Thinking of the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent two decades of state consolidation in the global context that saw the rise of U.S. hegemony may best help us reflect on possible lessons for contemporary struggles in the Global South. I write these lines from Cuba, where I have been for most of January, arriving just a few days before the remains of the thirty-two Cuban security forces killed during the U.S. abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and the First Lady Cilia Flores. I write, too, as ICE agents kill white, U.S. citizens in cold blood for the crime of offering protection to the undocumented population that is scapegoated for the domestic damage wrought by a crumbling empire.[1] The urgency of the moment feels difficult to match, and no doubt, by the time this is published, we will be in the midst of a new crisis.
Arguably, a crumbling hegemon can do more damage in its downfall than in its ascent. As we witness the abandonment of international norms that accompanied the “American Century,” the U.S.’s capacity to act unchecked seems to have grown substantially. And yet, a view from Latin America—Operation Condor, the Massacre at El Mozote, the arming and training of the Contras, to name but a few—reveals the historically unchecked nature of U.S. terror, one whose logic was not to contain Soviet communism but to destroy home-grown projects of expansive democracy.[2] Indeed, the U.S.’s imperial rise was intimately tied to counter-revolution in its so-called backyard.
What can the first revolution of the twentieth century teach us about contemporary struggles in the Global South? This piece addresses this question by looking at some of the national, international, and transnational reverberations of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Nationally, the revolution shaped common sense notions of justice and a legacy to which subsequent movements both appealed to and nourished while creating a state whose legitimacy rested on administering access to land, education, and labor rights, and ensuring a basic set of social services. Internationally, the revolution produced a state that asserted its control over subsoil rights, defended other countries’ right to self-determination, welcomed political refugees, and, during the Cold War, navigated a third-way leadership between communism and capitalism. But it is the revolution’s transnational sphere that, I would like to think, might provide a measure of hope at this moment. The revolutionary ferment that marked both the years of armed struggle and the subsequent two decades of revolutionary consolidation provided a space where those of radical ideals could gather, witness the crumbling of previous structures of domination, dare to imagine new utopias, and create the paths for defusing and adapting them to different contexts. That the ascent of the U.S. empire coincided with a social revolution in the country that shared its border “challenged U.S. hegemony within the model of the New Imperialism” argues Christina Heatherton.[3] The global visions it helped produce were a constant foil to empire.
Legacies from Below
The 1910 Revolution so powerfully defined twentieth-century Mexico not only because it created a long-lasting state-party structure, but because those who it betrayed did not relinquish their ownership of it. Nor did its institutionalization foreclose their challenges. The story of Rubén Jaramillo, who in the Zapatista forces had achieved the rank of First Cavalry captain, is a case in point. As the revolutionary war neared its end, and the Constitutionalists headed for certain military victory, Jaramillo instructed his men, “Put your rifles away where you can easily find them again.” Future generations would not accept a life of enslavement, he explained, and when the time came, the struggle would continue.[4] Whether actually pronounced at the time or constructed years later as Jaramillo wrote his autobiography, the statement underscores the notion that, to achieve the justice enshrined in the 1917 Constitution, the battles, in some form, would continue. And, as the Jaramillistas would find, popular movements had to reinvent themselves. Through institutional means like campesino leagues, to state-sponsored cooperatives, such as the Zacatepec sugar refinery, to electoral struggles, armed incursions, and land invasions, the Jaramillistas fought to make real the revolutionary laws. In the process, they appealed to the legacies of Ricardo Flores Magón, Emiliano Zapata, and Lázaro Cárdenas. They also engaged in new frameworks of justice, most notably those inaugurated by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Thus, the two-and-a-half decades their movement spanned vividly reflect the dynamic legacies bequeathed by the revolution and an internationalist thinking. Jaramillo’s 1962 kidnapping and assassination—together with his wife and their three sons at the hands of the military soon after President Adolfo López Mateos had publicly granted him salvoconductos—added another repertoire to popular struggles: it radicalized them. The radicalization came both tactically and ideologically. Surviving Jaramillistas who, after the death of their leader, became part of Lucio Cabañas support base in the guerrilla struggles of the neighboring state of Guerrero, cautioned against negotiations with the government. Likewise, Cabañas’ ideological program appealed more uncompromisingly to socialism, a recognition of the limitations, if not the moral bankruptcy, of the Mexican Revolution. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the ghost of Zapata would powerfully return, this time in the form of an Indigenous rebellion that, from the southernmost state of Chiapas, galvanized the anti-corporate globalization movement. Long before the neoliberal ascendance had displayed its devolution to fascism, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation had declared “Enough!” and foiled the NAFTA banquet.
