last significant campaign of the war (May 23 to June 23, 1929). In Colima, Amaro hoped to repeat the quick success the revolutionary army enjoyed against the Escobar revolt in March of that year. To demonstrate his army’s recent modernization, Amaro deployed his forces in large, combined arms units (brigades of thousands, not single regiments and battalions of a few hundred), coordinated land and air and naval forces, and supplied troops via a quartermaster corps, as opposed to a horde of camp followers. Amaro counted on Ortiz to root out Cristeros dug in up in the hills with his main offensive force: several thousand cavalry, infantry, Chihuahuan irregulars under Nicolas Fernández, artillery, and a squadron of aircraft.48 Unfortunately for Ortiz, the rugged terrain and his own arrogance neutralized the army’s advantages in training and technology. Artillery and naval bombardment rarely hit Cristeros, and aerial bombing killed friendly troops. Ortiz’s fine cavalry had to either dismount or be channeled by impassible hills into the teeth of the Cristeros’ fire. Many federales fell to Cristero sharpshooters and hand grenades rolled down the slopes. Malaria struck both sides, but Ortiz’s casualties were exceptionally

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heavy. His forces suffered an estimated 1,250 combat deaths—so many that entire truckloads of soldiers’ corpses were burned to hide the extent of the carnage. Many Cristero units escaped unscathed.49 Ortiz suffered the bloody defeat because he decided to fight a war of attrition on terrain of his foe’s choosing and launched repeated frontal assaults on an entrenched foe in spite of the advice of the Colima state police and agrarista militia. At the narrow pass of El Borbollón, less than fifty Cristeros behind stone barricades and an improvised barbed wire fence repelled assault after assault, killing hundreds of Ortiz’s men and horses. It was, as Foley put it, a Cristero Thermopylae, with Ortiz the hapless Xerxes. The Cristeros finally broke down into small units and withdrew, leaving Ortiz in control of the battlefield, but it was the national arreglos (agreement; signed but not announced before the worst of the fighting) and not Ortiz’s assault that convinced Colima’s Cristeros to lay down their arms at last.50 The Colima campaign was especially hard on civilians. To deny Cristeros the logistical and moral support of their families, Ortiz intensified the reconcentration of civilians, causing even more non-combatant deaths. He adamantly refused to “concede to the pacíficos all the liberty he or she would like because 99 percent of them are rebels or sympathizers or accomplices.”51 Unable to recruit any elementos de confianza (informants) in Colima, he imported Chihuahuan scouts. They proved ineffective off their home ground, leaving Ortiz without eyes and ears in the battle. Out of frustration, he tortured captured Cristeros to try to extract intelligence before having them shot. Fear and duress probably yielded mostly useless information; nevertheless, Ortiz’s security agents claimed to have rolled up a large network of pro-Cristero civilian supporters in Colima, including members of the state’s leading business and landowning families (women especially) and even two state congressmen. Ortiz’s intelligence operatives focused on the Cristero Women’s Brigades, thus denying Colimense Cristeros much-needed logistical support. One imagines their methods were not gentle. To cow the Cristeros’ patrician sympathizers, Ortiz ordered Colima’s elite to assemble and then dressed them down like a drill sergeant replete with his trademark expletives. To the outrage of Catholics, he even arrested the Bishop of Colima.52 Ortiz’s last counter-Cristiada campaign in Colima, then, was pure antipolitics: contempt for civilian officials and the rule of law; ruthless use of torture and unconstitutional imprisonment against citizens (many of them women); and unapologetic assertion of the military’s right to deny citizens, in Ortiz’s words, “all the liberties they would like” in the name

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of national security. Ortiz earned the lasting hatred of most Colimenses, a serious impediment to revolutionary state-making that sought the consent of Mexican citizens. If postrevolutionary state formation in Mexico was a hegemonic process, Ortiz’s brand of hegemony was, to use Jim Scott’s terms, a razor-thin one, reliant mainly on coercion.53

Militant Jacobinism and State Formation To comprehend fully the military’s crucial role in revolutionary state formation, barracks anticlericalism must be considered.54 Ortiz’s provocative actions and intemperate words against Catholicism tried to claim the loyalty of society for the revolutionary state. Anticlericalism was, for Ortiz, first and foremost a military necessary. Winning the Cristiada required eradicating the Church’s influence. His preferred tactic was to strike against its most visible representative, the clergy. During the Cristero War, Ortiz told a captive cleric that he would “go on wiping out this cursed race of ‘priests.’ ”55 Ortiz’s anticlericalism was also another expression of his antipolitics, aimed at meting out harsh, summary justice to enemies of the state outside the law. Ortiz’s life experience, actions, and (rather terse) statements indicate that other factors predating his service in the Cristiada molded his antagonism toward Catholicism. To begin with, his hatred of the Church resembled that of other revolutionary converts to non-belief in adulthood who were once Catholic.56 After all, Ortiz’s sister was Catholic, strongly suggesting that he had religious upbringing. During the Porfiriato, he was a member of a Catholic mutualist syndicate, indicating he studied social Catholic doctrine.57 Ortiz’s militant Jacobinism was also driven by what Matthew Butler has termed primitivism, meaning attempts to restore Christianity to its original, essential simplicity.58 As I explore in greater detail below, Ortiz sincerely believed that science rendered religious belief unnecessary, making organized religion nothing more than a parasitical institution subsisting on the labor of the poor. Here Ortiz spoke for many revolutionary leaders.59 That said, Ortiz’s views on Catholicism, while strong, were never completely consistent or coherent. Ortiz believed the Catholic priests masqueraded as peaceful pastors while covertly leading the Cristiada. His friend General Andrés Figueroa blamed the revolt on “the overstimulat[ion] of the fanatical masses” by the high clergy who cynically claimed to be victims when given just punishment by the revolutionary state.60 In fact, for

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the most part the clergy did not actively support the Cristeros. In Zacatecas, Bishop Plascencia forbade Mass for rebels (though many priests ignored the interdiction).61 Nevertheless, Ortiz believed that priests duped the masses into revolt and that by destroying priests’ will to fight and revealing their subversive strategy he could end the Cristiada. Consequently, Ortiz kidnapped and tortured priests, trying to break them physically and psychologically. He also carried out spectacular acts of didactic iconoclasm, despoiling cherished religious symbols and humiliating priests to show their ultimate worthlessness to the gullible masses.62 No other revolutionary general went after priests with such fierce determination. Of the twenty-six “Cristero Saints” beatified by Pope John Paul II, Ortiz’s troops martyred five: Father Batis and laymen David Roldán Lara, Salvador Lara Puente, and Manuel Morales, executed on August 3, 1926, in Chalchihuites; and Father Mateo Correo Magallanes, shot in Durango City’s cemetery on February 27, 1927.63 Ortiz justified the latter’s murder on the grounds of acquiring military intelligence to defeat the Cristeros. Similarly, Ortiz believed torturing priests would turn them into willing collaborators. In January 1927, General Andrés Figueroa tasked Ortiz to abduct Father Felipe Morones of Aguascalientes, hoping to coerce him into renouncing the pope and the Mexican episcopate and joining a schismatic (Callista, nationalistic, and primitive) church. Figueroa’s plot was but the latest in a series of unsuccessful attempts by revolution generals to exercise a revolutionary patronato (selection of bishops by the state). Figueroa hoped to restore Christianity, in his own words, to “the simplicity of its original teachings.” For three months, Ortiz psychologically tortured the priest, threatening to march him into Cristero gunfire and locking him in a room with a bear (aged and toothless, it failed to frighten).64 Although Morones refused their offer (he did offer a few masses under their aegis), Ortiz captured and jailed another priest in the spring of 1929. While fighting Escobar’s revolt, he kidnapped Chihuahuan Jesuit J. Andrés Lara and tried to psychologically break his will and convince him to reveal Cristero plans. The day Ortiz took custody of Lara he told him, “Tonight you will ‘disappear,’ ” a threat he repeated the next day. Only entreaties by General Matías Ramos Santos and Ortiz’s own sister spared Lara’s life. But Ortiz took Lara with him to Colima in May, trying to use him as an envoy to Colimense Cristeros to convince them to surrender (the rebels rejected the priest as a Callista spy).65 During the Cristiada, Ortiz also tried to demonstrate the folly of Catholic dogma, ridiculing transubstantiation by conspicuously consuming consecrated hosts with carnitas de puerco (a pork dish) in the El Labertino

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market in Zacatecas City.66 Ortiz’s Sixth Calvary Regiment eagerly aped his anticlerical actions. During the Cristiada, Ortiz distributed the army’s anticlerical newspaper La patria to his troops and encouraged them to pilfer holy objects from churches and use them to mock liturgical ritual. Father Morones witnessed soldiers dressed in stolen cassocks marching about with “great satanic gusto [pleasure].”67 By targeting priests, Ortiz encouraged officers in his regiment to imitate him.68 But it is doubtful whether he and his soldiers’ attacks on Catholic icons and ideology helped convince Catholics of the error of their ways. Like the execution of priests, such actions proved counterproductive. The brutal executions at Chalchihuites probably restrained pro-Cristero sentiment in southern Zacatecas for a while.69 But it also outraged Catholics across Mexico and inspired Pedro Quintanar to take up arms against the government. The conspicuous iconoclasm in Zacatecas City, like the execution of priests and torture of Cristeros, turned Ortiz into a symbol of Callista godlessness for Catholics. He became “Eulogio el Cruel” and “El Tigre de Durango.” Catholics alleged Ortiz shot a soldier when he saw his scapula (religious medallion). A maid who surprised Ortiz changing reportedly caught a glance of his “forked tail and claws.”70 Undaunted (if not pleased), Ortiz continued to discredit the Church in the eyes of Mexicans even after the Cristiada ended. In September 1934, while commander of the Laguna district of southern Coahuila and northeastern Durango, Ortiz executed a dramatic raid on the cotton plantation “El Coyote” and incarcerated resident priest Lucas Cervera Arámbula. He charged Father Cervera with conspiracy in La Segunda, or the Second Cristero War, which flared in some areas of Mexico throughout the 1930s. After arresting and then pardoning peons in another ritual assertion of his power to discipline civilians, Ortiz gave the estate’s resident peons a rousing talk to convince them to avoid the clergy in the future. Invoking crude materialism, he said priests “could not give them [the working folks] any hope of any help in their betterment [mejoramiento].” Rather than trying Father Cervera for treason, he leveled the humiliating charges of public drunkenness and sexual degeneracy against him. He summoned military doctors to test the priest for several venereal diseases. Laboratory results came back positive, a fact that Ortiz promptly publicized in El Siglo de Torreón, a newspaper owned by a friend and business associate. In the article “Priest’s Depravity Demonstrated,” Ortiz encouraged “the public to realize that some individuals who claim to be worthy of respect and practice as priests are perverted and at the same time criminal vehicles of secret sicknesses.” It concluded with a signed confession by Cervera.71 The act subordinated

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the shamed priest to the revolutionary state and science. It also mimicked General Álvaro Obregón’s well-publicized claims in March 1915 that dozens of clergy in Mexico City tested positive for venereal disease.72 The show trial of Father Cervera, like Ortiz’s infamous eating of hosts seven years before, was carefully staged with an eye to maximizing impact, this time amplified by the press. Ortiz’s troops eagerly imitated his Jacobinism, so when it came to his soldiers he was preaching to the choir. Most Mexicans were probably repelled and enraged by insults to their faith. Consequently, rather than persuading people of the revolutionary state’s benevolence and rationality, Ortiz’s anticlericalism widened the gap between the revolutionary military and civilians. If state formation requires compromise as well as coercion, then Ortiz’s campaign against the Church undermined the process.73

Praetorian Pillar of the Maximato, 1927–1935 Ortiz’s aggressive defanatization campaign failed, but he did forward postrevolutionary state formation in two other important ways. As I argue in the subsequent section, first he personally promoted a brand of populist antipolitics in his native Chihuahua and in his adopted home of the Laguna district (southernwestern Coahuila and northeastern Durango). Second, he helped stabilize the shaky postrevolutionary regime during a number of political crises, remaining steadfastly loyal while ruthlessly practicing violence against civilians deemed subversive. Reliance on praetorians like Ortiz, however, came at a cost for Calles and the state. A series of crises beset the postrevolutionary regime between the worst of the Cristiada and Cárdenas’s expulsion of Calles in July 1935. As civilian institutions weakened, Calles felt he had no choice but to turn to the military. The first crisis came when Obregón sought reelection in 1927. Two key generals, Arnulfo Gómez, a favorite of Calles, and Obregón’s own close friend and the ex–secretary of war, Francisco Serrano, stood against him. Foes accused Ortiz of flirting with Gómez and Serrano, but he did not lift a finger when Obregón and Calles liquidated the two.74 President Calles rewarded Ortiz with an invitation to be a guest of honor at his last presidential address in May 1928. For Ortiz, the invitation had “real and august symbolism.”75 Two months later, when Obregón was assassinated, Ortiz backed Calles even after Obregonista generals turned against him. In March 1929, General José Gonzalo Escobar revolted against Calles’s imposition of Pascual Ortiz Rubio as interim president, taking much of the

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army with him.76 Although Ortiz’s old friend Marceo Caraveo and other Chihuahuan ex-Villistas joined Escobar’s revolt, Ortiz once again stayed loyal.77 On April 2, 1929, Ortiz received his third star (divisionario, Mexico’s highest rank), an honor reserved for the most important generals.78 Calles used rank and ritual to ensure Ortiz’s future loyalty through trying times. From Obregón’s death until Calles’s ouster by Cárdenas in July 1935, Calles co-governed as jefe máximo (national boss) with four presidents (Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, Abelardo Rodríguez, and Lázaro Cárdenas until their rupture). But without the active support of Ortiz and a handful of other key generals, neither Calles nor the nominal chief executive could govern. When unified, the dozen or so most powerful military men could function as a de facto fourth branch of government, although their internal rifts often prevented them from taking collective action. Ortiz’s and Amaro’s other protégés tended to try to support both interim presidents and Calles and to claim relatively modest spoils (governorships, some graft, choice appointments). They counterbalanced the powerful “independents” among the top brass, men such as Cedillo, Almazán, and Cárdenas, who bypassed Amaro and dealt directly with Calles (all three eventually sought the presidency).79 At several key moments, Calles consulted with Ortiz and a small number of other generals before making crucial decisions. Ortiz was almost certainly among the generals whom Calles asked to back Pascual Ortiz Rubio’s nomination as president in 1928. In October 1930, when tensions between Amaro and Calles were at their highest, Calles invited Ortiz to call on him at his hacienda, Soledad de la Mota, in Nuevo León, underscoring Ortiz’s importance.80 In July 1931, Calles sent Ortiz as his emissary to San Luis Potosí strongman and “independent” General Saturnino Cedillo.81 When Calles’s partisans (“the Reds”) attacked President Ortiz Rubio’s supporters (“the Whites”), Ortiz joined the Reds in denouncing White políticos who permitted a public, ostentatious four-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12, 1931).82 At the same time, Ortiz and other generals refused to support a move by Calles to topple Ortiz Rubio until September 1932, apparently a sign of their support for institutional integrity. For his part, Ortiz Rubio clung to the fierce general during his clash with Calles, asking the man he called nephew to escort him on the presidential train after resigning.83 During the so-called Maximato, leading generals like Ortiz served as a kind of political ballast, stabilizing the often tense relations between Calles and three interim presidents. Because both the jefe máximo and interim presidents competed for their allegiance, the generals’ value became

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inflated. Many, including Ortiz, were tempted to meddle in politics and economically exploit their power.84 Several of Ortiz’s fellow three-star generals carved out brass cacicazgos (chiefdoms): Cedillo in San Luis Potosí, Abelardo Rodríguez in Baja California, and Rodrigo Quevedo in Chihuahua. The generals’ power waxed more when Calles and Amaro clashed between October 1930 and July 1931. Even after Amaro lost the Ministry of War, his former pupils such as Ortiz stayed loyal to civilian institutions.85 Calles met with only four generals more frequently than Ortiz, placing him in the “Second Foursome” of generals Alejandro Mange (see chap. 7), Miguel Acosta, and Matías Ramos in terms of political influence.86 Such prominence explains why Calles selected him to serve as a JOM of all but one of the politically sensitive border states: Tamaulipas (early 1929), Chihuahua (March–August 1930), Nuevo León (c. August– December 1930, mid-1931–1932), and Sonora (December 1934–c. June 1935). The jefe máximo also posted him to politically sensitive districts: his adopted home, the Laguna region (1933, December 1934–?), the Federal District (December 1929–March 1930), and Veracruz (Nov. 1931, early 1932).87 Throughout his revolutionary cursus honorum, Ortiz developed two strategic specialties: border control and internal security. On la frontera (border), he was tasked with stemming international contraband. Mexican liquor flowed north to US speakeasies, and Mexican gold was illegally sent to gringo banks; drug smugglers based in Ciudad Juárez worked both sides of the border with military and political protection. As in the Cristiada, border policing meant developing a network of local informers, gathering information on civilians, and acting as a law enforcement agent outside the law. Border security also facilitated more amenable and mutually rewarding contacts with business elites seeking friends in high places: in 1931, Ortiz petitioned the government to allow a Chihuahuan banker to import two cars from the United States.88 Ortiz’s militarized policing during the Maximato was not restricted to the border. In numerous states, Ortiz and his officers monitored suspected subversives, gathered intelligence on citizens, and struck against suspected subversives, unhindered by constitutional impediments. His troops often protected capital from the threat of labor or agrarista “disorder.” This mission reflected the Maximato tilt toward business, but also harmonized with his own antipolitical bent.89 While commander of Nuevo León in 1932, his soldiers assisted the Monterrey police when they put down the labor movement at the ASARCO foundry.90 On October 27, 1934, Ortiz violently broke up a meeting of a Communist labor and peasant front in Durango.91 As commander of Sonora in 1935, he was

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befriended by hacendados (landowners) and businessmen, suggesting he rendered similar services to capital.92 Although critics (above all Cardenistas) painted the Maximato as a corrupt regime, Ortiz did not sell protection to the upper class. In the first place, Amaro generally prevented his generals from directly extracting wealth from individuals, though they could enrich themselves through institutional perks to accumulate wealth discreetly.93 Rather than examples of quid pro quos, Ortiz’s ties to business interests are better seen as the result of converging interests of the brass and the upper class in the early 1930s.94 Ortiz’s determination to prevent civil disturbances put him on the side of business against labor. The Maximato’s pro-capital, anti-Communist policies facilitated the general’s budding friendships with prosperous men. During these years, Ortiz’s own landholdings increased substantially in Chihuahua and the Laguna region even as he imagined himself a modest rancher and middling farmer. In any event, as JOM, Ortiz buttressed the Maximato not only by protecting business but also by aggressively squelching electoral activity considered subversive or even just disorderly. While Amaro tried to make the revolutionary army apolitical and respectful of civilian authority, Ortiz believed national security trumped the law and civic jurisdiction. Amaro had tried but failed to curb Ortiz’s attacks on both during his first stint as JOM back in 1924–1925 in Zacatecas. Ortiz exhibited little respect for either elected officials or the judiciary: when a federal judge issued a stay to prevent the seizure of the state seminary, a furious Ortiz hounded His Honor out of Zacatecas. Ortiz later helped depose a pro-labor governor.95 In early April 1925, as Church-state tensions escalated, Ortiz summoned the leaders of the Zacatecan Catholic Democratic Union to a secret meeting and disbanded it under threat of persecution.96 Although Ortiz never directly expressed how he viewed the law, he reportedly forced a Zacatecan agrarista to eat his letter complaining about Ortiz’s human rights abuses while torturing him.97 During the Maximato, superiors found it difficult to keep Ortiz on a short leash. During the 1929 presidential campaign, Ortiz as JOM of Tamaulipas grudgingly obeyed President Portes Gil’s directives and let supporters of opposition candidate José Vasconcelos campaign. But he complained of their personal attacks against Portes Gil and the revolution in general, ominously warning that he (Ortiz) would have to react to any “irregularity” on their part.98 When the opposition contested the questionable defeat of Vasconcelos, Ortiz was unleashed. He came down hard on Tamaulipan Vasconcelistas as well as Communists, expelling foreigners

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without due process and shipping suspected leftists off to the Islas Marias without trial.99 When sent to Nuevo León, he pledged to Amaro that he would prevent “insults” and impose “order” and “peace” in Nuevo León’s local elections in July 1931.100 Four years later, the US consul in Sonora reported that he was still relying on his trademark heavy-fisted approach when it came to dealing with civilians.101 During the Maximato, Ortiz’s subordinates routinely inflicted the same sort of mental and physical duress on civilians that Cristeros and their family members suffered during wartime. Ortiz also personally tortured prisoners. On February 19, 1929, while JOM of Tamaulipas, Ortiz improbably accused anarcho-syndicalist journalist Librado Rivera of complicity in a recent dynamite attempt against President Ortiz Rubio’s life because Rivera’s newspaper Avante called the president a parasite. Elaine Scarry notes that historically torture is almost always justified as a necessary tool of interrogation, needed to produce vital information to protect national interest. Moreover, “within a precarious regime the motive for arrest is often a fiction . . . just as the motive for punishing those imprisoned is often fiction.” Ortiz refused to swear out a warrant against Rivera from a federal judge. Instead, he seized him and denied him habeus corpus by taking him to his personal residence for interrogation. Rivera lived to publish his tale, giving us rare insight into one of Ortiz’s military operations targeting civilians.102 During Rivera’s captivity, Ortiz displayed his trademark obscenity (“cabrón” [bastard], “hijos de la chingada” [sons of a bitch]) as a complement to his physical violence. The general punched Rivera repeatedly in the face and lashed him with his trademark cavalry whip, an important symbol of his rank. (In 1926, Ortiz had wielded his whip against the face of the pro-labor mayor of Rio Grande, Zacatecas, then threatened to kill him.)103 Rivera’s account also sheds some light on Ortiz’s narrow antipolitical ideology: at one point during his interrogation, an aide read a puzzled Ortiz the dictionary’s definition of anarchism. Ortiz flew into a rage at the very notion of an ideology without authority.104 He used torture in the name of extracting military intelligence in the Cristiada; now he used it on the grounds of law enforcement to induce a confession in an attempted presidential assassination. Perhaps Ortiz also believed in torture’s supposed ability to turn a rebel into a loyal subject.105 In any event, his stint in Tamaulipas proved to be a rehearsal of an even harsher brand of constabulary work in the nation’s capital. When post-electoral protests of fraud by disgruntled Vasconcelistas escalated in Mexico City in late 1929, Calles summoned Ortiz to command

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the capital’s garrison. His principal task: preventing Vasconcelistas from answering the candidate’s call for revolt in December. Keeping order in Mexico City had long been a concern for the postrevolutionary state. During the Cristero War, Catholics had staged massive pilgrimages on the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe and turned raucous funerals for Cristero sympathizers such as Luis Segura Vilchis into demonstrations against Calles. Most menacingly, a pro-Cristero espionage cell assassinated Obregón in the capital on July 17, 1928.106 Communists, who had stepped up labor organizing after the Depression started, were another prime target of Ortiz in Mexico City. On December 18 and 19, 1929, his troops raided the homes and offices of Vasconcelistas and Communists, sweeping up many family members in the process. Ortiz denied suspects habeas corpus by confining them on military bases or in suburban jails far from federal judges. As in the Cristiada, his troops unconstitutionally abused suspects both physically and mentally. One Communist was tortured until he signed a false confession for plotting to kill the president and other leaders. To extract information from a Cuban labor leader, Ortiz’s men claimed his daughters had been sexually assaulted, which drove him to try to commit suicide.107 Ortiz ratcheted up the pressure on them in early February 1930 after President-elect Ortiz Rubio barely survived an assassination attempt en route to his own inauguration at the hands of Daniel Flores, allegedly a Vasconcelista.108 The general escalated the extra-judicial incarceration of hundreds of José Vasconcelos’s supporters, collaborating with the chief of the civilian police detectives, José Mazcorro.109 Ortiz apparently deputized the famous bullfighter Juan Silveti, a crony of his, who killed Vasconcelistas with impunity.110 A disguised army captain entrapped Vasconcelistas by offering them arms to induce them to declare their readiness to revolt. Federal troops, at times personally led by Ortiz, “disappeared” Vasconcelistas into the barracks of Maximino Ávila Camacho’s Fifty-first Cavalry Regiment. On the night of February 14, 1930, a lieutenant of the Fifty-first took out a dozen suspects, drove them to a point on the road to Cuernavaca near Topilejo, and ordered them out. After they dug their own graves, they were shot into them. On March 9, hungry dogs exhumed the corpses, and the national press publicized the atrocities. Simultaneously, accused assassin Flores died mysteriously after protracted physical and psychological abuse (Ortiz’s troops pretended to execute Flores’s father). Ortiz proclaimed the cases closed. The Senate declined to investigate, and the press soon backed off both the Flores case and the Topilejo massacre.111

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While garrisoning the capital, Ortiz perfected the techniques of infiltration, surveillance, and torture that he first deployed during the Cristiada. Ortiz also relied on entrapment, institutionalized intelligence gathering, and imposed censorship. For good measure, his agents read the mail of suspected subversives with the connivance of Postmaster General Arturo Elías. When North American journalist Carleton Beals, a friend of Calles, criticized the military’s conduct, Ortiz hauled him in and grilled him. In the end, the US military attaché, who was also a polo buddy of Ortiz’s, intervened.112 To try to contain the controversy, Calles and Amaro transferred Ortiz to his native Chihuahua in March 1930. In another sign of his growing political clout, Ortiz plotted with other generals to impose his chief of staff, General Máximo García, as governor of neighboring Durango. Even Durango’s business community fought back, calling Ortiz “unpopular and feared” and forcing Calles to veto García’s imposition.113 Undaunted, Ortiz shifted his political ambitions to Chihuahua. As JOM, he undermined Interim Governor Francisco Almada and courted popular support by claiming to be a modest man helping his beloved home state by building roads.114 In fact, Ortiz was plotting with another newly minted threestar general, Rodrigo M. Quevedo, to install their client Manuel Prieto as a place-holder until either Ortiz or Quevedo could be elected in 1935. Toppling Almada meant taking on the strong political machine of Luis L. León, a key national ally of Calles.115 Rival elite cliques in Chihuahua weighed in: mining barons favored León, while agro-business backed Ortiz. At the same time, Ortiz was acquiring land in Chihuahua and disarming pro-León agraristas. Ortiz lobbied Calles to divert a federal bailout for Chihuahuan mines to the state’s ranchers and commercial farmers.116 Ortiz’s ability to meddle in Chihuahuan politics and regional economics speaks to the brass’s growing power in the Maximato. In spite of Amaro’s warning to stay out of Chihuahuan politics, Ortiz went too far, personally insulting Governor Almada and menacing the state police with his federal troops.117 On May 30, 1930, Ortiz took advantage of Amaro’s orders to subordinate paramilitary regional forces to the army in order to disarm the pro-León rural guard and seize the Chihuahuan state arsenal.118 Then, on June 25, Ortiz arrested seven state government officials and tried to seat Prieto in the state capital. Almada and his supporters put up a fight; a state congressman and police chief died in the resulting two-hour-long gun battle between Ortiz’s federals and pro-Almada officials, police, and supporters. Ortiz’s strong-arm tactics alienated many in Chihuahua and alarmed Mexico City. Amaro and

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President Pascual Ortiz Rubio had no choice but to order Ortiz to stand down. After the July 1930 elections concluded, Amaro summoned him to the capital for a dressing down, and on August 9, 1930, Ortiz was transferred to Nuevo León.119 Still, it was not long before Calles called on Ortiz to handle another delicate mission. In November 1931, Calles sent Ortiz to Veracruz on a special mission to disarm thousands of agrarian militiamen loyal to regional caudillo Adalberto Tejeda after JOM Miguel Acosta sided with Tejeda. With the warm support of landowners (some North American), Ortiz branded agraristas bandits and put them down harshly. In April 1932, he returned again to Veracruz, this time as JOM, disarmed more agraristas, and expelled Herón Proal, a key Communist organizer from the city of Veracruz. As in Mexico City, charges of illegal attacks on civilians forced his removal.120 Ortiz’s career between 1929 and 1935 underscores both the centrality of key generals in the process of state formation and the perils of relying on the military. In the absence of effective civilian law enforcement agencies, a handful of generals often served as constabularies to coerce internal foes. In the Cristiada and afterwards, Ortiz tortured, intimidated, and gathered intelligence on civilians outside of the law. In other words, he tried to expand the officer corps’ power to discipline and punish from just their own enlisted men or cristeros (or other insurgents) to civilians. To understand better how the Mexican military organized, directed, and legitimized extralegal violence, I draw on sociologist Martha Huggins and psychologists Mika Haritous-Fatouros and Philip Zimbardo’s study of the militarized police of the Cold War Brazilian dictatorship. Huggins, Haritous-Fatorous, and Zimbardo coined the term “violence worker” to refer to these “direct perpetrators of violence.”121 Of course, the military did not rule Mexico with Calles as a figurehead, nor was Calles’s ideology comparable with the Brazilian Cold War dictatorship. Rather, I argue that the Mexican military’s use of violence against civilians can be understood better by comparing it to the loosely analogous process during the Brazilian dictatorship. My point is not to equate Callista Mexico with Cold War dictatorships, but rather to follow Huggins et al.’s focus on the social organization of violence and the role of masculinity in it.122 Rather than aberrant individuals or good soldiers just following orders, Huggins et al. argue that violence workers are socially produced by five interrelated factors: secrecy, isolation, insular organizations with little oversight, a complex social division of labor of violence, and an ideological justification analogous to Loveman and Davies’s notion of antipolitics. All but the last factor characterized Ortiz’s operations during the Maximato.

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Like the Cold War militarized police in Brazil, Ortiz and his army units (above all his elite Sixth Calvary Regiment) operated in secrecy, with no critical coverage in the press and only loose political supervision due to the Maximato’s fragmented polity and Amaro’s demotion. Like Brazilian violence workers, Ortiz and his officers intentionally isolated their units from civilian supervision and larger society (Catholic attitudes toward Ortiz after Chalchihuites certainly contributed to this as well). He lived apart from the people of the states he garrisoned, surrounded by a large entourage, including his officers, his siblings, and occasionally, famed bullfighter Juan Silveti. In Durango City during the Cristiada, men challenged him to duels, which he refused to accept. Ortiz seemed to savor society’s disdain and relish playing the role of the heavy.123 As with his Brazilian counterparts, Ortiz’s isolation bred contempt for civilians in general, and elected officials, judges, and the law in particular. In 1931, the US consul of Monterrey noted that Ortiz flouted his disregard for civil authorities and that his devoted junior officers imitated his attitudes.124 As in Brazil, Ortiz organized violence by creating specialized mixed units of civilian officials and military men to handle specific tasks, ranging from officers who infiltrated opposition political groups in plainclothes to civilian collaborators who provided intelligence on fellow citizens. For instance, in Chihuahua, he used Cecilio Bustillos—an ardent anticlerical schoolteacher and a colonel of the Chihuahua irregulars—to track down fugitive priest J. Andrés Lara.125 In Colima, he used scouts, informers, other deputized civilians, and detectives to track foes ranging from Cristeros and their auxiliaries to Communist organizers. In Durango, he based his operations in the state police headquarters, and likely cooperated with them. In Aguascalientes, he relied on a newspaper editor and state policemen to hound Cristeros and sympathizers.126 In Mexico City, his officers operated out of uniform and worked with civilian detectives and the postal service against Vasconcelistas and Communists. Like Brazil’s violence workers, Ortiz altered his appearance to intimidate. In an age before sunglasses, he hid his eyes under the brim of his (appropriately) black tejano sombrero, making him appear colder and less human.127 Publically shaming others enhanced his own status and extended the army’s power over the rest of society. While commander of Chihuahua in mid1930, he humbled Governor Francisco Almada at a formal luncheon before the state’s assembled business and political elite by insulting the governor’s hat. Dishonored, Almada stormed out, taking his official state band with him.128 Ortiz summoned his military orchestra to play and continued with the lunch.129

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His infamous skill at obscenity reinforced his image as a hard man beyond social restraints. When a truck broke down in Zacatecas during the Cristero War, he chewed out the driver. When a crowd gathered to watch, he feigned more anger, screamed obscenities, and even theatrically made “immoral gestures” toward women in the crowd. His officers, who had come to appreciate this kind of macho performance as part of their regiment’s distinctive identity, applauded. As Ortiz’s captive for a long period of time, Father Lara came to understand these rages and vulgar tirades as calculated behavior intended not just to shock its target but also to impress Ortiz’s own troops.130 Journalist Beals, arrested by Ortiz in 1930 and subject to saliva-laced verbal grapeshot at point-blank range, also believed all his rage was faked, “obviously for the benefit of various military hangers-on who laughed boisterously and appreciatively.”131 In front of the right audience, verbal insults could be just as humiliating as physical assaults.132

Ortiz as Revolutionary New Man Ortiz excelled at militarized policing, but he served the state as more than just a violence worker. Ambitious regional commanders like Ortiz could, in John Watanabe’s words, serve as “the face of the state.”133 Ortiz tried to instill his notion of revolutionary values—order, discipline, petty capitalism, a bit of macho populist panache—in the everyday life of Mexican civilians within his reach. His actions and narrow ideology sketched a militaristic variant of Callista revolutionary political culture. As Matthew Butler has shown, Callismo exalted the economic value of the small farm over the ejido (common land) and the hacienda, and materialist, secular nationalism as opposed to regional, Catholic traditionalism.134 Martha Loyo Camacho suggests all Amaro’s cavalry generals shared the world view of rancheros, including a reverence for private property, mestizo (and not indigenous) ethnicity, and suspicion of the left.135 In his own mind at least, Ortiz served as kind of a Callista new man: a hardy sportsman, hardworking yeoman farmer, and patriotic (and secular) man of the people.136 Ortiz’s political ideology remained underdeveloped, but his friend Saturnino Cedillo’s system of military colonies captured his imagination. Cedillo protected private property even as he distributed land to worthy veterans, and he ran his home state with military efficiency. While Ortiz recoiled from labor unions and collective ejidos, he lauded Cedillo’s “perfect organization” as a bulwark against future revolts against the Callista regime.137 Had he governed Chihuahua, Ortiz probably would have created

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military colonies combined with pro-owner development similar to Cedillo’s. In spite of his hostility to the left, Ortiz considered himself a friend to the poor, able to materially better their lives. During the Cristero War, he distributed clothing and personal items, confiscated from a clandestine convent in Zacatecas City, to the needy.138 Efforts to cultivate civilian support were undercut by his antipolitical bent and brutality. The upper class was often repelled by his willingness to use violence, lack of respect for the law, and seeming pettiness. For instance, in the city of Aguascalientes, young people suffered his wrath for sporting fashionable “pantalones balón” (pants that were narrow at the bottom and baggy above the knees)—the fashion so enraged Ortiz that he jailed young men who wore them.139 Image, not ideas, captured Ortiz’s political imagination. He understood the press’s potential to shape popular perceptions, as evident in the carefully staged raid on El Coyote described above. The former Villista editor was media conscious; in 1931, he advised Amaro to round up homeless people lest visiting foreign journalists denigrate Mexico’s image by advertising its social problems.140 This hollow, paternalistic brand of populism characterized his actions as commander of his home state of Chihuahua in 1930, during which time Ortiz seemed to be preparing the groundwork for a future gubernatorial campaign. The Gran Liga Socialista de Resistencia del Norte, a regional party based in Ciudad Juárez, arranged a reception that seemed more like a campaign swing and that was covered by an adoring press. Before a large crowd, Ortiz boasted of his popular roots in Chihuahua, the “son of peasants” who “profoundly respected the working class” and who wanted only to work for them. Reporters were charmed.141 A pro-Ortiz ad run in the Chihuahua press clearly seemed to be the start of a campaign, responding to the “popular clamor” to fight “enemies of the Pueblo.”142 While in Chihuahua, he built roads, raised money for children’s charities, bought seed corn for impoverished peasants, and provided potable water. To these worthy ends, Chihuahua’s wealthy chipped in eighteen thousand pesos (several “donors” complained they did so under duress).143 Even after Calles sacked him as JOM of Chihuahua after his attempted coup against Alamada, he remained close to Governor Rodrigo M. Quevedo (1932– 1936), who planned to bring Ortiz back to his state as commander and possible successor.144 Although he never gave up hopes for returning to Chihuahua, Ortiz put down deep roots in the Laguna region in the 1930s. After the defeat of Escobar in 1929, Calles and Amaro gave Ortiz Escobar’s former zone of Torreón. The general made the thriving, cosmopolitan town his adopted

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home.145 Even though Ortiz advised Amaro in 1931 that JOMs should be rotated every six months to avoid entangling “comprimos” (entangling agreements), Ortiz was soon linked to key political and economic elites who made him a prominent figure in Torreón’s high society.146 Torreón was the center of the cotton-growing Laguna district and the largest city in Coahuila, a state long dominated by a political machine directed by former governors Manuel Pérez Treviño and Nazario Ortiz Garza. With military jurisdiction over the southern half of the state, Ortiz backed the electoral imposition of their machine’s candidate over the opposition candidate Julio Madero. In doing so, he put himself in the middle of another bitter regional political feud. Madero was revolutionary royalty, and he was backed by General Miguel Acosta, another key general with deep roots in northern Coahuila.147 The Laguna straddled the border with Durango, and Ortiz meddled in regional politics there, too. Early on, he made peace with Duranguense governor José Ramón Valdez after trying to impose a military crony as governor in 1930, even making a campaign contribution to Valdez.148 But in 1933, he helped General Carlos Real oust the Valdez machine.149 During the Maximato, Real and Ortiz, like generals Pablo Quiroga and Miguel Acosta, became large landowners in the Laguna region in spite of Callista rhetorical celebration of yeomen farmers.150 Ortiz not only acquired several estates but also became a fixture of Laguna society. He was constantly surrounded by his admiring tribu (tribe) of prominent men, including Antonio de Juambelz, editor-publisher of the independent, pro-business newspaper Siglo de Torreón (see the El Coyote incident above); banker José F. Ortiz (no relation); and José de la Mora, leader of the Union Agrícola Regional de la Comarca Lagunera, a key lobbying group for cotton landowners. Ortiz’s tribe organized social events that recast the bullying general infamous for Topilejo as a gallant man about town. In the pages of the Siglo, he could be seen rubbing elbows with financiers and cotton barons at a reception for a Mazatlan beauty queen and feting the governors of Durango and Coahuila. The tribu and Ortiz founded Torreón’s most prestigious country club, the Club Campestre. Here, Ortiz polished his social skills, giving up the bullfight for polo (he reportedly closed stores to boost attendance at his matches). Sports and socializing lubricated the regional politicized economy of the Maximato. Ortiz supported large landowners’ attempts to try to divert agrarian discontent through an agrarian colonization scheme. More importantly, the general successfully lobbied Calles on behalf of José F. Ortiz’s Banco de la Laguna for federal help, for credit for medium-sized cotton producers, and for the Union Agrícola Regional’s plan for damming the Nazas River.151

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By early 1935, Ortiz’s influence was at its zenith in the Laguna. His only setback was a freak hailstorm that wiped out his cotton crop in May 1935. He wrote to Calles, “I arrived to my ranch when the storm passed, there was still time to find enough unmelted hail to make a Sonoran-style frozen ice with syrup.”152 More threatening storm clouds were on the horizon. In early June 1935, Calles and Cárdenas publicly split. Because of his close ties to Calles, Cárdenas removed Ortiz from active duty on June 19. Rather than either aligning with or plotting against Cárdenas, Ortiz headed north to the United States to ride out the conflict.153 Before leaving, Ortiz signaled to Calles that he would not take up arms against Cárdenas: “It is our unavoidable obligation to support and cooperate with the Government.”154 Only a few months earlier, in June 1934, Ortiz entertained then-candidate Cárdenas during his presidential campaign, showing off his hacienda “with which the Revolution had done him justice.”155 When Cárdenas subsequently came to carry out agrarian reform in the Laguna area, he partitioned the haciendas of Ortiz and other once-prominent Callista generals. At the ceremony at which Cárdenas signed the reform proclamations on October 17, 1936, Ortiz appeared at the president’s side. Ortiz publicly affirmed his support for Cárdenas even though it cost him much, proclaiming that in 1910 he took up his rifle to defend the campesinos and he would now divide his rancho among the workers. In his own words: “[T]he Revolution gave me land and the Revolution took it away.”156 Cárdenas noted in his diary that Ortiz should have said, “During the Revolution I acquired it, and today I return it to the people.”157 By refusing to support a Callista golpe (coup), Ortiz helped guarantee a bloodless transition from the Maximato to Cardenismo, but the president still viewed him with a jaundiced eye.

