What the villagers of Morelos had always feared gradually came to pass: the city expropriated the revolution. It was there, in the city, that the increasingly powerful revolutionary state was centered and, in the name of progress, it was the city that this state favored when it distributed resources, for the new ruling class progress meant industrialization and urbanization.
Samuel Brunk, 1995158
Upward mobility based on the Revolution came in waves. Under Madero, the dissident elite assumed power. Then, as Villa and Zapata dominated the political scene, the lower class became upwardly mobile. From the Constitutionalist victory through 1940, the middle class harnessed the Revolution for its own enrichment. Finally, as Mexico stabilized, technical and administrative expertise became more important, and the political elite was increasingly drawn from the university-educated professional classes. This tendency intensified after the Second World War. Upward mobility often resulted from seizing haciendas, marrying daughters of the Porfirian aristocracy, selling influence in government circles, embezzling government funds, selling food allocated to feed soldiers, or obtaining sweetheart loans from government banks.159
Changes in leadership were much more dramatic than changes in living standards. The year 1917 was not the year of the constitution for most Mexicans, but rather one of hunger. The government, burdened with enormous debt and without access to internal or external credit, had difficulty buying grain to feed the population. Unemployment was rising, and the country lay in ruins. Just as the Mexican population was beginning to benefit from economic recovery, the Depression halted progress in health and education. Annual per capita consumption of corn, the mainstay of the popular diet, fell from 300 pounds in 1928 to 194 in 1930.160
At the time of Cardenas’s inauguration, rural life had changed little. Many small towns, accessible only by mule trail, lacked schools, churches, and running water. In his classical study of Tepoztlan, Morelos, anthropologist Robert Redfield observed that in the late 1920s the town lacked electricity and power tools. Even though the village was only fifty miles from Mexico City, because of the rough, rocky roads, humans and a variety of quadrupeds carried all the cargo coming to town.161
In contrast to the Sonora dynasty, which focused on economic progress promoted by the state, Cardenas used the state to promote social justice. The major agents of change were education and
Land reform. Improved communications also facilitated change, as Cardenas donated radios so residents of every agricultural and workers community in Mexico could listen to three state radio stations—one belonging to the education ministry and two to the official party. By 1940, Mexicans were benefiting from thousands of new schools, innumerable public services, and extensive new irrigation projects. Government-run stores opened in urban areas, selling food at reduced prices. As Carlos Fuentes noted, “Even if the upper and middle classes were favored, the working and
Peasant classes received larger slices of the national pie than they had before or ever have had »162
Since.
As the Revolution faded into history, it became increasingly difficult to isolate what emanated from the Revolution and what was attributable to change sweeping all of Latin America. Motor vehicles, for example, had an impact far more diffuse than that of the railroad, which left the vast majority of Mexico’s villages just as isolated as they had been in colonial times. As naturalist Aldous Huxley noted:
Over and above their material freight, the Fords will carry an invisible cargo of new ideas, of alien, urban ways of thought and feeling. . . Along the metalled roads the Fords will bring, not only reading matter, but also notions that will make the printed words fully comprehensible . . . The metalled roads and the Fords will have the effect of making large-scale urban vulgarity accessible to almost all.163
Rustic village shops increasingly stocked such city-made goods as matches, candles, beer, and even canned foods. Other changes included increased state bureaucracy, extension of tax powers, and more mass participation in politics. These changes were occurring not only in revolutionary Mexico but also in non-revolutionary Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.164
While change was indeed occurring, the Mexico of 1940 in many ways had more in common with the Mexico of the late nineteenth century than that of the late twentieth. The population remained small, rural, and agricultural. Although there was steady population increase and migration from rural to urban areas, the rate of change was quite low compared to the rate later in the century. In 1921, 68.8 percent of the population was rural, and by 1940, 64.9 remained so.165
World History