Internationalism
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Mexican landscape became dotted by armed guerrilla groups that, while small, represented ideological links to global struggles for national liberation. To be sure, the context—determined by Mexico’s own early twentieth-century revolutionary struggle—differed profoundly from its Latin American neighbors like Nicaragua, not to mention the anti-colonial struggles of the Global South. Yet the appeal to socialism as a project of justice was in step with revolutionaries who posited it as the only path to overcome the structures of underdevelopment. Despite Mexico’s ruling party’s seemingly infinite capacity to absorb dissent, the state still carried out a dirty war that, in places like Guerrero, included torture, death flights, and attacks on entire villages. Such state terror linked the Mexican government to the wave of counter-revolutionary forces at the heart of hemispheric Cold War policy. Unlike its southern neighbors, however, Mexico’s repression was tempered. This, again, was a legacy of the revolution whose land reform, anti-clerical legislation, and civilian control of the armed forces severed the church-oligarchy-military triumvirate that in places like Argentina and Chile structured fascist dictatorships. The Mexican Revolution’s nationalist character also led it to navigate a more independent foreign policy vis-à-vis the United States. Mexico’s assertion over its subsoil rights, put into practice by Lázaro Cárdenas’ 1938 oil expropriation, and the loss of half of its territory to the United States almost a century earlier, powerfully animated popular sentiments that the state could harness in support of a defiant position toward its northern neighbor—one more evident in rhetoric than in practice. Extensive compliance aside, recent scholars have shown Mexico’s ability to wield important leadership within multilateral institutions. And it was “the revolutionary process itself,” writes Christy Thornton, that “provided important ideological justification for Mexican advocacy.”[5] Its almost 2,000-mile border with the U.S. was, and remains, the only one conjoining the First and Third World, making Mexico a regional as well as a bilateral battleground. Its leadership, states Eric Zolov, “was the strategic and ideological lynchpin of the Pan-American alliance, and its diplomatic policies carried weight.”[6] This leadership manifested itself, on the one hand, through a consistent defense of Cuban self-determination and, on the other, by offering a path that, if ignored, Mexican diplomats warned, would lead recently independent nations in Asia and Africa down the road to socialism. Mexico’s foreign policy, “with all its nuances and contradictions,” as the Mexican economist José Romero recently put it, “preserved its singular feature: the defense of sovereignty as an operating principle, not as a rhetorical slogan”[7]—at least until now, when President Claudia Sheinbaum has acquiesced to Trump’s threats and halted oil shipments to Cuba.