Ortiz and the Contradictions of Revolutionary State Formation The revolution in fact gave some back to Ortiz. In 1940, President Manuel Ávila Camacho restored Ortiz to active service along with other Amaristas sidelined by Cárdenas. In April 1943, Ávila Camacho chose Ortiz to arrange security for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s visit because of his loyalty, zeal for internal security, and command of English. The US Secret Service had to dissuade Ortiz from “getting rid of . . . personally” fifty suspected Nazi agents in Mexico (Ortiz dismissed the Secret Service’s suggestion to just jail them as “very silly”).158 As JOM of Nuevo León, Ortiz was

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soon surrounded by a new “tribe” of wealthy admirers, including GermanMexican pharmaceutical magnate Guido Moebius. Once again, he enraged many civilians, this time by harshly enforcing the new military conscription law.159 In early 1947, he was fatally injured when a speeding car struck him while he was overseeing the campaign against hoof-and-mouth disease in Querétaro. For days, Ortiz lay in agony in a hospital bed. Priests whom he had persecuted during the Cristero War flocked to his side and waited in vain for a deathbed conversion. Ortiz died unrepentant on April 10, 1947.160 Catholics saw the fatal accident as an act of divine justice. North American writers Ernest Gruening and Carleton Beals, men who generally sympathized with Calles, remembered Ortiz as exemplifying the corruption and brutality that stained the revolution’s legacy during the Maximato. Ortiz’s scholarly biographer Enrique Plascencia, on the other hand, rightly stresses how the general’s combination of loyalty and force served the postrevolutionary state so well. Certainly, Ortiz, along with a cohort of other Amarista generals such as Mange and Heliodoris Charis, sustained the increasingly fragile Maximato during a very stressful period. I would argue that Ortiz played multiple, often contradictory roles in postrevolutionary state formation. First and foremost, he was a gifted battlefield commander, one of the few generals to effectively wage counterinsurgency campaigns against the Cristeros. Calles relied on his loyalty and his skills as a violence worker to fix a number of thorny political problems, from imposing Ortiz Rubio to dismantling Tejeda’s agrarian project. Ortiz’s antipolitical compulsion for order allowed Calles to hold on to power even at a time when opposition from the left and the right mounted and popular discontent rose. As such, Ortiz and a handful of other generals enabled the fragile postrevolutionary regime to survive a number of tests between 1927 and 1935. In his own way, Ortiz tried to remake postrevolutionary society—with little success. Defanatization via clericide and iconoclastic spectacle clearly failed. As a stealth candidate for governor of Chihuahua and then a key figure in the Laguna’s regional economy and society, Ortiz aspired to spread the Callista project of progress (secular, athletic, and small-scale capitalistic). In fact, he mainly assisted his tribu and middle-sized cotton growers. After the fall of Calles ended his populist political pretensions, Ortiz identified more and more with wealthy businessmen and landowners like them. Had the Maximato endured, Chihuahua or Coahuila would probably have been run by Ortiz as his own big ranch, just as Cedillo governed San Luis Potosí. In the final analysis, Ortiz’s use of violence both fortified and undermined the revolutionary state. His obsession with subversion contradicted

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the revolutionary project’s promise of secular progress. In particular, Ortiz’s violence work complicated the Sonoran regime’s claim to govern justly with popular consent. Topilejo, like Chalchuites, left victims who became martyrs for many. Notes Author’s Note: I gratefully acknowledge a Colby College Social Science Division research grant in the summer of 2005 that enabled me to conduct archival research for this project. Terry Rugeley, David Nugent, Winifred Tate, and two anonymous readers gave me thoughtful comments to improve it. Remaining errors are of course mine alone. Abbott Matthew helped greatly to prepare this chapter for publication. I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo Gral Joaquín Amaro (AGJA); Archivo General de Nación (AGN); Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, Dirección de Educación Federal, Zacatecas (AHSEP DEF ZAC); Archivo del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (AINAH); Dirección General del Gobierno (DGG); Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (FAPECYFT); Records of the Department of State Related to Internal Affairs of Mexico (RDSRIAM); US Military Intelligence Reports: Mexico (USMIR). 1.  Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr., “The Politics of Antipolitics,” in Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr., eds. The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1978), 3–5. 2.  Michael A. Ervin, “The 1930 Agrarian Census in Mexico: Agronomists, Middle Politics, and the Negotiation of Nationalism,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (August 2007): 539–72. 3.  The only systematic published study of his career is Enrique Plascencia’s “Eulogio Ortiz: La domesticación de la violencia,” Universidad de México 602 (2002): 13–20. While extremely valuable, Plascencia does not draw on most archival sources tapped here. I also relied on John Adrian Foley’s fine dissertation, “Colima, Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1979). 4.  Pedro Salmerón Sanginés, “Catolicismo socialismo, mutualismo y Revolución en Chihuahua,” Estudios de Historia Moderno y Contemporáneo de México 35 (enero– marzo 2008): 75–107. 5.  Undated newspaper clipping, “Fue imponente la popular recepción al Gral. E. Ortiz,” AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT. 6.  Armando Chávez, Diccionario de hombres de la revolución en Chihuahua (Cuidad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico: Meridiano 107 Editores; Universidad de Ciudad Juárez, 1990), 154; Adriana Konzevik Cabib and Danna Levín Roja, eds., Diccionario histórico y biográfico de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: INEHRM and SG, 1991), II:524–45; Francisco R. Almada, La revolución en el Estado de Chihuahua (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1964), II:322; William Slocum, “I Guarded FDR,” Saturday Evening Post, September 28, 1946, 219, issue 13: 17–47; http://www.e-local.gob.mx/work/templates/enciclo/chihuahua/Mpios/08044a. htm (accessed March 20, 2006); Angel Aguilar Luna, “Algunos pasajes de La Toma de Zacatecas y personas de Valparaíso que conocieron a Pancho Villa 3a. Parte—x,”

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Revista Valparaíso, November 2005, http://www.Portalvalparaiso.com/portal/Content/ pid=76.html (accessed March 20, 2006).   7.  Prudencio Moscoso Pastrana, El Pinedismo en Chiapas 1916–1920 (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1960), 322–23; Ortiz to Calles, 20 Feb. 1923, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 1/2, FAPECYFT.   8.  Roberto Cruz, Roberto Cruz en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1976), 89.   9.  G-2, Report December 1927, roll 6, USMIR. 10.  Martha Beatriz Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro y el proceso de institucion­ alización del Ejército Mexicano, 1917–1931 (Mexico City: UNAM, 2003), 88. 11.  Jean Meyer, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, Tomo 11: Periodo 1928–1934: Estado y sociedad con Calles (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1977), 12. 12.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 149; Edward Nathan to Sec. State, 13 Nov. 1931, roll 14, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 13.  John W. F. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico: A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919– 1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 251; various correspondences, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), legs. 1/7 and 2/7, FAPECYFT. 14.  Ortiz to Amaro, 6 Jan. 1925, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 1/7, FAPECYFT. 15.  Amaro to Eulogio Ortiz, 26 Feb. 1925, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 1/7, FAPECYFT. 16.  Ortiz to Amaro, 2 Feb. and 2 April 1925, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 1/7, FAPECYFT. 17.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 183. 18.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 2 Apr 1925, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 1/7, FAPECYFT; Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 14 Jan. and 8 Feb. 1926, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 3/7, FAPECYFT; Invitation, 22 Nov. 1928, and Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 26 Jan. 1929 and 12 May 1927, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT. 19.  David Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 87–89. 20.  “The Mexican Army. Study Made in the Latin American Section.” G-2, March 1927, 34, roll 7, no. 951, USMIR. 21.  Salvador Varela to National Director Rural Education, 11 Dec. 1934, caja 88, exp. 14, AHSEP DEF ZAC; José G. Montes, Tlatenango de Zacatecas: Geografía, historia, tradición y anécdotas (Mexico City: n.p., 1972), esp. 85. 22.  G-2, Report Territorial Commands Changes in Jefatura Commanders since June 1926, roll 6, USMIR. 23.  Inspector SEP Nochistlan Fortino Lopez R to Secretary of Government, 7 Sept. 1926, DGG 2.340, caja 97, exp. 5, AGN; Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 30 Nov. 1926, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 3/7, FAPECYFT; Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 25 Jan. 1927, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT; Lic. Juan Carlos Esparza R., “La Guerra Cristera (1926–1929) 3. Una breve perspectiva,” http://www. liceus.com/cgi‑bin/ac/pu/crist3.asp (accessed February 4, 2007). 24.  John Keegan, Intelligence in War (New York: Knopf, 2003), 9. 25.  “The Mexican Army. Study Made in the Latin American Section.” G-2, March 1927, roll 7, no. 951, USMIR.

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26.  Eulogio Ortiz to private secretary Amaro, 22 Apr. 1930, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT. 27.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 25 Jan. 1926, and Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 17 Feb. 1926, both AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 3/7, FAPECYFT; DGG 2.347(28), vol. 36, exp. 24, AGN; anonymous residents Juchipila to Secretary of Government, 1 Aug. 1926, and Ortiz’s reply, 26 Aug. 1926, DGG 2.347(28), vol. 36, exp. 22, AGN. 28.  Foley, “Colima, Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion,” 229. 29.  Lic. Juan Carlos Esparza R., “La Guerra Cristera (1926–1929) 3. Una breve perspectiva,” http://www.liceus.com/cgi-bin/ac/pu/crist3.asp (accessed February 4, 2007). 30.  Foley, “Colima, Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion,” 229–30. 31.  Ortiz formula al C. Colonel Arturo Bernal, memorandum, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT. 32.  Jim Tuck, The Holy War in Los Altos: A Regional Analysis of Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 42–43. 33.  On the Cristero underground devoted to direct action, logistical support, and intelligence gathering, see Fernando González, Matar y morir por Cristo Rey: Aspectos de la cristiada (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de México, 2001). 34.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 3 Oct. 1926, and Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 23 Sept. 1926, both AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 3/7, FAPECYFT; Francis Styles Consul Chihuahua to Sec. State, 31 May 1930, roll 8, RDSRIAM; Antonio Rius Facius, Méjico Cristero: Historia de la SCJM, 1925–1935 (Mexico City: Editorial Patria, 1960), 102. 35.  Valentín García Juárez, Los Cristeros (Fresnillo, Mexico: n.p., 1990), 17, 29–30. 36.  García Juárez, Los Cristeros, 50. 37.  Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 9th ed. (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1985), II:164; Jim Tuck, The Holy War in Los Altos, 71–74. 38.  “XXIV JOM...formula al C. Colonel Arturo Bernal,” memorandum, no date [mid-1927], AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT. 39.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 24 May 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT. 40.  Ortiz to President, 7 Oct. 1926, DGG 2.347(28), vol. 36, exp. 18, AGN. 41.  Meyer, La Cristiada, I:220–21. 42.  XXIV JOM . . . formula al C. Colonel Arturo Bernal, memorandum, no date [mid-1927], AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT. 43.  Meyer, La Cristiada I:220–21. 44.  Ernest Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage (New York: The Century Co. 1928), 324–25. 45.  R. T. Taylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 32–34. 46.  Pedro Rodríguez Lozano, Ofrenda: Geografía, historia, hechos, costumbres y tradiciones del municipio de Nochistlán, Zac., 2nd ed. (Zacatecas: n.p., 1984), 306–7; Tirso Garcia C to SEP, 24 Jan. 1929, AHSEP DEF ZAC. 47.  Maurilio P. Nañez to Secretary of Education, 30 Jul. 1929, caja 81, exp. 10, AHSEP DEF ZAC; María Ruth López Ruiz and Soledad Sotelo Belmontes

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“A los agitados años despues de la revolución 1917-32,” in Ramón Vera Salvo, ed., Historia de la cuestion agraria mexicana, estado de Zacatecas vol. II: 1940 (Mexico City: Juan Pablos, 1992), 133–37. 48.  Foley, “Colima, Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion,” 231, 299–306. 49.  Jean Meyer, La Cristiada en Colima (Colima, Colima, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Colima, Universidad de Colima, Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes, 1993). 50.  Foley, “Colima, Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion,” 303–6. 51.  Ortiz to Amaro, 11 Jun. 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT. 52.  Jean Meyer, La Cristiada en Colima, 62–65; Ortiz to Amaro, 24 May and 11 June 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT; David Bailey, Viva Crísto Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 262–63. 53.  James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 82–84. 54.  On the Callista military’s anticlerical culture, see Meyer, Cristiada, II:193–211. 55.  Felipe Morones, Capítulos sueltos o puntes sobre la persecución religiosa en Aguascalientes (Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes, Mexico: n.p., 1955), 55. 56.  Meyer, La Cristiada, II:208. 57.  Pedro Salmerón Sanginés, “Catolicismo socialismo, mutualismo y Revolución en Chihuahua,” Estudios de Historia Moderno y Contemporáneo de México 35 (enero– marzo 2008): 75–107. 58.  See Matthew Butler, “Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico’s Revolutionary Schism,” The Americas 65, no. 4 (April 2009): 535–58. 59.  Butler, “Sotanas,” 554. 60.  Arturo Figueroa Uriza, Andrés Figueroa: Biografía (Mexico City: n.p., 2000), 212. 61.  José Adolfo Arroyo, “Algo Sobre la Persecución Religiosa, Defensa Armada y Arreglos,” 24 Jan. 1934, roll 36, AINAH. 62.  Adrian Bantjes, “The War against Idols: The Meanings of Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico, 1910–1940,” in Anne McClanan and Jeff Johnson, eds., Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 41–66. 63.  Lucas Rivas Piccorelli, 27 Nuevos Santos Mexicanos (Mexico City: Obra Nacional de la Buena Prensa, 2002), 19, 23, 37, 43, and 51; DGG 2.347(28), vol. 36, exp. 22, AGN. Federales killed four other non-beatified Zacatecan priests during the Cristero War, according to one historian of the Cristiada, although Ortiz’s complicity in their deaths remains unclear. See Valentín García Juárez, Los Cristeros (Fresnillo, Mexico: n.p., 1990), 20–21. 64.  On the revolutionary patronato, see Ben Fallaw, “Varieties of Mexican Revolutionary Anticlericalism: Radicalism, Iconoclasm, and Otherwise, 1914–1935,” The Americas 65, no. 4 (April 2009): 481–509. On Figueroa’s religious beliefs, see Figueroa Uriza, Andrés Figueroa, 215; Morones, Capítulos, 130. 65.  J. Andrés Lara, Prisionero de Callistas y Cristeros, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1956). On Ortiz’s threats to kill him, see 2, 20–23, 33, 38, 44. 66.  García Juárez, Los Cristeros, 22. 67.  Morones, Capítulos, 48, 63.

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68.  Morones, Capítulos, 28. 69.  Alicia Olivera Sedano, Aspectos del conflicto religioso de 1926 a 1929: Sus antecedentes y consecuencias (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1966), 165–66. 70.  The account of Ortiz ordering a soldier caught with a scapulary shot was apparently published first by Meyer, La Cristiada I:146. On rumors that he bore the mark of the beast, see Meyer, La Cristiada II:210. 71.  Ortiz to Calles, 8 Sept. 1934, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT. 72.  On Obregón’s testing of priests for venereal disease, see David Bailey, “Álvaro Obregón and Anticlericalism in the 1910 Revolution,” The Americas 26, no. 2 (Oct. 1969): 183–98. 73.  Calles’s biographer, Jurgen Buchenau, shows that Calles allowed Portes Gil to negotiate an end to the Cristiada and made it clear that he had no intention to destroy the Catholic Church—a position Ortiz would never have accepted. Jurgen Buchenau, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 153. 74.  Luis Leon to Plutarco Elias Calles, 25 May 1927, 47 121 3179, exp. 6, Archivo Histórico Plutarco Elías Calles (AHPEC); FEC GAV. 40 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 101/193, inv. 644, leg. 1/2, FAPECYFT. 75.  Ortiz to Amaro, 29 May 1928, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT. 76.  Ortiz to Amaro, 29 Jan. 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT; Ortiz to Amaro, 16 Jan. 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT. 77.  Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 103; Mark Wasserman, Persistent Oligarchs: Elites and Politics in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1910–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 106. 78.  The new divisionarios minted in 1929 included future presidents Abelardo Rodríguez and Lázaro Cárdenas, as well as Saturnino Cedillo, Rodrigo Quevedo, and Benigno Serrato. Alvaro Matute, La Revolución Mexicana: Actores, escenarios y acciones: Vida cultural y política, 1901–1929 (Mexico City: INEHRM; OCEANO, 1993), 155. 79.  Matute, La Revolución Mexicana, 148–50. 80.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 2 Oct. 1930, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT; Arthur Bliss Lane to Sec. State, 9 Oct. 1930, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 81.  Ortiz to Amaro, 4 Jul. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 7/7, FAPECYFT. 82.  “Current Religious Situation,” 13 Dec. 1931, roll 30, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 83.  Luis Astorga, “Organized Crime and the Organization of Crime,” in John Bailey and Roy Godson, eds., Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 58–82; Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 542. 84.  Buchenau, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution, 158–164; Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 103–7.

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  85.  Arthur Bliss Lane to Sec. State, 9 and 10 Oct. 1930, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Clark to Sec. State 7,10, and 11 Mar. 1931, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Hombre Libre, 2 March 1931, 1, 3.   86.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 69–70, 104.   87.  G-2, Reports 15 and 29 Aug. 1930, 10 Jan. 1933, roll 8, USMIR.   88.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 9 Sept. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT.   89.  Amaro to Eulogio Ortiz, 14 Nov. 1930, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT; Rafael Mancero to Amaro, 26 Mar. 1931, and Ortiz’s reply, 13 Apr. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 7/7, FAPECYFT. On the cross-border drug trade, see Luis Astorga, “Organized Crime and the Organization of Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 58–82.   90.  J. R. Martínez of Monterrey to President, 31 May 1934, DGG 2.311, caja 12a, exp. 55, AGN; Michael Snodgrass, Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 145–65, esp. 162.   91.  Siglo de Torreon, 16 March 1933 I:1; J. R. Martínez to President, 31 May 1934, DGG, caja 12a, exp. 55, 2.311, AGN.   92.  Consul Torreon to Sec. State, 31 Dec. 1934, roll 10, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 17.   93.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 183.   94.  For the revisionist depiction of generals as crony capitalists, see Norah Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 75–76, 129, 255.   95.  Various correspondences, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 4/7, FAPECYFT; Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage, 473; Meyer, La Cristiada, II:253.   96.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 11 Apr. 1925, and Amaro’s reply, 29 Apr. 1925, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 1/7, FAPECYFT.   97.  Salvador Gómez Molina, Monografía de Río Grande: Estudio históricogeográfico del Municipio de Río Grande, Zac. (Monterrey: Rubén Gómez y Gómez, 1985), 57.   98.  Ortiz to President, 1 Sep. 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT.   99.  Carleton Beals, “Mexico and the Communists,” The New Republic 19 (Feb. 1930), 12; Carleton Beals, The Great Circle: Further Adventures in Free-lancing (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1940), 226. 100.  Ortiz to Amaro, 23 Jul. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 7/7, FAPECYFT. 101.  Consul Torreon to Sec. State, 31 Dec. 1934, 29 Dec. 1934, roll 10, 1930– 1939, RDSRIAM; Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 17. 102.  Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28; “Arresto y tortura de Librado Rivera,” Avante, 15 April 1929, http://www.antorcha.net/biblioteca_virtual/politica/viva_tierra/ librado34.html. 103.  Gómez Molina, Monografía de Río Grande; DGG 2.382, caja 67 exp. 5, AGN.

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104.  “Arresto y tortura de Librado Rivera.” 105.  Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 67. 106.  Matthew Butler, “Trouble Afoot? Pilgrimage in Cristero Mexico City,” in Matthew Butler, ed. Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007), 149–66; González, Matar y morir. 107.  Carleton Beals, “Mexico and the Communists,” The New Republic, 19 February 1930, 12. On the larger context, see Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 44–46. 108.  Tzvi Medin, El minimato presidencial: Historia política del Maximato 1928– 1935, 5th ed. (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1991), 83, cited in Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 15. 109.  Elsa Aguilar Casas, “Los crímenes de Topilejo,” 3, http://www.inehrm.gob .mx/pdf/exc_crimenestopilejo.pdf. 110.  Paul Gillingham, “Maximino’s Bulls: Popular Protest after the Mexican Revolution,” unpublished manuscript. 111.  Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 487–89; Magdaleno, Palabras Perdidas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956), 203–11; Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 15–16; Aguilar Casas, “Los crímenes de Topilejo,” 3. On the fake execution of Flores’s father, see Buchenau, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution, 157. 112.  Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 226–48; Arthur Bliss Lane to Sec. State, 9 Oct. 1930, 10 Oct. 1930, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 113.  Alberto B. Terrones, 1 Sep. 1930, AHPEC 73/1/5583/exp. 2, FAPECYFT; various correspondences, roll 11, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 114.  Eulogio Ortiz to Secretary of Government, 29 Mar. 1930; DGG 2.380, caja 8, exp. 20, AGN; various correspondences, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; newspaper clipping, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 1/2, FAPECYFT. 115.  Francis Styles Consul Chih City to Sec., State, 30 Apr. 1930, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 116.  Francis Styles Consul Chih City to Sec. State, 31 May 1930, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Ignacio Portillo to Secretary of Government, Aug. 1930, DGG 2.380, caja 8, exp. 26709, AGN; Wasserman, Persistent Oligarchs, 51–53. 117.  Francis Styles to Sec. State, 31 May 1930, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 118.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 19 Jun. 1930, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT. 119.  Various correspondences, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT; Wasserman, Persistent Oligarchs, 51–54; various correspondences, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; various correspondences, roll 8, 1930, RDSRIAM; G-2, Report 15 and 29 Aug. 1930, roll 8, USMIR. 120.  Various correspondences and Excélsior clipping, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Antonio Santoyo, La mano negra: Poder regional y Estado en México (Veracruz, 1928– 1943) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 114; Heather Fowler-Salamini, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 1920–1938 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 91. On Proal, see Andrew Grant Wood, Revolution in the

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Street: Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870–1927 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001). 121.  Martha Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip Zimbardo, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1. 122.  While Cold War violence is often explained by referring to right-wing ideology, Huggins et al. argue that anti-Communist ideology played little role in motivating violence workers who perpetrated torture and murder in Brazil’s militarized police. Instead, they stress the social organization of violence, as well as masculinity, in particular the “blended masculinity” with both individualist and bureaucratic functionary traits. Huggins et al., Violence Workers, 111–29. 123.  José Ignacio Gallegos, Historia de la Iglesia en Durango (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1969), 35; Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage, 324–25. 124.  Consul Monterrey Edward I. Nathan to Sec. State, 11 Mar. 1931, roll 14, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 125.  Lara, Prisionero de Callistas y Cristeros, 15–17. 126.  Morones, Capítulos, 59, 182. 127.  Lara, Prisionero de Callistas y Cristeros, 20. 128.  Since colonial times, the head was the body part most vulnerable to physical attacks as a means of shaming in Mexico. See Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, “De obra y palabra: Patterns of Insults in Mexico, 1750–1856,” The Americas 54, no. 4 (April 1998): 511–89. 129.  Francis Styles to Sec. State, 31 May 1930, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 130.  Morones, Capítulos, 74. 131.  Beals, The Great Circle, 232. 132.  Lipsett-Rivera, “De obra,” 527. Although Lipsett-Rivera’s work covers the late colonial and early national era, a much more hierarchical society than post­ revolutionary Mexico, Ortiz’s obscenities stung in a way analogous to insults a century ago. 133.  John Watanabe, “Culturing Identities, the State, and National Consciousness in Late Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 19, no. 3 (July 2000): 321–40. 134.  Matthew Butler, “The Church in ‘Red Mexico’: Michoacán Catholics and the Mexican Revolution, 1920–1929,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55, no. 3 (July 2004): 520–41. 135.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 183. 136.  On the Callista new man, see Adrian Bantjes, “Burning Saints, Molding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic Ritual, and the Failed Cultural Revolution,” in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1994), 261–84; Beatriz Urías Horcasitas, “Retórica, ficción y espejismo: Tres imágenes de un México Bolchevique (1920–1940),” in Relaciones. Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 101 (invierno 2005): 261–300. 137.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 15 Jun. 1929, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 5/7, FAPECYFT. 138.  Eulogio Ortiz to President, 7 Oct. 1926, DGG 2.347(28), vol. 36, exp. 18, AGN.

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139.  Morones, Capítulos, 203. 140.  Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro, 24 Jul. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 7/7, FAPECYFT. 141.  Undated article “fue imponente la popular recepción” clipped from unidentified newspaper, presumably March 1930, attached to Eulogio Ortiz to Amaro 17, Mar. 1930, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT. 142.  “Retiro de Documentos,” AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), FAPECYFT. 143.  Various correspondences, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 6/7, FAPECYFT; Francis Styles Consul Chih City to Sec. State, 31 May 1930, roll 8, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 144.  Robert Cummings to Sec. State, 4 Sep. 1931, roll 1, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Ortiz to Calles, 2 Jul. 1935, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT. 145.  http://vicenteguerrero.iespana.es/Escobaristas.htm (accessed 9 July 2006). 146.  Ortiz to Amaro, 18 Mar. 1931, AGJA 0301, Ortiz, Eulogio (Gral Brig), leg. 7/7, FAPECYFT. 147.  Federico Berrueto Ramon, Obras completas, 2 vols. (Saltillo, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 1984), I:250. 148.  Vice Consul Bonnet to Sec. State, 30 Dec. 1930, roll 11, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; Manuel Zamora to Secretary of Government, 16 Jun. 1932, DGG 2.311G, caja 228, tomo I, AGN. 149.  Various correspondences, roll 11, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 150.  María Isabel Saldaña, Pedro V. Rodríguez Triana: Un general de la revolución en Coahuila: Iconografía (Torreón, Torreón, Mexico: Coordinación Nacional de Descentralizacion; Instituto Coahuilense de Cultura; Universidad Iberoamericana Laguna, 1997), 24–25. 151.  Siglo de Torreon, 28 Feb. 1933, I:1; 16 Mar. 1933, I:1; 20 Mar. 1933, I:1; 13 Sep. 2003, “Campestre de Gómez Palacio”; 18 Aug. 2007, “Rumbo al centenario,” http://elsiglodetorreon.com.mx (accessed December 26, 2007). Terán Lira, 139–40; Elias A Bonnet to Sec. State, 20 Mar. 1930, roll 11, 1930–39, RDSRIAM; J. R. Martínez to President, 31 May 1934, DGG 2.311, caja 12a, exp. 55, AGN; various correspondences, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT. 152.  Ortiz to Calles, 31 May 1935, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT. 153.  Ortiz to Calles, 29 Jun. 1935 and 2 Jul. 1935, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT; various correspondences, rolls 9 and 10, 1930–39, RDSRIAM. 154.  Ortiz to Calles, 12 Jun. 1935, GAV. 57 ORTIZ, Eulogio (Gral), exp. 28, inv. 4216, leg. 2/2, FAPECYFT. 155.  Enrique Krauze, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810– 1996, trans. Hank Heifetz (New York: Harper, 1997), 456. 156.  José León Robles de la Torre, Cien años de presidentes municipales en Torreon, Coahuila, 1893–1993 (Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico: Ayuntamiento de Torreon, 1993), 143–44; Pablo C. Moreno, Torreón: Biografía de la más joven de las ciudades Mexicanas (Saltillo, Mexico: Talleres Gráficos Coahuila, 1951), 261–63; Saldaña, Pedro V. Rodríguez Triana, 24–25.

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157.  Krauze, Biography of Power, 462. 158.  Slocum, “I Guarded FDR,” 39. 159.  Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 17. On popular resistance to national service, see Thomas Rath, “Que el cielo un soldado un cada hijo te dio . . . : Conscription, Recalcitrance and Resistance in Mexico in the 1940s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (August 2005): 507–31. 160.  Plascencia, “Eulogio Ortiz,” 20.

chapter six

Revolutionary Citizenship against Institutional Inertia Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934–1940 Thomas Rath In 1939, two radical printmakers from Mexico City’s Popular Graphics Workshop, Leopoldo Méndez and Alfredo Zalce, made a new flyer to be pasted on the city’s walls and street corners. In the center of one panel stands a stern, young army officer dressed in a smart but modest uniform. Standing behind him are a humble peasant couple and an industrial worker in overalls. At the officer’s feet scamper four small, grotesque figures representing Mexico City’s right-wing newspapers, whom the officer is shooing away from the others with the swing of a military boot. The reason for the officer’s disdain is clear. Aside from their obviously gaudy and decadent clothing, the figures from the press flaunt the money of foreign oil companies that had recently been expropriated by the state. Moreover, as the cartoon’s caption makes clear, they are guilty of pining for the former counterrevolutionary military dictator, General Victoriano Huerta. In short, they appear under the sway of capitalism and its characteristic militarist fantasies.1 The cartoon reveals the often-bitter debates between contending notions of the revolutionary army during the Cárdenas administration. Certainly, it shows a distinct change in how the army was represented within the leftwing, often Communist, artistic milieu in which the printmakers worked. Like many radical artists during the 1920s and early 1930s, Méndez had used the figure of the decadent “repressive military officer” as a standard part of his repertoire of political symbols to question the achievements of the postrevolutionary regime.2 In 1934, he produced a print underscoring the gaping class inequalities in the army between officers and troops.3 172

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By 1939, the army’s solidarity with the masses appears to have been accomplished, the fruit of a new, younger type of class-conscious officer, keen to take center stage to defend the Mexican Revolution from capitalist elites and their military stooges. Although this representational shift was due in part to a new Communist party line after 1935 that emphasized the collaborative politics of the popular front, it also reflected changes in the policy and discourse of the postrevolutionary state. After all, just as the printmakers of the Popular Graphics Workshop supported other radical policies of the Cárdenas administration, they doubtless found much to admire in Cardenistas’ understanding of the military’s place in politics and society, which in many respects mirrored their own. The flyer itself was sponsored by Mexico City’s Workers’ University, closely tied to the state’s official labor confederation.4 Finally, although the cartoon portrayed the press in rather crude and hyperbolic fashion, it was true enough that the notion of the Mexican Army presented in the cartoon—of a class-conscious and openly political institution—faced vociferous opposition, not just within the press but also from a variety of groups within the government and the army itself. In this chapter, I tell the story of how Cardenismo tried to impose a new version of revolutionary citizenship on the military, one based on class identity and revolutionary engagement. Historians have often described the transformation of the postrevolutionary army as the result of a coherent project of professionalization and centralization implemented progressively from the top down, which prepared the ground for stable civilian rule after 1946. Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency is usually portrayed as a decisive moment in this long-term project. In contrast, I argue that Cardenista discourse and policy toward the army in significant respects broke with the past; engendered considerable political conflict, debate, and resistance; and had markedly ambivalent results. After first sketching the military reforms of the 1920s, I analyze the Cardenista project for the army and its impact, focusing on military discourse in army texts, public ritual, and speeches, alongside key policies such as the construction of schools for the children of soldiers, the arming of a reserve peasant militia, and the creation of a military sector within the ruling party.

The Army and the Historiography of Cardenismo Historians have long seen Cárdenas’s tenure as a period of sweeping social reform and institutional innovation that profoundly strengthened state and ruling party. A common narrative explains the subsequent fifty-four-year

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rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) as the fruit of Cárdenas’s social reforms and his creation of a corporate party capable of smothering popular demands in its clientelist embrace and inculcating a widespread legitimacy.5 More recent treatments of Cardenismo have painted a far more nuanced picture of the many political conflicts of the 1930s and the complex dialogue between the national state, popular groups, and regional elites, many of whom successfully resisted elements of Cardenismo.6 Historians have also explored Cardenismo’s impact on cultural identities and notions of revolutionary citizenship, and some argue that Cardenismo ultimately helped to forge a shared political culture and “language of contention” that would bind state and society and ultimately underpin PRI rule.7 Such Neo-Gramscian perspectives have tended to focus on the expansion and impact of specifically “cultural” institutions such as schools, radio, and the mass media and have continued to place their studies within an overarching narrative of mounting state capacity and institutionalization.8 Scholarship on the army has remained insulated from these newer historiographical currents, although the army was a core national institution central to the state’s power and legitimacy. Historians’ view of army politics and reforms in the period have usually echoed these broader assessments of successful institutionalization and centralization, and most have followed Edwin Lieuwen in seeing Cardenismo as bringing the decisive “bridling of the political generals” and the “depoliticization” of the army.9 In subsequent decades, the regime, along with many historians, portrayed these changes as the result of an unwavering state project of military professionalization and civilian rule begun in the 1920s, by which the revolution gradually assumed a mature institutional shape.10 In Manichean fashion, the state usually framed obstacles to this unitary project in terms of its confrontation with a baleful (but equally coherent) tradition of military praetorianism and caudillismo, often understood as a cultural trait inherited from a traditional, “feudal” past.11 Finally, those historians, such as Lieuwen himself, who did recognize some of the ways that Cardenismo’s military policy differed from earlier administrations, tended to assume the state’s capacity to enforce that policy rather than explore its reception in detail.12

Sonoran Professionalization and Moralization Throughout the 1920s, the victorious faction of revolutionaries from the northwestern state of Sonora controlled the government, led by presidents

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Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles. In general, the goals pursued by the Sonorans were far from novel: political stability, capitalist development, national integration, and anticlericalism. However, the Sonorans pursued these aims with a new nationalist, even revolutionary, fervor and ambition, although their nationalism mingled with an admiration for what they saw as the material progress and dynamism of the US society that bordered their home state. Sonora’s would-be state-builders were also forced to employ a new range of institutional and political techniques to achieve these goals, operating as they did in the wake of unprecedented mass mobilization and civil war. In the early 1920s, the army bequeathed by the revolution was decentralized, fractious, and socially heterogeneous. If the rebellion of Agua Prieta in 1920 marked the final ascendance of the Sonorans to national power, it also further swelled the ranks of the army with soldiers from previously antagonistic factions such that, for some, it was “no longer possible to know who was a revolutionary and who was an enemy of the revolution.”13 In contrast, in ideological terms the situation appeared somewhat simpler, at least in public. Mexico’s aspiring state-builders all agreed that a central aim of the revolution had been to extirpate, once and for all, the vice of militarism. However, there was disagreement about what precisely this term meant, and thus the ideological and institutional form that this commitment should take. Of course, disagreement about the nature and causes of militarism was by no means peculiarly Mexican. At the same time, the coexistence of revolutionary officers’ political ambitions with the ubiquitous rhetoric of anti-militarism provided a central theme for those who ridiculed the revolution as little more than a “frenzied dance of military anarchy” and a “tragicomedy that never ends.”14 Reforming the army inherited from the revolution was, then, a task at once central to the consolidation of the new state’s power and to its selfimage as a serious, modern regime that had broken decisively with the past. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the stated aim of military policy was to create a politically neutral army, formally subordinated to democratic civilian powers and dedicated to its technical, organizational, even “scientific” perfection. The regime represented militarism as primarily a problem of institutional design or individual morality.15 In this, military reformers drew on the formal provisions of the 1917 constitution and on a longer tradition of nineteenth-century liberal diagnoses of militarism, both in Europe and Latin America.16 Of all the revolutionary factions, the victorious Constitutionalist army had always most resembled the blueprint of a centralized, professional army, in contrast to Zapatismo’s decentralized militia.17 General

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Joaquín Amaro, the energetic secretary of war from 1925 to 1931, codified rules on military discipline, pensions, promotions, and uniforms; reopened the military college, Colegio Militar; and oversaw the creation of the Superior War College and Logistics Service.18 These policies were portrayed by the regime largely in apolitical terms, as purely technical endeavors, or as campaigns of stern, individual “moralization” of officers and troops.19 In its efforts to moralize the army, the regime’s military policy also reflected other cultural goals of the Sonorans.20 Military reformers proudly differentiated their army from “aristocratic” armies where military ranks overlapped with rigid markers of social class.21 However, many of the military leadership were keen to reform the morals and sociability of the great mass of their lower-class soldiery, as well as army officers, whose reputation for gambling, philandering, and corruption was considerable. As new institutions of military education were established, army hierarchies were implicitly understood, at least by some of the products of these new institutions, as corresponding to certain class markers of education and status. When new cadets at the military academy were punished for indiscipline with time in the ranks, they remembered the experience not only as a professional setback but also as an immersion in the crude, bawdy habits of another class (and sometimes race) of people.22 During the revolution, many people thought of army barracks not as bulwarks of respectability but as epicenters of vice. Aside from their poor and unhealthy construction, barracks were full of enlisted men whose crude manners and proclivity for gambling, alcohol, and marijuana were notorious. Soldaderas, the female companions of enlisted men who lived alongside them in the barracks, were considered by many as a kind of sex worker.23 Army reformers largely agreed with this diagnosis and sought to inculcate new masculine habits of sobriety, self-discipline, cleanliness, and physical fitness. Amaro also sought to promote discipline and respectable sexual morality among soldiers by banning soldaderas from the barracks in 1925, although the impact of this decree was patchy at best.24 After the founding of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR, National Revolutionary Party) in 1929, a shift in official discourse can be detected. In official speeches the army was, at times, tied more explicitly to the national project of political and social reform that the new revolutionary party claimed to embody. Nevertheless, the military’s removal from politics and its technical and organizational progress continued as the dominant tropes of official discourse.25 The implementation of this project was fraught with huge difficulties, not least the limited capacity of a central state that was still prone to periodic rebellions and which had precious few other institutions of national reach. The new regime had to respond to the powers of military men not

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simply with public decrees and regulations but also with an unspoken policy of payoffs and patronage. This was what ex-Zapatista General Rodolfo López de Nava called the “internal politics” of “military administrative life” in the late 1920s, the rules of which were governed by factions, personalism, and clientelism. Rather than a series of random or improvised responses on the path to professionalization, these practices followed rules which were, to an extent, commonly understood within the political elite and even civil society as a whole. Internal military politicking and influence peddling were a game, which López de Nava “had to learn to play.”26 After all, the revolution had not only given rise to a noisy public commitment to military professionalism but also generated (or reinvigorated) a colorful and widely understood lexicon with which to describe the frequently experienced discrepancy between military theory and practice: cañonazos (military bribes); generalazos (politically important generals); coronelitos (inconsequential colonels); generales de dedo (dubiously promoted generals); and generales de banqueta (generals more skilled at banqueting than fighting).27 Thus, General Pedro Almada’s sense of his informal political power as a regional commander (1927–1933) to lobby the national government for particular gubernatorial candidates or business interests sometimes seeps into his memoirs, even as he discusses the impression Amaro’s professionalizing reforms made on him. Amaro’s jeremiads on discipline and professionalism also had a patchy effect on his newly trained cadets who, in the mid-1930s, “invariably” felt loyal to generals Amaro or Calles rather than the new president Cárdenas.28 Obviously, recurrent military rebellions revealed disagreement within political society about the scope and nature of the deals being cut within the military.29 However, it was clear that in practice military men could expect to receive prebends and weighty political influence under the Sonorans.30 In the 1920s, some army reformers found conscription a compelling solution to the political and cultural shortcomings of the army. The idea that conscription could integrate the nation and check the autonomy of provincial officers had been a staple part of doctrines of military professionalism imported to the region in the late nineteenth century.31 The introduction of a national system of conscription had enjoyed some support among military and political elites in Mexico in the early twentieth century, although any practical plans were cut short by the revolution. By the 1920s, systems of conscription had been introduced in many other Latin American countries, and some Mexican officers clearly thought that their country lagged behind in what they saw as the “latest achievement in the field of military organization.” As secretary of war, Amaro dispatched dozens of military attachés to survey military institutions in the rest of the Americas and Europe, and

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some wrote glowing reviews of the systems of conscription they observed. Conscription’s advocates, writing in the press and military publications, provided a familiar range of arguments about its capacity to strengthen national defense, spread national sentiment, and inculcate discipline along with a sense of egalitarian citizenship in the masses.32 At the same time, it was hoped that conscription would erode the powers of regional military commanders by stripping away their powers to recruit volunteers, solve chronic problems of desertion by delivering a disinterested soldiery motivated by patriotic duty, and not least, finally remove the “immoral” influence of soldaderas.33 However, while some rising generals such as Amaro and Cárdenas himself were attracted to conscription, the revolutionary military elite also contained influential skeptics. In June 1925, General Francisco Serrano, Obregón’s secretary of war, wrote an open letter to the head of the presidential General Staff in which he equated conscription with wasteful and unproductive “militarist plans,” sparking considerable debate in the press. In a revealing private letter from August 1925, Obregón, the revolution’s most prestigious military strategist, objected to conscription on two scores. First, conscription was simply impracticable at the present time since the army’s dirty, dilapidated barracks and the crude habits of the army’s “poor soldiers” would mean that, far from integrating society, conscription would simply antagonize and corrupt “the few men of good manners and learning” that Mexico had. However, Obregón was also suspicious of conscription in principle, arguing that it ultimately represented an urge to reconstruct Mexico on the basis of “brute force” rather than “moral force,” which the experience of the revolution had shown to be futile.34 In 1933, President Abelardo Rodríguez seemed altogether keener on conscription and used state propaganda agencies to probe public opinion’s tolerance for such a policy. After releasing a range of propaganda and holding several conferences, a state commission reported, rather sheepishly, that it would be “inopportune” to introduce conscription at present because of the “state of mistrust in the actual collective conscience,” which meant that all of Mexico’s “social classes” thought of military service as a “tribute of blood, for fratricidal purposes.”35

Cardenismo and the “Armed and Organized Auxiliaries of the Humble Classes” Before Lázaro Cárdenas became president, many in Mexico’s revolutionary elite saw him as a loyal military man and a decidedly safe pair of hands.

