State Governors in the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1952: Portraits in Conflict, Courage, and Corruption (review)
Since the 1970s, regional studies of postrevolutionary Mexico have thrived amid scholarly interest in explaining the PRI's control of the state through much of the twentieth century. But even with the recent cultural turn, which has emphasized the local and popular facets of state building, regional studies still commonly portray governors as either charismatic caudillos or bland bureaucratic cogs in the ruling party's patronage machine. This collection, by contrast, shows us governors who were occasionally violent and sometimes heroic, though most often pragmatic. As William Beezley suggests in his introductory chapter, many governors pursued the hard-headed state building at the regional level—including mass organizing, social reform, and the modernization of infrastructure and taxation—that ultimately underpinned the consolidation of the national state. Almost all of the content chapters eschew explicit theoretical and historiographical insights, but together they make important contributions regarding state building, regional sovereignty, and the Janus-face of Revolutionary politics.