The Wind That Swept Mexico

The History of the Mexican Revolution 1910-1942
text by Anita Brenner
photographs assembled by George R. Leighton

Originally published in 1943, and then reissued without revision in the 1970s. The text is a little breezy for me to find it useful (or enjoyable to read), but the collection of almost 200 photographs is wonderful. It's almost sufficient to look at the pictures and read the captions.

Starting in 1910, with a formal portrait of Porfirio Diaz, looking quite Kaiser-like, they include everyday street scenes, from cities and towns throughout the country. They feature a few of the famous revolutionary photos, such as Villa and Zapata in the presidential chair in Mexico City, and plenty of faces of ordinary people.

I don't really have a reflection for this one, rather a report on what I learned (which may reflect on how we teach history, I suppose). Traditionally, the years of the "active" revolution are given as 1910-1917, the time of heavy violence. In 1910, the government was led by Diaz practically as monarch; in 1917 Carranza was inaugurated and the Constitution written. The social revolution, redistribution of land (and power), is generally given to have burst back into activity in 1938, when Cardenas appropriated foreign oil fields.

How did that happen? Where did Cardenas come from? Why all of a sudden, well into a global depression, this reversion to land reform and reclamation of Mexico's patrimony?

Having been through two university courses on Mexican history, plus my own best reading from the public library, I had spent sort of a while trying to work out a plausible theory. (I spent really a while trying to find a common intellectual precursor with Roosevelt's New Deal policies.) Nothing.

Then this photo of "A young Lázaro Cárdenas during the Revolution". Duh! Do the math! When else would he have developed, and seen implemented, such a set of values?

And a true road anecdote

(from Dr. Lynn Warner, Dyersburg, Tennessee)

Dr. Warner and his wife were travelling back from the Gulf Coast, through Mississippi to Tennessee, on two-laned paved blacktop, through the open delta and through the bottomland hardwood forests of the northern part of the state. It was dark, and it was raining. Every now and then the headlights would flash on the eyes of a deer or fox off to the side of the road, but other than that, there was nothing but the rain and the dark.

They were trying to push along the curvy road, wanting to get on home but not wanting to drop off onto a muddy shoulder and get stuck. They came up a little hill and rounded the curve and saw an orange diamond-shaped temporary road hazard sign: "Death Ahead".

Despite that threat/warning, they continued on their journey. A few more curves, and they came to a section of road with several cars parked along the shoulder, and people in their slickers trudging up to a small house set in a clearing. A state trooper was directing traffic. Turns out that someone had died, and the laying out was at home. The sign was just meant to warn of pedestrians and congestions.

Another opening road scene

All The King's Men
Robert Penn Warren, 1946

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shiny against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her back on but you can't because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you'll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won't make it, of course. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he'll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent throbbing blue of the sky, and he'll say ""Lawd God, hits a-nudder one done done hit!" And the next nigger down the next row, he'll say "Lawd God," and the first nigger will giggle, and the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the sun like a heliograph. Then a few days later the boys from the Highway Deepartment will mark the spot with a little metal square on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt off the shoulder, the metal square painted white and on it in black a skull and crossbones. Later on love vine will climb up it, out of the weeds.

Déjà vu all over again?

Shooting the Moon
The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever
2001, by David Harris.


Harris seems to particularly enjoy quoting law enforcement officials saying the f-word, and is a little shaky on some obvious facts (like highway names), which suggests he may be shaky on some less obvious ones. But I am supposed to be reflecting rather than reviewing...

(Although Harris has a strong first paragraph:
One of a kind, this story begins at its end, in the here and now of Miami, where the afternoon rain sizzles off the pavement and cruise ships dock for weekends on Biscayne Bay, flags limp, smothered in warmth on all but the very worst of days, the air heavy with the breath of swamps long since paved over; Miami, jumping-off point for America's hemispheric underbelly, where all directions point south, the evenings end with breakfast, and the fast lane runs bumper-to-bumper from the beach to the jungle and back; Miami, no holds barred, where if it weren't for "under the table", there would be no table at all; Miami, nose open and packing heat, where twenty-dollar bills are moved around town by the suitcaseful and almost anything goes as far as it is able and not much farther.
Cue Miami Vice music.)


The book is about Manuel Noriega, deposed Panamanian strongman. Remember those crazy 80s when the CIA financed itself with dope runs, leasing the planes for money laundering between trips? La Guerra, in Central American terms. Arms for hostages, Iran-contra-gate, crazy like a fox Bill Casey, and that poster boy for national service and close shaving, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

Not to be glib! People suffered, suffered horribly and died, by the tens of thousands across the region. And people of faith and people of strong values thoughtfully and prayerfully made hard choices about whether to preserve their moral purity and sacrifice their society’s future.

But there was money and power and secrecy that may not have been used for good. Which caused me to reflect on recent US intelligence reforms, including the creation of a truly "central" agency function. Sure, it sounds more efficient. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be more effective - no more duplication of effort, no more intelligence dropped in the cracks, no missed connections due to inter-agency barriers. In a less perfect world, we've lost checks and balances, independent opinions from independent agencies.

Especially since recent intelligence "failures" seem more related to lack of Arabic speakers than to lack of intelligence or of skilled analysts, I'm not sure we made a good trade.