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However, the confluence of the crisis in capitalism brought about by the Depression, Cárdenas’s split from the dominant faction of Callistas in 1935, legal changes that extended the right to unionize into the Mexican countryside, and the collaborative tactics of the Communist Party during the popular front all led to a great upsurge in popular mobilization and a major radicalization of government policy. As a complex movement with national, regional, and local variations, Cardenismo certainly had its share of time-servers, “sunflowers and charlatans.” However, Cardenismo also espoused a recognizable set of goals aimed at sweeping agrarian and labor reform, economic nationalism, and a commitment to political inclusion and mass mobilization tempered by disciplined organization.36 Cardenistas increasingly interpreted the revolution as the culmination of the struggle of the peasant and working classes for an ambitious range of political, social, and economic rights, whose fulfillment would require the creation of some kind of mixed economy. In terms of military discourse and policy, Cardenismo’s break with the past was far from complete. Cárdenas’s attempt to assert central control of the army and deepen its institutionalization is amply demonstrated in the rules and regulations churned out by the Commission of Military Studies on the functioning of zone commands, logistics, military etiquette, and officer training. He also sought to curb some of the military’s power by creating a new ministry to separate the navy from the rest of the armed forces in 1939.37 Most importantly, Cárdenas continued to rely on many familiar strategies to manage and contain rather than eliminate military patronage and factionalism. Cárdenas’s lengthy military career had equipped him with an extensive knowledge of the officer corps and the country. One of his major political advantages was that he seemed to enjoy some prestige within all the different military factions.38 Just as had the Sonorans before him, Cárdenas sought to exploit his hard-earned knowledge of the “internal politics” of the army by carefully selecting and circulating the country’s zone commanders, who remained in their posts for an average of approximately thirteen months between January 1935 and December 1940.39 The circulation of commanders was governed less by bureaucratic rules than by the various complex alliances and loyalties of officers. Thus, in order to exert “underhand” pressure on recalcitrant Callistas in states such as Sinaloa or Durango in 1935, Cárdenas selected certain officers precisely because they enjoyed political ties to their states independent of Callismo.40 In addition to his reliance on old military allies such as Francisco J. Múgica and Rafael Cházaro Pérez, Cárdenas also increased the potential pool of such loyalists by bringing back a number of revolutionary

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generals from the political wilderness, principally old Carrancistas, who had found themselves “out” for many years.41 However, military discourse and policy also shifted significantly. Whereas class identity was mainly relevant for Sonorans in the sense that the army had ceased to be “aristocratic,” the Cárdenas regime now represented soldiers as ideally exercising solidarity with the peasantry and proletarian classes. Such solidarity was often portrayed as the result of soldiers’ own view of themselves as the “proletarian class of the army.”42 Rather than representing soldiers as standing decorously outside of politics, Cardenistas inserted soldiers into a larger story of political and class struggle. Mexico’s problem of militarism was understood, at least in part, as stemming from capitalism and class conflict rather than simply deficient institutional design, a lack of definition between civilian and military spheres, or an absence of military honor. Lieutenant Colonel Juan Carrasco Cuéllar’s 1938 primer intended for “soldiers, workers and peasants,” published by the Department of Press and Publicity, along with his various contributions to military magazines, exemplify this shift in official discourse. Carrasco explained that the army was principally made up of members of the proletarian and peasant classes, claimed to identify himself as a “proletarian officer,” and argued that Cárdenas wished to transform the army into a “new social and military organization of workers.”43 He also took it upon himself to guide soldiers and workers through some introductory chapters on Marxist sociology in order to “fortify their class consciousness” and explain the current conjuncture of capitalist crisis and the coming collectivization of sectors of the economy.44 The discourse of prominent officers echoed how Cardenistas in the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP, Secretariat of Public Education) reshaped the meaning of revolutionary citizenship by overlaying social and economic rights on the constitution’s “liberal base” and portraying the revolution as the culmination of a longer history of anonymous class struggle.45 The military magazine El Soldado, intended for the army’s enlisted men, also took up this view of history and confirmed that Mexico stood at a critical juncture in the history of the class struggle at which the revolution was poised to fulfill its promise for the masses. Nevertheless, the magazine also struck a note of nationalist caution. Although the Mexican Revolution formed a part of the global “struggle of the proletariat,” it “has its own physiognomy . . . and fundamentally Mexican characteristics,” which Cárdenas would address without the “influence of exotic doctrines.”46 Under Cárdenas, the government used the new Day of the Soldier to illustrate the army’s closeness to the masses. Some local politicians under

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President Abelardo Rodríguez had voiced their support for such a celebration in the early 1930s, and Cárdenas had actually organized the first such celebration as secretary of defense in 1933. However, after Cárdenas assumed the presidency, it became a major national event on which the press lavished attention. Each year on April 27 the president gave a lengthy speech and performed a carefully orchestrated show of solidarity and rapport with common soldiers, “mixing amongst them,” and dining and dancing with their families. By sitting down to dine with a “worker” and a sergeant, Cárdenas could “act as a link to confirm the brotherhood of the soldier and the worker.”47 Official speeches on the day stressed predictable military themes of loyalty, bravery, and sacrifice. The date was chosen in honor of Damian Carmona, a captain known for his calmness under fire from the French in the nineteenth century. The ceremony was also designed to emphasize lower-class soldiers’ respectability and “gentlemanliness,” and the press reported that civilian visitors to the barracks uttered astonished approval at the improvement in soldiers’ manners and decorum. In this respect, the state acknowledged some of the contributions of Sonoran military reforms: “The old legend that the soldier—once a product of the press gang or the country’s prisons—was somebody to fear for the gente de bien, was becoming obsolete while General Amaro was Secretary of War. . . . It is now definitively destroyed with the creation of the Day of the Soldier.”48 However, speeches also focused on recovering the image of the revolutionary soldier from the perceived condescension of an ungrateful, elitist public who dismissed the revolutionary army as being made up of criminals and “thieves” and stressed soldiers’ solidarity with the social struggles of the masses and their constructive role in society; a 1939 poster marking the day portrays a dark-skinned private, happily wielding a pick-ax.49 Government propaganda featured a poem reassuring soldiers that the working classes did not “hate” them but considered them “one and the same.”50 The organization of the Day of the Soldier also expressed the army’s ties to broader society. Instead of the army organizing public ritual for itself, the norm during the 1920s, local civilian authorities and the SEP led the organization of events, which included various ceremonies performed for soldiers by civilians. Each day began with a group of local women gathering outside of the barracks and singing the traditional “mañanitas.” In 1938, the Cardenista Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM, Confederation of Mexican Workers) sent official groups of workers to congratulate soldiers in the barracks scattered around the capital.51 The government instructed provincial teachers to organize ceremonies honoring soldiers either in their local barracks or by inviting soldiers to their school; children

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should leave such ceremonies with the clear understanding that the army, in addition to defending “Republican institutions,” constitutes “the main agent of the revolution, and a promise of triumph in the social struggle.”52 The new Escuelas Hijos del Ejército (schools for soldiers’ children) exemplify how Cardenistas sought to give this discourse on class concrete form in particular policies and reforms. The government set up these state-run boarding schools for the children of soldiers across the country at the height of Cardenismo and announced them as one of the policies “of most importance” to the Cárdenas administration.53 The students of the schools, “wearing brilliant, new uniforms,” took pride of place during the Day of the Soldier and Independence Day parades under Cárdenas, thereby placing “before the eyes of the nation the true condition of the little children of the soldiers.”54 The first school opened with much fanfare in an old clerical building in Colonia del Valle in Mexico City in August 1935, followed shortly by another in Tacubaya, also in the Federal District. The government announced its aim to eventually place a school in each of the country’s thirty-four military zones, and by 1940, schools had opened in the states of Michoacán, Jalisco, Sonora, Durango, Morelos, San Luís Potosí, Zacatecas, Coahuila, Tlaxcala, Guanajuato, Sinaloa, Puebla, Campeche, and Chiapas. The schools were supposed to provide primary education for three to four hundred students between the ages of four and twelve, but also provided vocational training for older students in small industrial “workshops” where students could learn a variety of trades (plumbing, repairing shoes) and operate sewing machines and small printing presses. Other schools focused more on teaching modern agricultural techniques.55 Their immediate purpose was to allow children the possibility of a stable education, something that military mobilizations and redeployments had previously made impossible. The government also presented the schools, which were run by the SEP from 1935 to 1938, as making a vital contribution to the “socialist” transformation of the country. The schools were supposed to admit only the children of enlisted men (privates, corporals, and sergeants), and the schools’ teachers assumed that troops in the lower ranks formed but another part of the working masses. Indeed, it was on this basis, they argued, that soldiers’ children belonged under the auspices of the SEP.56 Teachers assumed that life in the barracks had somehow prevented such children, and their parents, from developing a true politicized class consciousness, a failing that they intended to rectify. In contrast with life in the barracks, “these schools will be closer to the people, and in great part in its sphere of action, and at its service; the students, therefore, will be in intimate

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contact with the realities of the outside world and will fully identify with the ideals of their class, in which they have been trained, for the social struggle in which, as adults, they will be protagonists.”57 The vocational printing and sewing workshops in the schools, run as co-operatives, provided training that was as much political as technical. The workshops could form “true laboratories of socialism” and “train individuals so that they know that with class consciousness they are capable of successfully controlling businesses that today exploit the working classes.”58 The schools were also designed to educate a certain unspecified quota of “peasants’ and workers’ children” alongside soldiers’ children to spread more effectively horizontal ties of fraternity and class solidarity.59 At the opening ceremony of the first school, attended by the president and various government dignitaries, students gathered to sing the “hymn of the agrarista,” before posing for photographs taken from the roof of the student body assembled in the courtyard in the shape of a hammer and sickle.60 Cardenista discourse took further institutional shape in the regime’s creation of a peasant militia of defensas rurales armed and trained by the army. The arming of peasant reservists was a tactic that had been used extensively by the postrevolutionary state since President Obregón, and such forces had been important in defeating several military rebellions in the 1920s.61 However, the Cárdenas regime gave the militia a more explicit social rationale and attempted to create a more formal, institutionalized relationship between these forces and the army. After the Cristero War, General Amaro tried to reduce the number of agrarista (land reform supporter) militia and formalize their relationship with the army as ad hoc security forces that could be mobilized by regional commanders against subversives and rebels.62 Cárdenas created a central department at the Secretariat of War to oversee these reservists and placed zone commanders in charge of them. In public, he argued that the militia should include only peasants who had received government grants of land. Cárdenas noted that the spread of the militia was an achievement of the Agrarian Department along with the Secretariat of War.63 As land reforms accelerated, the militia’s numbers reportedly expanded to about sixty thousand men by 1939. On his visits to new ejidos (common lands), Cárdenas was often met by a small corps of armed peasant militia standing to attention.64 In Cardenista discourse, the authority of peasant defensas rurales stemmed from their social and political position as well as a military rationale. Many Cardenistas argued that their understanding of the army’s place in society marked a rupture with Callismo. After 1934, a new generation of Cardenista politicians associated Callismo with “militarism.”65 Teachers

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at the schools for army children saw themselves as part of a larger struggle over national values against “militarism,” hierarchy, and violence that they associated, sometimes explicitly, with Callismo and the federal army institutionalized under Callista auspices. Teachers did acknowledge improvements in the army’s organization and discipline since the revolution and constantly paid homage to the army’s popular historical roots. However, teachers such as Gregorio Lara clearly remained suspicious of the culture of the federal army. While “forming, orienting, and strengthening the class principles of the proletariat,” the schools could also “give the military instruction necessary so that they (children) will know how to defend the conquests of the workers: but they will not form new soldiers.”66 In a telling metaphor, reformers presented the schools as converting the army’s children into “armies of labor” or “new soldiers of labor.”67 The schools would inculcate physical strength and discipline through sports, assured El Maestro Rural, but would not form a “militaristic youth” or a “military caste.”68 Margarita Díaz de Téllez, head of the school in Tacubaya, defended the independence of the schools from the Secretariat of War because the SEP was the only institution fully trained and organized by “socialist tendencies.”69 By contrast, she believed army control “would certainly be unilateral, highly disciplinarian . . . and lead to tendentious teachings inspired by a purely military education.”70 Even loyal Cardenista officers within the army published narratives of military history that questioned the technical achievements of the military reforms of the Sonorans and their political inspiration. Second Captain Rosendo Suárez Suárez, a history teacher at the Colegio Militar, published a short history of the army in 1938 in which he painted a very mixed picture of the army of the 1920s and early 1930s. According to Suárez, at the end of the revolution, the army contained far more “bandits” than “soldiers of honor.”71 Although Amaro carried out some useful reforms, such as introducing sports to the regiments, Suárez held the army responsible for the brutal assassination of rebel officers in 1927 at Huitzilac and noted that during the Cristero War numerous federal officers were rumored to be “fraternizing with them (the rebels) to sell them arms and munitions.” Although he noted that the country had now thankfully left behind “counterrevolutionary militarism and dictatorial maximatos,” it was up to the army’s youth to end decisively “the traditional vices of the institution.”72 Of course, such views of radical rupture with Callismo should be tempered by an acknowledgement of tensions within Cardenismo’s project for the army and that project’s continuities with Sonoran developmentalism.73 In the case of the new schools for soldiers’ children, official discourse’s

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emphasis on class was crosscut with the sense that the schools represented a personal gesture of the president’s paternalism. Cárdenas had pioneered similar institutions while zone commander in the Huasteca region and in Michoacán, and they were constantly heralded in the press and in state propaganda as the president’s particular brainchild.74 In a broad sense, the Cardenistas built on the Sonorans’ efforts to extend military men’s exposure to education and other social services as a way to wean them away from loyalty to individual officers and reform the vice-ridden barracks. However, the state’s focus on the families of lower-class soldiers as a matter of national policy was genuinely new, as was its implicit recognition that lower-class soldiers’ consensual unions actually constituted legitimate families in the first place.75 Although Amaro did expand basic schooling facilities for troops, Callista reforms and benefits had tended to focus on new batches of young, well-educated career officers, and military rules did not recognize consensual unions for the purposes of army benefits.76 The most serious tension in Cardenismo’s project for the army was between the notion of the army as an active “revolutionary factor” in social and political struggle and the regime’s residual attachment to the idea of an apolitical army.77 While the regime talked of soldiers’ solidarity with the masses, it never broke entirely with the discourse of military neutrality, even (or perhaps especially) when zone commanders interfered in local politics. Criticism of the partiality of zone commanders appeared in the national press, particularly Excélsior, with some frequency. When the army defended itself from these accusations by issuing press releases, it did so by denying that zone commanders had ever been diverted from their professional “duty.”78 Cardenismo’s emphasis on class struggle also raised some difficult questions about the internal organization of the military whose enlisted ranks were drawn from the “proletarian and peasant classes” in contrast to their usually better-educated and more-middle-class officers. Unsurprisingly, faced with this tension Cárdenas clearly came down on the side of military discipline. In many ways, Cárdenas’s approach to the officer corps was not particularly novel; in the mid-1930s, he built on Sonoran professionalization by introducing exacting new examination requirements for junior officers.79 However, he did experiment with trying to break down some of the divisions between enlisted men and career officers. In a much-publicized speech in December 1935, Cárdenas promised to change military regulations to allow more enlisted men into career-officer schools. This represented another attempt to secure enlisted men’s loyalty at a time of acute conflict between Cárdenas and a politically suspect officer corps. Cárdenas probably also understood it as a way

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of helping to produce officers who would see themselves as “protectors of the poorer classes (clases desvalidas)”; after all, Cárdenas also promised that any civilian accepted to military academies would first have to serve a year in a provincial regiment or battalion experiencing the humble “life of the soldier.”80 Cárdenas’s collaborators in the army also tried to curb harsher military punishments, make it somewhat easier for subalterns to lodge complaints against superiors, and root out other typical abuses such as officers speculating with wages or demanding “gifts” from their subalterns.81 The difficulty of reconciling these divergent interests is encapsulated in Cárdenas’s inclusion of a military sector in the new corporate party of “peasants, workers and soldiers” in 1938. In many ways, this arrangement grew quite naturally out of the government’s discourse in 1935–1937 stressing soldiers’ “solidarity” with the social struggles of the popular classes.82 Earlier, the state had attempted to resolve the tension between the notion of an apolitical and a revolutionary army by portraying soldiers’ influence as social or ideological rather than political. The founding of the corporate party seemed to eclipse the notion of a politically neutral army altogether.83 The army justified the move by citing Cárdenas’s insistence that the army should follow “the generous idea that we are not professional soldiers but the friends, the armed and organized auxiliaries of the humble classes and of the people.”84 That the military’s compulsory presence in the new party sat rather uncomfortably with its professional status and duty to oversee public order during electoral contests was obvious to all, and this reflected the contradictions involved in creating a corporate revolutionary party within Mexico’s liberal constitutional framework. The government addressed these apparent paradoxes by arguing that soldiers would participate in the party not as representatives of the army per se but only in their capacity as individual citizens. The government claimed soldiers would regain their full rights to open political participation granted them in the constitution, while the army as a whole could continue to act as the guardian of national institutions. Perhaps the most convincing argument put forward for the reforms was that they would end the hypocritical situation in which the political influence of military men was felt in all sorts of formal and informal ways, but remained unacknowledged.85 A range of complex and rather opaque institutional arrangements were created to convey the impression that soldiers’ participation in the party did not compromise the army’s ability to remain neutral during political campaigns and elections. The net result of these arrangements was that, in practice, soldiers’ participation in the party was highly circumscribed.

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A total of thirty-three deputies were elected by the units in each zone command to represent them in the party, while another seven were chosen by the Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA, Secretariat of National Defense). The exact procedures by which soldiers might elect representatives were never made clear to the public.86 The secretary of defense, General Manuel Ávila Camacho, announced his intention to leave the details up to the “prudent judgement of the zone and corporation commanders.” Ávila Camacho could overrule any of the “elections” anyway if he saw fit.87 To further reinforce the image that military participation in the party did not erode discipline or institutional neutrality, army delegates at the new party’s constituent assembly were required to wear regulation army uniforms at all times and signed a pact that required them to form a “bloc” that only engaged in political debate in private.88 Even with the founding of the party, the Cardenista administration continued to oscillate a little uneasily between acknowledging the army’s informal powers and revolutionary authority and circumscribing them with professional norms, depending on the context. In essence, Cardenistas tended to argue that this apparent paradox represented a false problem since, under the present government, a commitment to social reform, institutional loyalty, and the demands of Mexico’s particular conjuncture of class struggle all happily co-existed and reinforced one another.

Implementation, Resistance, Outcomes Cardenismo aimed to further centralize and institutionalize the army, and reshape how the army was understood by its own soldiers and society at large. Clearly, tracing the reception of the project across Mexico’s heterogeneous political and social landscape is a huge task. However, we can approach an assessment of the project’s impact through an examination of the evolution of discourse and key institutions, a consideration of the roles of army commanders, a synthesis of the regional literature, and a consideration of one state (Puebla) in particular. By one important measure, of course, the state’s military policies were successful. The Cárdenas regime avoided both a violent coup and a repeat of the kind of backroom power play by the military hierarchy that forced President Pascual Ortiz Rubio’s resignation in 1932.89 This was a considerable achievement, given the recent past, and the air remained dense with rumors of coups and uprisings for most of the decade. The one attempt at a military uprising, that of San Luis Potosí’s General Saturnino Cedillo,

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was more of a regional political challenge than a serious military revolt, and was ultimately contained without too much difficulty.90 Some officers wrote editorials damning Cardenista radicalism, sparred with Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the CTM in the press, held academic conferences condemning military reforms, and eventually turned to electoral opposition.91 Best known is General Juan Andreu Almazán’s campaign for the 1940 presidency. In the 1920s, Almazán had used his term as minister of public works and communications to support his sizable construction business. For most of the 1930s, he remained a key regional power broker as Nuevo León’s zone commander and built close ties to powerful Monterrey business interests.92 Amaro, chief engineer of the Sonorans’ military reforms, also moved from backroom plotting to open, and ultimately futile, electoral opposition.93 In the course of campaigning, Almazán harnessed an extremely broad range of grievances against the official party, counting on the support of disgruntled unions and peasant groups alienated by agrarian reform or its corrupt implementation. To defeat Almazán’s campaign, the ruling party combined corporatism and propaganda with electoral fraud and street fighting.94 However, the prevention of coups and general regime continuity is a limited indicator of state strength and, in any case, did not exhaust the ambition of the Cardenista project for the army. Like its Sonoran predecessor, the Cardenista state was not in a position to extinguish the political autonomy of military officers. After all, although the army could never hope to police all of Mexico’s large and often-inhospitable territory, military men were still essential to the state’s basic ability to rule and were embedded in a huge range of local policing roles across most of the country. Each military zone was split into two or three military sectors, typically manned by an infantry or cavalry unit. While these units were based in urban centers, their commanders received orders from SEDENA to place detachments across small towns and strategic points such as railroad lines.95 Cárdenas certainly exercised considerable skill in appointing military commanders and at cultivating the political careers of commanders loyal to him. However, the image of obedient, intensely loyal army commanders simply acting as “the watchdogs of Cárdenas” in the provinces oversimplifies their role and exaggerates their efficacy as instruments of Cardenismo.96 Some commanders fit this image well, notably General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, who spent the sexenio posted to the most troublesome states in the country, helped to ram through agrarian reforms against local opponents, built numerous military and public facilities, and hunted down Cedillo.97 General Félix Ireta used his time as sector and zone commander

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in Cárdenas’s home state of Michoacán (1935–1937, 1938–1940) to build up his own political base, although he remained closely tied to Cárdenas.98 However, other zone commanders were rather blunter instruments of central authority and Cardenista reformism. The president’s attempts to exert pressure on local political groups in Baja California in the mid-1930s were undone, in part, by the incompetence or the mutable loyalties of the apparently Cardenista generals who were sent there.99 Zone commanders still enjoyed political leverage in the grey area between obedience to the center and open rebellion, particularly in more distant areas of the republic. Some discreetly curried favor with local elites through routine corruption, built clienteles, or deflected the impact of social reforms at key junctures.100 In late 1936, after the country’s zone commanders had been moved or replaced dozens of times, Francisco J. Múgica’s political agents still considered them to be distinctly unreliable allies in combating provincial opponents of Cardenismo.101 The government continued to need a range of payoffs and deals to manage these troublesome political actors. For example, Cárdenas rehabilitated General Jesús Agustín Castro as Durango’s zone commander in 1935 in order to subvert the power of the Callista governor General Carlos Real. Castro performed the task very ably, but then proceeded to aggressively rebuild his own political machine and tried to impose his own man as governor. It required the deployment of General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán to ensure that the Cardenista radical Calderón was installed as governor, while Castro was given the large and apparently lucrative zone command of Chihuahua.102 The government’s open encouragement to zone commanders to take the “initiative” in organizing the construction of barracks, roads, schools, sports grounds, and airfields probably reflected both an acknowledgement of persistent military entrepreneurialism and an attempt to channel it to useful, popular ends.103 In December 1937, Cárdenas renamed the Secretariat of War and Navy as the Secretariat of National Defense to foster the image of the army as a constructive force rather than an institution that the public, officers complained, associated with “endless warfare.”104 However, by 1939, the army command was trying to subject provincial commanders’ rampant construction to some kind of “general plan” and ensure that any public funds were used “with honor.”105 The army also remained an unreliable ideological ally of Cardenismo. While Marxist texts circulated in military schools, and some military cadets caused a public scandal by travelling to Spain to fight for the Republicans, in Mexico City’s cafés other officers bitterly complained about the unprecedented power of organized labor.106 In early 1937, US intelligence

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employed a Mexican captain to probe the opinions of a range of army ranks across several different states. The captain, whose anonymity the US military attaché decided to protect, reported widespread discontent with radical policies and ingrained local obstructionism from both military and civilian authorities. Despite the dramatic reduction in desertions, and the fact that the regime had done more than any other in the last fifteen years to improve the conditions of privates to colonels through pay increases, promotions, and expanded services such as the new military schools, no one is satisfied. Everyone considers that what has been done for him is very little or nothing—that he deserves a great deal more, that the President only concerns himself with the Indians, and with laboring men whom he has literally showered with favors . . . the more violent use strong language against the president calling him “lazy” and “ungrateful to his own” . . . As to the conversations which I have purposely overheard, I can decidedly state that all were absolutely against the President; they complain bitterly and criticize him as a communist, ignoramus, etc. . . . Every man in the army, from the Zone Commander to the common soldier who forms part of a detachment in the most obscure village, obstructs the President’s policy which involves decided protection for the workman and peasant. Towards these elements the army has declared itself an irreconcilable enemy, perhaps jealous of the very substantial favors which they receive from the government. This obstruction of military men to the President’s policy consists in their not furnishing the guarantees that they should when troops are called in to put down conflicts between peasants. It must be remembered that peasants are always quarrelling among themselves, over lands given them by the President. Furthermore, the military authorities pay no attention to the peasants’ complaints.107

The record of Cárdenas’s schools for soldiers’ children also reveals ideological tensions. The schools certainly tapped into a genuine enthusiasm for vocational education, and they do not seem to have had difficulty attracting students. Some commissioned officers demanded the admission of their children into the schools; Cárdenas promptly acceded to this request in at least Guadalajara, although this rather undercut the schools’ stated aim to admit only children of the lower ranks.108 However, the available correspondence between parents of students and the central state suggests that the schools were better at fostering a paternal image of the president as the “dignified protector” and “one true father of the soldiers’

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children” than class solidarity or anticlericalism.109 In their correspondence with Cárdenas, soldiers and their families discarded most of the radical rhetoric surrounding the schools in favor of an older language of paternalism and rights conferred by patriotic military service, bravery, and soldierly suffering. Captain Lauro J. Flores thanked Cárdenas for admitting his children, “who have shared with us the sufferings of campaign and the privations inherent to this life of continual hardship.” Flores had once been a subaltern under Cárdenas, and he saw the schools as marking a long-delayed reward for fulfilling his military duty: “I fondly remember that during one long tour of duty where you, as head of the forces that combated the reaction, fell prisoner of the enemy, with your bravery and abnegation you taught us the meaning of the fulfillment of duty, and you told us that one day our situation would improve; we are seeing this now although we thought it would never happen.”110 When Candelaria S. de Arcovedo wrote to claim a military pension and a place for her children in one of the schools, she appealed to Cárdenas’s paternal instincts and urged him to “think about your own wife and children if they were in the same sad circumstances as ourselves.” She combined this appeal with a pointed argument about the heroic manner of her husband’s death as an army captain fighting “bandits” in Guanajuato in 1937, in contrast to the “useless” peasant militia who “ran away like scared geese.”111 In Mexico City, one group of “soldaderas” even visited the SEDENA to denounce the schools’ “attractive young feminine school teachers” who tried to bamboozle them into joining the Communist Party by talking “about matters of which soldiers know little.” Speaking to the press after the visit, they insisted that they “loved President Cárdenas,” but simply wanted their children to “learn to read and write and not to curse God.”112 Other right-wing officers had severe misgivings about the schools’ radical teaching staff. Brigadier General Carlos Martín del Campo, who served in the Department of Military Education in the mid-1930s, was certain that Cárdenas had made of the schools a hotbed of leftist agitation inspired by “exotic theories . . . supported by a flag that is not the national one”: .

In these schools there is a regular percentage of students who do not come from, or have relatives in the army; they are attended by civilian teachers who feel more antipathy than affection for the army and, as a natural consequence, work in a way that is as contrary to it as possible . . . Logically those educated in an atmosphere of constant exploitation, in hunger and misery, and having as a norm falsehoods and a lack of respect for the flag, cannot but feel hatred towards the army . . . forming a generation

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without a sense of their civic duties nor culture, that will be at the vanguard of those who hate the army . . . This institution (the school), far from having conquered the sympathy and gratitude of the students and their families, will bear the responsibility for social disintegration.113

The case of General Maximino Ávila Camacho well illustrates the interlocking obstacles posed by the political autonomy and conservatism of some officers. During a lengthy military career, Maximino had learnt the considerable benefits that could accrue to military commanders by not overtly challenging the central government; the wealth Maximino accumulated by muscling in on Zacatecas’s cattle industry during the Cristero War was well known by the political elite and is amply attested to by the dozens of complaints in his military file.114 After being overlooked for the governorship of Puebla in 1933, Maximino eventually obtained Cárdenas’s unspoken backing to build up a formidable political machine in Puebla in 1935 in exchange for loyalty to the regime. Although Maximino bolstered the powers of the state government while he was governor between 1937 and 1941, he began constructing his political machine as military zone commander (January–September 1935). He built an alliance with the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM, Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) through his considerable power to intervene in agrarian and labor disputes and even started his own state newspaper to support his gubernatorial bid.115 Maximino’s use of the zone command to extend his control over state politics was more or less an open secret.116 Once Maximino stepped down as zone commander, he arranged for reliable military allies of himself and his brother to be posted to the state, such as generals Anacleto López Morales, Rodrigo Quevedo, and Donato Bravo Izquierdo; and colonels Edmundo Sánchez Cano and Maximiliano Ochoa Moreno.117 By the late 1930s, Maximino had constructed a broad, multiclass political alliance in the state, obtained a rapprochement with the state’s business and Catholic elites, and decisively shifted the state’s politics rightwards. The rising tide of federal interventionism and the mass organizations of the corporate Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM, Party of the Mexican Revolution) broke on the rocks of Maximino’s regional power base. Maximino oversaw the organization of such national entities in Puebla more or less on his own terms and similarly resisted the interference of radical federal teachers, and even federal intelligence agents.118 Likewise, Cardenismo’s institutional and cultural reforms of the army were also strongly shaped by such regional arrangements. Puebla provides a telling example of the various ends to which commanders’ control over

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the defensas rurales could be put. As zone commander, Maximino fostered ties with rural power brokers through his authority to arm and select the state’s peasant militia.119 The CTM’s grand parades of “workers’ militia” in Mexico City were echoed in Puebla in 1942, but consisted of Maximino’s allies in the rival CROM, along with other non-CTM unions, all “uniformed and militarized.”120 Conversely, military officers’ organization of paramilitary forces did not necessarily proceed through these new institutional channels. In 1940, Avilacamachista ally General Donato Bravo Izquierdo returned to Tehuacán and took it upon himself to drum up several “battalions of peasants” to help in the campaign against Almazanismo in the state.121 The case of Puebla exemplifies the political polyvalence of the peasant militia, subject as it was to zone commanders’ autonomy and corruptibility, the military hierarchy’s own apparent skepticism of the utility of the defensas rurales, and the varying perceived requirements of pacification. In 1936, the Secretariat of War issued confidential orders for the blanket disarming of agrarista militia in at least Michoacán and Guanajuato; in the state of Sinaloa, wracked by agrarian conflict, military commanders and the army hierarchy opposed the formation of defensas rurales throughout the sexenio.122 Similarly, in Puebla, Cardenismo’s discourse about the army was subject to idiosyncratic local interpretation. In 1936, an ex-Zapatista from Teziutlán complained that their sector commander, Colonel Edmundo Sánchez Cano, had “betrayed” the idea of the Day of the Army by celebrating it with a dinner offered by the town’s priest and Catholic organizations, which were allied to armed groups that had attacked federal teachers.123 In the late 1930s, the zone commander’s chief of staff supported Catholic groups’ calculated efforts to celebrate independence in Puebla on the anniversary of Iturbide’s victory, rather than Hidalgo’s uprising.124 The Avilacamachistas crafted a legitimizing discourse of regional order, hierarchy, and stability, in which the military was portrayed very much as a classic disciplinary antidote to agitation, rather than a mobilizing “revolutionary factor.” As governor, Maximino liked to wear his military uniform in public at events such as the commercial exposition he organized in 1939. Likewise, during meetings with recalcitrant students or local power brokers, Maximino often brandished a riding crop, a commonly understood trope of harsh military discipline.125 While Maximino’s brother, Colonel Rafael Ávila Camacho, was mayor of Puebla City in 1939, he sometimes wore his army uniform, and he created a “militarized” sports club for employees of the Puebla City government. In addition to playing baseball and basketball, employees took part in “military exercises and marches,

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for purely disciplinary purposes,” all paid for by contributions from employees’ wages.126 Maximino also ultimately illustrates the cumulative impact political deals with military men could have. The 1940 election produced shrill rhetoric, violence, and chicanery. However, many army officers moved within the emerging party-state to counter more radical parts of Cardenismo by backing General Manuel Ávila Camacho’s presidential bid. According to Gonzalo N. Santos, Manuel was encouraged to promote his candidacy by General Rodrigo Quevedo and Santos himself after the death of the previous secretary of war, with the explicit aim of moderating land and labor policies.127 Manuel built up a sizable political following among army officers, aided by his ability after 1938 to dispense offices in the party as secretary of defense.128 While building his coalition, Manuel also marginalized some of the more radical Cardenista zone commanders. In late 1938, he mediated a tense dispute between Sonora’s powerful right-wing governor Román Yocupicio and the pro-labor zone commander General José Tafolla, exonerating the governor and sending Tafolla brooding back to Mexico City.129 To the extent that Manuel also relied on his brother Maximino’s influence over state governors, his campaign also reveals how informal military politics powerfully shaped national politics. By late 1938, the three main factions of right-wing governors had united behind the candidacy of Manuel.130 Manuel Ávila Camacho’s election brought both a more moderate course in national politics and a rapid return to the Sonoran blueprint of military professionalism. Various controversial Cardenista innovations in military discourse and policy were quietly abandoned in the early 1940s. Most famously, President Manuel Ávila Camacho effectively dissolved the party’s military sector in 1941, only months after Cárdenas had vociferously defended it to the Congress.131 Ávila Camacho’s decision simultaneously implied an explicitly “middle-class,” professional identity for those non-serving officers who held political posts, since these were directed to join the party’s popular sector. Although military officers took prominent roles within the “popular sector” of the party in the 1940s, military matters were not a prominent feature of the sector’s demands and propaganda.132 Through the war years, military propaganda returned to the themes of political neutrality and technical and organizational improvements, repeated in countless pamphlets, magazines, speeches, and radio programs. The fate of the schools for soldiers’ children again illustrates an ideological shift. Misgivings by officers such as General Carlos Martín del Campo, along with budgetary difficulties and endemic syndical conflict within the SEP, probably persuaded Cárdenas to place the schools under

