The Mexican Miracle, the Golden Age, the Tlatelolco Massacre and the Earthquake, 1940-1985 Modern...

The Mexican Miracle, the Golden Age, the Tlatelolco Massacre and the Earthquake ,

1940-1985

Modern Mexico Lecture, 27 February 2011

Post-Cardenas Mexico, 1940-

• “After 1940, the key institutions of Cardenismo – the ejido and the socialist school; the CTM, CNC, and PRM; Pemex and the National Railways – hardly fulfilled the radical high hopes of the mid-1930’s; nor...did they realise the lively fears of businessmen and conservatives..... ...The institutional shell of Cardenismo remained, but its internal dynamic was lost.....the jalopy was hijacked by new drivers; they retuned the engine, took on new passengers, and then drove it in a quite different direction.”

• (Alan Knight “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy”, JLAS, 1994)

Post-1940 Mexico

• neglected until recently by historians: property instead of “essayists, journalists and practitioners of the policy sciences”.

• 30 years ago my lectures were on “The Failure of the Agrarian Reform”, “The Mexican Economic Miracle”, “Mexico City: Wealth and Marginality”, “The Institutionalised Revolution and the Mexican Political System”.

Post-1940 Mexico

- focus then tended to be around a meta-narrative of sequential “regime histories”

- eleven PRI presidential sexenios between 1934-2000- zigzagging from Left to Right, back to Left again,

according popular or business pressures.- Revolution’s rhetoric and agenda revived in late

1950s under Adolfo Lopez Mateos, in early 1970s under Luis Echevarria, in late 1990s under Carlos Salinas

“regime histories”

- job of “regimes historians” was to fit current events into teleology of the Revolution

- in 1971, when the national archive was still in the presidential palace, I would meet young Mexican historians in La Presidencia (& the pay of the PRI), engaged in writing the official history of the unfolding Revolution in an office on the top floor of the Palacio Nacional....

- we went for lunch at the Cantina “La Peninsular” on the edge of the Zocalo....

Zocalo, Mexico City

Cantina La Peninsular, Mexico City

The Cultural Turn• “regime histories” are no longer adequate to explain

the complexity of change in Mexico since 1940 ... they weren’t then

• In 2001, in a very useful essay*, Arthur Schmidt wrote that:

• “Mexico’s processes of change are so complicated and unpredictable that they engulf the writing of history itself...(one) ...has the sensation of finding oneself facing the foreseeable end of a civilization, a country, a nation.”

• * “Making it Real compared to What ? Reconceptualising Mexican History Since 1940,” in Joseph, Rubinstein & Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age (2001), pp.23-71

Fragments of a Golden Age

• Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubinstein & Eric Zolov, eds. Fragments of a Golden Age, The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940

• explores growing cultural studies historiography: cinema, radio, television, tourism, food, Mexican workers’ culture in US multinationals, regional cultures and ethnicities, cosmopolitanism manifested in “jipitecas”, “la Onda”, “rocanrol”, popular culture evident in “lucha-libre” wrestling, etc

Classic and Revisionist Histories of post 1940 Mexico

• Schmidt discusses two master narratives of Mexican History since 1940 corresponding to two 2 economic models and their corresponding politics

– “From Revolution to Evolution”, 1940-1982 Classic “Mexican Miracle” literature.....

– “From Revolution to Demolition”, 1982 onwards Revisionist “Neo-Porfirian” literature....

“From Revolution to Evolution”, 1940-1982:

• Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) • highpoint PRM /PRI as a corporate “Liberal

Machiavellian” party: praised by US political scientists (and State Dept.) as the “preferred revolution”

• Golden Age of Mexicanidad: nostalgic, rural, mestizo, heroic, romantic and masculine Mexico expressed in cinema and song, pan-American in appeal......

• Emergence of a cosmopolitan intelligentsia - Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Daniel Cosío-Villegas – endowing the Revolution internationally with prestige.....

Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: Jorge Negrete (with Maria Felix)

Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: Pedro Infante

Cosmopolitan intellectuals

Octavio Paz Carlos Fuentes

Daniel Cosio Villegas (1898-1976)

• Professor of History at El Colegio de Mexico which he helped found, along with many Spanish Republican exiles

• Published 8 Volume Historia Moderna de Mexico between 1955 1972

“From Revolution to Evolution”, 1940-1982:

• 1968 Olympics: “Mexico has arrived !” • 1968 Massacre at Tlatelolco: Revolution dies/

authoritarian regime exposed• 1970s: “La Década Perdida”– neo-populism to win back legitimacy – oil boom after 1973: balanced development

abandoned, revenues squandered, massive corruption & foreign borrowing

• 1982: debt crisis, spiralling inflation, default....• 1985: earthquake and emergence of “new social

movements”

“From Revolution to Demolition”, 1982 onwards:

• 1980s: In response to debt crisis and inflation, state gradually shifts to neo-liberal economics: privatisation, financial austerity, directing populist policies at the marginal population (“Solidaridad” under Salinas).

• Prompts “new social movements” and the growth of “civil society”, regional opposition movements

• massive increase in migration to the US during the 1990s.• growth of national political opposition: Left “neo-

cardenismo” and Right PAN, combated by electoral fraud• 1994 crisis: Mexico enters NAFTA sparking EZLN uprising in

Chiapas• 2000 PRI suffers electoral defeat

Economic Miracle, 1940-1973

• 1940s-70s “stabilising development” (high growth/low inflation: Mexican Peso 12/$)

• close relations with the US during the 2nd WW when Mexico became a key strategic ally of the US: oil, minerals, workers (braseros) even a fighter squadron

• ISI: industrialisation behind high tariffs protected expanding market attracted foreign capital…


• Public investment in infrastructure crucial, by 1950 Mexico's road network had expanded to 21,000 kms, of which some 13,600 were paved.

• Flexibility on rules on foreign capital (presta-nombres); foreign enterprise found reinvestment in Mexico attractive due to growth

• industry 22 % of national output in 1950, 30% by 1970, share of agriculture and other primary activities declines, services constant.....


• Growth benefited by the social achievements of the Revolution:

• – Education: skills– income redistribution: demand– Agrarian reform shifts private investment from

agriculture to industry and commerce

• a controlled labour movement through CTM and Fidel Velazquez suppressed wage demands


• rapid growth of urban population, outstripping employment in industry, kept wage demands down (helped by CTM’s “charrismo”).

• during 1960s alone 1.8 million moved to DF, described by Octavio Paz “a monstrous inflated head crushing the frail body that holds it up”

• migration to US as safety valve: by 2000 approximately 20 million US residents identified themselves as either Mexican, Mexican-Americans or of Mexican origin.


• Tourism: US Visitors to Mexico

• 13,982 (1929),100,000 (1937), 384,297(1950) 631,000 (1960), 1,986,000, (1970) (Dina Berger, The development of Mexico's tourism industry : pyramids by day, martinis by night (New York, 2006 )

• Basis of stabilising development until the 1970s: close understanding between political and economic elites allowed for high levels of capital formation and rapid economic expansion in a context of low inflation and orderly government finances.


• Progressive ideology : belief that the archaic monopoly interests that had controlled economic life before 1910 were now broken, creating instead “a socially responsible class of Mexican entrepreneurs”, with the foreign allies, both working in partnership with the state.

• Admiration of US academics: “Private capital, management and personnel, no less than their counterparts in the public sector, are forcefully building the Nation.” Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico


Results:

• 1940-1972:

• 3-4% annual per capita growth combined with low inflation of 3% annually

• Mexican economy expanded six fold and manufacturing by a factor of ten.

Miguel Alemán, 1946-1952

Miguel Alemán,

“Mexico Has Had Its Revolution”

Time Magazine, April 1947

Mexico’s Population Growth

Mexico• 1930 16.6 million• 1973 52 million• 1977 66 million• 2009 111 million

• City/Country• 1940 65% rural• 1970 50% rural

Mexico City Population• 1900 500,000• 1924 100,000• 1940 1.6 million• 1950 3.1 million• 1960 5.4 million• 1970 9.1 million• 1980 13.9 million• 1995 15.6 million• 2000 18 million• 2010 22 million

Mexican economic Growth• Average annual GDP growth by period

• 1900–1929 3.4%

• 1929–1945 4.2%

• 1945–1972 6.5%

• 1972–1981 5.5%

• 1981–1996 1.5%

• 1995–2000 5.1%

The PRI: “the Liberal Machiavellian”• Mexican scholarly views of the Mexican Revolution,

as dynamic social experiment became increasingly critical from the late 1940s: see Daniel Cosio Villegas “Mexico’s Crisis” in The Mexico Reader

