Week 8: Signs of Crisis in a Gilded Age Research Paper

Source 1: Meyers, William K. “Pancho Villa and the Multinationals: U.S. Mining Interests in Villista Mexico, 1913-15” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 339-336

Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/157028

The career of Pancho Villa began in during the two-pronged revolution to overthrow Porfirio Diaz, with him and his Norteño cavalry descending from the arid north and Emiliano Zapata coming up from the verdent south with an army of campesinos, both intending to storm Mexico City. With the ultimate failure of this revolution culminating in the 1913 assassination of the new president Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa again took to the field to rid his region of Mexican governments who would allow their country to be sold piecemeal to foreign business interests. But, despite this attitude being the bedrock of the Villista movement, strategic concessions had to be made during the course of the war to ensure the day-to-day operation of certain economic activities that required specially trained personnel like mining.

Pancho Villa’s revolutionary activity proceeded, necessarily by his region’s proximity to the border, only with tacit American support for his actions. The balance was particularly in favor of the Americans when it came to heavy industry, as Americans had built most of Mexico’s railways and operated almost all of their mineshafts. When Villa captured several significant American-run shafts and their respective towns, he found it difficult to keep the mines in operation without allowing the Americans to have some degree of control over the external affairs of the mine’s operation. This clearly contradicted the spirit of the revolution, but Villa had to make the choice of all revolutionaries, between ideological purity and the pragmatic success of his movement.

Mining’s fortunes had always determined the overall economic health of Mexico’s north, as it provided jobs and provided a reliable means of foreign exchange. But, for the revolutionary movement, only the successful operation of the mines and export of their ore meant more revenue to continue fighting. For Villa to succeed in the overall struggle against foreign firms controlling the fate of Mexico, he needed to curry their favor while simultaneously maintaining a consistent, revolutionary popular platform for his troops. This meant convincing his thousands of partisans to help restore railroad service to these mines so that they could continue their export.

In the end, the situation or the Villistas was never meant to last, as the Constitutional government fell into disunity and civil war and Villa’s forces dissolved in the fighting. But on a more basic level, global mineral prices were at their lowest point in decades during 1913 and even in the absence of revolutionary turmoil, most firms were liquidating their investments in Mexican mining anyway. In the end, it was a lot of compromise and bloodshed that begat more compromise and bloodshed, while the American companies were subsidized by the Villista revolution during a time when, as a result of market forces, they would have ordinarily been tempted to abandon their investments.

Source 2: Gilbert, Dennis. “Emiliano Zapata: Textbook Hero” Mexican Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 127 – 159

Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/msem.2003.19.1.127

Emiliano Zapata is an official national hero of Mexico, by an act of Mexican congress that mandated his name be enshrined in gold script along the Wall of Honor in the legislature building. April 10, the day of his death, is considered a statutory “Day of National Mourning” during which speeches and memorials are commonplace public spectacles. There are more streets that bear his name than all of his more successful contemporaries (Villa, Madero, etc.) combined. The songs, books, poems, odes, articles, ceremonies and other homages to his legacy are too voluminous to number, including the largest equestrian statue in Latin America. At the time of his death in 1919, nobody would have suspected that he might have such a mythic status. He was known as the “Atilla of the South” in the halls of government, vilified in the public press throughout his life, and on top of all of that had been on a steady losing streak between 1915 and his death. What happened to promote him from a reviled rural terrorist to the most celebrated revolutionary hero of Mexico’s history?

The important background for the discussion of Zapata and the resurrection of his legacy is the relationship of the heavily Latinized elite to those who are more visibly Aboriginal. The literature and discourse of the time, generally penned by the elite, expressed disgust and fear at the primitive, provincial ways of “the Indian” and devote their intellectual energy to trying to find a way to integrate them into “civilized life.” These biases drastically affected the way Zapata’s contemporaries, who dismissed his political mission because they believed that he wasn’t capable, as an “Indian”, of having anything serious political vision outside of his immediate grievances. Despite his ignominy, he textbook history would redeem him in the eyes of common students by giving his life a symbolic importance in the overall narrative of Mexican history as it is taught.

The mood that emerged from the decade of chaos and bloodshed that was the Mexican Civil War and the 8 years of lesser, but nonetheless profound, political unrest was one that was looking for a way to understand the last 20 years of its history. Public school textbooks, while not a valuable historical resource in the way their editors intended, give us insights into the process by which Zapata became a crucial figure in understanding the goals of the initial revolution and the roles of others within the revolutionary story.

The common explanation of Zapata in a textbook history is as follows: the charismatic leader of a peasant army, Emiliano Zapata initially rose against Porfirio Diaz (despot) in support of Francisco Madero (democrat), only to have his hopes dashed on the rocks by Victoriano Huerta’s (traitor) coup that reignited the civil war. The similarities to America’s national mythology (democratic rebellion against a foreign-backed autocracy that risked betrayal [Benedict Arnold and the British Loyalist faction]) are worth noting, as the struggle for Latin American national identity has often been contrasted with the constancy of America’s national mythos. Zapata gave Mexico a figure to organize their national consciousness around, despite the fact that the elite Mexicans of his era would have been violently offended to have him representing their society’s values. Over time he was embellished by illustrators to have his now iconic oversized moustache and his dual bandoliers and became the symbol of the revival in agrarian social consciousness during the 1950s.

Populism and Publicity: Week 10 Reading

20th century modernity was a novel experience for every level of society, accompanied with new tools to facilitate connection to the now truly massive urban populations by political leaders. Previously, a political speech was made to a small assembled group on topics that were of interest and relevance to the specific community where the speech was being made. This added a layer of intimacy to politics that soon became lost in the generalized speeches broadcast to millions simultaneously via radio or played over loudspeakers to thousands in a densely packed city square. The people who took advantage of these innovations and the general sense of disorientation at the beginning of the century were frequently called populists by their detractors to try and highlight a vagueness that was a result of their new mass-media vehicles rather than any personal lack of ideological clarity. Once these populists came into power, they frequently nationalized broadcasting facilities as a way of trying to harness mass media as a tool of enforcing the state's cultural agenda, not just publicizing a political campaign.

Radio and mass media also helped construct a new codex of national identity that had nothing to do with one's class background or ethnicity through the broadcasting of songs and stories that became treasured cultural items for people across all sections of society. This new collective identity was usually based on an appeal to the paradoxical notion of belonging to a "community" made up of millions of simultaneous listeners as well as the broader national community (if the program was political in nature), which produced some of the highly emotional but irrational rhetoric associated with populism. At its root, populism feeds on the insecurity and transience of modern life that causes a citizen to reach out for anything that might satisfy the basic human instinct for belonging, even if it is as simple as listening to a song and knowing that your neighbour could sing along. Unsurprisingly, the people who emerged as major demagogues in Latin America during the advent of radio were people who could effectively capture this longing for a sense of community. Vargas in Brazil was unable to effectively cater to the needs of the people once he was in power, but Juan Peron had captured their attention even early in his career and knew how to effectively conduct his public relations as he ascended to the offices of power.