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the direct control of the SEDENA at the beginning of 1938.133 This led to simmering tensions between the new military authorities, who proposed “militarizing” the schools entirely, and the remaining civilian staff of radical teachers, who accused the new authorities of being “reactionaries” and defended their rights to unionize as civilians.134 In 1939, Margarita Díaz de Téllez, director of the school in Tacubaya, complained that army inspectors were trying to remove her because they argued that it was illegal for her as a woman to have members of the armed forces “at her orders.” Meanwhile, the army authorities expelled the members of the school’s cooperative of seamstresses, and an unnamed army representative blocked Díaz’s control over the school’s budget of eight thousand pesos, despite a presidential order that she was to administer it.135 The tone of the teaching and public image of the schools also seemed to moderate under military control; the numbers of non-military children in the schools dwindled, and self-identified “Cardenista” teachers complained about new clerical influence in the school in Guadalajara. Teachers in Mexico City complained at harsher discipline in the schools and “a complete ignorance of workers’ rights.”136 Under President Manuel Ávila Camacho, this uneasy compromise in the schools gave way to a full-scale assertion of military control and a purge of the remaining leftist teachers who had responded to army control with “passive resistance” toward the “orders of the directors.”137 Some Avilacamachistas in the Congress even tried to turn the schools into a public symbol of Cardenista misgovernment and social dissolution. In 1941, the new federal deputy from Durango, Colonel Enrique Carrola Antuna, took the press on a tour of the schools in the capital and pointed out the poor facilities, flea-ridden beds, and ominous daubings of hammers and sickles on the walls.138 In 1941, General Sánchez Cano, the new director of the school in Coyoacán, also conjured a press campaign to facilitate his removal of staff.139 After the SEP itself had been purged of leftists in 1942–1943, the remaining “founding” Cardenista teachers were removed, and the schools were quietly absorbed into the SEP’s department of primary education.140 Early in the Ávila Camacho administration, Mexico City’s press also urged the abandonment of the defensas rurales. The right-wing Excélsior, sensing a change in political priorities, increasingly cast the militia as a troublesome anachronism, ripe for disbanding; residents of Mexico City were canvassed for their opinions and tended to agree that the militia belonged, or ought to belong, to the past.141 In the 1940s, the defensas rurales did not disappear, and the institution continued to prove amenable to diverse regional political arrangements.142 Despite their troubling associations with

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radical agrarianism and reportedly poor discipline, Cárdenas’s defensas rurales nevertheless represented a step toward centralization from which the state was unwilling to retreat even as it turned rightwards. However, any ambiguity surrounding the militia’s social revolutionary or military rationale was expunged from official discourse. Between 1939 and 1942, several decisions by the Supreme Court and military tribunals confirmed that the militia were subject to military discipline and law while they carried out military orders.143 In the 1940s, the militia continued to be subject to considerable debate within the government; state governments experimented with a number of other institutional solutions to rural policing, such as the defensas ganaderas (cattle-ranchers’ militia) in Zacatecas and Chiapas; in 1942 to 1944, the army created its own regular forces dedicated to rural policing.144 Under Alemán, the justification for the militia shifted to that of securing agricultural production for the nation, “moralization,” discipline, and literacy, emphases more befitting the “constructive phase” of the revolution in which “the time of hate, rancor and opposition” had been left behind.145 In the early 1940s, Lombardo Toledano agreed to disband the CTM’s worker militia.146 By the end of Cárdenas’s term, the government had drifted toward more conventional policies of recruitment. By the end of 1938, efforts to recruit enlisted men into the officer corps dissipated. Officer schools returned to a policy of only accepting better-educated “young civilians,” and the school created for non-commissioned officers to advance their careers was closed due to “innumerable” problems.147 By the late 1930s, plans for conscription reemerged once more and enjoyed support from various factions in the revolutionary elite. Cárdenas, who had long been attracted to conscription’s egalitarian promise, was now convinced that conscription was necessary to protect Mexican sovereignty in the coming world war, not least from the US government’s intrusive plans for hemispheric defense; he passed a new law on military service months before he left office.148 Once it was finally implemented in 1942, a core goal of the Ávila Camacho administration was to use conscription to help bring an end to the social upheaval of the 1930s and to solve “the difference of the social classes” through discipline, national integration, and unity.149

Conclusion Cardenismo’s project for the army was at once ambitious and laden with contradictions. When Cardenistas interpreted postrevolutionary society

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through the lens of class struggle and sought a radical redistribution of power, property, and rights, it seemed to them that the Sonorans’ model of military neutrality was increasingly hypocritical and inadequate to the task. Cardenismo sought to impose a new understanding of what it meant to be revolutionary on the Mexican Army, one based on class consciousness, civic action, and revolutionary engagement. To this end, the regime praised soldiers’ solidarity with (and origins in) the working and peasant classes, extended benefits to enlisted men, immersed soldiers’ families in the vanguard of socialist education, encouraged commanders to build infrastructure for the masses’ benefit, and charged the army with organizing a peasant militia made up from the beneficiaries of collective land grants. At the same time, Cárdenas’s military reformers sought to consolidate military discipline even as they moderated its excesses. Cárdenas also created a military sector in the new corporate revolutionary party, thereby both acknowledging the army’s power and revolutionary authority and insisting that this arrangement was compatible with military neutrality in electoral politics. This project’s legacy was distinctly ambivalent. Cárdenas faced many of the same obstacles of military autonomy as the Sonorans and could not hope to displace Calles or simply govern Mexico’s unwieldy provinces without tolerating a range of “brass cacicazgos.” On the other hand, Cárdenas’s approach to the army and his careful political management of commanders ultimately encouraged enough officers to work within the system rather than resort to outright defection, albeit at some cost to Cardenismo as a transformative project. Many officers shrugged off much of Cardenismo, or used their influence to push for a shift rightwards and a return to more conventional policies of military professionalization. Less radical aspects of Cardenismo—its tacit approval of the background political influence of officers, its tolerance of military entrepreneurialism under the guise of civic action, its promise of a more general political stability—were probably palatable enough to many in the military. By the 1940s, the Avilacamachistas abandoned most of Cárdenas’s more controversial institutional and discursive innovations, or rendered them eminently compatible with the hollow populism of the PRI. Ultimately, this story of Cardenismo’s confrontation with the military questions traditional accounts that have emphasized the continuity and efficacy of postrevolutionary military reform. The postrevolutionary army was shaped not simply by the gradual, inexorable dialectic between institutionalization and recalcitrant caudillismo but also by competing notions of revolutionary citizenship. In subsequent decades, some Cardenista officers occasionally lamented the army’s deviation from what they saw as

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its heyday as a genuinely popular, revolutionary institution in the 1930s and its conversion into a force of “simple gendarmes” protecting civilista authoritarianism. However, they were rather futile and lonely voices, with increasingly tenuous connections to the army itself.150 Cárdenas himself largely remained tactfully silent. Notes Author’s Note: I am grateful to Pablo Piccato, Paul Gillingham, Terence Rath, and the editors of this volume for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo General de la Nacíon (AGN); Fondo Joaquín Amaro (AJA); Abelardo L. Rodríguez (ALR); Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (APECFT); Centro de Estudios Sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CESU); Departamento de Enseñanza Superior Técnica Industrial y Comercial (DESTIC); Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS); Escuela Hijos del Ejército (EHE); Emilio Portes Gil (EPG); Fondo Francisco Urquizo (FFU); Fondo Heriberto Jara (FHJ); Lázaro Cárdenas (LC); Military Attaché (MA); Manuel Ávila Camacho (MAC); Ramo Presidentes: Obregón-Calles (OC); Pascual Ortiz Rubio (POR); Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SDN); Archivo de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP); United States Military Intelligence Reports: Mexico, 1920–1941 (Fredericks, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), microfilm (USMIR). 1.  “¿Libertad . . . para asesinar al pueblo? El Ejército de la Revolución desprecia a los ‘periodistas’ amigos de Victoriano Huerta, que hoy hipócriticamente lo adulan,” reproduced in Leopoldo Méndez, Leopoldo Méndez y su tiempo: Colección Carlos Monsiváis: El privilegio del dibujo (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2002), 85. The cartoon is paired with another accusing the press of supporting big business and fascism. 2.  Carlos Monsiváis, “Leopoldo Méndez: La radicalización de la mirada,” in ibid., 23. See, for example, Diego Rivera’s illustrations in Carleton Beals, Mexican Maze (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1931). 3.  “¿Pos pa’que luchamos? (La familia del general y el ‘Juan’),” reproduced in Leopoldo Méndez y su tiempo, 63. 4.  On the relationship of the Popular Graphics Workshop to Cardenismo after 1935, see Deborah Caplow, Leopoldo Méndez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 123–58. 5.  Lorenzo Meyer, “Historical Roots of the Authoritarian State in Mexico,” in José Luis Reyna and Richard S. Weinart, eds., Authoritarianism in Mexico (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1977), 3–22. For a concise and convincing critique of the emphasis on Cardenista corporatism, see Jeffrey Rubin, “Decentering the Regime: Culture and Regional Politics in Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 31, no. 3 (1996): 85–126. 6.  Adrian A. Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora and the Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998); Ben Fallaw, Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

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  7.  William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 355–66. See also Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–40 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); and Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004). For a similar approach applied to the 1920s, see Christopher R. Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).   8.  Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920–1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). For a particularly nuanced discussion of the relationship between state cultural policy, transnational intellectuals, and indigenous artisans, see Rick López, Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans and the State after the Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).   9.  Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 121. See also Lieuwen’s “Depoliticization of the Mexican Revolutionary Army, 1915–1940,” in David Ronfeldt, ed., The Modern Mexican Military: A Reassessment (San Diego: Center for US–Mexican Relations, 1984), 51–62. Some studies have raised doubts about this interpretation, but have not offered detailed historical research, the major exception being Elisa Servín’s Ruptura y oposición: El movimiento henriquista, 1945–1954 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2001). Roderic Ai Camp offers the most empirically rich analysis of long-term trends in the internal sociology of the military, and he has used an extensive database of officers’ careers to suggest that Cárdenas’s success in eliminating “political” officers has been “exaggerated.” However, Camp still basically frames Cardenismo as a step along the long road to military professionalism and as marking the creation of a strong corporate state. Roderic Ai Camp, Generals in the Palacio: The Military in Modern Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20. For a fuller treatment of the military in the last two decades, see Camp’s Mexico’s Military on the Democratic Stage (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2005). 10.  Jesús de León Toral, El ejército mexicano (Mexico City: Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, 1979); Jorge Alberto Lozoya, El Ejército Mexicano (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1965); Stephen J. Wager, “The Mexican Army, 1940–1982: The Country Comes First” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1992); William S. Ackroyd, “Military Professionalism and Nonintervention in Mexico,” in Linda Alexander Rodríguez, ed., Rank and Privilege: The Military and Society in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 219–34; Luis Alamillo Flores, Memorias: Luchadores ignorados al lado de los grandes jefes de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Extemporáneos, 1976), 612–14; Enrique Krauze, La presidencia imperial: Acenso y caída del sistema político mexicano (1940–1996) (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2002), 66. 11.  Emilio Portes Gil, Quince años de política mexicana (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1941), 241.

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12.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 113–38. 13.  Adalberto López Jara, quoted in Hans Werner Tobler, “Peasants and the Shaping of the Revolutionary State, 1910–40,” in Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 493. 14.  Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861– 1979 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Mexico in Revolution (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 3, 208. 15.  General Joaquín Amaro, DF, to Escuela Superior de Guerra, January 1932, 04/01, exp. 8, APECFT, AJA. 16.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 44; Berghahn, Militarism, 7–30; John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 36–61. 17.  Héctor Aguilar Camín, “The Relevant Tradition: Sonoran Leaders in the Revolution,” in David Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 92–123; Arturo Warman, “The Political Project of Zapatismo,” in Katz, Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, 321–37. 18.  Martha Beatriz Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro y el proceso de institucionalización del Ejército Mexicano, 1917–1931 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003), 121–33, 137–46. 19.  General José Alvarez quoted in El Universal, May 7. For Obregón’s view of himself as a moralizing influence on his troops, see Emile Joseph Dillon, President Obregón: A World Reformer (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1923), 69–96. 20.  On anticlericalism in the army, see chap. 5 by Ben Fallaw in this volume. 21.  Reports from Colonel Rubén García, Santiago de Chile, to Amaro, 22 January 1926, 03/04, exp. 22, leg. 1, 1924–26, APECFT, AJA. 22.  J. Antonio Beltrán González, Mejores anecdotas del H. Colegio Militar (Mexico City: n.p., n.d.), 44–46. 23.  Rubio Darío found an older use of the term “soldadera” as a euphemism for a female prostitute and a newer use referring to enlisted men’s common-law wives; see La anarquía del lenguaje en la América Española (Mexico City: Confederación Regional Obrera, 1925), 2:237. The distinction was not clear to many. See Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 64, 74–75, 128–29. 24.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 94; La Prensa, 18 June 1936. I discuss the gendered aspects of military reform further in “Masculinity and Military Reform in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1950” (presentation, Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Toronto, 2010). 25.  Translation of 1933 speech by President Abelardo Rodríguez, in Marshburn to G-2, September 1933, reel 4, 339–42, USMIR; Génesis de la Escuela Superior de Guerra (Mexico City: Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Biblioteca de la Dirección General de Educación Militar, 1933); Los estudios de la Escuela Superior de Guerra (Mexico City: Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, Biblioteca de la Dirección General de Educación Militar, 1934). 26.  Rodolfo López de Nava Camarena, Mis hechos de campaña: Testimonios del General de División Rodolfo López de Nava Baltierra, 1911–1952 (Mexico City:

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Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana; Secretaría de Gobernación, 1994), 127. On the uneven impact of Amaro’s reforms, see also the chapters by Fallaw and Smith in this volume. 27.  For examples see Abel Quezada, El sistema: Los mejores cartones (Mexico City: Planeta, 1999), 24. 28.  Pedro J. Almada, Con mi cobija al hombro (Mexico City: Editorial Alrededor de América, 1936), 209–19, 257; Marshburn to G-2, 16 December 1935, reel 4, no. 6716, USMIR. 29.  Military rebellions in 1923, 1927, and 1929 certainly did not seem to reflect strong ideological differences. See, for example, General Arnulfo Gómez, El centinela: Obra escrita por el Señor General de División Arnulfo R. Gómez, jefe de la guarnición de la Plaza de Mexico, dedicada a las clasas y tropa, del Ejército Nacional (Mexico City, 1924); and comments of General José Gonzalo Escobar cited in John W. F. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico: A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 389–90. 30.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 146–49; Alicia Hernández Chávez, “Militares y negocios en la revolución mexicana,” Historia mexicana 34, no. 2 (1984): 181–212. 31.  Frederick M. Nunn, Yesterday’s Soldiers: European Military Professionalism in South America, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Brian Loveman, For la patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999), 73. 32.  General Gustavo A. Salas, El servicio militar obligatorio: Apuntes sobre la reorganización del ejército (Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico: Talleres Lino-Tipográficos, Escuela de Artes y Oficios del Estado, 1922), 6; Reports from Colonel Rubén García, Santiago de Chile, to Amaro, 22 January 1926, 03/04, exp. 22, leg. 1, 1924–6, APECFT, AJA; Rubén García, El servicio militar obligatorio (Santiago de Chile: Balcells and Co., 1927); El Universal, 7 May 1925. 33.  Salas, El servicio militar, 50. On conscription’s appeal to a variety of different regimes, see Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization Since the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 34.  Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro, 133; Lázaro Cárdenas, Apuntes: Una selección (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de la Revolución Mexicana “Lázaro Cárdenas”; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003), 196; Álvaro Obregón, Cajeme, Sonora, to General Gabriel Gavira, DF, 9 August 1925, 580/121, O-C, AGN. 35.  Centro Revolucionario de Estudios Políticos, DF to ALR, November 1933, 580/121, ALR, AGN. 36.  Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 1 (1994): 73–107. 37.  Camp, Mexico’s Military, 21. 38.  Alicia Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 1934–1940: La mecánica cardenista (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1979), 77–81. Cárdenas’s military career had also given him firsthand experience of the local power and highhandedness of foreign oil companies in the Huasteca region. Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor and the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 306–7.

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39.  Author’s calculations based on bi-monthly reports from MA to G-2, 1934–1941, reel 7, USMIR. Only one commander, General José Amarillas of Tlaxcala, remained in his command throughout the entire sexenio. 40.  Juan F. Azcárate, Escencia de la Revolución (Mexico City: B. Costa-Amic, 1966), 180; Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 91–95; Pavel Leonardo Navarro Valdez, El cardenismo en Durango: Historia y política regional, 1934–1940 (Mexico City: Instituto de Cultura de Estado de Durango, 2005), 94–101. 41.  Adolfo Gilly, El cardenismo, una utopía mexicana (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2001), 166n40; Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 77–81. 42.  Copy of speech by Margarita Díaz de Téllez, director of EHE No. 2, 22 August 1937, in caja 32, 1216, FHJ, CESU. 43.  Lieutenant Colonel Juan Carrasco Cuéllar, Hacia la república socialista de trabajadores: Obra de lectura para soldados, obreros y campesinos; oratoria revolucionaria socialista (Mexico City: DAPP, 1938), 24, 26, 47. This text also contains numerous speeches given by Carrasco at public events and military ceremonies in the provinces, including a conference in Torreón’s “Princesa” theater in December 1936, two months after the Laguna land reform. Ibid., 39–56. 44.  Ibid., 39. 45.  Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 39; Alfonso Teja Zabre, Breve historia de México (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1935). Carrasco explicitly acknowledged his debt to Teja Zabre. Carrasco Cuellar, Hacia la república socialista, 24. 46.  Captain Luis Macedo, “Desarollo histórico e ideológico de la Revolución,” El Soldado, November 1936, 702–3. On revolutionary citizenship and competing notions of “revolutionary time,” see Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 10. 47.  See photo-essay “Día del Soldado” in El Nacional, 28 April 1938. 48.  Ibid. 49.  Speech by President Cárdenas on 27 April 1935, El Maestro Rural, 15 May 1935, 3–5; Museo Nacional de Arte, Los pinceles de la historia: La arqueología del régimen, 1910–1955 (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2003), 150. 50.  Gabino Palma, “El militarismo mexicano y las ‘Escuelas Hijos del Ejército,’ ” in El Nacional, 28 April 1938. The featured poem is “No sé por qué piensas tú . . .” by Nicolás Guillén, a Cuban Communist. 51.  El Nacional, 28 April 1938; Excélsior, 30 April 1938. 52.  Joaquín Jara Díaz, Circ. No. II-32-97, 9 April 1936, caja 2136, exp. II/356(015)/, SEP. 53.  Gilberto Bosques, The National Revolutionary Party of Mexico and the Six Year Plan (Mexico City: Bureau of Foreign Information of the National Revolutionary Party, 1937), 264–65. Postrevolutionary governments had a tendency to establish specialized schools with great fanfare that could serve as laboratories for, and symbols of, their larger political and social goals. See the discussion of the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in Dawson, Indian and Nation, 3–33. In 1937, Cárdenas also set up a boarding school for orphans of the Spanish Civil War in Morelia. The orphans were briefly housed in the Escuela Hijos del Ejército in Colonia del Valle and posed for a round of press photographs with army children. See photomontage “Los Niños Españoles” in

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El Nacional, 13 June 1937. Numerous photographs of the visit by the Spanish orphans are available in El Archivo Fotográfico Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García at the AGN. 54.  Rosendo Suárez Suárez, Breve historia del Ejército Mexicano (Mexico City: Editorial Anáhuac, 1938), 71. See also Juan de Dios Bátiz, Departamento de Enseñanza Superior Técnica Industrial y Comercial (DESTIC), SEP, to General Brig. Salvador Sánchez, Secretaría de Guerra, 7 September 1936, caja 2146, V/356(8–5)/-1, SEP; Images from the 1938 “Informe Gráfico de la Escuela Industrial Superior ‘Hijos del Ejército, No. 2’ ” in Museo Nacional de Arte, Los pinceles de la historia, 19, 55. 55.  Estimates varied among reformers of the actual number of children that might be eligible for the schools. Teacher Gregorio Lara estimated as many as 60,000. Gregorio Lara, “Mi visión de las Escuelas Hijos del Ejército,” July 1936, 534.4/47, 2, LC, AGN. While the SEP was investigating the founding of a school in Guadalajara in October 1935, zone commander General Antonio Guerrero estimated that from the 2,000 soldiers in the Jalisco zone there would be about 250 eligible children. Juan de Dios Bátiz to LC, 1 October 1935, 534.4/47, caja 721, LC, AGN. The latter was probably more realistic, suggesting a generous national estimate of around 8,000 army children. 56.  Lara, “Mi visión,” 2. See also transcription of speech by Margarita Díaz de Téllez, director of EHE No. 2, 22 August 1937, caja 32, exp. 1216, FHJ, CESU. On the radicalization of SEP policy in the 1930s, see Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 25–46. On Communist influence in the SEP, see John A. Britton, “Teacher Unionization and the Corporate State in Mexico, 1931–1945,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1979): 674–690. 57.  Lara, “Mi visión,” 19. See also Carlos M. Peralta, “Dictamen sobre el proyecto que para la educación de los hijos del ejército presenta a la consideración del c. Presidente de la República el C. Profesor Marcelino M. Murrieta,” 20 March 1935, 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN. 58.  Margarita Díaz de Téllez, director of EHE No. 2, 22 August 1937, caja 32, exp. 1216, FJH, CESU. 59.  See 1935 budget for “Centro Escolar Hijos del Ejército, de Obreros, y Campesinos,” 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN. 60.  El Nacional, 16 August 16 1935. This image later circulated in a set of commemorative postcards produced by the SEP. See program and postcards in 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN. 61.  Jean Meyer, “Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 201–40. 62.  The 1929 Reglamento de las Defensas Rurales envisaged the use of these militia as “factors of order” for the preservation of “public tranquility.” The forces were to be organized and deployed whenever state governments found it “convenient,” although they would be under the direct command of the regional chief of operations. In addition to policing functions, they would act as army guides and provide protection from bandits. They were also to provide the army with intelligence, and they were provided with an exemption from telegraph and postal costs for this purpose. Artemio Arellano Cruz, “Las defensas rurales como fuerza militar de protección de los derechos agrarios” (Law thesis, UNAM, 1950), 55–57. See also Ricardo Calderón, El ejército y sus tribunales (Mexico City: Ediciones Lex, 1944), 190–92.

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63.  Diario de los debates de la Cámara de Diputados: Diario 21, 1 September 1936 (Mexico City: LV Legislatura, Comité de Biblioteca, 1994). See also Marshburn to G-2, 4 September 1936, reel 4, no. 7421, USMIR. 64.  Memorias de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, August 1938–September 1939, 38–46; Anales gráficos de la historia militar de México (Mexico City: Editorial Gustavo Casasola, 1973), 550. 65.  See speeches by deputies Arnulfo Pérez and F. Altamirano, 17 December 1935, Diario de los debates de la Cámara de Diputados: Diario 21. 66.  Lara, “Mi visión,” 9. 67.  Copy of speech by Colonel Tomás Martínez Catache at the opening of EHE No. 1, 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN. 68.  El Maestro Rural, 15 November 15, 21–23. See also Gabino A. Palma, “El militarismo mexicano y las ‘Escuelas Hijos del Ejército,’ ” El Nacional, 28 April 1935. 69.  Margarita Díaz de Téllez, Director EHE No. 2, 22 August 1937, in caja 32, exp. 1216, FHJ, CESU. Military magazines also presented the first school as being at the vanguard of “socialist education,” even praising its library stocked with everything from children’s literature to up-to-date “Marxist pamphlets.” El Soldado, February 1936, 85–88. 70.  Margarita Díaz de Téllez, DESTIC, SEP, to General Heriberto Jara, 24 August 1937, caja 32, exp. 1216, FHJ, CESU. 71.  Suárez, Breve historia del Ejército Mexicano, 65. 72.  Ibid., 66, 67, 73. That such a re-narration of the recent past by a serving captain might prove controversial was obvious to Suárez: “There will be sanctimonious people (timoratos) for whom my work will seem scandalous . . . My profound love for the army has tempted me in certain passages to shut my mouth; but I know that I make a worthy contribution with the truth.” Ibid., 62. 73.  On the “bi-partisan” support for developmentalism, see Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 3 (1994): 393–444. 74.  Cárdenas, Apuntes, 261–62; El Soldado, February 1936, 85. In fact, some other commanders had experimented with similar schools in the 1920s in their respective zones. Memorias de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1936–37 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1937), 136–37. 75.  Rath, “Masculinity and Military Reform.” 76.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 93; Memorias de la Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, August 1930–July 1931, 28–29; Military Attaché Lieutenant Colonel Marshburn, “Visit of Military Attaché to Certain Mexican Military Headquarters,” 19 June 1934, reel 5, no. 5374, USMIR; Draft of “Ley de Retiros y Pensiones del Ejército y Armada Nacionales,” 1940, caja 8, FFU, CESU. 77.  Lázaro Cárdenas, cited in Gilly, El cardenismo, 327. 78.  See Excélsior’s criticism of Zone Commander General Juan Soto Lara’s partiality toward the “Red” unions in the port of Tampico in February 1936. On the Secretariat of War’s response, see Marshburn to G-2, 11 February 1936, reel 4, no. 6887, USMIR. 79.  Seis años de gobierno al servicio de México, 1934–1940 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Gobernación, 1940), 97. 80.  El Soldado, January 1936, 1–3. 81.  Various correspondences, General Heriberto Jara’s investigation to Secretaría de Guerra y Marina, 1935, caja 29, exp. 1057, CESU.

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82.  General Heriberto Jara, quoted in El Nacional, 18 September 1937. 83.  Colonel Ignacio Beteta, radio address, 27 April 1937, reproduced in Bosques, The National Revolutionary Party, 357. 84.  Lázaro Cárdenas, cited in Informe del Secretario de la Defensa Nacional (Mexico City: Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, 1938), 24. 85.  This was an argument put forth by members of the senate, as reported in El Gráfico, 26 January 1938. In an editorial on 17 February 1938, El Universal Gráfico remained somewhat skeptical of the military sector, but agreed that the unacknowledged political influence of the army, as one of the “dark forces behind the throne or presidential seat,” represented a harmful “paradox” and that at least in the new party soldiers would be no more than other citizens. The Excélsior, long concerned about Communist infiltration in the army, worried about the new party causing a “political virus” to spread through the military. Excélsior, 3 December 1935; Freehoff to G-2, February 3, 1938, reel 2, no. 624, USMIR. 86.  J. Lloyd Meacham, “Mexican Federalism—Fact or Fiction?” in Arthur P. Whitaker, ed., Mexico Today: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 208 (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1940), 34. 87.  Informe del Secretario de la Defensa Nacional, 10, 27, 63. 88.  “Reglamento Interior del Bloque Militar” and “Normas de Conducta Aprobados por los Representantes del Sector Militar,” 28 March 1938, in Informe del Secretario de la Defensa Nacional, 73–80. 89.  Marshburn to G-2, 11 and 16 September 1936, reel 4, no. 7436, USMIR. 90.  Dudley Ankerson, Agrarian Warlord: Saturnino Cedillo and the Mexican Revolution in San Luis Potosí (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). 91.  Various reports March–April 1938, caja 80, exp. 7, DGIPS, AGN; José Alvarez y Alvarez de la Cadena, El ejército nacional ante la militarización de obreros y campesinos: Conferencia sustenada por el General Brigadier José Alvarez y Alvarez de la Cadena, en el Congreso Internacional de Plasmogenia y Cultura General, el 20 Julio 1938 (Mexico City: American Press, 1938). 92.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 91; Camp, Generals in the Palacio, 251. Monterrey’s provincial elite looked to Almazán to fulfill the valuable roles that regional military strongmen such as Bernardo Reyes had performed before the revolution: local enforcer of order and buffer against unwanted interference from the central state. Alex Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State, 1880–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 124–25. 93.  Marshburn to G-2, 11 and 16 September 1936, reel 4, no. 7436, USMIR; Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 113. 94.  Gonzalo N. Santos, Memorias (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), 711. A useful overview of the 1940 election can be found in Aaron Navarro, “Political Intelligence: Opposition, Parties and the Military in Mexico, 1938–1954” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004). See also Albert Michaels, “Las elecciones de 1940,” Historia mexicana 21, no. 3 (1971): 80–134. 95.  General Brigadier Manuel F. Enríquez, Jefe del Estado Mayor, 25 Zona Militar, Puebla, to General Brigadier Edmundo Sánchez Cano, Comandante 32 Batallón de Infantería, 11 December 1935, X/III/1-330, 1096, SDN. 96.  Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth, 189.

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  97.  Francisco Estrada Correa, Sin reconocimiento oficial: La biografía de Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, el último liberal mexicano (Mexico City: Editorial Consuelo Sánchez y Asociados, 2006), 29–45.   98.  Victoriano Anguiano Equihua, Lázaro Cárdenas: Su feudo y la política nacional (Mexico City: Editorial Eréndira, 1951), 148–56. Ireta was sector commander in Uruapan in 1935, Michoacán’s zone commander in 1938–1940, and state governor in 1940–1944. He became zone commander in Michoacán again from 1954 to 1969. Various correspondences, XI/III/1-574, SDN.   99.  Paul Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 162–63. 100.  Fallaw discusses the Yucatecan elite’s successful “renting” of General Ignacio Otero Pablos to help derail Cardenismo in Fallaw, Cárdenas Compromised, 59, 69–74. Guillermo de la Peña finds that in the 1930s the strategically crucial Sayula garrison generally remained “an effective instrument of the federation,” although individual officers sometimes accepted bribes from local landowners. Guillermo de la Peña, “Populism, Regional Power, and Political Mediation: Southern Jalisco, 1900–1980,” in Eric Van Young, ed., Mexico’s Regions: Comparative History and Development (San Diego: Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1992), 204–5. 101.  Confidential report dated September 11, 1936, reproduced in Alicia Gojman de Backal, Camisas, escudos y desfiles militares: Los Dorados y el antisemitismo en México, 1934–1940 (Mexico City: Escuela Nacional de Estudios Profesionales Acatlán; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 345–48. 102.  Navarro Valdez, El cardenismo, 91–104, 242–52. 103.  Excélsior, 20 March 1939, 10; Colonel Ignacio Beteta, radio address, April 27, 1937, reproduced in Bosques, The National Revolutionary Party, 357–67. 104.  El Soldado, February 1936, 65. The new name also echoed Mexico’s defensive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. 105.  Memorias de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, August 1938–September 1939, 15. 106.  General Brigadier Carlos Martín del Campo, Mixcoac, D.F., to MAC, 7 November 1941, 534/92, MAC, AGN; Roberto Vega González, Cadetes mexicanas en la Guerra de España (Mexico City: Colección Malaga, 1977), 20–21; Report by S19, DF, 12 May 1938, caja 80, exp. 7, DGIPS, AGN. See also reports by S19 from 29 March and April 1, 1938 on tensions between the military sector and the CTM at the party assembly, caja 80, exp. 7, DGIPS, AGN. 107.  Marshburn to State Department, 1 June 1937, reel 4, no. 7972, USMIR. The Mexican captain claimed to have spent two months talking to over four hundred officers around the country and particularly tried to focus on the opinions of junior officers by “listening in” on their conversations with “discretion and extreme caution.” 108.  General José Riverón, Zone Command, Guadalajara, Jalisco, 8 January 1937, to LC, and LC, DF to General José Riverón, 13 January 1937, 534.4/47, caja 721, LC, AGN. 109.  Humberto Cerdio y Conde, Inspector General de Policía, Toluca, Mexico, to LC, 22 September 1936, 534/64, LC, AGN. 110.  Capitan 1/Inf. Lauro J. Flores, Ayudante del 51 Batallón, Veracruz, Veracruz to LC, 9 July 1937, 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN.

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111.  Candelaria S. Vda. de Arcovedo, Salamanca, Guanajuato, to LC, 25 July 1937, 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN. 112.  New York Times, 29 June 1938. For parent and student discontent at teaching in EHE No. 2, see also El Nacional, 5 October 1938. 113.  General Brigadier Carlos Martín del Campo, Mixcoac, D.F, to MAC, 7 November 1941, 534/92, MAC, AGN. General Martín del Campo had been director of the Centro de Instrucción para Jefes y Oficiales while Manuel Ávila Camacho had been secretary of defense (1937–1939). During his time at the military school, he reminded Ávila Camacho, he had obstructed the spread of Communist “exotic theories” and “activities” by “traitorous” elements. Hernández Chávez suggests that he was one of General Amaro’s “people.” Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 113. He had been chief of the General Staff of the Secretariat of War in 1934. Marshburn to G-2, 26 December 1934, reel 4, no. 5768, USMIR. 114.  Various correspondences (Maximino Ávila Camacho), September–October 1929, X/III/1-8, 514–40, SDN. 115.  Cummings to G-2, 8 December 1931, reel 2, no. 812, USMIR; various correspondences, September 1935 (Edmundo Sánchez Cano), X/III/1-330, 945–50, SDN; Will Pansters, Power and Politics in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987 (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990), 47–77. 116.  “Gran Centro Político, formado por miembros del PNR,” Puebla, to H. Congreso de la Unión, DF, May 1935 (Maximino Avila Camacho), 1218, X/III/1-8, SDN. 117.  I discuss the relationship between the army and avilacamachismo in Puebla in detail in my Army, State and Society in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). 118.  Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 72–76; Inspector PS-2, to Gobernación, 11 July 1938, caja 140, exp. 3, DGIPS, AGN. 119.  Gregory Crider, “Material Struggles: Workers’ Strategies during the Institutionalization of the Revolution in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1996), 228–37; Pansters, Power and Politics, 50; 1938 report of Federal Labor Inspector at Atlixco, cited in Alan Knight, “Habitus and Homicide: Political Culture in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Wil Pansters, ed. Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture (Amsterdam: Thela, 1997), 114. 120.  Alejandro C. Manjarrez, Puebla: El rostro olvidado (Cholula, Puebla, Mexico: Imagen Pública y Corporativa S.A. de C.V., 1991), 135. 121.  Donato Bravo Izquierdo, Soldado del pueblo (Puebla, Mexico: n.p., 1964), 318. 122.  Marshburn to G-2, 6 October 1936, reel 2, no. 7508, USMIR; General Alejo González, Mazatlán, to LC, March 1939, 559.1/69, LC, AGN; various correspondences, Secretariat of National Defense to LC, October 1937–November 1938, 556.7/6, LC, AGN. For the varying, and largely unsuccessful, methods of pacification employed by different zone commanders in Sinaloa through the Cárdenas sexenio, see Francisco Padilla, Lo que el tiempo no se llevó: Los conflictos agrarios en el sur de Sinaloa durante el periodo cardenista, 1935–1940 (Culiacán, Mexico: Dirección de Investigación y Fomento de la Cultura Regional; Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, 1993), 35–72. On General Alejandro Mange’s disarming of agraristas in Veracruz in 1937, see Marshburn to G-2, 23 April 1937, reel 2, no. 7928, USMIR, and Paul Gillingham’s chapter in this volume. 123.  Sergeant Andrés Ros, Teziutlán, Puebla, to LC, 1 May 1936 (Edmundo Sánchez Cano), 1081, X/III/1-330, SDN.

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124.  Jesús Márquez Carillo, Tiempo y su sombra: Política y oposición conservadora en Puebla, 1932–40 (Puebla, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Puebla, 1997), 83–84. 125.  Puebla en marcha, August 1939; Armando Romano Moreno, Anecdotario estudiantil (Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1985), I:180–1, 197–98. 126.  Puebla en marcha, May 1940. For images of the club marching through Puebla’s streets in uniforms very similar to those used by army officers, see Puebla en Marcha, March 1940. 127.  Santos, Memorias, 583–88. 128.  Santos, Memorias, 647–48, 665–66; Hernández Chávez, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, 118. 129.  Various correspondences, Freehoff to G-2, October–November 1938, reel 2, nos. 136–47, USMIR. 130.  Sergio Valencia Castrejón, Poder regional y política nacional en México: El gobierno de Maximino Ávila Camacho en Puebla (1937–1941) (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1996), 125–51; Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth, 182–86, 223. 131.  Antonio J. Bermúdez and Octavio Véjar Vázquez, No dejes crecer la hierba . . . El gobierno avilacamachista (Mexico City: B. Costa-Amic, 1969), 55–57. Cárdenas remained strongly attached to the idea, at least in private. Cárdenas, Apuntes, 636–37. 132.  See, for example, Historia documental de la CNOP (Mexico City: Instituto de Capitación Política, 1984), I:45–46. 133.  Cárdenas, Apuntes, 329. Cárdenas explained the handover as a result of the army being “more closely linked” to the schools’ mission, but offered no more details. Oddly, though, the first two schools in Mexico City were controlled directly by the president’s office until January 1939. 134.  Federación de Sindicatos de Trabajadores del Estado (FSTE), DF, to LC, 22 May 1940, 534.4/47, caja 721, LC, AGN. 135.  Margarita Díaz de Téllez, DF, to Doña Amalia Solórzano de Cárdenas, 7 August 1939. See also report by Miguel Chávez, to LC, undated, LC, 534/64, caja 687, AGN. 136.  C. Calderón Rabanales, Tapachula, Chiapas to LC, March 27, 1940, 534/64, caja 687, LC, AGN; Rafael Teja, Sec. Gen. Grupa Acción Revolucionaria del Sindicato de la EHE No. 4, Guadalajara, Jalisco, to LC, September 29, 1938, 534.4/47, caja 721, LC, AGN; Excélsior, 12 March 1939. 137.  Transcription of report by General José Inocente Lugo, in Subjefe Estado Mayor, Gen. Brigadier Luis Rueda Flores to Rómulo Meza Miralles, 7 June 1941, 534.6/121, caja 651, MAC, AGN. See also Estado Mayor del Secretario de la Defensa, to Rómulo Meza Miralles, Sec. Gen. Union General de Trabajadores Materiales de Guerra (UGTMG), DF, 23 June 1941; Rómulo Meza Miralles to MAC, 7 May and 29 July 1941; Prof. Roberto Abrego, DF, to MAC, May 15 1941; Federación de Sindicatos de Trabajadores del Estado, DF, to MAC, 21 January 1942, in 534.6/121, caja 651, MAC, AGN. 138.  La Prensa, 28 February 1941; Eduardo Correa, El balance del avila camachismo (Mexico City: n.p., 1946), 26–27. 139.  La Prensa, 3–4 March 1941; Transcription of report by General José Inocente Lugo, in Subjefe Estado Mayor, Gen. Brigadier Luis Rueda Flores to Rómulo Meza Miralles, 7 June 1941, 534.6/121, caja 651, MAC, AGN.

