Peace by institutions: The rise of political parties and the making of the modern Mexican state, 1920-1928

This dissertation provides a new account of the making of the modern Mexican state by examining the emergence of political institutions in the period immediately following the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. By tracing the development of political parties in Mexico between 1920 and 1928, it helps to make sense of the transition that Mexico made from a decade of civil war during the Revolution, to the consolidation of a durable and stable political system by the mid-1930s.;In 1929, scarcely a decade after the end of the Mexican Revolution, General Plutarco Elias Calles founded the first official party of the state, the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). This was a predecessor to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated Mexican politics at all levels for the rest of the twentieth century. Although flawed in many respects, this unique political system helped Mexico to achieve a lasting postrevolutionary peace. However, there are very few accounts of the genesis of this system, and its formation is therefore often described as having been very sudden, out of a vacuum of political institutions. This dissertation shows that, on the contrary, the official party of the state was only formed after a decade of active experimentation with political party formation in Mexico.;Some of the most important of these political experiments took place in the Southeast of Mexico, in the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatan. In these states in the 1920s, a group of self-described Socialists broke new ground in Mexico with the designs of their political parties and their strategies of governance once they came to power. Political parties already existed in Mexico, but the southeastern Socialist parties constituted something new. By forging multi-class coalitions and balancing centralized authority with local autonomy, the southeastern Socialists were able to enact progressive and sometimes radical social reforms. In doing so, they pioneered a means of translating revolutionary promises of reform into a system of postrevolutionary governance. The Southeast has generally been regarded as peripheral to Mexican politics in this period, but this dissertation demonstrates that the innovations of the Socialist parties of the region in the immediate postrevolutionary period served as essential precedents for the subsequent consolidation of the modern Mexican political system. These regional Socialist regimes in the 1920s also presaged the corporatism and progressive populism that would become the hallmark of the Mexican federal government in the 1930s.;This dissertation focuses first on the beginnings of Socialism in the Southeast in the state of Yucatan, and then shows how the same basic organizational principals were subsequently applied in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco. It also examines two rebellions against the Mexican government during the 1920s, and demonstrates the central roles that the Socialist Southeast and emerging political parties had in both of these moments of crisis. By revealing the extensive connections that existed between the southeastern Socialist regimes and national politics in Mexico, and demonstrating the influence that these regional experiments had on the process of national political consolidation during the 1920s, this dissertation clarifies the origins of both the official party of the state in Mexico, and the political system that it so effectively dominated for so many years.