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A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4214531

1527-1900

Alexander Aviña,

Politics and Society in Latin America

A Persistent Revolution is a synthetic political history of contemporary Mexico that identifies revolutionary nationalism—a flexible, negotiated “cognitive framework” borne from revolution that set the terms and boundaries for contentious engagement between citizens and the state—as the source for political and social stability during moments of severe crisis (p. 8). In his reading of Mexican politics, which focuses largely on ruptures and crises beginning in 1982, Randal Sheppard looks at historical commemoration ceremonies, protest movements, oppositional politics, and public intellectual debates to analyze the political power of certain historical myths that underscore revolutionary nationalist cultural identity. That the figure of Emiliano Zapata emerged in the early 1990s in both neoliberal and guerrilla Mayan guise indicates for Sheppard the hegemonic power of a revolutionary nationalism malleable enough to sustain Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule during the crisis-ridden neoliberal economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s and to simultaneously generate popular resistance to that shift. It “provided a language of contestation as well as consent” successful enough to ensure general stability during a sustained moment of neoliberal state retreat, to discipline and contain PRI political opponents like the National Action Party, with its “Catholic conservative nationalism,” and even to frame the latter's actions during the 2000 “democratic transition” (pp. 4, 11).Though the book title references 1968, Sheppard focuses most of his attention on post-1980 Mexico up to the election of Vicente Fox in 2000. Sixty-eight serves largely as another historical myth used by political parties and social movements to either reaffirm or contest PRI policies, political rule, and history. Moving ably and crisply between different moments of political, economic, and social crisis, Sheppard aims to demonstrate how PRI leaders recast historical figures and past crisis moments in order to mediate potential conflicts and political challenges during the neoliberal structural realignment of the 1980s and 1990s that precipitously dropped living standards and pauperized millions of Mexicans. If José López Portillo's “last gasp” of revolutionary nationalism in September 1982, when he nationalized Mexican banks (and directly linked his act to the 1938 Cardenista oil expropriation), ultimately lost at the hands of international capital, subsequent technocratic PRI leaders learned how to reframe nationalist myths with a neoliberal bent to justify highly unpopular austerity policies (p. 65).And here emerges the major strength of Sheppard's study: his serious engagement with, and attention to, the rhetorical efforts of the Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas de Gortari administrations at annual commemoration events to modify revolutionary nationalist discourse as they dismantled the social and economic achievements of the postrevolutionary state. Populated by a new generation of technocrats intellectually formed in neoliberal-minded university departments and think tanks, the de la Madrid administration framed austerity as “revolutionary,” the only available alternative that could ensure the survival of the revolution (in other words, the PRI state) amid rising inflation, debt, and the 1985 earthquake (p. 89). The PRI state, cast as “an organic political expression of the nation's history,” had become a Mexican version of the Fukuyamian “end of history” (pp. 83, 89). Sheppard's chapter on Salinas de Gortari's authoritarian brand of “neoliberal populism,” and the cultural project of social liberalism that underscored his Solidaridad and Concertación programs, outlines a sophisticated effort to renegotiate the revolutionary nationalist framework that had linked state and civil society (p. 143). Posing neoliberal social policies as liberatory and democratic in the face of ossified bureaucracy and anachronistic public policies, Salinas de Gortari promised a modernity neither Porfirian nor Cardenista. Sheppard smartly contributes to an emerging historical literature on Mexico's neoliberal transition, joining the excellent works by Sarah Babb and Louise Walker.If Salinas de Gortari could pose in front of a Zapata portrait in 1992 on television while announcing the end of land redistribution, protesters in the streets and countryside could also claim the Morelos revolutionary as their own. The revolutionary nationalism that sustained PRI rule in moments of crisis also generated oppositional movements. Here Sheppard is less successful and innovative in breaking new ground, particularly in his discussion of the much-studied Zapatista Army of National Liberation. More broadly, he minimizes the role of state violence, that “gray zone” of state making identified by anthropologist Wil Pansters, in perpetuating PRI rule, particularly at the local and regional levels. As Antonio Gramsci (somewhat cryptically) wrote, hegemony fundamentally depends on the “armor of coercion”—a point that recent scholarship on the post-1940 period has demonstrated. Perhaps engaging the growing drug trade in the 1980s—another largely neglected theme in this study—could have facilitated a look at these gray zones during the process of neoliberal transition. Such criticisms notwithstanding, Sheppard's lucidly written account is accessible to a broad audience and constitutes a welcome contribution to contemporary Mexican history.