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140.  Prof. Roberto Salinas, DF, to MAC, 20 February 1943, 534/92, caja 623, MAC, AGN; Calderón, El ejército y sus tribunales, 51. 141.  Excélsior, 3 March 1941. 142.  Santos, Memorias, 840–1. See also 18 June 1938 report by Colonel Miguel Badillo, cited by Knight, “Cardenismo,” 103. 143.  Calderón, El ejército y sus tribunales, 194. 144.  Antonio García de León, Fronteras interiores: Chiapas, una modernidad particular (Mexico City: Océano, 2002), 81; Ramón Vera Salvo, Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana: Estado de Zacatecas (Mexico City: Gobierno del Estado de Zacatecas; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas; Centro de Estudios Históricos del Agrarismo en México, 1990), 3:38–39; Memorias de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, August 1942–September 1943, 4; Calderón, El ejército y sus tribunales, 44. 145.  Arellano Cruz, “Las defensas rurales,” 72. 146.  Marshburn to G-2, 11 February 1936, reel 4, no. 6887, USMIR; Marshburn to G-2, 13 May 1938, reel 4, no. 8458, USMIR; Raquel Sosa Elízaga, Los códigos ocultos del cardenismo: Un estudio de violencia política, el cambio social y la continuidad institucional (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1996), 455. 147.  Memorias de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, August 1937–September 1938, 17, 55. Camp dates the formal end of enlisted men’s entry to the military college to 1944, although he notes that examples of such officers in his database stop “several years” before this. A more modest program admitting enlisted men started again in 1955. Camp, Mexico’s Military, 54. 148.  Friedrich Schuler, Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 153–71. 149.  Copy of speech by Conscript Lorenzo Cuevas Castro, 25 June 1944, 545.2/14-8, MAC, AGN. I discuss conscription more fully in “Que el cielo un soldado en cada hijo te dio: Conscription, Recalcitrance and Resistance in Mexico in the 1940s,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 37, no. 3 (2005): 507–32. 150.  Press release by Agustín Leñero, transcribed in memorandum, July 1951, caja 24, exp. 15, 75–76, DGIPS, AGN. See also various complaints about military education and corruption sent to President Adolfo López Mateos by General Heriberto Jara, 1961–2, caja 6, exp. 475, FHJ, CESU.

chapter seven

Military Caciquismo in the PRIísta State General Mange’s Command in Veracruz Paul Gillingham The history of the Mexican military’s discreet self-effacement after the revolution is well known but under-researched.1 It is in many ways a peculiar story.2 The young, predatory generals of the revolutionary army, that strange hybrid of diverse citizens in arms, ended the bloody decade of the 1910s by taking a substantial majority of the federal budget and anointing themselves with national and regional powers.3 Three rebellions in the 1920s, however, allowed the Sonoran presidents to make culls on a grand scale. Álvaro Obregón, facing down the rebellion of a majority of his troops, halved the army at a stroke. Plutarco Elías Calles pushed through critical reforms, ley fuga’d his main military rivals, and easily suppressed the Escobar rebellion. Both military budgets and political representation declined steeply across the 1930s, and the army stayed loyal during the last big rebellion, that of Saturnino Cedillo, in 1938. In the early 1940s, the army’s (substantially overrepresented) corporate sector of the revolutionary party was suppressed. In 1945, soldiers were banned from participating in “political affairs or tasks, whether directly or indirectly”; that same year, 550 revolutionary generals were allegedly forced into retirement. In 1946, the last military president stepped down.4 Among the great advances of the 1940s, Excélsior editorialized, was the army’s realization of “its noble guidelines as a fundamental institution of the patria through stopping soldiers . . . from sticking their oar into politics.”5 Scholars by and large have agreed, reinforcing the Mexican military’s self-image of early institutional unity, professionalization, and depoliticization and depicting the army post-1940, as does Edwin Lieuwen, as “a pliable and disciplined tool of the civilian 210

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leaders of the Mexican nation.”6 Budgets back this master-narrative of costfree demilitarization. By the 1970s, Mexico spent less of the national wealth on her armed forces than any other country in Latin America, including Costa Rica.7 In such a story a general like Alejandro Mange Toyos comes as something of a surprise. Mange was a staunch Callista, close enough to the jefe máximo (national boss) to rally round him (together with Joaquín Amaro and a few others) when he returned from exile in Los Angeles in December 1935.8 The other generals were demoted, and Amaro, the architect of the postrevolutionary military, went on to resign his commission. Mange, on the other hand, was soon thereafter given command of the Twentysixth Military Zone in Veracruz.9 This was a prize job: the Twenty-sixth was the most powerful provincial zone command, grouping three regular infantry battalions, two cavalry regiments, three battalions of irregular reserves, and even one of the (very scarce) artillery units.10 The posting, moreover, presupposed trustworthiness: Veracruz was a good place to run a rebel government, and the Interoceanic Railway of Mexico gave its troops ready access to the capital.11 Veracruz was furthermore one of the wealthiest states, affording its military commanders rich business opportunities. Finally, Mange’s command endured when Miguel Alemán Valdés rose to national power as secretario de gobernación (secretary of the interior), a distinct surprise given that it was Mange’s troops who had executed Alemán senior in 1929.12 Despite this baggage, Mange was not disposed to conciliate the clever and unscrupulous young lawyer. When Alemán launched his bid for the presidency, Mange joined a diverse group of generals who placed ideological differences second to the maintenance of military power in Mexico City, and he toured Veracruz promoting the alternative candidacy of General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán.13 “Un hijo de la chingada pelele,” Mange was heard to bluster, “can’t control the military, nor be president.”14 But the civilian Alemán did assume the presidency and quickly purged assorted provincial power brokers, including the governors of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Tamaulipas. Yet he left Mange well alone. General Mange went on, in fact, to command Veracruz until his reluctant retirement in 1959.15 His was a long-lived military cacicazgo (fief), which left him extensive and diverse business interests across the state and which does not conform to mainstream scholarly appreciations of military-state relations in Mexico. Caciquismo is a central organizing concept in understanding Mexican political history. It describes an informal, backstage system of clientelist domination, often disowned but rarely (if ever) discarded by national elites.

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The main features of its operators, the caciques, are that they are (i) local or regional political leaders, (ii) exercising autocratic, personalist rule, which is rooted in (iii) violent capabilities, and (iv) their status as middlemen between local societies and the state. They are usually (v) hegemonic, in the sense of offering at least some choice between pan o palo (carrot or stick); (vi) extremely mutable, all-pervasive colonizers of institutions without much distinction; and (vii) while portrayed as antithetical to state, frequently irreplaceable components of much state functioning. While the precise borders between the two types are fuzzy, caciques are not caudillos—in Mexican usage, it should be stressed. The differences lie in the scale of their dominion and the scale of their violence; i.e., they are neither cupular nor praetorian enough to cast the long shadow of a caudillo.16 General Mange’s power as zone and later region commander in Veracruz fulfils all of the above criteria of caciquismo. His cacicazgo’s longevity—across several presidential terms, in the face of both presidential and popular enmity, and in defiance of longstanding policy requiring rotation in command—left onlookers baffled.17 It was an impressive exercise of autonomy, or, in Weber’s definition—an actor’s capacity “to carry out his will despite resistance”—power.18 This chapter explores the concept and consequences of military caciquismo through Alejandro Mange’s career, paying particular attention to his lengthy reign in Veracruz. That reign—from 1937 to 1959—coincided, of course, with the formative years of the PRIísta state. It is not intended as a history of great men on a provincial, cacical scale, but rather as a case study in demilitarization and its defects in Mexico: a modest form of what Ian Kershaw calls structuralists’ biography, “looking instinctively . . . to downplay rather than to exaggerate the part played by the individual, however powerful, in complex historical processes.” (Nor do I intend to hint that General Mange, for all his rough edges, was a little Hitler; although he was, like Hitler, an “indispensable fulcrum” charged with personalist, clientelist, and violent power inside the part-bureaucratic, part-Hobbesian world of mid-century Veracruz.)19 Such case studies (with epistemological safety in numbers) will be essential as Mexico’s incremental archival opening permits historians to revisit, extend, and perhaps modify the generalizations of earlier scholars. For while historians of Brazil have used a similar incremental opening of the military archives to profitably reconsider the military’s role in Brazilian politics and state formation, contemporary Mexicanists have so far produced meager analysis of the army’s part in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary regimes.20 In such a context, the advice proffered by political generals from Napoleon to Patton—“De l’audace,

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encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace”21—may be of some use to historians. In its spirit, this chapter advances a hypothesis based on a single— albeit extended—case study. This hypothesis is that Mexican demilitarization was more complex Faustian pact than zero-sum game of power. While a marked military withdrawal from the highest levels of national politics did indeed occur, it happened both later and against significantly more opposition than hitherto believed. It was, consequently, significantly less complete than hitherto believed, and it came at the cost of a certain continuity in the independence, rent-seeking, and petty politicking of generals and other military actors across the Mexican countryside. This may have been masked by the military’s subtle but enduring cultural control: a long-lasting control revealed in their successful censorship of Rojo Amanecer, a 1989 film on the Tlatelolco massacre, or in the eight years General José Francisco Gallardo Rodríguez spent in jail for proposing increased transparency in the armed forces.22 Analysts remain hamstrung by a very partial release of army records. At the moment, the military documents for most of the twentieth century are confined to army yearbooks and personnel files.23 Yet some striking indicators of enduring military autonomy are to be found in those personnel files. The service records of officers like Mange chart in some detail an exchange of national influence for institutional independence and provincial cacicazgos—an exchange that implied, moreover, clear continuities with an earlier age of military politics. Not all those continuities were costs to the state. The army continued to play a critical state-building role, ensuring rural control and “softening up” local societies for bureaucratic domination. Yet the hidden costs, the soldiers’ “residual political roles,” could—as David Ronfeldt has argued—add up to a quasi-independent, parallel government structure or “a world,” as a recent US Embassy assessment had it, “largely separate from the rest of Mexico.”24 Alejandro Mange was well placed to advance himself in that parallel state by birth, if nothing else. He was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in 1885, and so although he went to the revolution a corporal, he was a corporal who knew the Sonoran revolutionary leaders from the outset: Calles made him an officer, Obregón made him a major, and by 1920, when he was one of a handful present to sign the Plan of Agua Prieta, he had made general. There was more to his rapid promotion than northern cronyism, though, and the breadth of experience he garnered in his first two decades as a general make it clear that Mange was a useful fighting soldier.25 His main military experience lay in counter-insurgency: the main task, given the level of strategic threat posed by Belize and Guatemala, of the modern Mexican

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army.26 He fought Yaquis in the 1910s, delahuertistas and Cristeros in the 1920s, and—at a lower, less visible, less admissible level—peasant and worker activists across the entire period. His exemplary service during the 1929 Escobar rebellion made him, Lieuwen suggests, one of the key political generals of the time.27 He served clear across Mexico, from Aguascalientes to Zacatecas or, in less rhetorical and more geographical terms, from Yucatán to Sinaloa. At one time or another, he commanded most of the major states, whether in terms of wealth, such as Puebla or Veracruz, or in terms of instability, such as Morelos, Michoacán, or Chihuahua.28 He must also have been an able administrator; as head of the department of infantry of the Secretariat of National Defense under Amaro, he believed himself on the brink of becoming secretary himself in 1943.29 Denied that, he did however end his career with one of the top regional postings, overseeing the Gulf Command.30 Certain key themes emerged in Mange’s widely varied commands between 1916 and 1937, the year he took over Veracruz. He was from the outset a deeply political soldier. His first zone command, the Nineteenth Zone in Yucatán, was the product of an ouster he engineered: dispatched on an inspection tour, he cultivated local allies, including the leaders of the Partido Socialista del Sureste (Socialist Party of the Southeast), with whose backing he replaced the incumbent zone commander General Carmona. (He also engineered Carmona’s arrest, apparently embittered by Carmona’s successful rivalry for the affections of a prostitute: lucky in Mexican army machinations, unlucky in love?)31 He went on to play a significant role in Felipe Carrillo Puerto’s toppling of his incumbent Liberal Party rivals.32 Moving on to command in Nayarit, Mange was accused of attempting another ouster—this time of the agrarian reformers in the agrarista state government—by dint of a campaign of political assassination whose targets stretched from ejidatarios to state senator Pedro López.33 Here a second theme emerges, namely Mange’s political conservatism. In his Campeche, Durango, Nayarit, and Veracruz commands, he allied himself consistently with rural and urban bourgeoisies against agrarian reformers and union militants.34 There were cultural reasons for his choice of sides: Sonorans had little tradition of communal ownership or litigation, and their largely arid state favored capital-intensive, extensive agribusiness. Sonora, as a result, had very few agraristas, and her entrepreneurial, export-minded elites had very little sympathy with them.35 (“We have no agraristas here, thank God,” Obregón is supposed to have said.)36 There were also sound economic reasons for generals to make conservative alliances across this period, commercial farmers and pistoleros generally

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making better business partners than first-generation ejidatarios. And therein lies the third main theme of Mange’s career, namely his success in exploiting the rent-seeking, empire-building possibilities that provincial command could afford. His early business dealings, cropping up in scattered denunciations from peasant telegrams and provincial newspapers, were relatively modest. In Yucatán, Mange was supposedly corrupted by free petrol, expensive suits, and five hundred pesos a month; in Nayarit, the dominant Aguirre family was reported to have recruited the general against importuning agraristas, gaining control of post and telegraph and a “reign of terror” through the gift of a car.37 Mange apparently missed out, however, on the bonanza that the Cristiada represented to some of his contemporaries, such as Maximino Ávila Camacho, and it took his command in Veracruz to draw out his full entrepreneurial potential. Veracruz in the late 1930s was a failing state. Peasants and workers in the 1920s had achieved unusual power, the former thanks to their organization, leadership, and the arms they had obtained in defense of the regime, and the latter—particularly in the cases of oilworkers and railwaymen—through their grasp on strategic resources. Both groups had allied themselves with Adalberto Tejeda’s state government, promoting some regional stability in the face of land reform and conservative resistance and rebellion. When Tejeda was toppled in 1933, the federal government’s priority was to avoid any single actor’s dominance of the state. By March 1937, however, Cándido Aguilar had taken control of many of the state’s agrarian leagues and unions and had installed a client, Miguel Alemán Valdés, as governor.38 Seeking a counterweight to such concentrated power, in April President Cárdenas sent Alejandro Mange to command the Twentysixth Military Zone in Veracruz, where he immediately began disarming Aguilarista defensas rurales. So far—from a central perspective at least— so good. But in containing Aguilar’s regional capabilities, Cárdenas fostered two fresh, enduringly powerful, and conservative cacicazgos, those of General Mange himself and of Miguel Alemán. While the two men were enemies, Mange’s dominance of the Twenty-sixth Zone (and much more in Veracruz) survived until his 1959 retirement. His longevity was eloquent testimony to the difficulty of controlling the state and to the center’s reliance on the military toward that end.39 Mange was the main beneficiary of that reliance, controlling the state’s flawed but (for a long time) only effective violent agency in a Machiavellian environment of highly aggressive geographical and organizational fiefdoms. In exerting some form of tenuous control there—for both his masters’ and his own benefit—he oversaw four main types of state violence: the informal tasks of collective repression,

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decapitation, and decimation of popular movements, and the more formally acknowledged duty of maintaining everyday social control. Collective repression was the army’s main job. Mange’s soldiers broke strikes, disrupted union dissidents’ activities, raided ejidos, and toppled agrarista or opposition town councils in localized coups. Threats alone sometimes sufficed. General Mange attempted to end a strike in Boca del Rio by touring the pickets, “recommending” that the strikers disperse (which misfired when one striker failed to recognize his car and shot him.)40 He was usually more successful. By the mid-1940s, the military regularly intervened in the frequent stoppages that hampered port operations in Veracruz; in 1948, Mange stopped cross-class demonstrations in Orizaba against the cost of living by warning organizers that he would forcibly dissolve any march.41 The regularity with which the army actually used violence gave weight to such threats. Soldiers beat dissidents and raided houses in repressing the oilworkers’ union in a struggle for control with grassroots militant leaders which ended in the 1949 takeover of the Poza Rica oilfields and the Minatitlán refinery.42 Such political dissidents, particularly in rural frontier zones, could face actions ranging from mass arrests to undeclared counterinsurgencies: in March 1945, for example, soldiers killed five peasants who had armed themselves against the sugar mill’s pistoleros in their fields near Cempoala in central Veracruz.43 While such killings drew intense protests, they did not ever lead to a reprimand. Collective repression was a delicate task on the borderline of the state’s accepted practice. If it misfired or was disowned by elites, it could damage a career: thus some of the familia revolucionaria ruled out General Bonifacio Salinas Leal as presidential material due to his responsibility for the León massacre.44 Yet elites saw much collective repression as justified by raison d’état, and successful practitioners such as Mange tended to be rewarded rather than rebuked. Decapitation, the assassination of dissident leaders, was less costly, more deniable, and less provocative than collective repression, and it was widely employed across the period. It was also a task which did not necessitate direct army involvement, although there were cases of regular soldiers carrying out killings. In 1947, for example, Lieutenant Abel, a corporal, and three hitmen accompanied the manager of “La Gloria” sugar mill to the Cempoala baseball ground to invite a shop steward for a beer; the lieutenant shot the union leader as he drank it.45 Reports of killings by soldiers dressed as peasants or peasants dressed as soldiers—a reporting formula which insinuated without risking actual accusation—were frequent enough in Veracruz.46 The numerous, historically unknown ejidatarios (and the less numerous workers) whose deaths populate interior ministry

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files were probably in many cases the non-commissioned officers of dissidence. In others, they may merely have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mange’s troops were accused of maintaining black lists of ejidatarios who were to be shot, or of thinning out the ranks of ejidatarios on a commission basis for local economic elites.47 Mange was also influential in decapitation and decimation through sins of omission, turning a blind eye (wherever possible) to the violence of his conservative allies and affines. Many of the motives for decimation were economic: to prevent ejidatarios from taking up grants, to move them off already existing plots, to control their land use, or to discourage them from applying for extensions. However, the impact of such violence was profoundly political. In extreme cases, decimation caused whole groups to go into exile: cattlemen killed the agraristas of the Veracruz port hinterlands who refused them grazing, causing many to leave the area.48 More commonly, the attrition of regular violence softened up local societies for domination, obliging recalcitrant peasants to accept what offers of increased security they could, whether proffered by pistoleros or by the nearest arm of the state. Recovering the central meaning of military violence is often difficult. Victims tended to present all provincial violence as factional and hence illegitimate. Dissident politicians encouraged them to do so for tactical advantage.49 Victims and perpetrators were consequently locked in a perpetual struggle to control the accepted meaning of violent acts. The country people arrested, beaten, and sometimes shot or hanged in army, reserves, or police operations were deemed ejidatarios or campesinos by their political allies, and bandits or cattle rustlers by the violent agency in question. For a historian to distinguish between factional and more legitimate violence on a case-by-case level is sometimes guesswork, and inevitably constitutes a political decision in itself. Neither were factional violence and more neutral, order-seeking violence mutually exclusive categories. There was, rather, frequent overlap between the two. Yet while such distinctions are intrinsically dubious, it is clear that at least some acts of provincial violence aimed more at the maintenance of basic stability than at the explicit promotion of factional interest constituted—by a very crude, normative definition at least—legitimate policing operations. Formally, these should never have happened. Article 129 of the Constitution of 1917 specified that “in time of peace, no military authority may perform any functions other than those that are directly connected with military affairs”; it was a dead letter. State elites depended overwhelmingly on the army for policing from the armed revolution until the late 1940s. (Mónica Serrano suggests that the army’s policing role was particularly

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marked in the 1950s; the trends of the late 1940s and early 1950s in Veracruz and Guerrero suggest instead a partial, regionally varied but noteworthy decline in that role.)50 It was customary for governors to include a catch-all acknowledgement of the military’s role in “maintaining public order” in their annual reports, which greatly underrepresented the omnipresence of soldiers in carrying out a broad range of police tasks.51 In towns and cities, the army controlled crowds, unions, the press, gamblers, prostitutes, and even politicians.52 On the eve of Orizaba’s 1949 municipal elections, Mange’s chief of staff, General Joaquín Martínez Iñiguez, called the bitterly opposed candidates together and “instructed them in an appropriate and educated way to go into the political contest with the utmost order and that both precandidates should refrain from bringing in outside contingents and should make the said primary elections a civic function that burnished the reputation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party) as well as the Civil and Military Authorities.”53 Election days across the 1940s were usually policed by the army, as the civilian police were seen as inevitably politicized.54 Yet the army’s principal role remained rural policing, and a substantial proportion of their business was to manage collective violence in the countryside. Central to this was despistolización (gun control). Under the terms of the 1943 law on firearms, soldiers, reservists, policemen, teachers, and bureaucrats could all carry guns; all other actors needed permits from the Secretariat of National Defense or became liable to on-the-spot confiscation and arrest.55 The decision to increase the regulation of arms was an extremely significant decision in a country where, in Frank Tannenbaum’s words, “political life was lived with a gun at hand.”56 Gun control was difficult to enforce, and the army’s efforts tended to be at best local, equivocal, and reversible. In Veracruz, Mange’s efforts in the middle of the 1945 crime wave reportedly disarmed all of eleven people, and in 1952, an estimated 95 percent of guns remained unlicensed.57 The army did more than decide whom to disarm: the zone commander simultaneously, through his powers of appointment to the reserves, decided whom to arm. As the hard men of different local factions struggled physically in the streets, cornfields, and plantations, they simultaneously struggled with words to convince the zone commander and the federal government of their claims to defend law and order and the common good. The makeup of the reserves was fluid, and they sometimes changed dramatically when the zone commander changed. In Veracruz, Mange disarmed many of the groups constituted by his predecessor, General Heriberto Jara, and by the regional cacique General Cándido Aguilar, handing the guns over to their

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opponents. Such radical shifts in local balances (or imbalances) of power generated intense correspondence between local power brokers and the center, as the beneficiaries of the new order defended it as meritocratic and the losers complained of political bias, criminal pasts, corruption, and clientelism.58 Vital competition for arms and recognition demonstrated how, beneath a surface of multiple competing violent agencies, the federal army enjoyed considerable potential to rig the market of violence. Three phenomena in particular militated against the army’s depoliticization in the states. Provincial commands were frequently overstretched in trying to cover extensive, ill-communicated, and unstable territories, an overstretch revealed in large operations such as the foot-and-mouth campaign, which left troops in the rainy season in Veracruz without tents or rations.59 This overstretch left commanders with profoundly imperfect information regarding their zones of influence, allowing crooked or incompetent subordinates to flourish and political targets to be sold to them as straightforward criminals. It also pushed them inevitably into ad hoc local alliances that, in turn, drew them further inside the faction-ridden politics of local societies. There were, moreover, debilitating contradictions at the highest level of the state, exemplified in the regular flouting of the policy on rotating commanders. Commanding officers continued to be posted to their home states, where they arrived with ready-made cacical networks: Adrián Castrejón was an ex-governor when he took over Guerrero in 1945, while General Othón León Lobato, who took over the Twenty-sixth Military Zone in 1952, was a xalapeño who had previously run for governor.60 When commanders “went native,” the results were generally grim for local societies; as a letter from several high-ranking officers to Alemán explained, “The jefes of the Military Zones should, in our view, be transferred [regularly], as when they settle in they make themselves Dictators, they monopolize the state’s Business . . . as a concrete case you have General [Pablo] Díaz Ávila, in Cuernavaca, Mor., jefe of the 24th Zone, who has great landholdings, some of which he has bought, and others of which he has taken by force.”61 Finally, the numerous opportunities for self-enrichment that provincial military command afforded were taken up with some regularity. The army was an institution without the power to achieve lasting neutrality, but with more than enough power to reward extensive rent-seeking behavior in its cadres. Army officers such as Mange turned their commands into highly successful businesses in four ways: licensing other, more junior violent entrepreneurs; renting out their troops’ violent capabilities; grafting from the army budget; and using their cacical power to foster their own private enterprises. Sometimes they licensed provincial violence in quite literal terms,

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selling reserve commissions and gun permits; at other times, they merely raked off surpluses in systematic bribes from pistoleros. (These practices later transferred across to the drug trade, with northern commanders selling smugglers garantías (constitutional protections) of an unconventional nature.)62 In 1945, the bandit Bartolo Lara gave General Mange three thousand pesos and a horse in exchange for a commission as a commander of reserves in the Soledad de Doblado area.63 There may have been—as in the unreformed British Army of the early nineteenth century—something of a going national rate for such appointments: in Tecpan, Guerrero, General Pedro Pizá Martínez demanded about the same price for the same service. (Pizá Martínez, a busy man, also demanded money for gun licenses and for permits to celebrate saints’ days.)64 Officers also rented their violent capabilities in diverse ways that ranged from taxing public space through protection to extortion. A detachment on the Poza Rica road was paid off by the local ferry owner to block the bridge, forcing drivers to pay four pesos a crossing.65 In Chihuitán, Oaxaca, Mange himself was reported to have executed thirty-three villagers as rebels in 1929, releasing those whose families paid five hundred pesos or more.66 Not all profiteering was violent. Straightforward graft was also good business, as the army’s institutional autonomy allowed generals to put down whistleblowers with trumped-up charges.67 Charges of systematic graft reached the very top of the army: in 1948, spies reported that the secretary himself, General Gilberto Limón, had sold personal landholdings in Mexico City to the army at a 1,000 percent markup.68 Officers could, finally, use political alliances, free army labor, and violence to build extensive and highly competitive businesses. In Alto Lucero, Veracruz, Lieutenant Colonel Sebastián Contreras ordered his local operatives to steal cattle.69 In Chiapas, General Antonio Ríos Zertuche used soldiers as agricultural workers on his estates and charged the local government four thousand pesos a month for “public works”; in Mexico City he obtained a large share of the Lomas de Chapultepec at the knockdown price of sixty centavos a square meter when they were subdivided; in Veracruz he obtained the lucrative contract to clear the site of the Palma Sola military colony, keeping the timber cut as a bonus.70 In Veracruz the charges against General Mange reached epic proportions, with his “multitude of properties” stretching into Oaxaca, connected by roads built by soldiers and funded by “taxes” on trade, gambling, and gunmen.71 The military’s contemporary reputation for professionalism and neutrality was consequently a fragile plant. A colonel inspected the Chicontepec garrison in 1946, registered the townmen’s preference for military over

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corrupt civilian policing, and concluded that “the federal troops who cover the region enjoy the trust and esteem of the inhabitants for their clean and honorable record.”72 Two years later the same garrison was denounced to the presidency for assaults, extortion, cattle rustling, and threatening to burn hamlets that complained.73 Such violence—driven by economic incentives, political competition, or more frequently, a Gordian combination of both rationales—did not support so much as subvert the state. In the 1940s, the sum of the army’s multiple roles in provincial life added up to a lot more than a military that had, in Lieuwen’s misleading conclusion, “had it politically.”74 The military remained deeply inserted in the everyday life of local societies across Mexico: in the early 1950s, there were small, generally platoon-sized garrisons in some 650 of Mexico’s municipalities, approximately 20 percent of the total.75 Research suggests that these garrisons were often closely intertwined with local elites and other violent agencies.76 The resulting overlap between public and private agencies of violence hampered attempts to reduce provincial violence and slowed, in some cases blocked, the expansion of an effective, centralized state. General Mange’s first decade in the Veracruz command exemplified the pitfalls of Mexico’s overreliance on the military for order in the countryside. Arriving in 1937, he quickly tapped into the system of territorial domination run by the leading regional gunmen agrocapitalists, establishing an effective dyarchy with Manuel Parra. Parra was a commercial farmer, who had made the Hacienda de Almolonga the center of economic and political domination of some twenty-five municipios. He was a violent entrepreneur, with close links to the defense ministry, accused of “thousands” of killings, and something of a hegemon (at least according to the Corrido de Manuel Parra, a possibly biased source).77 Heriberto Jara, the departing zone commander, had maintained something of a bloody balance of power in the countryside by arming agrarian radicals while tolerating their opponents’ violence.78 Mange, who had a history of energetic alliances with local bosses against agraristas, set out from the start to disarm peasant militias and to redirect the sequestered army rifles to Parra’s men. He failed to prevent arms shipments from the coast from reaching Parra’s Hacienda de Almolonga. He also visited Parra, with whom he had a “regular and frequent” correspondence, and was observed meeting other pistoleros, such as Gonzalo Lagunes.79 This shift in power gave Parra an unusual ascendancy, exercised through a paramilitary force of some five hundred men.80 Parra’s 1943 heart attack ushered in a less-stable era, when the former consensus on spheres of influence was undercut by rivalries such as that between the Armenta family of Plan de las Hayas and

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Crispín Aguilar of Actopan. By 1945, a pistolero civil war was underway as different groups struggled to replace Parra as the acknowledged leader.81 Yet even as bands sent by the Armentas invaded Actopan, notably collegial practices still prevailed at the highest level of the pistolero/military alliance.82 In 1945, for example, Mange summoned the leaders of central Veracruz’s guardias blancas (paramilitaries) to a meeting in the port, where he complained that their feuding had given General José Reyes Esquivel in Martínez de la Torre “a very bad impression” of them. He asked them to visit the general’s headquarters and explain themselves; they rented a bus and traveled together to meet Reyes at a petrol station in Perote. From there they went on to Reyes’s barracks, where the pistoleros explained “that they were slandered in the sense that they were killers and bandits but that that was not true.” They were, they assured him, unified and prepared to give constitutional guarantees to the agraristas they had made refugees. The gunmen then returned to the state capital, where they tried to meet the commander of state police. Or so went the semi-official story; gobernación agents suspected it to be a smokescreen, behind which Mange and the pistoleros had really been coordinating support for the presidential campaign of General Henríquez Guzmán.83 Whichever version happened to be true, the matter-of-fact way in which Veracruz’s gunmen did business with the state’s military and police commanders revealed their normalized role inside the state’s ruling classes—entitled, whatever their foibles, to a substantial cuota de poder, a codified and clearly defined share of regional power. This period, the early to mid-1940s, was the peak of Mange’s power. Faced with a weak presidency, a moribund agrarian movement, and a weak governor, his alliance with the pistoleros furnished the most reliable source of some degree of “stateness” for large areas of central and southern Veracruz. He was formally in command of not just the Twenty-sixth Military Zone, but the entire Gulf Coast. His control over local society extended to the venerable and influential bourgeois press, as he posted Captain Arias Barraza as a “representative” inside El Dictamen, giving him constant favorable press coverage, “defending his killings and cock-ups with enthusiasm.” (A son had married into the powerful owners’ family, the Malpicas.)84 Gobernación agent Gonzalo Migoni reported how “General Mange . . . possesses a multitude of properties and is a very rich landowner in the Zone he commands, and even beyond it: in Oaxaca, bordering Veracruz, where his subalterns impose taxes and charge their own ‘taxes’ on gambling, which is rife across the state, without anyone doing anything about it because the municipal authorities have fixed their ‘contributions’;

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the soldiers taking part too.”85 Vox populi called repeatedly for his removal and deemed him “the biggest thief in Veracruz”; gobernación agents detailed his property and business empires, his rents from gambling— “cards, roulette, dice”—and his protection and selling of reserve command appointments in recurrent critiques of military corruption.86 Yet while Agent Migoni railed, seemingly without effect, from the port of Veracruz about Mange as a “genuine disgrace,” “incapable of offering constitutional guarantees through the federal forces at his command which are distracted in other engagements and serve as tools for personal vendettas,” a series of national ruptures in civil/military relations were on the point of reducing military autonomy in Veracruz and across the rest of Mexico.87 The first of these ruptures was superficially apolitical, an administrative rather than partisan question of changing the division of labor in provincial policing to increase civilian responsibilities. Yet as any Weberian would note, the implications of that change were profoundly political. In Veracruz—as in many other regions of Mexico—Alemán’s sexenio coincided with the emergence of a newly technocratic breed of governor, who invested heavily in expanding civilian policing and court systems. Initially impotent, Governor Adolfo Ruiz Cortines had by the late 1940s something of his own violent autonomy vis-à-vis the army, and used it convincingly to crush Mange’s former pistolero allies. Armed with jeeps, generals, and Mausers, the state police of Veracruz ceased to rely completely on the army for force. This was the real beginning of what demilitarization did occur in the countryside. The professionalization of police, the suppression of pistoleros, and the attendant attempts to reduce the numbers and scale of everyday military operations were central to curbing rural violence after 1945. These PRIísta policies were a distinct contrast to those followed in contemporary Colombia during the bloody civil war of La Violencia, where a Conservative government politicized the police, encouraged the formation of Conservative hit squads, and militarized the countryside. Mexican policies were distinctly more successful. (In the light of this comparative history, the recent convergence between the two cases, centered in Mexico on rural remilitarization, is disturbing.)88 The generals, no longer indispensable, lost appreciable leverage over local societies and national politicians. The second rupture was profoundly political, a confrontation between army and government that teetered on the brink of a coup d’état. While the tensions preceded Alemán’s election, the catalyst was the “very great” shock of the July 1948 devaluation.89 As the peso crashed in two weeks from 4.85 to 7.50 to the US dollar, two groups of influential conservative

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generals coalesced and began circling what appeared to many a fatally wounded administration.90 (There was also, US diplomats reported, a revolutionary movement in gestation that counted on junior officers.)91 One group, meeting at Antonio Ríos Zertuche’s house, centered around powerful, mainly northern commanders such as Rodrigo Quevedo, Bonifacio Salinas Leal, Anacleto López, Miguel Z. Martínez, and Roman Yocupicio and considered recruiting Abelardo Rodríguez as an emergency replacement for Alemán.92 The second was led by the director of Colegio Militar (national military college), General Luis Alamillo Flores, in many ways the army’s leading thinker, and had his patron General Joaquín Amaro as a figurehead.93 Exactly how their would-be coups were defused remains— despite the open intelligence files—unclear. Intelligence and diplomatic reports do make it clear that for six weeks Alemán’s survival hung in the balance. The intelligence agencies flooded Mexico City with agents whose reports, from unions, cafés, markets, and the street, sniffed revolution in the air. As early as July 24, there were rumors of a popular rising; flyers, corridos, and gossip all predicted the same, and the assassination or lynching of Alemán.94 It may have been tried. On August 3, 1948, the US ambassador was told that the Alamillo Flores group was planning to assassinate the president; elite airmen from Squadron 201, Mexico’s only veterans of World War II, joked very publicly about just that. On August 11, strong and widespread rumors ran from Mexico City to Veracruz reporting that his car had been machine-gunned and his driver killed.95 Even the military yearbook, professionally noncommittal, gave some indication of backstage turbulence by demoting Alemán from the 1949 edition’s frontispiece. The president was replaced by a soldier, a flag, and the quietly suggestive “the fatherland comes first.”96 Gossip was pithier. “For Miguel’s bloody idiocy,” a spy heard one man say, “militarism is back all over us.”97 Yet the Alemán faction, and with them the PRI, held on to power with an aggressive display of force and cooption, and with the critical, grudging neutrality of ex-presidents Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho. Lacking their support, the dissident generals seem to have backed away from a quick strike in favor of turning Alemán into a puppet ruler. On August 13, a large party of generals called on Alemán, officially to assure him of their support, in reality to exert pressure for changes in the cabinet and the General Staff.98 The atmosphere as they left was one of swaggering authority; Generals Ríos Zertuche and Maurilio Rodríguez had called the president “tu,” enjoyed his panic, and believed that they would get “all they wanted” from Alemán, including five generals in the cabinet.99 Various sources suggested that a deal had been struck, and that the presidential informe,

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a state of the union address, would deliver a drastic reshuffle to purge both Alemanista civilians and Secretary of Defense Gilberto Limón. This would probably have been the first of an open-ended series of capitulations: Alemán’s fate was, according to both the US embassy and some Mexican intelligence briefs, in the hands of the army.100 By the time of the informe, however, he had partly defused the situation by winning the public support of the unions and by increasing the supply of affordable food in Mexico City and provincial capitals. Alemán then gambled that the moment for a coup had passed and kept his cabinet unchanged, facing the army down. Cárdenas had allegedly given the president until the middle of September to improve his administration; diplomats noted that neither Cárdenas nor Ávila Camacho turned up to the much-publicized “unity dinner” that the military offered Alemán on September 3; Cárdenas was believed to be under constant surveillance by gobernación spies.101 The autumn remained a tense time. Alemán may have delivered part of a deal in November, when he fired the loathed secretary of the national economy and dissolved the General Staff, seemingly one of the Alamillo Flores group’s demands.102 He certainly systematically bribed zone commanders with money from the unaudited president’s discretionary fund; conciliated other ranks (and some ­veterans) with land grants, houses, servants’ allowances, full-pay retirements, life insurance, and soft loans; granted a 44 percent mean wage increase, more than twice the pay rise given industrial workers in Mexico City; and maintained tight presidential control over a core of the army’s most effective units in Mexico City.103 At the same time, however, he purged many of the dissidents, removing Amaro from command in Oaxaca and Alamillo Flores from the Colegio Militar.104 Many of the dissidents subsequently passed into the ranks of Henriquismo, where their failure to mount a serious military challenge to the election of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines confirmed the extent to which the military veto on presidential power had declined. Alemán was in part lucky and in large part indebted to Cárdenas and other calm voices in the army. But his eventual defiance of the generals in 1948 was also critical in consolidating the new civilian age in Mexican politics. Subsequent explicitly military parties—1949’s quasi-fascist Partido Nacionalista (Nationalist Party), which explicitly set out to destroy (among other servants of “Stalin’s Russian Imperialism”) the “totalitarian PRI,” 1961’s Celestino Gasca rebellion—would be more or less fringe movements.105 Reflecting on the crisis, one diplomat realized that he had seen a turning point. “Mexico,” he reported, “has apparently outgrown the more romantic aspects of revolutionary activity as carried