Transnational Consciousness
The global context that produced the first revolution of the twentieth century fueled transnational consciousness. With their radical party platform, the Magonistas forcefully pushed revolution as the only path to liberation. They were more than the precursors to the Mexican Revolution. The transnational nature of their struggle is evident in both their consciousness and the repressive machinery designed to crush them. Early on, political repression sent many of them north where they mobilized among their compatriots, driven into U.S. territory by economic need or residing in the crevices left to them after the American takeover of the Southwest. Their struggle, and the repressive machinery produced to crush them, exemplified “the era’s interlocking cords of empire, capitalism, and white supremacy.”[8] Racial terror, a defining feature of the settler colonial project, victimized ethnic Mexicans but also led to an “explosion of indignation,” as Ricardo Flores Magón characterized the reaction to the lynching of Antonio Rodríguez. A fieldhand who resided in Rock Springs, Texas, Rodríguez was kidnapped, tied to a tree, and burned alive by a white mob for allegedly killing his boss’s wife. Dutifully reproducing the protection of white womanhood trope (Rodríguez’s own boss—a man known for beating his wife—had made this accusation), U.S. newspapers justified the killing.[9] Yet, in cities across the U.S. and as far away as Mexico City and Cuba, protesters decried this latest instance of racial terror, the 448th on record.[10]
“While the Mexican Revolution is often understood as a contained nationalist event,” writes Heatherton, “the allied struggle of the Mexican peasantry and working class was largely mobilized against dramatic transformation of property ownership, state power, governance, and social structures wrought by the ascendant influences of foreign capital and the political economy.”[11] As they mobilized men and women, workers, fieldhands, farmers, journalists, and lawyers on both sides of the border, the security forces from both the U.S. and Mexico collaborated in their pursuit. When counterinsurgency agencies like the FBI were created, they had as one of their first assignments persecuting the Magonistas. From Mexico, Porfirio Díaz applauded their arrests.[12]
The 1906 Magonistas call on the Mexican working class to organize and “take part in the tremendous struggle that alone will liberate the proletariat of this world”[13] would, during the revolutionary war and the subsequent consolidation of the state, find dynamic expression. From the murals that adorned government ministries and brought together Marx, Lenin, and Zapata; to the Anti-Imperialist League headquartered in Mexico City, which called for the return of the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo, pan-Latin American solidarity, the internationalization of the Panama Canal, and the Independence of Puerto Rico and the Philippines; to the Nicaragua solidarity campaign, whose support for Augusto César Sandino’s struggle against U.S. marines was so extensive that it encompassed even the mainstream press and officials in the Calles administration; Mexico’s revolutionary experience nurtured an unprecedented clarity about empire, one that understood “U.S. hemispheric dominance [as] inseparable from the global dominance of capitalism.”[14]
The imperial boomerang we now see in fascism’s domestic rise is unmasking the raw power upon which the U.S. long relied to establish its dominance over Latin America. That power has been consistently defied by legacies of resistance, internationalist longings, and rebellious states. It is no surprise then, that, faced with its diminishing global dominance—but still eminently powerful and with unrivaled military might—the U.S. dispenses with pretenses of democracy. The kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign nation—for the oil, President Trump does not shy away from telling us—and the energy stranglehold on Cuba issued in the boastful tradition of a medieval siege as the United Nations and the international community issue the meekest of protests, vividly displays how little formal counterweight there is to empire. Mexico’s recent decision to cede to U.S. pressure and stop its oil shipments to Cuba, Romero alerts, is “the moment in which sovereignty has ceased to be the guiding principle to become a variable up for negotiation.” It may be a symbolic loss, he continues, “but symbolic losses tend to have lasting effects that are difficult to reverse.”[15]
Where does this leave the question of the Mexican Revolution as a foil to empire? It tells us we cannot rely on states which, at best, are slow to act, if they act at all. But the Mexican Revolution did produce a transnational consciousness that today might guide our efforts to resist the most noxious effects of the crumbling empire. Writing from Mexico where he had fled President Gerardo Machado’s repression in Cuba, Julio Antonio Mella denounced the characteristics that made the U.S. empire different from its Roman and British predecessors, which established “dominance through military conquest.” U.S. power instead took the form of “absolute economic domination with political guarantees when they are necessary,” with intergovernmental summits and Wall Street shaping the imperial contours.[16] A counter project could come only from below, “by the revolutionary forces that are enemies of international capitalism: workers, peasants, the indigenous, students and vanguard intellectuals.”[17]
This continental unity might seem farther away than ever. The wreckage of the crumbling empire is striking hard at what were already tenuous bonds of resistance. But the wreckage can embolden. It can produce a transnational consciousness such as that which, over a century ago, propelled a revolution that, while not a foil to empire, birthed a wellspring of legacies to challenge it.