Last month I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dr. Steven Hyland for the Historias Podcast of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS).
Check it out here: https://soundcloud.com/historiaspod/historias-107-state-consolidation-in-post-revolution-mexico-with-sarah-osten
One of the many things we talked about was my new article that came out in the journal The Latin Americanist this past June, entitled “Out of the Shadows: Violence and State Consolidation in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1927-1940” (available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757675/).
I have never worked for longer or more intensively on any article-length piece of research; this was the product of nearly eight years of research and writing, on and off. Known informally around my house for all that time as “the murder article,” it tells the story of the mass assassination of 14 political dissidents in Mexico in 1927 at the side of a highway outside of Huitzilac, Morelos, and also the story of the official investigation of the case ten years later, when it became politically useful to reckon with it in the mid-1930s, at another moment of political transition.
General Carlos A. Vidal, early 1920s
This article was an offshoot of my book research on Socialism in southeastern Mexico in the 1920s. In 2012 I was made aware of a cache of documents that were briefly made available online by the historical archive of the Ministry of Defense (SEDENA), in commemoration of the bicentennial of Mexican independence in 1810 and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution which began in 1910. The SEDENA archive could reasonably be described as the Fort Knox of Mexican archives: it is immensely difficult to access even for professional researchers, and scholars are usually very restricted in terms of which documents they may view once they are there. I was very fortunate to have already been able to do some research there in person, but like most researchers had only been able to work with “cancelados” (personnel files of former members of the military). For all of these reasons, the existence of a SEDENA archive website was an especially exciting prospect. Because I was still working on my book on southeastern Socialism, I fired up the site and the first keyword search I tried was for “Carlos Vidal,” who was the Socialist governor of Chiapas in the 1920s who was also a Brigadier General.
The first hit that came up from that first search was a 750+ page file of the military’s investigation of the Huitzilac Massacre of 1927, in which Vidal was killed, which was conducted by Lázaro Cárdenas’ government in the mid-1930s (for some very interesting reasons that I explore in the article). The file included the testimonies taken from eyewitnesses, mostly soldiers and officers present at the scene of the massacre, by the military’s investigators over the course of about a year. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only historian to have worked with this extraordinary document collection, which was the main documentary base for this article; the website was subsequently taken down after the database ceased to function some years back.
One of the interesting features of the investigation file was that it also included copies of multiple tabloid exposes about the massacre that appeared in the summer of 1935, just before the official investigation was opened (intriguing timing!). One of these was in a magazine called Mujeres y Deportes, which combined political reporting with sports coverage, and, you guessed it, pictures of women (a combination of content the editor in chief formulated specifically to maximize his sales). To give you a taste, here’s the kind of content Mujeres y Deportes was publishing side by side in August of 1935:
My only regret with this article is that I couldn’t share more of the details I found in the investigation file, because I had to make room for other sources, and of course also for analysis (and not have it be 80 pages long). One of the reasons the article took me as long as it did was the challenge I faced in writing about the history of the massacre itself, in the 1920s, and also writing about the historical context for the investigation of the massacre in the 1930s, while also trying to highlight the documents of the investigation file to the greatest extent possible.
Working with this collection was one of the highlights of my career as an historian thus far. It’s hard to imagine ever having an equivalently momentous stroke of research luck again, but here’s hoping.
Here’s the abstract of the article that came out of this research:
In October of 1927, fourteen men were assassinated by federal soldiers by the side of a highway outside of Mexico City. Among them was Francisco R. Serrano, a prominent general running for president in opposition to the re-election of former president Alvaro Obregón. Serrano and other anti-reelectionists regarded Obregón's potential return to power to be an unacceptable violation of the Mexican revolutionary prohibition against presidential reelection; they also feared a return to the personalist politics of the pre-revolutionary period. The government's justification for the killing of political dissidents, in what is now remembered as the Huitzilac Massacre, was that the anti-reelectionists were in open rebellion against the government, and that their executions were both just and necessary. Yet the victims had not been tried or convicted of any crime, nor were their assassins. Eight years later, at a moment of momentous political transition in Mexico, the federal government itself impelled the army to investigate the massacre for the first time. This article is based on the military's records of its yearlong investigation of 1937–8, which were briefly made available to the public for the first time in 2010. It demonstrates that the reformist government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) turned the massacre from a political liability into a valuable asset, as the investigation of the killings became a powerful symbol of his government's broader, public repudiation of intra-elite and state-sponsored violence in Mexico's recent past. It argues that the Cardenistas' explicit turn away from political violence was an essential part of an ongoing process of postrevolutionary political consolidation, but that the Huitzilac case also ultimately set a precedent of effective criminal impunity for agents of state-sponsored violence, including members of the military, thus further complicating the history of Mexico's postrevolutionary demilitarization of politics.
I am currently working on an unrelated second book on Mexican solidarity and support for Central American revolutions in the 1970s and 1980s (which really deserves its own post here at some point!), but I plan to come back to opposition parties and political campaigns in the 1920s and 30s (and thus inevitably back to Vidal and the anti-reelectionists again), in my third book.