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on in the second decade of this century. Modern communications and modern arms and equipment have outmoded the horse, the 30–30 rifle, and the pronunciamiento [coup].”106 That shift was tested in the presidential elections that bracketed it, those of 1946 and 1952. General Henríquez Guzmán was a tentative “precandidate” in 1945, backed by Mange and other officers; he never became a declared rival because of Cárdenas’s swaying of the army and Ávila Camacho’s purge and reshuffle. (Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho broadly represented the left and the right of the army, respectively.) The first election of a civilian candidate was not, however, completely smooth, and supporters of Alemán’s defeated PRIísta rival, Ezequiel Padilla, launched an abortive rebellion in the highlands of Guerrero.107 In 1951, Henriqúez Guzmán left the PRI and became the candidate of the Federación de Partidos del Pueblo Mexicano (FPPM, Federation of Parties of the Mexican People), a vehicle for three diverse groups: political outcasts of all stripes, Cardenistas, and militarists. Ex-governor Berber of Guerrero, a political untouchable, was a regional leader; Francisco Múgica, Genovevo de la O, and Rubén Jaramillo were prominent; 1948 militarist leaders generals Antonio Ríos Zertuche and Luis Alamillo Flores were too.108 The Henriquista campaign was never genuinely national, and Cárdenas refused to commit himself publicly to its support.109 It was, however, powerful in Mexico City and several states, caused fears of risings on election day and in the run-up to the inauguration, and was met with intense repression.110 The army in Mexico City backed the government as it faced down numerous crowds: on November 16, for example, spies estimated twenty-five thousand Henriquistas in a demonstration.111 Henriquismo ended up an anti-climax, but a landmark in military/civil relations. Conceptualized in part as a classic Latin American militarist movement, patriotically correcting the corruption of civilian rule, it ended up underlining the domination of the early PRI and affording another opportunity to purge some of the most threatening or geriatric officers. In its aftermath, Alemán created seventy-six new generals and sixty-six colonels.112 After the first year or so of the Ruiz Cortines sexenio, Mexico’s peculiar brand of authoritarianism was quite well established—peculiar, in part, for an army far smaller than those of Latin America’s later bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes.113 Yet this contested demilitarization implied both hidden costs and striking ambiguities. Across the 1940s and early 1950s, the first PRIístas and key ex-presidents reached a clearly defined modus vivendi with the armed forces, a tacit pact that ceded considerable regional and institutional autonomy to the generals in partial exchange for increased, but not wholesale,

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national submissiveness. This pact was not merely implied: formal, institutional arrangements—the foundations of earlier, “cost-free demilitarization” arguments—clearly reflected its terms. After 1946, there would be no more military presidents; a direct line from the armed forces to the highest level of power was preserved, on the other hand, in the four generals who headed the PRI over the next two decades.114 Miguel Alemán relied on no less than fifteen generals as governors over his term; in Frank Brandenburg’s analysis, the military zone commanders of the 1950s and 1960s held more regional power than all bar a handful of the most important governors, civilian caciques, and bureaucrats.115 Meanwhile, the regime gave those divisional generals too powerful to ignore a whole new level of formal power. In April 1951, a territorial reorganization of the army created ten new regiones militares, each one grouping several zonas militares. The list of those regional commanders constituted a who’s who of deeply political soldiers—several ex-governors, at least one possible presidenciable, a future defense secretary—several of whom had built cacicazgos in real or adopted patrias chicas (little fatherlands).116 Rodrigo Quevedo and his family had controlled the critical posts in the Chihuahua state administration across the 1930s, pledging, gossip had it, “to develop the state of Chihuahua with gambling, whores and vice”; Bonifacio Salinas Leal had been the strongman of Nuevo León.117 These two, at least, had been at the center of the military’s recent steps toward retaking national power: gobernación spies had watched closely as they organized a would-be secret junta in autumn 1948.118 They may have been being paid off; they may have been making comebacks. They were clearly participants in a quid pro quo, and they did not retire from politics.119 Salinas Leal, for example, interfered in both the 1958 presidential succession and the 1960 naming of a new chief of staff.120 In 1970, he became a senator; a 1973 report had him plotting to topple the incumbent chief of staff, running a private intelligence service using taxi drivers, and allegedly preparing a group of agents provocateurs to destabilize President Luis Echeverría with a further student massacre. Despite this, he stayed on active service until his death at age eighty-two.121 Yet nobody, perhaps, did as well as Alejandro Mange, for he kept hold of Veracruz. Everyday demilitarization in the Mexican provinces was thus partial. Top commanders lost some autonomy, but gained new territories. They exercised less violence, but maintained significant businesses—businesses backed, in the last analysis, by force or the threat of force. Their remaining autonomy made it something more than a straightforward Tocquevillian exchange of political for economic power.122 Indicators of continuing

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independence are not hard to find. Mange’s mere survival on active service was one of them. Divisional generals were supposed to retire at sixty-five, an age Mange reached in 1950.123 In May, Secretary of Defense Limón ordered his retirement; Mange, however, refused to provide the army with proofs of his age and subsequently had his retirement suspended by presidential decree.124 Far from collecting a pension, in August 1950 he collected a medal for perseverancia (length of service).125 In January 1951, General Limón tried to pension Mange off once more, ordering forcible retirement; he was instead promoted to head the new Second Military Region, headquartered in Veracruz.126 This continuity in the same command was itself another indicator of independence: it went directly against the policy (designed in the late nineteenth century) of what the army yearbook called “rotation in command . . . to give new elements a chance and to avoid prejudicial settling down.”127 The new president—Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, another Veracruzano—seems to have continued backing Mange, who was not retired until Adolfo López Mateos began his term in 1959.128 Admittedly sparse anecdotal evidence from the 1950s points to continuing cacical practices. During the 1952 presidential election, Mange summarily arrested his old enemy, General Cándido Aguilar, and reportedly had to be prevented from summarily killing him.129 During his 1959 retirement negotiations (dubbed “muy urgente” by the Secretariat of National Defense) he asked that his 100 percent salary and $68,000 retirement bonus be supplemented with the grant of two aides, one of them suggestively named César Mange. He was, according to one report, disenchanted enough with the final settlement to discuss rebellion with the Colonna brothers, old gunmen friends from the south.130 When it came to the imperatives of old age, Alejandro Mange did not go gentle anywhere at all, raging instead over how “le quitaron la chichi.”131 General Mange’s Veracruz cacicazgo offers an illuminating case study in military autonomy. The general powerfully influenced life in Veracruz, first as zone and later as regional commander, for twenty-two years.132 Whether this was due to (perhaps literally) knowing where the bodies were buried during two Veracruzano presidencies or whether it reflected his ability to maintain some control at any cost remains an open question.133 It baffled contemporary observers, who stressed his personal empire-building, corruption, and subversion of local government.134 His power in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when he and a network of violent agrocapitalists ruled much of Veracruz and tried to veto the party’s pick for the presidency, was admittedly extraordinary. Yet the intense focus on rebellion, formal budgets, and the power to select presidents that underpins Lieuwen’s

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pathfinding analysis should not conceal the partial, pacted, Faustian quality of Mexican demilitarization. Mange did preserve his command and the wealth it brought him. He preserved, according to one (scandalous but signed) denunciation, his business relationship with criminals such as the cattle rustlers of southern Veracruz.135 He was straightforwardly unfirable: when the secretary of defense tried to forcibly retire the aging general, the president overrode the decision and promoted him instead.136 One of the last entries in the general’s personnel file is a complaint from the Ferrocarriles Nacional de México, dated March 31, 1959. Railway engineers investigating a train crash between Chacaltianguis and Cocuite traced it to gravel on the line. The gravel came from a road that Mange’s troops were busily constructing “to the benefit of the aforementioned soldier’s personal properties”; it caused $3,110 worth of damage.137 We know more about the costs of this (literal) crossroads than we do about the cost of the (metaphorical) crossroads where military and civilian power intersected in Mexican state formation. More research is needed. For now, though, it seems likely that the autonomy and enduring power of Alejandro Mange will not prove a lone case; and that such generals, filing reluctantly out of the palace, clung to their power to derail local societies across the supposed heyday of PRIísta Mexico.138 Notes Author’s note: I use the following abbreviations in the notes: Archivo General de la Nación (AGN); Archivo Histórico del Estado de Veracruz (AHEV); Archivo Histórico Plutarco Elías Calles (AHPEC); Carmen Blázquez Domínguez, Estado de Veracruz: Informes de sus gobernadores, 1826–1986, 22 vols. (Xalapa: Gobierno del estado de Veracruz, 1986) (BD); Dirección General de Gobierno (DGG); Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS); British Foreign Office (FO) 371; Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Presidente Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (LCR); Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Presidente Manuel Avila Camacho (MAC); Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Presidente Miguel Alemán Valdés (MAV); Manuel Ríos Thivol (MRT); National Archives Record Group (NARG); Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SDN). 1.  A high-quality exception to this generalization is provided by Thom Rath’s recent dissertation. Thomas Rath, “Army, State and Nation in Mexico, 1920–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009). 2.  For an exploration of Mexican exceptionalism, see Alan Knight, “The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, quincentenary supplement (1992): 99–144. 3.  An estimated 66 percent of the total federal budget in 1919 went to the armed forces. Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 153.

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  4.  Rath suggests that this was a public relations coup, as many of the announced retirements may not have happened in reality. Rath, “Army, State and Nation in Mexico,” 78–79; Ávila Camacho decree of 3 December 1945, reproduced in Instituto de Capacitación Política (PRI), Historia documental del Partido de la Revolución (Mexico City: Partido de la Revolución Institucional, Instituto de Capacitación Política, 1982), 5:173–75; Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 144.   5.  Excélsior, 1 October 1951.   6.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 148–49. See also Pablo González Casanova, Democracy in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36–38; Peter H. Smith, Labyrinths of Power: Political Recruitment in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 38.   7.  And this was in 1976, before Costa Rica’s dramatic expansion of her security services in the early 1980s. In 1976, Mexican military expenditure was 0.6 percent of GDP, or in relative terms, half that of Brazil, a quarter that of Argentina, and an eighth that of Great Britain. Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 74–77. On the exaggerated image of Costa Rican demilitarization, see James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988), 640–44.   8.  John W. F. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico: A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919– 1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 659–60.   9.  C. H. Bateman, “Report on Leading Personalities in Mexico for the Year 1946,” F0371/60955; Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356, vo1. 11. 10.  The long coastal sweep of Veracruz was divided between two zones: the Twenty-sixth, covering central and southern Veracruz, and the Nineteenth, covering Tuxpan, the northern oilfields, and the Huasteca. 11.  SEDENA disposition of forces, 1 September 1948, AGN/MAV-550/19. 12.  Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 445. 13.  The officers stretched from the deeply conservative Mange to the Zapatistas Adrián Castrejón and Manuel Palafox. 14.  Migoni to Gobernación, 18, 21 June; 26, 29 September; 7, 10, 13 October 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282. 15.  Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356, vo1. 11. 16.  Caciquismo is a concept that has colonized many of the social sciences when they turn to Mexico—and other places, such as Russia—and generated an appreciable literature. Critical works of the anthropologists, sociologists, and revisionist and neo-populist historians who have explored the phenomenon include Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Hills, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970); The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); Eric Wolf, “Kinship, Friendship and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies,” in Michael Banton, ed., The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–22; Roger Bartra, Caciquismo y poder político en el México rural (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978); the contributors to David Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, eds., Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2002). For a sample of the application of caciquismo to post-Soviet Russia, see Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Regional Politics and Municipal Building: The Reshuffling of

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Local Chief Administrators in Russia, 1990–1996,” in Alfred B. Evans Jr. and Vladimir Gelman, eds., The Politics of Local Government in Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 170. 17.  María López vda. de Pampín to Alemán; 1951–(?), “Información de Todo,” clipping, both in AGN/MAV-001/4232. 18.  Cited in Alan Knight, “The Weight of the State in Modern Mexico,” in James Dunkerley, Studies in the Formation of the Nation-State in Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002), 215. 19.  Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris (London: Penguin, 1999), xii. 20.  A lack bemoaned by, among many others, Roderic Camp. Roderic Ai Camp, Mexico’s Military on the Democratic Stage (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2005), xvii. Compare this to the rich recent scholarship on the army in Brazil, including Peter Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Hendrik Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence-Era Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Frank McCann, Soldiers of the Patria: A History of the Brazilian Army, 1889–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Shawn C. Smallman, Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cándido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Celso Castro, Vitor Izecksohn, and Hendrik Kraay, eds., Nova historia military brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: FGV; Bom Texto, 2004). 21.  “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity,” a dictum coined, however, by Danton: a lawyer and not a soldier. 22.  Through the creation of a military ombudsman. Salvador Velazco, “Rojo amanecer y la ley de Herodes: Cine político de la transición mexicana,” Hispanic Research Journal 6, no. 1 (February 2005): 67–73. Mónica Beltrán Gaos, La Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos de México (Valencia, Spain: Universitat Politècnica de València, 2005), 145–47. 23.  However, the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN, General Archive of the Nation) has received more wide-ranging records for the counterinsurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s, and the secretary of national defense, General Guillermo Galván Galván, recently promised to open the armed forces archives to “civil society.” Francisco Martín Moreno, “El archivo de la Sedena,” Excélsior, 18 January 2008. 24.  David F. Ronfeldt, “The Mexican Army and Political Order since 1940,” in James Wilkie, Michael Meyer, and Edna Monzón de Wilkie, eds., Contemporary Mexico: Papers of the IV International Congress of Mexican History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 317–36; US embassy cable, “The Mexican Army—Still Passive, Isolated, and above the Fray?” 11 May 1995, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB120/index.htm#docs. 25.  Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356/XI. 26.  At the other extreme, Mexican strategic plans such as DN-1 have long recognized the impossibility of defending against invasion from the north. Mónica Serrano, “The Armed Branch of the State: Civil-Military Relations in Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 27 no. 2 (May 1995), 425. 27.  However, he was not important enough to have his name spelled correctly. “Alejandro Monge” is listed by Lieuwen as one of four “second tier” generals (along with

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Eulogio Ortíz, Miguel Acosta, and Matías Ramos Santos) behind the “big five” of Calles, Cedillo, Almazán, Amaro, and Cárdenas. Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 104. I thank Ben Fallaw for bringing this to my attention. 28.  Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356/XI. 29.  Raleigh A. Gibson to State, 17 May 1943, NARG-812.00/32150. 30.  Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356/XI; Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 33. 31.  Agente del Ministerio Público Mérida to Procurador de Justicia Militar México DF, 7 July 1922, SDN-1-356/XII, AMP. 32.  Diario de los debates de la Cámara de Diputados XXIX Legislatura, I:115 (6 July 1921). 33.  Agent 10, Tepic, to Gobernación, January 1927, AGN/DGIPS-106/ 135(S5)6. 34.  Campeche Congress to XXIX Legislatura, 6 July 1921, Diario de los Debates de la Cámara de Diputados XXIX Legislatura, I:115; Enrique Najera to Calles, 28 April 1924, AHPEC-55/7/3932/1; Tejeda to Amaro, 17 December 1926, AGN/DGIPS106/135(S5)6; Arriola to Campos Gómez, 11 June 1940, AGN/DGIPS-87/2; Parra to Cárdenas, 9 August 1940, AGN/LCR-542.1/211; “Actividades reaccionarias en el estado de Veracruz,” 4 October 1939, AGN/DGIPS-140/9. 35.  Hector Aguilar Camín, “The Relevant Tradition: Sonoran Leaders in the Revolution,” in David Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 92–123. 36.  Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), II:11. 37.  La Opinión, 19 February 1921; Trigos to Francisco M. Delgado, 22 January 1927; Agent 10, Tepic, to Gobernación, January 1927, AGN/DGIPS-106/135(S5)6. 38.  PS-10 to Gobernación, 3 October 1939, AGN/DGIPS-140/9; F. Martínez to Gobernación, 29 December 1939, AGN/DGIPS-77/5-130-625; Heather Fowler, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 1920–1938 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 132–33. 39.  Assorted correspondence, SDN-1-356/VI, XI. 40.  Document summary, 14 December 1938, SDN-1-356/VI. 41.  Migoni to Gobernación, 9 August 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1; Diario de Xalapa, 23 August 1948. 42.  Report on Coatzacoalcos political situation, 7 April 1949, AGN/DGIPS-787/21/49/545; assorted correspondence, July to October 1949, AGN/MAV-437.3/195. 43.  “Crímenes cometido . . . por Crispín Aguilar,” AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282. 44.  La Prensa, 7 October 1948. 45.  Excélsior, 2 November 1947. 46.  Borges Ortiz to Rodríguez, 29/10/1934, AGN/DGG-2/012.2(26)137/68/37; Migoni to Gobernación, 24/08/1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282; Diario de Xalapa, 18 July 1945. 47.  Gobernación to Vázquez Vela, 27 March 1935, AGN/LCR-541/411. 48.  PS-7 to Gobernación, 15 January 1943, AGN/DGIPS-776/1; Gómez Galeana to Alemán, 25 March 1947, AGN/DGIPS-12/2/389(9)38. 49.  See, for example, Ramos to Avila Camacho, 20 June 1944, AGN/ MAC-542.1/579.

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50.  Serrano, “The Armed Branch of the State,” 439; Paul Gillingham, “Force and Consent in Mexican Provincial Politics: Guerrero and Veracruz, 1945–1953” (D.Phil. diss., Oxford, 2005), 238–41. 51.  Carvajal report, 1949, BD-XIV/7743. 52.  La Verdad, 7 May 1949; Alvarado to Martínez, 15 May 1941, AGN/MAC542.1/269; PS-31, 34, 43 to Gobernación, 28 April 1949, AGN/DGIPS-84/MRT; Presidente municipal Acapulco to SEDENA, 21 June 1950, SDN-1-398/XVI. 53.  PS-31 to Gobernación, 29 August 1949, AGN/DGIPS-84/MRT. 54.  Flores to Gobernación, 6 December 1952, AGN/DGG-2.311M(9)155/2B. 55.  Diario de Xalapa, 14 April 1945; circular, Ramos to defensas rurales, 5 November 1943, AGN/MAC-542.1/579. 56.  Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: Mexico after 1910 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 104. 57.  Diario de Xalapa, 23 May 1945; 5 June 1952. 58.  Assorted correspondence, AGN/MAV-542.1/506, AGN/MAV-542.1/2. 59.  Sánchez Salazar, 19a zona Tuzpam, to Alemán, 27 June 1947, AGN/ MAV-425.5/2-29. 60.  Diario de Xalapa, 6 June 1952. 61.  Revolutionary veterans to Alemán, 29 May 1948, AGN/MAV-556.63/48. 62.  See, for example, Terrence E. Poppa, Drug Lord: The Life & Death of a Mexican Kingpin: A True Story (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2010), 73, 111, 301–2. 63.  Amorós to Ruiz Cortines, 6 August 1945, AGN/MAC-542.1/891; Migoni to Gobernación, 10 October 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282. 64.  Ojeda to Gobernación, 10 December 1948, AGN/DGG-2.311M(9)/3B/6. 65.  Gómez Galindo to Alemán, 16 January 1947, AGN/MAV-515.5/3. 66.  Vecinos de Chihuitán, Tehuantepec, Oax., to SEDENA, undated, SDN-1-356/VII. 67.  Sergeants Hernández Espinosa and Bailón Segundo to Alemán, 7 April 1947, AGN/MAV-556.63/26. This practice continued across the rest of the century; see, for example, the corruption charges, trial, and nine-year imprisonment of high-ranking whistleblower Brigadier General José Francisco Gallardo Rodríguez in 1993. Gallardo Rodríguez had published excerpts from his master’s thesis, “The Need for a Military Ombudsman in Mexico,” La Jornada, 12 March 1998. 68.  “Militares políticos-1948-sep.,” memorandum, 25 October 1948, AGN/ DGIPS-24. 69.  Diario de Xalapa, 28 March 1945. 70.  “Situación política estado de Chiapas,” 23 September 1940, AGN/DGIPS83/10; La Prensa, 7 October 1948. 71.  Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México to SEDENA, 31 March 1959, SDN-1-356/ XII; Migoni to Gobernación, 10 October 1945. 72.  Garate to Avila Camacho, 31 March 1946, AHEV-1360/166/1(179). 73.  Presidente municipal Chicontepec to Alemán, 8 March 1948, AGN/MAV542.1/592; Bautista to Alemán, 15 May 1948, AGN/MAV-540.1/15. 74.  Edwin Lieuwen, “Depoliticisation of the Mexican Revolutionary Army, 1915– 1940,” in David F. Ronfeldt, ed., The Modern Mexican Military: A Reassessment (San Diego: Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California, 1984), 61. 75.  Rath, “Army, State and Nation,” 95.

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76.  Gillingham, “Force and Consent,” 205–44; Rath, “Army, State and Nation,” 68–75. 77.  Ricardo Corzo Ramírez, José González Sierra, and David Skerritt, . . . nunca un desleal: Cándido Aguilar (1889–1960) (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos, Colegio de México; Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1986), 293–94; Arriola to Crescenciano Campos Gómez, 11/vi/1940; PS-50 to Gobernación, 26/vi/1940, AGN/DGIPS87/2; Maldonado to Cárdenas, 4/xii/1934, AGN/DGG/2/012.2(26)143/68/41; Antonio Santoyo, La Mano Negra: Poder regional y estado en México (Veracruz, 1928–1943) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 152; Georgina Trigos, El corrido veracruzano (una antología) (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1990), 65–67. 78.  Assorted correspondence, SDN-1-356/VI; Santoyo, La Mano Negra, 131. 79.  Tejeda to Amaro, 17 December 1926, AGN/DGIPS-106/135(S5)6; Arriola to Campos Gómez, 11 June 1940, AGN/DGIPS-87/2; Parra to Cárdenas, 9 August 1940, AGN/LCR-542.1/211; “Actividades reaccionarias en el estado de Veracruz,” 4 October 1939, AGN/DGIPS-140/9. 80.  PS-50 to Gobernación, 26 June 1940, AGN/DGIPS-87/2. 81.  For more on pistoleros in Veracruz in this period, see David Skerritt, “¿Qué es la mano negra?” in Anuario del Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Universidad Veracruzana 3 (1980): 129–38; Paul Gillingham, “Who Killed Crispín Aguilar? Violence and Order in the Postrevolutionary Countryside,” in Wil Pansters, ed., Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 82.  Diario de Xalapa, 1, 2, 3 July 1945. 83.  PS-1 & PS-18 to Gobernación, 2 May 1945, AGN/DGIPS-88/Carlos Saavedra. 84.  Migoni to Gobernación, 14, 15, 21 June 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282; López vda de Pampín to Alemán, n.d., AGN/MAV-001/4232. 85.  Migoni to Gobernación, 10 October 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/457282. 86.  Pérez to SEDENA, 7 January 1959, SDN-1-356/XII; Migoni to Gobernación, 23 June, 10, 19 October 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282; Migoni to Gobernación, 6 June 1946, AGN/DGIPS-791/2-1/46/405; Amorós to Ruiz Cortines, 6 August 1945, AGN/MAC-542.1/891; López vda de Pampín to Alemán, s.f., AGN/MAV-001/4232. 87.  Migoni to Gobernación, 10, 19 October 1945, AGN/DGIPS-787/2-1/45/282. 88.  For a useful analysis, see Aleida Ferreyra and Renata Segura, “Examining the Military in the Local Sphere: Colombia and Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 2 (March 2000): 18–35. A brief overview of La Violencia is to be found in Gonzalo Sánchez, “The Violence: An Interpretative Synthesis,” in Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Peñaranda, and Gonzalo Sánchez, eds., Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992), 89.  “Annual Report on Mexico for 1948,” F0371/74076. 90.  There were no dollar sellers at the official rate of 6.70. Pavón Silva to Gobernación, 2 August 1948, AGN/DGIPS-111/2-1/260/82. For popular predictions of a violent end to the regime, see DGIPS director Lamberto Ortega Peregrina’s intelligence summaries in AGN/DGIPS-111/2-1/260/82. 91.  Nuevo Laredo Consulate to Secretary of State, 7 October 1948, NARG812.00/10-748. 92.  Memoranda, 17–19 August 1948, AGD/DGIPS-24/“militares políticos”-1948sep.,” 23 August, AGN/DGIPS-24/3; La Prensa, 6 September 1948.

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  93.  Memorandum, 25 October 1948, AGD/DGIPS-24/“militares políticos”1948-sep.”   94.  Assorted reports, 22 July to 30 August, AGN/DGIPS-111/2-1/260/82.   95.  Speaks to ambassador, 3 August 1948, NARG-812.00/8-548; PS-16 to Gobernación, 11/08/1948; memorandum, 13/08/1948, AGN/DGIPS-111/2-1/260/82; Diario de Xalapa, 15 August 1948.   96.  Speaks to ambassador, 3 August 1948, NARG-812.00/8-548, Memo, 23 August 1948, AGN/DGIPS-24/3; SEDENA, Memoria de la Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, Septiembre 1948–Agosto 1949, Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, Mexico City, 1950.   97.  Caccia Bernal and Alba Calderón to Gobernación, 30 August 1948, AGN/ DGIPS-111/2-1/260/82.   98.  Rapp to Bevin, 19 August 1948, FO 371/67994.   99.  Unsigned memorandum, 31 August 1948, AGN/DGIPS-24/3. 100.  Thurston to Secretary of State, 5, 20 August 1948, NARG-812.00/8-548, 8-2048; memorandum, 23 August 1948, AGN/DGIPS-24/3. 101.  He was rumored to have responded by dismissing his bodyguard and moving his bed out onto the patio for better visibility. Speaks to ambassador, 3/08/1948, NARG-812.00/8-548; Turkel, memorandum, 1 October 1948, NARG-812.00/10-848. 102.  Anonymous memoranda, 8, 16 February 1949, AGN/DGIPS-24/3. 103.  PS-19 to Gobernación, 3 August 1945, AGN/DGIPS-132/2-1/302.4(0.11)/2; Diario Oficial 20 January 1949; El Universal, 19 June 1951; Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 169; La Verdad, 2 June 1949; El Nacional, 19 June 1951; Diario de Xalapa, 21 June 1952; SEDENA, Memoria de la Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, Septiembre 1946–Agosto 1947; Jeffrey Bortz and Marcos Aguila, “Earning a Living: A History of Real Wage Studies in Twentieth-Century Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 41, no. 2 (2006): 127. 104.  La Prensa, 22 October 1948. 105.  Gasca’s call to arms to the remnants of the Federación de Partidos del Pueblo Mexicano (FPPM, Federation of Parties of the Mexican People) did mobilize rebels across seven states, kill some one hundred people, and lead to about one thousand political jailings. The rebel bands were small, however, and did not at any point seriously threaten the regime. Col. José Inclan to Governor of Veracruz, 29 November 1949, AHEV-1693/542/0; Elisa Servín, “Hacía el levantamiento armado: Del henriquismo a los federacionistas leales en los años cincuenta,” in Verónica Oikión Solano and Marta Eugenia García Ugarte, eds., Movimientos armados en México, siglo XX, 3 vols. (Michoacán: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social, 2008), II:337–42. 106.  Massey to Secretary of State, 20 October 1948, NARG-812.00/10-2048. 107.  Codoner to State Department, July 1945, NARG-812.00/Guerrero/7-3145; Third Secretary Massey to State Department, 28 September 1948, NARG-812.00/ 9-2848; PS-19 to Gobernación, 3 August 1945, AGN/DGIPS-132/2-1/302.4(0.11)/2; Gillingham, “Force and Consent,” 56–57. 108.  Carlos Martínez Assad, El Henriquismo, una piedra en el camino (Mexico City: Martí­n Casillas Editores, 1982), 19. 109.  For an example of abject failure, see the history of henriquismo in Guerrero. Assorted reports, January–June 1952, AGN/DFS-Guerrero-100-10-14-51H194L4,

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H203L4, H219L4, AGN/DFS-Guerrero-100-10-14-52H247L4, H264L4, H302L4, H313L4, H319L4, H2L5. 110.  The concern of the government and the endurance of strong support for Henríquez Guzmán past July 1952 have been underestimated. See the reports of the six inspectors assigned to the case in AGN/DGIPS-104/2-1/131/1062. 111.  Reports, 16 November 1952, AGN/DGIPS-104/2-1/131/1062. 112.  Serrano, “The Armed Branch of the State,” 439. 113.  In the early 1950s, Mexico’s military absorbed some 0.6 percent of the GDP and consisted of 2.1 armed forces members per 1,000 population. In the heyday of bureaucratic authoritarianism, Argentina’s military spent 3.6 percent of GDP and numbered 5.6 soldiers per 1,000 population; Chile spent 3.6 percent of GDP and numbered 10.5 soldiers per 1,000 population. INEGI, Estadísticas históricas de México CD-ROM (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2000); Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 73–74. 114.  Serrano, “The Armed Branch of the State,” 448. 115.  Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 32, 151. 116.  This reorganization and these officers—namely Pablo Macías Valenzuela, Leobardo Ruiz Camarillo, Agustín Mustiales Medel, Bonifacio Salinas Leal, Juan Izaguirre Payan, Teófilo Álvarez Borboa, Rodrigo Quevedo Moreno, Matías Ramos Santos, and Alejandro Mange Toyos—are the subject of a current research project. Cuartel General to Comdte 119 regto, 5 April 1951, SDN-1-356/X-2325. 117.  López to Daniels, 5 March 1934, NARG-812.114 narcotics/370 roll 34. 118.  Regional militar commands were not the only institutional means of pacifying politically ambitious young generals. In a deeply Tocquevillian transaction, Luis Alamillo Flores, the leader of one of those juntas, was removed from the Colegio Militar and given control of a seventy-million-peso budget as head of the National Diesel Motor Factory. Memoranda, 27 September, 25 October 1948, AGN/DGIPS-24/3; La Prensa 7, 22 October 1948. 119.  The interpretation that postings to regiones militares constituted an incentive to acquiescence in civilian rule is reinforced by some subsequent appointments. Miguel Z. Martínez, for example, was one of the powerful generals at the heart of the 1948 juntas; in 1952 he was given command of the Tenth Region Militar. La Prensa, 6 September 1948; El Universal, 30 January 1952. 120.  RPTE-XA 1 to “Mi General,” telegram, 5 October 1956, SDN-P/111/1-109; anonymous to “Mi Mayor,” telegram, 9 February 1960, SDN-P/111/1-109. 121.  IPS report of P.L.L, 24 March 1973, AGN/DFS-VP Bonifacio Salinas León, hoja de servicios 1963–1982 SDN A/111/1-58. 122.  Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 123.  Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 119. 124.  General Limón to Dir. General Personal, 24 May 1950, SDN-1-356/X/2264; Jefe del EMP Santiago Piña Soria to SEDENA, 22 June 1950, SDN-1-356/X/2422; Limón to Dir. Justicia y Pensiones, 24 June 50, SDN-1-356/X/2173. 125.  General Anaya to Dir. General Personal, 7 Aug 1950, SDN-1-356/ X/2288. 126.  Coronel Heliodoro E. Cabrera Jiménez to Dir. General de Personal, 17 January 1951, SDN-1-356/X/2304.

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127.  SEDENA, Memoria de la Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional, Septiembre 1949–Agosto 1950, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, 1950, 21. 128.  Departamento del retiro y pensiones to departamento de hojas de servicio, 9 May 1959, SDN-1-356/XII. 129.  Corzo Ramírez et al., . . . nunca un desleal, 328. 130.  Dir. General de justicia to Jefe del departamento de Archivos, 9 May 1959, SDN-1-356/XII/2798; Dir. general de personal to comandante de la 1a zona militar, 7 August 1959, XII/2804; Mange to SEDENA, 29 December 1958, SDN-1-356/ XII/2856; Pérez to SEDENA, 7 January 1959, SDN-1-356/XII. 131.  Pérez to SEDENA, 7 January 1959, SDN-1-356/XII. 132.  General Alejandro Mange Toyos, hoja de servicios, SDN-1-356/XI. 133.  According to the FBI, Alemán was rumoured to have left some forty-five bodies behind him in his political ascent. Alejandro Quintana, “With a Gun in His Hand: Maximino Avila Camacho and the 1941 Challenge to Presidentialism” (presentation, American Historical Association Meeting, 2007), 30. 134.  López vda de Pampín to Alemán, 1950, AGN/MAV-001/4232. 135.  Pérez to SEDENA, 7 January 1959, SDN-1-356/XII. 136.  Jefe del EMP Santiago Piña Soria to SEDENA, 22 June 1950, SDN-1-356/X/2422. 137.  Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México to SEDENA, 31 March 1959, SDN-1-356/XII. 138.  That power was reinvigorated in the 1990s. As Ferreyra and Segura argue, “While the military has contributed to a consolidation of democratic transformations at the national level, it has acted against it in the local sphere.” Ferreyra and Segura, “Examining the Military in the Local Sphere,” 19, 32–33.

Conclusion Reflections on State Theory through the Lens of the Mexican Military David Nugent

In the spring of 2008, Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico, began sending thousands upon thousands of army troops and federal police to the city of Ciudad Juárez along the US–Mexican border. The mission of these personnel was clear: they were to restore the rights of citizens and reestablish control for the central government. The president felt compelled to take such drastic measures because conditions of law and order along the border were rapidly deteriorating. Powerful drug cartels, each of which had allied with elements of the local police, were engaged in open battles with one another. In addition to compromising the integrity of the forces of order, the cartels had unleashed upon the residents of Ciudad Juárez truly alarming levels of violence. Despite the efforts of the armed forces to regain control of the situation, however, conditions became progressively worse. Within short order, the military had become implicated in the very kinds of atrocities for which the drug cartels and their allies among the police had already become infamous. These included kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder. Although President Calderón has announced plans to scale back the military presence, human rights violations by the cartels and the armed forces alike continue unabated. Furthermore, rumors abound that the most powerful of the illegal narcotics networks has formed an alliance with elements of the army and the federal police and from this vantage point intends to eliminate its rivals. As the contributions in this volume show, these recent problems, although extreme, are anything but novel or unusual. Rather, they resonate with tensions long at the heart of Mexican society. Throughout much of the 238

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independence period, Mexico has struggled with the contradictions between military power, economic possibility, state control, and citizens’ rights. One of the great merits of this book is that it sheds important new light on the forces that have made these typical rather than exceptional problems. In the pages that follow, I seek to highlight the book’s contributions. I do so by focusing on its discussion of the role of armed force in the process of Mexican state formation. The relation between force and the consolidation of national governments is of course an especially intimate one. Max Weber, among the most influential theorists of modern political life, framed this relationship in unusually lucid terms. In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber quotes Leon Trotsky to the effect that “every state is founded on force” and that “if no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy.’ ” Weber goes on to relate that “in the past, the most varied institutions . . . have known the use of physical force as quite normal.” He explains that in the present, however, this is no longer the case. Today, he says, the “state is [the] human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”1 Scholars have long debated the meaning of Weber’s elegantly (but deceptively) simple conceptualization. In terms of sheer numbers, a great many commentators have been drawn to Weber’s emphasis on compulsory organization.2 They conclude that states are above all else institutions— whose distinguishing feature is that they enjoy a monopoly on the use of violence within the boundaries of a national territory. Most scholars who view the apparatus of government in these terms regard it as having a predominantly conservative role in social affairs—as using its monopoly on force to maintain social order and reproduce inequality. There is a distinguished and influential intellectual tradition—in history, sociology, anthropology, and political science—that draws upon this strain in Weber’s thought. Focusing initially on Western Europe, and later extending their studies to include other world regions (China, Latin America, etc.), scholars of what is sometimes referred to as the “institutional school” have studied in great detail “revolutions” in the organization of armed force.3 They have examined in equal detail the processes by which coercion thus reorganized has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.4 The institutionalists have also documented the role of these processes of reorganization and concentration in enabling the consolidation of national polities.5 Scholars drawn to Weber’s notion of compulsory organization have also studied attendant processes of the growth of

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bureaucracies and the ability of coercion-wielding institutional orders to know the national territory and society and to tax and conscript its members.6 The institutionalists have been equally concerned with documenting the processes by which states-as-compulsory-organizations structure national territories as autonomous economic, social, and political spaces.7 A second group of scholars has interpreted the importance of Weber’s conceptualization of the apparatus of rule in somewhat different terms. While not disputing that governments do indeed exercise a monopoly on the use of violence, they have been concerned with the forces that render the use of that violence legitimate.8 As is well known, Weber himself broached the question of legitimacy in modern states by invoking a peculiarly modern form of authority—one that is rational/bureaucratic in character. Since Weber’s era, scholars in multiple disciplines have attempted to expand upon and refine his concept of legitimacy in modern political life so that it might be applied to a broader range of settings, especially those in the colonial and post-colonial worlds.9 They have often done so by focusing on the issue of popular sovereignty and the fraught relationship between projects of nation building and processes of state formation. It is in this context that Antonio Gramsci’s much-celebrated (and muchdebated!) notion of “cultural hegemony,” cousin to Weber’s concept of legitimacy, has entered academic debate—especially “ideological consensus” interpretations of hegemony. Initially popularized by literary scholar Raymond Williams, the consensus model has gone on to influence an entire generation of historians, anthropologists, and cultural theorists.10 How does the present book advance our understanding of ongoing theoretical discussion? It is a curious fact that neither of the two approaches to the state that currently inform academic debate—the organizational nor the representational—has had much to say to each other. Scholars who concern themselves with the violent processes that structure social orders along particular lines during particular historical periods betray relatively little interest in the forces that render such structuring processes legitimate.11 Scholars whose main concern is with the ways that social order is represented and enacted socially so as to legitimize rule generally show little concern with the actual organization of force that structures the social order along particular lines. The selections in this volume open a long-overdue dialogue between these two approaches to the consolidation of central control. Drawing upon what is sometimes referred to as the “new military history,” the contributions concern themselves in part with the organization of violence. Despite the fact that most of the contributions to this volume are squarely within the institutionalist camp, they go beyond a consideration of force

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per se to focus on “how the military and militia reflected and perpetuated social divisions,” to quote the volume’s editors.12 The chapters analyze how the organization of armed power affected processes of social reproduction. But they also show how the forms that organized violence could take at any given point in time were shaped profoundly by the characteristics of the social order. The ways that armed force could be organized, we learn, were a function of the social structures of household, village, and region; of relations of gender, race, and class; and of the conditions of material need and relations of political dependence that emerged out of those structures and relations. But the organization of violence was structured in equally important ways by mentalities, routines, and practices that were deeply engrained in everyday social life. In short, the chapters here show how violence was embedded in the social order, even as force was used variously to defend, undermine, or transform the status quo. By virtue of their careful examination of the ways in which the military and militias have both engaged with and have also emerged from more general political-economic and sociocultural processes, the authors afford us an unusual opportunity. They present us with an invitation—to place in dialogue the two aforementioned approaches (the institutional and the representational) to the state. But the present volume does more than invite, it also compels. Having initiated a conversation between these two perspectives, Forced Marches compels us to engage in a critical assessment of each approach in terms of the other. Finally, having opened a dialogue between the two perspectives, and having compelled an evaluation of both, the volume points out interesting new directions about how to reframe theoretical debate. In the following sections of this concluding chapter, I suggest how the arguments made in the present volume might be drawn upon to critically assess the two perspectives on the consolidation of central rule that derive from Weber—one of which focuses on efforts to establish a monopoly on armed force through processes of organization, the other of which examines efforts to legitimize the use of force through its public enactment and representation. I close with a consideration of some of the unresolved issues and novel questions about the state that these contributions raise.