• Yet, across the Border, thanks to the work of Mexicanists such as Howard Cline, Stanley Ross and Frank Tannenbaum, Mexico came to be seen as the “preferred revolution” and model of nation-building: “The Mexican experience afforded a preferred solution for the hemispheric problem of change and development...with much to offer the world” (Frank Tannenbaum)

The PRI: “the Liberal Machiavellian”

• During the 1940s-60s, a period of de-colonisation and the onset of the Cold War, many American political scientists (including Samuel Huntington) came to view “the Mexican system as the politicians wanted them to see it, not as a sham but as a reality – an eccentric, revolutionary, one party democracy” (Arthur Schmidt)

• A bit like Creelman’s rosy view of Diaz in 1908 • Or Woodrow Wilson’s view of Pancho Villa as

Mexico’s natural democrat in 1914 • Both periods of anxiety and crisis in the US

“The Mexican Proposition”

• Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (1964)

• “Revolution in Mexico, the permanent revolution*, is a dynamic political, social and economic fact. First unleashed in 1910, its perennial goal is striking in its simplicity: social justice for all Mexicans…..

• *by this time the Mexican Left was referring to the Mexican revolution as the “Frozen Revolution”, the “Interrupted Revolution”

“The Mexican Proposition”

• Frank Brandeburg continues:

• “…..Many routes have been tried, some followed, some expanded, some abandoned, but all have been directed toward achieving the over-all goal...Revolution for this modern Mexican is more than an ideal: It is the continuing struggle to transform his society into the shape of an ideological image. The Mexican sees himself as part of this struggle.”

Mexicanidad• US political scientists’ optimism echoed by Mexican

“behaviourists” such as Octavio Paz in The Labarynth of Solitude (1950)

• “Mexico is on the road up, the errors of youth are giving way to the experience of maturity. Mexicans no longer need to learn how to die; they may now even plan how to live”.

• See early versions of this culturalist - behaviourist teleology :Jose Vasconcelos, La Raza Cosmica, 1923

• Samuel Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1932)

Mexicanidad• “..the mestizo is the only Mexican who has a strong

sense of the nation....to him will go the credit of having created a common people out of the many diverse groups on Mexican soil”

• Frank Tannenbaum, Mexico, the Struggle for Peace and Bread, (New York, 1950)

• Mexican national character was said to have “successfully amalgamated with the main traditions of Western-style political democracy” producing “a coherent pattern of attitudes and mechanisms that form a unique New World ‘middle way’”

“The Revolutionary Family”

• Mexico’s leaders: Brandenburg describes them as “the Revolutionary Family”- 20 leading figures and 200 other key figures in public and private bureaucracies - led by strong presidents ensuring political stability (the “Liberal Machiavellian”)....their creed was nationalism and social justice, their function was to bring modern improvements to the rest of Mexico.

1968: the Olympics and the Massacre at Tlatelolco

- holding the Olympics in 1968 seemed to confirm that Mexico had come of age…….

- then on 2 October 1968: troops fired on a crowd of unarmed students at the Plaza de Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco, causing at least 300 deaths …

Elena Poniatowska: “From that moment, the lives of many Mexicans were divided in two: before and after Tlatelolco”, the massacre destroyed the official image of Mexico “lustrous, full of blue skies and promise...”

1968: the Olympics and the Massacre at Tlatelolco

- Mexico’s student movement was in response to 300 police being sent into the “Vocational School No 5” to break up a student strike in July 1968.

- a mounting pattern of demonstrations against police brutality culminated in a mass meeting at the Plaza of the Three Cultures on 2 October 1968.

- Police agents fired on the army, soldiers fired on a building, people in building fired back, army fired on crowd and on each other ..

The Massacre at Tlatelolco, October 2 1968

1968: the Massacre at Tlatelolco

“After the massacre, the same October 2, taxis, cyclists, and pedestrians passed by the Plaza of the Three Cultures as if nothing had happened. Life returned to be an insulting normality. There were a few public protests. Either the government silenced them, or the people were terrified...what in another country would have unleashed a civil war disturbed only a few Mexicans.”Elena Poniatowska La Noche de Tlatelolco (1971) (based on personal testimonies) published in English in 1975 as Massacre in Mexico

“La Onda”

• Student movement part of a broader cultural movement among Mexico’s youth: La Onda

• Zolov: “a double mirror effect – Mexican youth observing American youth observing Mexico – of trans-cultural connection and reception which played an important...role in the subversion by Mexican youth of the state’s hegemony.”