State Theory, State Formation, and the Mexican Military According to institutionalist scholars, the state is distinguished from institutions in the non-governmental domain in that it exercises a monopoly

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on the use of force. Furthermore, these scholars suggest, states form themselves into stronger institutions by progressively enhancing their ability to monopolize force and by eliminating organizations that would compete with that monopoly. To this basic institutional definition, scholars drawn to the cultural side of Weber’s formulation add an additional consideration. Central rulers must always seek to legitimate the violence they wield. In modern polities, scholars suggest, they do so by invoking the principles of popular sovereignty. To what extent is such a conceptualization of state formation useful in making sense of the historical materials about Mexico presented here? We may begin to answer this question by posing several additional ones. First, has the Mexican state (understood in institutional terms) assumed a role with respect to the use of violence that distinguishes it from non-governmental organizations and actors? Second, has the central government of Mexico succeeded in enhancing its ability to monopolize force through time by eliminating organizations in the civilian domain that wield violence? Third, assuming that we answer the first two questions in the affirmative, to what degree have the Mexican military and militias contributed to the consolidation of such a unique institutional role on the part of the central government? Fourth, has the legitimation of force been a major issue in the process of Mexican state formation? And finally, if so, by what means have the forces of order sought to legitimate central rule? Even a quick review of the contributions to this volume provides some unexpected answers to these questions. At virtually no point during the period reviewed in this book was there anything unique about the activities of government institutions with respect to the use of force. Rather, from the beginning of the period until the end, the institutions of the central rule (whether civilian or military) were only a few among many organizations that wielded violence on an extensive scale. Furthermore, rather than seek to eliminate competitors, the government apparatus usually lent strong support to coercion-wielding actors, organizations, and activities from throughout the non-state domain and actively sought out alliances with them in order to maintain rule. Surprisingly, this was as true circa 1950, the end of the period in question, as it was circa 1840, the beginning. Paul Gillingham brings out this continuity with striking clarity. The point of departure for his analysis is the widely shared perception that by the 1950s the army was “a pliable and disciplined tool of the civilian leaders of the Mexican nation”—and thus was an important stalwart in the defense of the principles of nationhood.13 In terms of theory, such a view implicitly marks the period circa 1950 as

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the beginnings of truly “modern” rule in Mexico. It was at this moment when the country’s formerly archaic, undisciplined, unruly armed forces were finally superseded by a professionalized army—a military that was indifferent to the struggles and tensions of the broader social order and subordinated to the principles and processes of civilian control.14 In other words, the “army as servant of the nation” perspective represents the circa1950 era as the successful culmination of a long period of modern state formation. Furthermore, it does so in a way that appears to marry the concerns of both of the aforementioned varieties of theory—the organizational and the representational. At first glance, the behavior of the military in the 1950s appears to fit this very understanding of the state. By this time, the country’s generals had abandoned their efforts to control the presidency and seemed content to retire to their barracks, where they could play an apolitical role in national life. At the same time, Mexico’s depoliticized armed forces seemed well positioned to assume the role of neutral, disinterested bystander and enforcer. The army had not only developed a truly formidable military apparatus but also distributed its might throughout the national territory, having established garrisons in a startling 20 percent of the country’s municipios (towns). But despite these appearances, Gillingham suggests, only the thinnest of evidence suggests that the military had developed into a compulsory organization that stood apart from the social order, preserving and protecting the principles of civilian rule. The generals did indeed retreat to their barracks, but the army continued to play a profoundly political role in national life. Officers were willing to forsake high political office, but only in exchange for other kinds of powers and privileges—most importantly, independence in rent seeking and (economic) empire building. In the process of seeking rents and building petty empires, the armed forces came to play a crucial role in maintaining social order, and in using violence on an endemic scale. But contrary to the claims of the institutionalists, they did not do so alone. Despite the fact that the military controlled a great deal in the way of armed force, which it dispersed in a systematic manner throughout much of the national territory, the army was in fact unable to maintain conditions of social peace without extensive assistance. Only by drawing on the coercion-wielding and order-inducing capabilities of an extensive network of compulsory organizations in the realm beyond the government administration—led by plantation owners, labor bosses, newspaper editors, village leaders, etc.—could social order be maintained. In other words, the reproduction of rule could only be

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accomplished by blurring the boundary between government and nongovernment domains. The state was unable not only to monopolize armed force on its own but also to employ the violence that it did control in an impartial manner—that is, in a way that respected the principles of the constitution. As Gillingham shows, regional commanders, in their efforts to form a network of organizations that could maintain order, almost always allied with rural and urban bourgeoisies. It was almost always the laboring poor of both city and country that were subject to the coercion wielded by these state/non-state coalitions. Both the nature and the scale of the violence unleashed upon the more humble social classes were truly frightening. It included everything from widespread assassination of dissident leaders to systematic breaking of strikes, from raiding recalcitrant ejidos (common lands) to beating political dissidents. It included mass arrests and undeclared counterinsurgencies as well. Regardless of its specific form, however, official repression had one overarching purpose: to threaten, intimidate, and whenever necessary, eliminate any and all forms of organized resistance. All of these activities were of course blatantly illegal, and thus the state (and its non-civilian allies) found itself systematically violating the laws of the land—the very laws it was charged with implementing and enforcing. Even so, the violence continued unabated, the perpetrators of the crimes rarely if ever receiving even a reprimand. For the repression visited upon subaltern groups was essential to stabilize the particular kind of social order to which dominant groups on both sides of the government/nongovernment divide were so deeply committed. What Gillingham describes as typical behavior for cacicazgos (chiefdoms) resembles in broad form Charles Tilly’s famous description of the state as protection racket.15 But contra Tilly—perhaps the most influential of all institutionalist scholars—in the case of Mexico the emergence of mid-twentieth-century protection rackets did not encourage a stronger, more institutionalized administrative apparatus. To the contrary: the consolidation of regional cacicazgos interfered with rather than promoted state formation and led to the fragmentation rather than the centralization of government control. The state as protection racket was expedient for those privileged sectors who were engaged in rent seeking and empire building. But it came at a high cost. It allowed a select group of army officers to establish themselves as regional power brokers who were largely autonomous of the central government. In other words, it fostered the emergence of “quasi-independent, parallel government structure[s] . . . [of ] ‘a world . . . largely separate from the rest of the Mexico.’ ”16

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As Gillingham demonstrates, the army of the 1940s and 1950s most emphatically did not get out of politics. Nor did the military take a step back from the social order and its many partisan struggles. Nor did the army abandon its long-familiar pattern of using violence to intervene in those struggles. Officers ceased trying to occupy the highest political office in the land—although they continued to exercise profound influence over it. But the military was not tamed, professionalized, or otherwise subordinated to civilian principles of rule. Rather, army officers came to have a powerful vested interest in the preservation of a certain kind of civilian order—of which they themselves were a part. It is hard to imagine a scenario that differs in more fundamental ways from the institutionalists’ “compulsory organization” model of the state. According to that model, the central government maintains a monopoly on force—in part by eliminating competing organizations—and uses that monopoly to enforce the social peace in a neutral, disinterested manner. In the case at hand, however, the apparatus of government did not enjoy a monopoly on the use of violence. Nor did it seek to eliminate extragovernmental organizations that interfered with its monopoly. To the contrary: the central administration relied extensively on coercion-wielding actors and entities in the civilian domain and could not maintain social order without their assistance. Nor could it be said that the Mexican army circa 1950 remained indifferent to the particular conflicts that characterized the social order. Although the military (together with its non-governmental allies!) did indeed establish a measure of stability, this was not because the army stood apart from the socioeconomic order. Rather, it was because the military had become inseparable from that order. Indeed, army commanders adopted a highly partisan attitude about which social groups they would and would not support. They systematically persecuted those whom they regarded as a threat, within the apparatus of government and beyond it, and they were not above resorting to intimidation, blackmail, torture, and even murder. Furthermore, they regularly consorted with bandits and criminals, as well as with hacendados (landowners) and politicians, and in the process blurred the boundary between the government and the realms beyond it. They did so in order to construct a strong coalition that would safeguard their position within a socioeconomic order in which they had come to have such powerful vested interests. To return to the questions raised earlier, the state did not assume a role with respect to the use of violence that differentiated it from non-state organizational forms. Nor did the military or militias contribute to the

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consolidation of such a unique institutional role on the part of the central administration. Rather than having clearly distinct roles, the governmental and non-governmental realms acquired similar, interdependent, overlapping functions and relied upon one another extensively in order to maintain social control. It became difficult to tell where one realm ended and the other began. Indeed, so intertwined did a select group of army officers become with powerful, non-governmental actors and interests that these military men ended up gravitating toward the social domain and distancing themselves from the central administration. They ended up creating their own semiautonomous domains of imposed order that were largely independent of central control. Furthermore, because these regional commanders were the official representatives of the government, they ended up “weakening” the central regime in the very course of enhancing its control over violence.17 Thus far, our argument has drawn upon Gillingham’s chapter in order to point to some of the limits of institutionalist conceptions of the state. But what of the role of cultural processes in the consolidation of rule? The question of how the central government of Mexico sought to legitimate central control is not central to Gillingham’s discussion of the cacicazgo of Veracruz. Nonetheless, his chapter has important implications for understanding the role of representation in the process of state formation. Gillingham engages this issue by means of his elegant, empirically based deconstruction of a widely propagated view of the armed forces—that by the 1950s, they had become a “pliable and disciplined tool of . . . civilian leaders” (above). Gillingham shows that the “army as servant of the nation” perspective is anything but a neutral description. Rather, it is a highly interested claim. This in itself is both interesting and important. The point, however, is not only that this is an assertion masquerading as a description. In terms of understanding the role of culture in the construction of states, equally important are several additional questions. According to whom is this a fact rather than a claim? In what specific ways does the assertion distort rather than describe? And finally, what are the representational terms in which the claim is made? In other words, what is masked by claiming that the military had become the servant of the nation? And how is it masked? As Gillingham shows, although it has crept into some academic circles, the assertion that the military was finally depoliticized circa 1950 is for the most part an official view—a representation to which both civilian and military branches of government have been deeply committed. Such an assertion does important cultural work. On the one hand, it conceals the

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kinds of coercive processes that Gillingham documents with such care— the violence visited so routinely and extensively upon subaltern groups by the military and its civilian allies. Representing the military as the handmaiden of the people, however, has an additional consequence. It also calls into question efforts to transform the status quo. By tying the fate of the armed forces to that of the people—by seeing them as one and the same—challenges to the established order are converted into challenges to popular rule itself. The fact that representatives and organs of the government attempt to convert highly interested claims about how rule should be organized into neutral descriptions about how it is organized does not mean that people believe such claims.18 The issue of belief is extremely difficult to assess, in no small part because people generally know that they are expected to speak and behave as if they do believe, and respond accordingly—even (or perhaps especially) when they do not.19 But for the present purposes, whether or not people believe government pronouncements is less germane than the form in which such pronouncements are made. The fact that official assertions about how order should be organized so consistently employ the principles of popular sovereignty—and that “should” is so often conflated with “is”—is no coincidence. It points to the existence of a distinct language of rule—one that defines the terms in which legitimate rule must be represented regardless of whether people believe the claims in question. An understanding of the state that revolves around competing claims to legitimate order is one to which we will return.20 The military’s lack of autonomy from the socioeconomic and political processes that it was charged with regulating—and its reliance on violencewielding, order-inducing organizations in the non-governmental realm to reproduce (and at times challenge) the status quo—are themes that come out clearly for the 1950s. But what of earlier periods? Revealingly, the same themes recur in virtually all of the contributions to this volume. These include the chapters by Benjamin Smith and Ben Fallaw, which focus on the role of high-ranking army officers in helping stabilize the shaky regimes of the immediate postrevolutionary period. As Ben Smith points out, during this era an entire series of regional cacicazgos came to be distributed across the Mexican landscape. He provides us with a very insightful discussion of the development of one such cacicazgo—that of illiterate Zapotec iguana hunter turned army general, Heliodoro Charis Castro. Smith is highly adept at tracing the process by which Charis came to establish himself as a key regional power broker. Among the most interesting aspects of Smith’s paper is that he shows how much General Charis’s

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cacicazgo in Juchitán had in common with that of General Mange in Veracruz. Like Mange, in order to remain in power, Charis was compelled to use his control over armed force in the most unconstitutional of manners. Over a period of decades, he employed a combination of outright violence, intimidation, electoral fraud, and elite politicking to construct a political machine that successfully eliminated all pretenders to the throne. His achievement was all the more remarkable because, as the indigenous leader of an indigenous constituency, he was forced to navigate through a sea of mestizo hostility. While General Charis employed armed force with little regard for the principles of popular rule, this is not the only feature that his cacicazgo shared with that of General Mange. Charis was also unable to maintain his hold on regional affairs by drawing only on the coercive capabilities of the government apparatus. Like Mange in Veracruz, in order to stay in power, Charis was compelled to construct an entire network of organizations that straddled the divide between the realms of state and society. On the one hand, he used the offices of the central government (in particular, military recruitment, military promotion, and the military college) to recruit, train, and promote a disciplined body of indigenous fighters who answered directly to him. On the other hand, having employed state offices to create an armed constituency, Charis went on to “settle” his followers outside the formal boundaries of the military—in a six-thousand-acre colony back in his home region of Juchitán. Once his battalion had retired from active military service, Charis was able to draw upon former battalion members as his own personal reserves, so to speak. He was able to “call them up” whenever extra-official tasks (violence, intimidation, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.) were necessary to safeguard his (and their!) position. Both Mange and Charis succeeded in stabilizing their respective regional social orders. But unlike Mange, the Zapotec caudillo employed racial identity in articulating a language of legitimacy that would speak to multiple audiences. As was the case in Veracruz, regional stability in Juchitán came at the price of central control. As Smith shows, Charis enjoyed considerable autonomy from central decision-makers. He did so in part because of the nature of his constituency. While the armed force that Charis commanded in Juchitán had certainly been molded by the state, it was not truly of the state. Rather, the battalion of indigenous fighters who answered to Charis derived their bellicosity from their primitive, war-like nature—or so central decision-makers believed. Charis and his followers lost no opportunity to remind government officials that this was the case—that the Zapotec had a long and proud tradition as warriors

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that General Charis had managed to harness, to the greater good of the nation. The threat, however, was clear, for it was Charis the (indigenous) individual rather than the government as institution who truly controlled this group. In other words, it was precisely because the state did not control the armed force represented by Charis’s Zapotec battalion that there was stability in Juchitán. As Smith shows, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, regional cacicazgos like General Charis’s came to be distributed across much of the Mexican landscape. Some relied on their connections with the military to build up a regional power base. Others cultivated their ties with the education bureaucracy, with agrarian organizations, or with the labor administration. In addition to helping us understand the dynamics of one particular cacicazgo, Smith provides interesting commentary on all of them—commentary that returns us to the role of culture in the consolidation of central control. According to Smith, the cacicazgos of this era all adopted what he calls a “Janus-faced” strategy. Whenever they dealt with their superiors in the central government, caciques presented themselves as rational bureaucratic servants of the state. To their superiors, they represented their actions within their regional domains in the same terms. By taking on a facade of bureaucratic rationality, Smith suggests, these caciques “gave the impression that state power operated through a series of bureaucratic chains of command”—an assertion that the spokespeople of the emergent corporatist regime were more than willing not only to accept but also to popularize.21 In fact, however, despite having adopted an official language of bureaucratic rule to describe their actions in official circles, regional power brokers organized their cacicazgos according to more traditional strategies of recruitment—kinship, friendship, minority status, personal loyalty, the promise of upward mobility, etc. Regardless of the specific branches of government upon which caciques drew in building up their regional power bases, the organs of the central administration were systematically cannibalized by regionally based elites and locally oriented interests. As a result, despite the projection of a bureaucratic state in political ritual and discourse, power remained firmly in the hands of these brokers.22 It seems unlikely, to say the very least, that virtually anyone believed the claims that regional caciques made when representing their actions to their superiors. What is important about these claims is not that they were (or were not) believed, but rather that they were so uniformly made. In other words, Smith’s discussion of the Janus-faced aspect of regional cacicazgos has much in common with Gillingham’s analysis of the

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representation of the armed forces as the servant of the nation. In both cases, civilian and military branches of government adopted a specific language to characterize their official actions and interactions. The regularity with which they did so, and also the contexts in which they employed this form of communication, are significant. Such highly patterned and ritualized behavior suggests that the use of this language was in some sense compulsory—that the most varied of actors and organizations felt compelled to adopt it in official dealings that concerned the central government. Both of the chapters discussed thus far offer a similar study in contrasts. They document the wide gulf separating the actual organization of power relations within the cacicazgos of Mexico and the language of legitimacy that regional power-holders employed when communicating about official matters of rule. The existence of such a gulf points in the direction of, but does not explicitly explore, the existence of additional languages of legitimacy—languages that were employed beyond the domain of official state communication, as caciques and their allies negotiated the reproduction of rule on an everyday basis in the regional societies of which they were a part. This important (and much neglected) topic is explored with great skill by Ben Fallaw. In many ways, Fallaw’s contribution to the volume reinforces what has already been said about the limits of institutional models of state formation to understand the historical development of Mexican society. As Fallaw shows, the postrevolutionary military apparatus of General Eulogio Ortiz lacked autonomy from Mexican society writ large, systematically violated the principles of popular sovereignty, repressed social groups deemed subversive or dangerous, and relied extensively on actors, organizations, and activities in the non-state realm to establish and maintain order. Unlike Gillingham and Smith, however, Fallaw does not draw on these materials to highlight the contrast between the organization of everyday power relations and the official language of rule. Rather, he draws upon the organization of everyday power relations to explore unofficial processes of legitimation. As Fallaw shows, regional power brokers such as General Ortiz were compelled to speak to multiple constituencies. In addition to their superiors in government, they had to be able to make statements about their ability to rule to those with whom they interacted on a regular basis—friends and enemies alike. In doing so, they sought to draw upon principles of social organization (race, gender, generation, region, religion) with which their constituencies were intimately familiar and to tap into mentalities, routines, and practices that were deeply engrained in everyday social life.

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These everyday mentalities and routines often had little to do with the principles of popular sovereignty. In fact, these more customary principles were in many cases the direct antithesis of popular rule. Ortiz himself exemplified these very processes. As a number of those around him noted, the general was in a sense always on stage. He appears to have engaged in the production of a public persona of a very specific sort. Furthermore, he seems to have done so in a quite deliberate and calculated manner. Ortiz went out of his way to cultivate an image of hypermasculinity and hyper-violence—thus underscoring the importance of gender as a core principle underlying everyday languages of legitimacy. Indeed, Ortiz presented himself as a man always on the verge of exploding, and therefore liable to do anything. In part, he performed in this manner for his troops and fellow officers (who not uncommonly showed their appreciation for the general’s performances by applauding). But Ortiz also cultivated the same image with audiences as diverse as North American journalists, captive priests, and spontaneously gathered crowds of onlookers in the street. Nor, Fallaw shows, was the general all talk. He regularly followed through on what was suggested by his public displays of rage and ferocity by subjecting his adversaries to intimidation, kidnapping, interrogation, torture, and murder. In terms of articulating an alternative language of legitimacy, it is of special note that Ortiz made no effort to conceal these activities—despite the fact that they were blatantly against the law. To the contrary: Ortiz was careful to insure that everyone knew. He went out of his way to develop a general reputation for such acts—to be sure that his violent, excessive behavior was common, public knowledge. But General Ortiz did not engage in performances of (masculine) rage and violence to diverse civilian and government audiences only in order to make statements about the kind of ruler he wished to be. He also performed in public for a related purpose: to make statements about the kind of society that Mexico should be. In the process, the general sought to articulate a new language of everyday legitimacy, one that specified who had a place in Mexican society, who did not, and what means could legitimately be employed to rid the country of those who posed a threat to its well-being. A prime example of Ortiz’s efforts to map out a new terrain of social inclusion and exclusion that defined who did and did not belong in Mexican society is the general’s behavior toward priests, and the Church more generally. Fallaw provides the reader with fascinating accounts of Ortiz’s anti-clericalism. As the author makes clear, however, the general sought to

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do more than simply do away with priests—something that he could have done (and actually did do) in private, as it were. Ortiz was also determined to use his persecution of priests to make statements to society writ large about the Church. His mistreatment of individual clerics had a larger purpose: to discredit and humiliate the priesthood and everything it stood for. The general’s insistence on staging public show trials of priests accused of drunkenness and sexual misconduct is one striking example. Another is Ortiz’s insistence on publicly violating Catholic religious custom and on having his men do the same. As Fallaw shows, in his zeal to discredit the Church, the general went so far as to ridicule transubstantiation (by going to crowded marketplaces, where he would eat inappropriate foods). He also encouraged his troops to pilfer holy objects from churches and to use them to ridicule liturgical ritual—a request to which many of his followers were happy to accede. By means of actions such as these, Ortiz attempted to make a mockery of the Church. He sought to reveal the hypocrisy of its priests, to expose its parasitical nature as an institution, and to show its betrayal of the true spirit of Catholicism. But his actions were designed to do more. They were intended to reconfigure the moral terrain of Mexican society—to declare the Church hierarchy outside the limits of the transformed social order the general was seeking to build. As Fallaw points out, Ortiz’s actions produced the very opposite of their intended effect. Rather than succeeding in his attempt to articulate a new language of everyday legitimacy, the general did little more than strengthen an already existing language. Indeed, so much so was this the case that he became “the very symbol of Calles Godlessness.” But Ortiz’s failure is instructive. While he was clearly very much out of touch with the views of much of Mexican society, the backlash against him shows the power of everyday forms of legitimacy. Huge numbers of Mexicans, it seemed, would not tolerate the general’s assault on the Church and could not abide by his implicit statements about who did and did not belong in Mexican society. Much the same can be said of General Ortiz’s dismissive attitude toward civilian authority and his sense that the armed forces were somehow above the partisan struggles of the civilian domain. As Fallaw brings out very effectively, Ortiz’s “anti-political” attitude was in fact deeply political. The general focused his energies on using violence to eliminate virtually any threat to the established order—in particular, labor, the press, and opposition politicians. As was the case with his crusade against the Church, what is significant about the general’s campaign against enemies of the regime

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is not only that he undertook it. Of equal importance is the fact that he carried out much of it out in the open. In this way, Ortiz made social statements about who did and did not deserve to be included in Mexican society, and also about the kinds of actions that were legitimate to undertake in order to put them in their proper place. What is so very striking about the languages of everyday legitimacy that Ortiz sought to employ, and the public statements he made by means of these languages, is their relationship to the principles of popular sovereignty. The general did far more than simply disregard the precepts of popular rule. He disregarded these principles openly, flagrantly, unapologetically. He made a mockery of the entire notion of rule by the people. It was almost as if he sought to prove that he was above the law of the land—that he was free to violate the protections of person and property, the rights of civilians, and the freedoms of expression and assembly, all of which figured so prominently in the constitution.23 We are not yet in a position to understand fully what alternative principles of legitimacy were implicit in the activities of army officers such as General Ortiz—the “ ‘revolutionary middle class’ [that] mediated between . . . elites and subalterns in the process of . . . state formation” (Fallaw, quoting Ervin). This is an important avenue of future research. But by focusing our attention on the question of everyday languages of legitimacy—on the principles implicit in the actions of those who wielded armed force in the name of central rule—Fallaw has opened a window onto a fascinating and under-studied aspect of Mexican state formation. The contribution by Stephen Neufeld, which focuses on Mexico’s Presidential Guard circa 1900, takes us further into the realm of the everyday. Neufeld insightfully shows how the social structure embodied principles of order and hierarchy that operated independently of government violence—that were in contradiction with the egalitarian, inclusive principles of popular rule. Neufeld offers a fascinating analysis of the Guard as an arena of colliding expectations about what was appropriate behavior for different categories of social person. The lower/middle-class individuals who served in the Guard regarded their service as a means of upward mobility. They looked to the Guard as a way of disassociating themselves from the plebian underclass that they would otherwise be grouped with—as a way of rising in the social structure. The officers who were responsible for overseeing the Presidential Guard, on the other hand, regarded the men who served, and service as a whole, in very different terms. The officers viewed service in the Guard as a kind of civilizing mission—an experiment in whether or not the plebe-like personnel who served could be trusted to

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behave in public in a way that was appropriate to their suspect station in life. This lack of shared expectations, Neufeld argues, meant that it was virtually inevitable that the members of the Guard would “behave badly.” Like Fallaw, Neufeld draws our attention to the existence of everyday forms of hierarchy, power, and discipline that did much to order Mexican society according to processes that were independent of the actual use of force by the central government. Indeed, it was because the members of the Guard were seen as transgressing social boundaries that the military’s cautious experiment in mestizo improvement fared so poorly. As Neufeld shows, it was not so much that the members of the Guard behaved in inappropriate ways. It was rather that they did so in inappropriate places, and in inappropriate company. It was notions of propriety—structured by considerations of race, class, and gender—that did so much to define what kinds of behavior would be tolerated, by whom, with whom, and in what contexts. This was the backdrop against which efforts to civilize people of suspect origins took place. Like many of the chapters in this volume, Terry Rugeley’s contribution points to the limits of both approaches to the consolidation of central control that dominate academic debate—the organizational and the representational. Concerning the state as institution, Rugeley is highly effective in showing the difficulty of identifying any clear line of differentiation between the administrative apparatus and the social order—and thus the difficulty of conceiving of the state as an autonomous entity that regulates society. He is equally effective in critiquing the notion that the increasing concentration of armed force in the hands of the military leads to a stronger structure of central rule—and thus that the military plays a key role in establishing a monopoly on the use of force by the state. Rugeley brings these points out by providing a concise, perceptive overview of the organization of violence in the middle of the nineteenth century. As he shows, the generals of this era became a new class of wealthy elites—building up their own petty economic empires—and came to be deeply invested in the reproduction of a particular kind of social order. They were thus anything but independent of society. In fact, it was the state rather than society from which they sought (and achieved!) independence. Indeed, Rugeley shows, the central government could do little to rein in its generals. As a result, the very individuals who should have wielded armed force in the name of the center became a threat to it— much like the wealthy commanders of the mid-twentieth century whom Paul Gillingham discusses or those of the postrevolutionary era that Fallaw and Smith analyze.

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Contrary to what institutional models of the state suggest, then, concentrations of armed force in the hands of government representatives (Mexico’s generals) weakened rather than strengthened central control. Because these officers came to establish powerful connections in the civilian domain, they ended up blurring the boundary between state and society even as they distanced themselves from central control. The generals did much to maintain order, but in collaboration with non-state actors, and to protect their own interests rather than to advance general principles or processes of rule. It was their lack of autonomy from society, and their independence from the state, that helped ensure social reproduction. Much the same can be said of virtually all of the arms-bearing units that were distributed throughout Mexico at this time. It was because they were not independent of the social order—that they represented particular rather than general interests—that they contributed to social stability. These included the “milicias activas,” which acted as a counterweight to central control, and which were run by local oligarchs. It included as well the informal civilian units known as “cívicos,” which performed local policing functions and allowed local political actors to promote their interests and to build clienteles. Armed units that blurred the boundary between state and society, and in the process helped reproduce existing inequalities, also included the police forces assembled by property owners and the gendarme-like units organized by the Indian republics. As Rugeley shows, these forces varied considerably in the degree to which they enjoyed government legitimacy. One aspect of Rugeley’s argument, however, is especially germane to institutionalist understandings of state formation. Collectively, these forces wielded violence on an extensive scale, and they were essential to the reproduction of rule. But they were an odd mix of non- and quasi-official units that represented rather than stood apart from particular social interests. Furthermore, it was the fact that they were embedded in social life rather than autonomous from it that made them useful in maintaining stability. The real focus of Rugeley’s chapter, however, is not the organization of force per se. Rather, it is the relationship between the organization of force and processes of legitimation. Rugeley explores this issue by posing a question that has been of much interest in recent decades to students of post-independence Mexico. In what circumstances, he asks, did the formation of popular militias, and military service more generally, generate tendencies toward democratization, folk nationalism, and popular citizenship? Engaging in particular the literature on central Mexico, where scholars such as Mallon have traced the origins of national sentiment to

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popular military service, Rugeley develops a comparative framework for understanding such processes.24 He does so by focusing on the southeast of Mexico, where militias had no such effect. Rugeley’s argument is informed by a broad reading of comparative scholarship, on Mexico and beyond, and it is quite convincing. What is important beyond the argument itself, however, is the following: like Fallaw, Rugeley explores the factors that structure everyday forms of legitimation. The impact of the formation of popular militias on projects of nation building, he shows, was anything but a foregone conclusion. While military service may have provoked a sense of folk nationalism in regions more closely associated with Mexico’s national wars and invasions, not so in Mexico’s southeast. Rather than embrace popular militias because they embodied the hopes of a free people, Yucatecans for the most part fled from military duty of all kinds. They did so because armed service was organized in the context of deeply hierarchical systems of social stratification and structures of feeling. Rather than democratize, or forge a sense of shared identity and interest, military service reflected and helped reproduce hierarchical social relations. Rugeley is not the only contributor to the volume whose chapter engages the broader debates among Mexicanists about the role of military service in generating a sense of popular political participation. The same can be said of Ben Smith’s paper. As we have seen, Smith shows that the military experience of the Zapotec in Juchitán, under General Charis, helped consolidate an indigenous brass cacicazgo rather than generate tendencies toward democratization or awaken feelings of everyday citizenship. Daniel Haworth’s analysis of the “hybrid” military units of Guanajuato during the 1850s also sheds light on the relationship between service in the armed forces and the emergence of folk nationalism. Haworth offers the reader a detailed analysis of the paramilitary force known as the Mobile National Guard (MNG), which was organized by state governor Manuel Doblado in 1855, after the Ayutla Revolt. As the author shows, compared to other military units of the time, the MNG was truly “of the people.” It was in fact at the bottom of a three-tiered military structure consisting of regular army units, reserves, and militia groups such as the MNG itself. Furthermore, after conscription was banned in September 1855, service in the MNG was on a strictly voluntary basis. As a result, those who joined and served did so as a result of their own personal inclinations and beliefs. Despite not only its humble social location at the bottom of the military hierarchy but also its non-coercive mode of recruitment, there is no evidence that service in the MNG was propelled by a sense of popular citizenship.

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Nor is there any indication that involvement in the militia helped produce such a sentiment. Perhaps the most important factor motivating subaltern groups to join the MNG was that it offered good prospects of upward social mobility—something that was otherwise lacking at the time. On this basis the MNG attracted a broad cast of characters, from former insurgents to Indian cultivators to the rural poor more generally. But the MNG was not only an attractive option for the humble social classes. As Haworth shows, the Liberals who seized control of the national government in 1855 undertook a massive reduction of the standing army, which they regarded as a threat to the state. By providing alternatives to high-ranking army personnel whose eviction from the military might otherwise have posed a threat, the MNG helped establish something of a consensus after the Liberal revolution. In sum, Haworth brings out in very insightful terms the ways in which personal connections between civilian leaders such as Governor Doblado and military followers from all walks of life contributed to the consolidation of a new status quo in what were exceptionally chaotic times. As he shows, the MNG was able to act as a transitional organization because it became integrated into an emergent set of military/civilian patron-client ties that linked formerly independent institutional domains. It was not considerations of citizenship or nationalism that were behind the success of the MNG, Haworth suggests, but rather factors like pragmatism, opportunism, and power. The contribution by Thomas Rath also points to the limitations of the two theoretical models that currently dominate academic discussion. It does so by addressing themes that run throughout the volume. These include the difficulty of separating the government apparatus from the social order. They include as well the extensive reliance of government institutions on civilian actors and organizations to maintain order. They also include understanding legitimation as a process that involves claims about the right to rule rather than belief in what states state.25 Rath’s chapter brings out these themes with exceptional clarity, in part because of the unique features of the historical context about which he writes. While many of the contributions in the volume examine periods of social instability and disorder, Rath’s paper is situated in the context of a particular kind of instability—that brought about by global, capitalist economic crisis. Writing as he does on Cardenismo and the Great Depression, Rath is the only author who concerns himself with a period during which the world’s dominant structures of capital accumulation—and the social structures accompanying them—were called into question on a global scale.

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As a number of the contributions to this volume show, it was these very structures of capital accumulation to which the leadership of Mexico’s armed forces had become so deeply committed—to such a degree that they had formed alliances with like-minded partners in the non-state realm and had sought to eliminate or silence any and all forms of opposition. During the Great Depression, however, individuals positioned throughout the entire social structure found it possible (and perhaps even necessary!) to engage in extensive public discussion about alternatives to (Mexico’s distinctive version of ) dependent capitalism. Furthermore, they found that they could do so with relatively little fear of retaliation from the forces of order. Indeed, President Lázaro Cárdenas himself endorsed the emergence of an entirely new official discourse about how Mexican society should be organized—one that stressed the importance of mobilizing the entire social order so as to effect revolutionary transformation toward a mixed, socialist economy. An important part of Rath’s analysis focuses on Cárdenas’s efforts to restructure the military as he went about trying to restructure Mexican society. The strategies he employed to do so reveal much about the limitations of institutional and representational models of state formation. With regards to the former, Rath is especially effective in bringing out the lack of autonomy of Mexico’s structure of government. He does so by showing the mutual co-constitution of the administrative apparatus, the military apparatus, and the social order. In order to steer Mexican society in a new direction, Rath shows, Cárdenas felt compelled to embark upon a major project of military restructuring. Rather than continue with the policies of his predecessors—who sought to make the armed forces apolitical, autonomous, and professional—Cárdenas attempted to politicize and de-professionalize the military. The president did so by breaking down the boundaries between the military order and the social order. Cárdenas sought to transform the military from a separate apolitical institution into an engaged, revolutionary force that could contribute directly to the regime’s broader project of social transformation. Toward that end, the president established a military sector in his new corporate political party of peasants and workers. In so doing, he did more than simply adopt measures to embed the military in non-military institutions and concerns. As Rath suggests, the integration of the military into the party “seemed to eclipse the notion of a politically neutral army altogether.”26 But Cárdenas did not stop here. Toward the same end of breaking down the boundaries between the military and the social order, and of transforming the armed forces into an active agent of social transformation, the president established a nationwide network of civilian-controlled

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schools for the children of common soldiers. In these schools, the offspring of the military rank and file would have their horizons broadened beyond the narrow confines of military life. They would be socialized into and come to embrace the ideals of the revolutionary new society that the Cárdenas administration sought to form. But the Cárdenas regime did still more in its effort to embed the armed forces in the social order and to make the military the servant of the people. His government went so far as to actively undermine whatever relative monopoly on armed force the military had managed to build up by this time. Cárdenas did so by creating an extensive network of peasant militias in the new ejido structures that his regime established. According to one source, all told these militias were sixty thousand men (!) strong. Finally, the Cárdenas regime employed political ritual and discourse on an extensive scale to accomplish the same goal of making the military one with society. His government did so by seeking to change the general perception of soldiers, who were held in low regard in many quarters. As Rath shows, the Cárdenas government went to great lengths to celebrate and valorize the common soldier—to encourage the populace to view soldiers as the brothers of peasants and workers and therefore as integrally involved in the same revolutionary struggle to which Mexico as a whole had committed itself. By focusing on policies such as these, Rath’s chapter brings out in stark terms the inability of institutionalist models to explain the developments of the Cárdenas period. As we have seen, these models stress the government’s monopoly on the use of force, its autonomy from the social order, and its impartiality with respect to the conflicts that emerge as social groups pursue their own, narrow self-interest. Under Cárdenas, however, the government sought partially to divest the military of its control of violence. Furthermore, it attempted to blur the boundary between state and society. Finally, the Cárdenas administration took a highly partisan attitude toward particular social groups and openly supported them at the expense of competing constituencies. The significance of Rath’s chapter is not limited to providing critical commentary on institutionalist models. Rath’s analysis has equally important implications concerning scholarship that focuses on the legitimation rather than the organization of armed force. Rath shows the limitations of such approaches in his discussion of the official language of rule that the Cárdenas regime employed. The government of Lázaro Cárdenas called upon Mexicans from all walks of life to put aside their differences and to work together in order to bring about broad social transformation. For the period that he was

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in office, the president’s discourse of revolutionary change proved to be broadly “hegemonic,” but in a very specific sense of that term. This discourse was hegemonic not because those who collaborated with the Cárdenas government believed in what it said about Mexican society. To the contrary: the discourse of the Cárdenas regime was hegemonic in the sense that the president’s representation of how society should be organized was difficult to challenge, even by those who opposed it. As Rath shows, the latter clearly included a number of Mexico’s generals. Despite official claims that the armed forces were to be an agent of radical social transformation, it was clear that many in the officer corps were deeply troubled by the government’s radical new rhetoric. The fact that they did not directly question the legitimacy of state discourse, however, did not mean that the generals believed that the army should take on the role of catalyst in the revolutionary transformation of Mexican society. It meant instead that the president had succeeded (temporarily) in articulating a language of rule that the generals could not question openly without bringing harm or suspicion down upon themselves. While they acquiesced in public, their obstructive, resistant behavior behind the scenes made it clear that it was not belief that mattered but rather pragmatism and power. Cárdenas understood this, and he responded with familiar strategies of manipulation and pacification to mollify potentially threatening army officers. Rath’s chapter thus forces us to pay careful attention to official discourse, especially forms of discourse that have pretensions to become hegemonic (in the sense outlined above). As his analysis suggests, however, discourse is important not because it indicates anything about the beliefs of those who employ it. Rather, it is especially important to pay attention to discourse when people feel compelled to employ it despite the fact that they do not believe in its content—in those circumstances in which specific discourses come to define the sole terms in which social and political life can be represented. Discourse, Rath’s paper suggests, is best understood as a highly interested claim about how society should be organized. It is best regarded as a normative assertion—an intervention into society masquerading as a neutral description of the social order. Thus far, we understand relatively little about the circumstances that allow particular discourses to enjoy (temporarily) unquestioned, normative status. Nor do we yet grasp the conditions in which it becomes possible to challenge the position of such discourses. These are important avenues of future research. But by focusing our attention on the question of political discourse as a powerful mobilizing and constraining force that people feel compelled to employ even in the absence of belief, Rath opens

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a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of Mexican state formation. Rath’s argument about a disconnect between official discourse and everyday life applies not only to the Cárdenas period but also to the postrevolutionary era as a whole. His chapter about the Cárdenas regime thus complements Gillingham’s paper about the military circa 1950. Both authors assert for their respective periods that the organization of the armed forces does not conform to what has come to be accepted in many quarters as the official narrative of the military since the Mexican Revolution. As we have seen, that narrative describes the postrevolutionary period as one of steady professionalization and depoliticization of the armed forces. What Rath’s analysis shows, however, is just the opposite. He suggests that the Mexican state under Cárdenas was at its “strongest” when the military was not institutionally distinct or depoliticized—when the boundaries between the armed forces as an institution and society writ large had come down, when the control of violence was embedded in rather than separate from the social order.

Unresolved Questions The foregoing discussion has sought to draw upon the contributions to this volume to assess the two approaches to the state that dominate current academic debate. As we have seen, one of these focuses on efforts to establish a monopoly on armed force through processes of institutionalization. The other approach examines efforts to legitimize the use of force through public enactment and representation. In order to assess these two approaches, I have posed a series of intermediate questions. First, has the Mexican government apparatus assumed a role with respect to the use of violence that distinguishes it from organizations in the social realm? Second, has the government apparatus succeeded in enhancing its ability to monopolize force through time by eliminating non-governmental organizations that wield violence? Third, assuming that the first two questions are answered in the affirmative, to what degree have the Mexican military and militias contributed to the consolidation of such a unique institutional role on the part of the institutions of government? Fourth, has the legitimation of force been a major issue in the process of Mexican state formation? And finally, if so, how have the forces of order sought to legitimate central rule? We are now in a position to respond to these queries. As the chapters in this volume suggest, the questions posed above must be answered in the

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negative. At virtually no point during the long century reviewed in this book was there anything unique about the activities of government institutions with respect to the use of force. Rather, from the beginning of the period until the end, these institutions were only a few among many that wielded violence on an extensive scale. Among the various branches of government, it was the military that was best positioned to control the means of coercion. Despite this fact, however, the armed forces did not enjoy a monopoly on the use of force. To the contrary: even in periods when it was at its most powerful, the military found it essential to ally with coercion-wielding power brokers in an array of non-military, civilian arenas in order to maintain social control. These brokers ranged from those who controlled villages, haciendas, and plantations to those who dominated parishes, states, and entire regions. In other words, it was not just force of the kind wielded by soldiers that the military relied upon in an effort to maintain order. Equally important were the quotidian forms of hierarchy, inequality, and exclusion that permeated the social order as a whole. A number of the chapters in the book point to the importance of these everyday forms of extra-official violence in maintaining the order and stability that the military was entrusted with safeguarding. As these contributions show, the violence by which inequality was reproduced in Mexico was integral to much of social life. It was not a monopoly of the army or the police. Rather, violence permeated virtually every aspect of the social order, and it was built into its very structure. Rights, duties, obligations, and opportunities were distributed in a highly unequal way, both formally and informally, between genders, generations, races, classes, regions, etc. The violence of everyday life informed the most intimate of social domains and social relations as well as the most public. Violence was an integral part of the organization of households, schools, factories, mines, and mills. Exclusionary processes that did great violence to entire categories of social persons were built into the very landscape that people built and inhabited, the spaces through which they were able (or not able) to travel, whom they were able (or not able) to interact with, and the kinds of interactions they were able to have with one another (whether intimate, friendly, professional, collegial, familial, etc.). Processes of exclusion, inequality, and difference structured life possibilities in ways that very few people had the privilege of challenging, regardless of social rank. What are the implications of these findings for institutionalist models of government rule? It would appear that these models have little if any applicability to Mexico during the period in question. Indeed, the historical

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materials presented in this volume call into question all of the major tenets of the institutionalists. The government apparatus did not assume a unique role with respect to the use of violence. Nor did it enhance its violencewielding abilities by eliminating competitors. Nor did the military contribute to the consolidation of such a unique institutional role on the part of the government apparatus. These points raise serious questions about the entire conception of the state as an institution defined by its ability to wield force. For as we have seen, there were multiple institutions in the social realm that did the same. If not on the basis of the control of force, how, then, are we to distinguish between what is and what is not the state? How are we to conceive of the apparatus of rule as something distinct from what (in theory) surrounds it? How are we to decide where the domain of government administration ends and where that of society begins? In other words, how are we to identify the limits of the state? The problems of conceiving of the state as an institution that is “made” by its control of force are compounded when we look within the government apparatus. Rather than making government power, the military’s ability to wield force on an extensive scale continually threatened to unmake central control. As the contributions in the volume show, whenever the army became especially large or powerful, the non-military branches of government were forced to strategize about how to protect themselves from the military. In other words, control of force did not lend coherence to the government as an institution. To the contrary: control of violence threatened the state with incoherence. It was only when the military had a vested interest in the preservation of particular social arrangements that it acted as a force for stability, and only of those arrangements! In these circumstances, however, the military ceased being an autonomous force that stood above or outside the social order. It thus ceased to conform to the institutionalists’ definition of the state. Instead, the army became deeply embedded in and indistinguishable from the social order. With respect to the control of armed force, we may conclude the following about Mexico during the period covered in this book. The fact that violence permeated virtually the entire social order calls into question the most basic claims of the institutionalists. The fact that the violence that the government did control weakened rather than strengthened central control does the same. As we have seen, in order to maintain social stability, the Mexican military was forced to ally with an entire array of power brokers in the civilian realm, who oversaw the reproduction of hierarchical social relations within

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their respective domains. As the contributions in this volume suggest, in the course of doing so these power brokers—military and non-military— did more than wield violence on an extensive scale. They also articulated and enacted their own languages about the legitimacy of rule. They did so by drawing upon mentalities, routines, and practices that were deeply engrained in everyday life—and that were not uncommonly organized around the enduring principles of race, gender, class, and religious belief. What, then, are the implications of these findings for discussions of the state that focus on questions of legitimacy? First, it is clear that virtually all actors who sought to wield violence in an effort to order social life felt compelled to offer some kind of public explanation for their actions—in deed, if not in word. Whether it was General Ortiz performing masculine rage to his troops, President Cárdenas insisting that Mexico mobilize to establish a new form of social justice, General Charis seeking to preserve autonomy for his “Indian” cacicazgo, or officers in the Presidential Guard scrutinizing the behavior of racially suspect recruits, implicit in the actions of those who sought to order social relations were a series of normative principles that allowed power brokers to “speak” to a variety of audiences. As noted above, the simple existence of these multiple languages of legitimacy is an important avenue of future research, and this represents one of the book’s most important contributions. Equally important is the fact that these everyday languages of legitimacy were often the very antithesis of the principles of popular sovereignty—upon which Mexico had been founded as a nation. But the chapters in this book allow us to do more than recognize the existence of multiple languages of legitimacy. They allow us to do more than recognize the potential conflicts between these everyday languages and the official language of government rule. The materials collected in this book also allow us to reframe the entire question of legitimacy and, by implication, that of hegemony as well. Efforts to conceptualize the state in terms of the legitimation of power, and to understand projects of nationstate formation in relation to ideological consensus interpretations of hegemony, have run aground on the issue of belief. As James C. Scott has pointed out so eloquently, it is easy to determine whether or not vulnerable populations obey, at least superficially. Knowing why they do so, however, is a far more difficult undertaking.27 The contributions to this volume point to a way out of this conundrum. They suggest that the many power brokers who sought to oversee the reproduction of hierarchical social relations in Mexico’s villages, plantations,

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factories, etc., were not forging consensus. Nor were they legitimating the use of force. Rather, they were staking claims. They were drawing upon the cultural paraphernalia at their disposal to make assertions about how society should have been organized. What is important about the everyday languages of legitimacy that they employed, however, is not that people did or did not believe them. Rather, what is important is whether or not these languages were employed even in the absence of belief. In other words, the contributions in this book open up a window on an important but largely neglected aspect of state formation: under what conditions does the use of languages of legitimacy become compulsory in particular social arenas (whether those of village, parish, region, nation, etc.)? In what contexts does the use of language inform action? And finally, what are the circumstances in which it becomes possible to challenge the “hegemony” of such languages, or even to transform them entirely? In closing, I would like to suggest a final point—one that concerns what might be referred to as “Mexican exceptionalism.” Were the case of Mexico unusual, one could argue that its divergence from the Weberian model did little more than demonstrate that Mexico lacked a true state— thus confirming the institutionalists’ focus on the monopoly of force as a valid measure of stateness. Although it is true that violence, inequality, and exclusion permeated the entire social order during the period covered in this book, this does not in any way make Mexico unusual among modern government polities. To the contrary: it makes it typical. What Gyanendra Pandey has called “routine violence” is integral to the organization of all state-level societies.28 The force controlled by armed agents of the government can therefore never be anything other than a small fraction of the violence wielded in endless everyday encounters in households, schools, villages, offices, fields, and factories. There has been a tendency in the social sciences and humanities to confuse Weber’s ideal typification of the modern state with the actually existing polities of Western Europe. On this basis, there has been a related tendency to assess the degree to which “other” polities deviate from the European norm, and thus are “struggling” or “failed” or “weak.” The points raised here, however, suggest that these efforts are ill conceived. For it appears that there can be no state that lives up to the Weberian ideal. This is not simply a question of some polities coming closer than others. The issues run far deeper. For it seems that the state is not in fact what institutionalists say it is. It is far from being unique among institutions in monopolizing force. Indeed, as we have seen, on the basis of this key defining criterion it is impossible to distinguish the state from actors and

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institutions in the social domain, or to find the boundary that separates these two realms. If the state has no feature that distinguishes it clearly and unambiguously from that which (in theory) surrounds it, then both of the theoretical approaches that dominate contemporary debate collapse in on themselves. For it is unclear what scholars mean when they use the term “state.” The contributions to this volume break new ground because they help us see beyond the limitations of contemporary debates. In the words of Philip Abrams, “the state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask that prevents our seeing political practice as it really is.”29 Notes 1.  Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Chris Krupa for stimulating discussions about Weber’s own understanding of the state, as opposed to those of his interpreters. 2.  Max Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 56. 3.  For an early, influential statement of the institutionalist school, see Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 3–83. For an influential statement concerning the importance of revolutions in the organization of armed force, see Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1550–1660—A Myth?” Journal of Modern History 46 (1976): 195–214. 4.  See Charles Tilly, “How War Made States, and Vice Versa,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 67–95; and Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 5.  See Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6.  On the growth of agrarian bureaucracies, see Samuel E. Finer, “State and Nation Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 84–163. On the ability of coercion-wielding institutional orders to know a national territory and society, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 7.  On states as autonomous economic, social, and political spaces, see Thomas Biolsi, “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space and American Indian Struggle,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 2 (2005): 239–59. 8.  For a thought-provoking discussion of scholarship on the role of legitimation in Latin American state formation, see James Dunkerley, “Preface,” in James Dunkerley,

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ed., Studies in the Formation of the Nation State in Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2002), 1–11.   9.  For examples of efforts to expand upon and refine Weber’s notion of legitimacy, see especially Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from Earliest Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 10.  In Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Kate Crehan provides a telling critique of cultural consensus models of hegemony and of how little they have to do with Gramsci’s writings on hegemony. Her analysis pertains most to the work of Mexicanist scholars such as Ana María Alonzo, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); and Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). William Roseberry offers a highly original reading of Gramsci, in which he suggests that hegemony is not about consensus but contention, in “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 355–77. 11.  See, for example, the papers in Dunkerley, Studies in the Formation of the Nation State. 12.  See the Introduction in this volume. 13.  See Gillingham (citing Lieuwen), chap. 7, this volume. 14.  As Gillingham shows, such a representation misconstrues the military in crucial ways. 15.  Tilly, “How War Made States, and Vice Versa.” 16.  Gillingham, chap. 7, n. 24, this volume, quoting an assessment in a US embassy cable (“The Mexican Army—Still Passive, Isolated, and above the Fray?”), dated May 11, 1995. 17.  One might argue that this example of the seeming limitations of the “state as protection racket” model does not apply because we deal here with regional (as opposed to national) concentrations of force. There are two problems with such an objection. First, the regional commanders who acted to de-center the state were in theory representatives of the national state. The fact that the strategies they chose to pursue ended up fragmenting the center thus begs the question about what is regional and what is central. Second, as a number of contributions in this volume show, the central concentrations of armed force posed the same dangers to civilian rule as did their regional counterparts. Consider the following: (1) Santa Ana’s enormous federal army in the 1850s—and the decentralizing responses to it; (2) Porfiro Díaz’s decision in the late nineteenth century to reduce the size of the army, to rotate commanders from region to region on a regular basis, etc., precisely because of the dangers posed by such a large, national concentration of force; and (3) Lázaro Cárdenas’s efforts in the 1930s to establish peasant militias among ejidatarios (communal landowners), and his attempt to embed the armed forces in the revolutionary transformation of society more generally. The question that all of these examples seem to pose is the following: where is it “safe” to locate the means of coercion?

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18.  Derek Sayer, “Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on ‘Hegemony,’ ” in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 367–378. 19.  James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 20.  David Nugent, “States, Secrecy Subversives: APRA and Political Fantasy in mid-20th Century Peru,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 4 (2010): 681–702. 21.  Smith, chap. 4, this volume. 22.  In this passage of his conclusion, Smith is paraphrasing an important work by Alan Knight, “State Power and Political Stability in Mexico,” in Neil Harvey, ed., Mexico, Dilemmas of Transition (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London and British Academic Press, 1993), 29–63. 23.  David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 24.  Mallon, Peasant and Nation. 25.  See Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell, 1985). 26.  See Rath, chap. 6, this volume. 27.  See Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 28.  See Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 29.  Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 58–89.

About the Contributors

Ben Fallaw completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1995, and he has taught Latin America history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, since 2000. He published his first monograph, Cárdenas Compromised (Duke University Press), in 2001, and his second, “The Religious Question and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” will be published by Duke University Press in 2013. Paul Gillingham holds an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on nationalism, authoritarian politics, and social movements in Mexico. He is the author of Cuauhtémoc’s Bones: Forging Identity in Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) and the co-editor of La Dictablanda: Soft Authoritarianism in Mexico, 1940–1968 (Duke University Press, 2012). Daniel S. Haworth (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2002) is an assistant professor of history at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. His research focuses on society and culture in nineteenth-century Mexico. He is working on a book manuscript titled “Coming of Age in Santa Anna’s Mexico.” Stephen Neufeld is an assistant professor of Latin American history at California State University–Fullerton. A native of Calgary, Canada, his research interests have happily brought him to warmer climes, first to the University of Arizona for a PhD and now to southern California. His continuing work focuses on the construction of subjectivities in the context of Mexican nation-formation, examining the daily lives of soldiers and officers and their role in society. 269

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David Nugent is a professor of anthropology and director of the Master’s in Development Practice Program at Emory University. He is the author of Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes (Stanford University Press, 1997), the editor of Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity ((Stanford University Press, 2002), and the co-editor (with Joan Vincent) of A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Blackwell, 2004). His current book project examines underground processes of state formation and alternative democracies in twentieth-century Peru. Thomas Rath is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Hamilton College, 2010–2012. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2009, and he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Maryland–College Park in spring 2010. His study of the military in post-revolutionary Mexico is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. From September 2012, he will be Lecturer in the History of Latin America at University College London. Terry Rugeley is a professor of Mexican and Latin American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of five books: Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, 1800–1847 (University of Texs Press, 1996); Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (University of Texas Press, 2001); Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts of Nineteenth-Century Yucatán (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Alone in Mexico: The Astonishing Travels of Karl Heller, 1845–1848 (University of Alabama Press, 2007); and Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880 (Stanford University Press, 2009). Benjamin Smith is an associate professor at Michigan State University. He has published articles on state formation, religion, and popular politics in various journals and edited volumes. He is the author of Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (University of Nebraska, 2009) and Religion, Society and Provincial Conservatism in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962 (University of New Mexico, 2012). He is currently co-editing La Dictablanda: Soft Authoritarianism in Mexico, 1940–1968 (Duke University Press, 2012) with Paul Gillingham, as well as researching a book on the nineteenth-century Triqui hero, Hilario Alonso, and another on the history of coffee in Mexico.

Index

Abrams, Philip, 266 Acosta, Miguel, 150, 155, 159 Afro-Mexicans, 112; pardos tiradores (black and mulatto riflemen), 25 agiotistas (“loansharks”), 17 agraristas. See paramilitaries Agua Prieta, Revolution of, 137 Aguilar, Cándido, 215, 218, 228 Alamillo Flores, Luis, 224–26, 236 alcohol, abuse of, 81, 95, 97–100, 102 Alemán Valdes, Miguel, 10, 126–27, 196, 211, 215, 219, 237; assassination attempt against, 224; and near-coup of 1948 against, 223–26 Allende, Miguel, 3 Almazán, Juan Andreu, 149, 188, 205n92 Alvarado, Salvador, 18, 31 Álvarez, Juan, 53–56, 61–62, 69 Amaro, Joaquín, 9, 115–19, 123, 127–28, 136–37, 176, 211, 214, 224–25 Anaya, Juan Pablo, 33 anticlericalism, 18, 145–47, 175, 187, 191, 251–52 antipolitics, 136–37, 144–45, 148, 155 Arenas China, Manuel, 116 Arroyo, Arnulfo, assassination of, 85 artillery, 7, 9, 15, 25, 50, 99, 143, 211

Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 10, 118, 125, 160, 187, 194–95 Ávila Camacho, Maximino, 12, 143, 153, 192–94, 215 bandits, 4, 6, 8, 26, 82, 127, 184, 191, 203n62, 217, 222, 245 Bantjes, Adrian, 128 Batis, Luis, 139, 141, 146 Battle of Ocotlán, 115, 118, 137 Berriozábal, Felipe, 87 Bourbon dynasty, 3, 5, 17–18, 24; reforms of, 13 Brandenburg, Frank, 227 brass cacicazgos (territorial domains of military bosses). See caciquismo; military Bravo Izquierdo, Donato, 15, 192–93 Brazilian Army, historiography of, 212 Brewster, Keith, 112 Butler, Matthew, 145, 157 caciquismo (boss rule), 211–12, 230, 244, 247–50 Calderón, Felipe, 189, 238 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 8–9, 115, 136, 148, 175, 177, 197, 210 Callismo, 157, 179, 183–84

271

272  Camp, Roderic A., 128 Cantón Rosado, Francisco, 6 capitalism, 258 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 9, 111, 118, 122, 136, 149, 173–74, 177–83, 185–92, 194, 196–98, 215, 257–59, 261, 264, 267; in 1948 crisis, 224–26 Cardenismo, 125–26, 160, 173–74, 178–79, 182–85, 187–89, 192–94, 196–97, 257–58 Carmagnani, Marcelo, 111 Carranza, Venustiano, 7–8, 31, 137 castas. See mestizo Caste War of the Yucatán, 5, 16, 29–32, 35, 39, 52 Castrejón, Adrián, 219 cavalry, 7, 9, 12, 25, 50, 57, 66–68, 85, 137–38, 140, 143, 152, 157, 188, 211; Sixth regiment, 96, 99–100, 139, 147, 156; Fifty-first regiment, 153 Cedillo, Saturnino, 41, 149–50, 157, 161, 187–88, 210 Centeno, Miguel Angel, 266n4 Chagova, Cutberto, 116 Chamula. See Maya Charis Castro, Heliodoro, 16, 110–13, 115–29, 247–49, 264 Chiapas, 17, 32, 41–42, 52, 113, 119, 137, 182, 196, 211 Chihuitán, 114 child soldiers, 12 Church (Roman Catholic), 1, 4, 12–13, 18, 27–28, 141, 145, 147–48, 151, 251–52 científicos (“scientific ones”), 6, 87 Cinco de Mayo (anniversary of the Battle of the Puebla), 5 Ciudad Ixtecpec, Oaxaca, 113–14, 121 Ciudad Juárez, Baja California Norte, 150, 158, 238 civilismo (civilized, modern behavior), 82–83, 97, 100, 102 class identity, 180–83 clergy, 3, 18, 34, 145–48 Coahuila, 115, 117 Colegio Militar, 83, 85, 116, 176, 184, 224–225

  Index

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Colima, 116, 140–44, 146, 156 Colombia, security policy compared to that of Mexico, 223 colonias militares (military colonies), 31–32 colonization, 248 Comonfort, Ignacio, 54–58, 60, 62, 68–72 Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), 124–25, 181, 188, 193, 196 Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), 140, 192–93 Constitution of 1917, 175, 180, 186 Constitutionalists, 7, 12–17, 111 Cora (indigenous group), 111 corridos (popular ballads), 7, 21n19, 224 corruption, 14, 18, 142, 214–15, 219–25, 243, 246, 254; carrancear (neologism referring to military corruption in the Revolution), 14; as part of the “business of war,” 17 Cosi Joeza, 118 Cossacks, 129 Costa Rica, security services of, 211, 230 coup d’état attempted in 1948, 223–26 Crehan, Kate, 267n10 criollos (creoles, American-born Spaniards), 3–4, 24–25 cristeros, 9, 115, 139–47, 152, 156, 161, 214 Cristero War, 8, 10, 110, 142, 144, 152, 157, 183–84, 192 Cruz, Roberto, 137 Daves, William, 12–13 Davis Jr., Thomas. See antipolitics Day of the Soldier, 180–82, 193 defensas rurales. See paramilitaries defensas sociales. See paramilitaries de Iturbide, Agustín, 4, 25–26, 32 de la Huerta, Adolfo, 8 delahuertistas, 15, 115, 137, 214 democracy, 255–56, 265 Departamento General de Investigaciones Políticas (General Department of Political Investigation), agents of, 220, 222–27

Index  despistolización (gun control), 218 Díaz, Porfirio, 6, 23, 31, 36, 82, 85–86, 89. See also Porfiriato Díaz Ávila, Pablo, 219 Doblado, Manuel, 50–52, 54–72, 74, 256–57 drugs: trade in, 150, 220; cartels, 238 duels, 100–101, 156 Dueñas, Victorio V., 34 Durango, 142, 146–48, 150, 154, 156, 159, 179, 182, 189, 195, 214 Echeagaray, Miguel María, 57–62, 64, 66, 70–72 ejido (community land grant), 121, 157, 183, 244, 259 elections, 218, 226 El Espinal, 121 Elías Calles, Plutarco, 115, 118 El Universal Gráfico, 126, 134n92, 205n85 Escobar, José Gonzalo, 8–9; revolt by, 142–44, 146, 149, 214 Escuelas Hijos del Ejército (Schools for Children of the Army), 182–83, 184, 190–92, 194–95 Estrada, Enrique, 137 family and the military, 2, 12, 17, 23, 29, 39, 59, 90–91 federalism, 4 Figueroa, Andrés, 138, 145, 147 Foucault, Michel, 13 Fueros (legal right to be tried by one’s corporate peers). See military Gadsden Purchase, 5 Galindo, Juan, 141–42 Gallardo Rodríguez, José Francisco, 213, 233 gambling, 98–99, 220–23 García, Rubin, 127 Gasca, Celestino, 225, 235 generals: as businessmen and landowners, 159, 215, 219, 228, 254; as conservative political force, 260; de dedo (self-appointed), 6, 177

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General Staff, 83, 86, 88, 92, 95–96, 178 Gómez, Arnulfo, 148 González Arévalo, Eduardo, 35 González Fernández, Vicente, 126–27 González y González, Luis, 111 Gonzalo Escobar, José, 8–9, 143, 146, 148–49, 210, 214 Gorio Melendre, Che, 114, 127 Gramsci, Antonio, 174, 240 Great Depression, 179, 257–58 Green Party of Oaxaca, 114, 121 Guadalajara, Jalisco, 12–13, 54, 58, 190, 198 Guardia Civil, 6 guardias blancas. See paramilitaries Guerrero, 112, 126, 218–20, 226 Guerrero, Vicente, 4 hacendado (landowner), 6, 32, 65, 113, 151, 245 Haritour-Fatouros, Mika. See Huggins, Martha hegemony, 145, 240, 260, 264, 265, 267n10 Henríquez Guzmán, Miguel, 188–89, 211, 222, 236 Henriquismo, 225–26 hidalguía, 30 hijo de la chingada, 152, 211 historia patria (patriotic version of history), 5, 7 Huave, 112 Huerta, Victoriano, 172 Huggins, Martha, Mika Haritous-Fatouros, and Philip Zimbardo, 155, 169n122 Huichol, 111 Huitzilac Massacre, 184 hybrid (combined professional-irregular) tactics, 9, 12 hygiene, 97–98 Imán, Santiago, 16, 28 independence. See Wars of Independence indigenous people, 28–29, 82, 84, 113–14, 122; as soldiers, 7, 16, 88, 110–12, 118–19, 127–29, 248, 255

274  infantry, 7, 12, 16, 25, 50, 55, 57, 58, 59, 66, 70, 143, 188, 211, 214; Thirteenth battalion, 115–19, 121 institutionalist view of state formation, 239–41, 244–46, 255, 259, 262–63, 265 Islas Marías, 152 Jalisco, 53, 55, 88, 139–41, 182, 203n55 “Janus-faced” strategy, 128, 249. See also caciquismo Jara, Heriberto, 218, 221 Jaramillo, Rubén, 11, 125, 226 jefe de operaciones militares. See Zone Commander jefe máximo (Calles’s unofficial title as super-executive), 9, 149–50, 211 jefe político (Porfirian prefect), 32, 38, 64–68 Jiménez, Benigno V., 116 Juan the Chamula, 16–17 Juárez, Benito, 6, 56, 86, 114 Juchipila, Zacatecas, 4, 7, 26, 138–43, 147, 151, 157, 196 Juchitán, Oaxaca, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 119, 121–24, 126, 128, 248, 256 Katz, Friedrich, 2 Knight, Alan, 18 Laguna district, Coahuila-Durango, 147–48, 150–51, 158–61 La Mano Negra, 126 legitimacy, concept of, 26, 84, 86, 240, 248, 250–53, 255, 260, 264–65 León Lobato, Othón, 219 Lerdo de Tejada, Miguel, 24, 122 ley fuego (extralegal execution of prisoners), 220 liberalism, 49, 52–54, 63, 72–73, 257 Lieuwen, Edwin, 128, 174, 210, 214, 221, 228 Limón, Gilberto, 220, 225, 228 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 188, 196 López Chinas, Jeremias, 116–19, 122 López Cortés, Francisco, 121 López Felix, Feliciano, 123–24

  Index

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López Mateos, Adolfo, 228 López Miro, Genaro, 122 López Morales, Anacleto, 12, 192, 224 López Vera, Tomas, 122 Loveman, Brian. See antipolitics Loyo Camacho, Martha, 157 mala conducta (bad conduct), 90–92, 95–96 Mallon, Florencia, 255 Mange Toyos, Alejandro, 15, 17, 211–29, 248; biography of, 213–14, 222, 228–29; business empire of, 215, 222–23, 229; and collective repression of peasants and workers, 216–18; and corruption, 215, 220, 222–23, 229; and extrajudicial killings, 216–17, 220; and pistoleros (gunmen), 220–22; and regional politics, 214–15, 221–23; and strike-breaking, 216; in Yucatán, 214 Manzanillo, 116 Martínez, Miguel Z., 224 masculinity, 18, 83–84, 90, 93, 96, 99–100, 241, 250–51, 254, 265 Matias Romero, town of, 113, 124 Maya, 16, 27–28, 31–32, 47n68, 82, 96, 100, 111; Chamula, 119; peasantry, 23, 29–30, 36–37, 39–40 Mayo, 7, 16, 82, 111, 119, 128 Mayoral Heredia, Manuel, 127 mestizo, 7, 16, 82, 84, 114, 121, 123, 125, 254; under colonial system of castas, 3 Mexican Land and Coffee Company, 113 Mexican Revolution, 6–10, 16, 41, 111, 142, 173, 175, 179–80, 197, 210, 249, 261 Mexican Tropical Planters Company, 113 Mexican way of war, 19 Mexico City, 172–73, 182, 189, 191, 193–95 Meyer, Jean, 111, 138 middle-class, 82–83, 88, 92–93, 102 milicias activas. See paramilitaries militarism, 175, 180, 183–84, 224, 226, 229

Index  military: budget of, 210–11, 236; cacicazgos (territorial domains ruled by generals), 6, 9, 15, 17, 138, 150, 197, 211–12, 227, 229, 244, 247–49, 255–56, 264; cases of discharge from, 91–92, 95–99, 102, 106; censorship and cultural control by, 210, 213, 217, 222, 230; conscription, 2, 60, 83, 161, 177–78, 196, 200n23, 201n149, 256; discipline in, 81, 92–93, 102; and domestic intelligence, 15; everyday life affected by, 12, 250, 253, 256, 262, 265; fueros, 94; and indigenous people, 248, 255; and masculinity, 11–12, 102, 155, 251; moralization, professionalization, and reform of, 6, 55–56, 62, 83, 174, 177, 194, 196, 197, 199, 210, 213, 220, 239, 243, 246, 254, 258; as part of middle class, 136; and PNR-PRI-PRM, 212, 218, 224, 226, 258; policing by, 216–18, 221, 243; politicalization and depoliticalization of, 136–38, 210, 217, 219, 245–46, 259; as product of social structure, 16, 241; as rational bureaucracies, 13; recruitment of bandits and rebels into, 60–62, 65, 70, 220; relations with capital, 214–15; repression of labor, 150, 216; schools and education in, 259; sector (of PRM), 173, 186–87, 194; and state formation, 13; violence against civilians and violations of human rights, 18, 238, 244, 250–51, 262, 265 Mixtec, 111, 119 Mobile National Guard of Guanajuato (MNG), 256–57; arms, equipment, and uniforms, 60; army officers in, 51–52, 57–59, 62, 71; civilian control of, 56, 59, 64–67, 69–70; deployment of (as army reserve), 69–70; deployment of (as constabulary), 52, 63–64, 67–68; dissolution of, 71–72; finances, 65–68; militia veterans in, 59–70; organization of, 50; origins, 51–52; recruitment of, 60, 63–64; and state formation, 71–73 modernity, 82, 98, 101–2

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monopoly on force, 27, 239–42, 245, 254, 259, 261–62, 265. See also Weber, Max Morelos, 6, 14, 33, 41, 125, 182, 214 Múgica, Franciso J., 179, 189, 226 municipio libre (free township), 40–41 nationhood, 242 navy, 29, 34, 117, 138, 143, 179, 189 new military history, 17–19, 240 New Spain, 1–4, 129 Niltepec, Oaxaca, 117 Nuevo León, 6, 115 Oaxaca: city, 115; state of, 211, 220, 222, 225 Obregón, Álvaro, 7–9, 11, 15–16, 115, 118, 121, 132n48, 148–49, 153, 175, 178, 183, 210, 213–14 Ortiz, Eulogio, 14–15, 17–18, 136–62, 250, 252–53, 264–65; attacks against civilians and violation of law, 142–44, 147–48, 152; as intelligence agent, 144, 150, 153, 155–56; relations with capital, 151, 159; as revolutionary new man, 157, 161 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 187 Otero, Mariano, 111 Otomi, 111 Pandey, Gyanendra, 265 paramilitaries: agraristas, 140, 214–17, 259; cívicos, 26, 255; defensas ganaderos, 196; defensas rurales, 183, 193, 195–96, 215; defensas sociales, 142; guardias blancas, 222; milicias activas, 25–28, 255; militia, 49, 51, 53, 59–62, 64, 69–70, 72–73; scouts and auxiliaries to regular army, 140 pardos tiradores. See Afro-Mexicans Parra, Manuel, 221–22 Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), 176 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 10, 126, 174, 197, 218, 224–27 Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM), 125, 192

276  patria chica (little fatherland), 101, 127, 227 patriotism, 5, 83, 117–19, 121, 123 Pax Hispánica, 12 pistoleros (gunmen), 214, 216–17, 220–23, 234 police, 96, 101–2, 144, 218, 222–23 polo, 138, 154, 159 Popular Graphics Workshop, 172–73 popular sovereignty, principles of, 240, 242, 247, 250–51, 264 Porfiriato, 9, 83, 101, 111, 113, 145 Presidential Guard, 81–84, 87–89, 91, 93, 98–102, 253, 264 press, 172–73, 178, 181, 185, 188, 191, 195 Proal, Herón, 155 propriety, 98, 254 public spectacles, 86, 102 Puebla, 5, 15, 27, 72, 115, 182, 187, 192–94, 214 Querétaro, 116–17, 121 Quevedo, Rodrigo M., 150, 154, 158, 192, 194, 224, 227 Quintanar, Pedro, 141–42 Ramírez de Aguilar, Alberto, 118 Ramos Santos, Matías, 146, 150 Real, Carlos, 159, 189 reconcentration (of civilians), 140, 142, 144 recruitment officer, 185–86, 196. See also military Red Party of Oaxaca, 114–15, 117 Reforma, Oaxaca, 125 Reform Wars. See War of the Reform Regiones militares, political importance of, 227, 236. See also military, cacicazgos. Reina, Leticia, 111 retirement, politics thereof, 228–29 Revolt of Ayutla, 5, 31, 52–55, 57–63, 68–71, 256 Reyes, Bernardo, 6, 85, 87, 205n92 Reyes, Luis R., 143 Ríos Zertuche, Antonio, 220, 224, 226

  Index

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Robles, Amelio, 12 Rodríguez, Abelardo, 118, 148, 178, 181, 224 Ronfeldt, David, 213 Roseberry, William, 267n10 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 10, 223, 225–26, 228 rurales, 6, 88, 98. See also bandits; paramilitaries Russia, 129 Saavedra Marín, Fernando, 116 Salinas Leal, Bonifacio, 216, 224, 227 San Blas, Oaxaca, 121 Sánchez Cano, Edmundo, 127, 192–93, 195 San Luis Potosí, 111 San Miguel de Allende, 61, 64–65, 67 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 1, 4–5, 25, 33, 51, 54, 82, 104 Santa María Petepa, Oaxaca, 113 Santa María Xadani, Oaxaca, 113, 121 Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, 125 Santos, Gonzalo N., 194 Scott, James C., 145, 264, 266n6 Second Reserve, 87, 94 Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), 118, 123–24, 128, 180–82, 184, 194–95 Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA), 10, 187–188, 191, 195 Secretariat of War, 183–84, 189, 193 Sentmanat, Francisco de, 33–35 sepoys, 129 Serrano, Francisco, 138, 148, 178; revolt of 1927, 116 Serrano, Mónica, 217 sex work, 13, 176 Sierra Juárez, 112, 128 Sierra Norte de Puebla, 111–12 Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de Juchitán Sole (Union of Juchitán Workers), 124 social order, 84, 239, 241, 243–45, 248, 252, 254–55, 257–63, 265 Sociedad de Estudiantes Juchitecos, 122 soldaderas (female camp followers), 12, 90, 176, 178, 191, 196

Index  soldado razo (common soldier), 15 Sonorans (regimes of Obregón and Calles), 8–9, 16, 115, 119–20, 137–38, 174–77, 179–82, 184–85, 188, 194, 197, 210, 213–14 state formation, 241, 261; compulsion in, 241; institutionality of, 239, 242, 245– 46; organization of, 259; professionalization of, 245; rational bureaucratic character of, 240, 249; representation of, 240; weakness in Mexico of, 242, 249, 263, 265–66 Suchiate, Chiapas, 119 Tabasco, 4; and French intervention, 34–35, 37; and origins of militias, 32–33; United States invasion of, 29 Tannenbaum, Frank, 218 teachers, 117, 122–25, 139, 181–84, 191–95 technology, 83, 101 Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, 113–14, 122, 127 Thompson submachine gun, 138 Tilly, Charles, 244, 266n3, 266n4, 267n15 Tlatelolco massacre, 11, 213 Tlaxcala, 115 Tobler, Hans Werner, 111 Toledo, Claudio, 110 Torreón, Coahuila, 158–59 Triqui, 111 Trotsky, Leon, 239 Unión Hidalgo, Oaxaca, 113, 117, 125 unions, 216, 218, 224–25 United States: embassy, 213, 225; frontier with, 150; intelligence services, 189 Valdés, Miguel Alemán, 10, 126, 211, 215 Vasconcelos, José, 151–52

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Vásquez, Genaro, 121 Veracruz, state of, 210–38, 246 Villa, Pancho, 6, 7, 11, 41, 137 violence, 1, 19, 29, 36, 82, 97–101, 119, 148, 155–56, 161, 215–23, 238–48, 251–55, 262–65 Virgin of Guadalupe, 10, 149, 153 Von Tempsky, G. F., 114 war games, 138 War of the Reform, 5, 31, 72 War on Drugs in Mexico, 238 Wars of Independence, 5, 13–14, 16, 25, 36, 61 Watanabe, John, 157 Weber, David, 17 Weber, Max, 212, 223, 239–42, 265. See also monopoly on force West Africa, 129 whips (as symbols of military authority), 152, 157, 193 William, Raymond, 240 Yaqui, 7, 10, 16–17, 82, 111–12, 115, 119–20, 127–28 Yocupicio, Román, 224 Yucatán, 4, 6, 16, 26–28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 68, 96, 101, 119, 215. See also Caste War of the Yucatán Zacatecas, 4, 7, 26, 138–43, 146–47, 151–52, 157–58, 192, 196 Zanatepec, Oaxaca, 117 Zapatismo, 175 Zapatistas, 6–7, 41, 142 Zapotecs, 110, 112–14, 116, 118–24, 126–29, 247–49, 256 Zimbardo, Philip. See Huggins, Martha Zone Commander (jefe de operaciones militares), 179, 183, 185, 188–90, 192–94