• In Joseph, Rubinstein & Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age pp.234-272.

“The Lost Decade”

• Political elite recognised damage caused by the massacre to PRI’s legitimacy….

• explains Luis Echeverría (1970-76)’s populist turn:– cooptation of intellectuals,– revival of agrarian reform,– Indian craft furniture instead of Louis VIV

furniture in Palacio Nacional– Close relations with Cuba and Allende’s Chile

1970s “The Lost Decade”

• I recall these heady times, but also a culture of political violence both on the Left and the Porra....tanks in Puebla surrounded the University in 1972

• Progressive Tax reforms allowed for higher social spending...

• then oil revenues took over, tax reforms were sidelined, mounting corruption under José Lopez y Portillo (1976-1982)

1982 Crisis• - anti-inflation policies under Reagan helped

provoke global recession, hit Mexico particularly hard because of reduced petroleum demand and prices, high international interest rates, overvalued peso…

• - growing capital flight forced Mexican government to default on debts and IMF to step in, marked the end of the post-1940 economic system

• - massive impact on middle class living standards……

1982 Crisis• - denunciation of camarillas (powerful groups

of “friends”) that now controlled the state: society had been left out of the Revolution

• - PRI’s belated response to the earthquake in 1985 confirmed Revolution’s death

• 19 September 1985 devastating earthquake struck centre of Mexico City killing 8.000, many more injured and homeless, causing $4 billon damage in property

19 September 1985 Earthquake

1985 Earthquake

• Coordinadora Unica de Damnificados (Victims’ Coordinating Council) (see Mexico Reader)

• few resources or means of communication, yet impressive street demonstrations and tangible results...spawned a new spirit of social activism

• This spirit influenced the presidential election of 1988, won by PRD under Cuautemoc Cardenas (and stolen by PRI) and the historic election of July 1997 when Cardenas was elected first non-priista mayor of Mexico City.

1985 Earthquake

• Arthur Schmidt on impact of earthquake of 1985:

• “herculean grassroots mobilisation....civil society seemed poised to seize the initiative from a hegemonic state in crisis”

• ....yet shocks of neo-liberalism “outpaced the welter of local forces that militated for democratisation”

Revolution to Demolition: 1982-2000

• Mexican historian Enrique Krauze in Mexico, Biography of Power (1997) writes

• “The true heart of the system rests on the traditional pre-modern political culture of the majority of Mexicans, for whom politicians are the legitimate owners not only of power but of the nation.”

Revolution to Demolition: 1982-2000

• Schmidt questions this state-centric view, stressing need for new ways of looking at recent Mexico: –5 x as many Mexicans as in 1940, –more urban, younger, daily lives and

identities revamped by mass communications–many have travelled to the US...

• historical interpretations can no longer presume a single national direction in all of these changes.

Revolution to Demolition: 1982-

• Schmidt observes new approach:

• i) de-centering scholarship : lecture in week 9

• ii) examining popular culture...

• just two examples before I conclude

“Lucha Libre” (Mexican wrestling)

• Heather Levi:• “The story Mexicans tell

themselves about themselves”• public secret that matches are

fixed• masks conceal real identity• Levi observes that masks and

match fixing are emblematic, parodying Mexican political culture, corruption and deception, hence are a critique of power

• Helen Levi, The world of lucha libre : secrets, revelations, and Mexican national identity (Duke University Press, 2008)

Superbarrio

- Former wrestler

-Helped homeless in poor neighbourhoods following the 1985 earthquake

-formed La Asamblea de Barrios from representatives of 40 neighbourhoods

http://hemi.nyu.edu/journal/1_1/sb11.html

Superbarrio: Popular redeemer

- "when peasants demanded land to the government, the government gave them land—but 6 feet under. Those who petitioned housing and invaded vacant lots, got housing—but inside jail. And those workers who asked for wage increases—found themselves fired.”

Superbarrio GomezSuperbarrio in Colonia Roma after earthquake

Superbarrio and Noam Chomsky

“Los Olvidados”

(“The Young and the Damned”) (1951)

Week 8 at 4.15

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