Vergara, German, Review of Justin Castro, Apostle of Progress

Latin American Research Review, 2018

Estudios De Historia Moderna Y Contemporanea De Mexico, 2001

Journal of the Southwest, 2016

In this article, I make the case that engineer Modesto C. Rolland’s work was critical in bringing the Baja California Peninsula, for better or worse, into the nation-state during Mexico's revolutionary era. Influenced by his provincial upbringing, his education in Mexico City, and his love of engineering, Rolland became an ardent nationalist who believed in a strong central government. I provide key examples of his work and discuss its legacy, including his initiatives in Baja California but also his work in Mexico’s Tehuantepec Isthmus, which was tied in important ways to his goals for the peninsula. In the process, I hope to show that despite the fact that many of his aspirations for Baja California were not realized to the extent he had hoped during his lifetime, some of them were, and that many of the plans he helped popularize came to fruition in the decades following his death in 1965. His continual promotion of the Baja California Peninsula brought it to the attention of revolutionary leaders and businessmen, affecting subsequent developers and historians of the region. All the while, Rolland became one of the most influential bajacalifornianos in the national government, a fact not well recognized.

History Compass, 2007

This article examines the recent trend to create a new periodization that concludes that the revolution ended in 1920 and therefore the decades of the 1920s and 1930s should be identified as the post revolution. The article argues that using the label post-revolutionary ignores major revolutionary social programs during the 1920s and 1930s and disregards the revolutionary achievements of Presidents Alvaro Obregón, Plutarco Calles, and Lázaro Cárdenas. The article proposes that recent studies of women during the revolution, and social programs in the cities both suggest a different periodization, but one that includes the disputed decades of the 1920s and 1930s, reaching instead to 1953, 1958, or perhaps best, 1982. Murals from the era of the revolution embellish the public buildings across Mexico. In the offices of the Ministry of Public Education, Diego Rivera painted two sets of panels on the second floor of the Ministry's Courtyard of Fiestas in 1928. His murals illustrate two popular songs, called corridos, from the era, entitled 'The 1910 Mexican Agrarian Revolution', written by José Guerrero, and 'That is How the Proletarian Revolution Will Be' by Alfredo Ramos Martínez. 1 The lyrics to these songs appear on cartoon-like ribbons above the life-sized images that illustrate the nation's agrarian revolution in the first set of panels and the promise of the proletarian revolution to come in the second. Coincidentally, the murals visually express a good deal about the historiography of the nation's revolution. Historians writing about the revolution generally agree about its focus on agrarian reform, but increasingly they have become dismissive of the efforts by the revolutionaries to achieve social change in the city and for organized workers in particular. In this analysis, the revolution ended because it did not result in the proletarian revolution that many expected, that historians wanted, and that Rivera portrayed. This is indeed rather curious. The losers, in a sense, have been the subject of the history of the revolution, focusing on the countryside and ignoring the cities that did not produce the revolution as expected. Historians, politicians, and artists have concurred that along with the horrific, spasmodic violence that began in 1910, the revolutionaries carried out social programs inspired by the

Latin American research review, 2024

In 1952, as summer brought the annual rains to Mexico City, engineer Modesto C.

Politics & Policy, 2019

Canadian journal of history, 2009

2015

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2007

Book Reviews Skierka, Volker (2004) Fidel Castro: A Biography , Polity Press (Cambridge), xxiv + 440 pp. £25.00 hbk [Translated from the German by Patrick Camiller]. ' One thing is certain … Fidel Castro is there to win … he does not have a moment ' s peace until he manages to invert the terms and turn it into victory '. Chapter 1 ' The Heroic Myth ' (p. 1). ' The man who serves a revolution ploughs a sea … ' Chapter 10 ' Don Quixote and History ' (pp. 378-379). Volker Skierka opens and closes his biography of Fidel Castro with the words of Gabriel (Gabo) García Marquez. The opening quote, taken from Gabo ' s 1998 A Personal Portrait of Fidel , is prelude to declaring Castro one of the greatest idealists of our time, perhaps his greatest virtue, though also his greatest danger. It is a statement to which Skierka clearly adheres (referring also to Castro himself having said his favourite literary hero is Don Quixote, jousting at windmills until the bitter end). The closing quote is from Gabo ' s 1991 novel, The General in his Labyrinth , on the Liberator Bolívar. The parallels are there to be drawn. Framing his biography thus, Skierka provides the key to understanding how the youthful Castro led the 1959 Cuban Revolution to power and how the aging Castro, now nearing 80, has held onto power to this day. Castro ' s idealism led Cuba down exhilarating and perilous paths, garnering the support of peoples and incurring the wrath of its powerful nation to the north, punctuated by pragmatic twists and turns. How could Castro, in 1989, abandon power at the precise moment the Cuban Revolution augured to be most at peril? As Cubans say, a captain does not jump a sinking ship, and Castro would not want to go down in history as having led a failed revolution. He set out to buck the domino theory of the end of socialism, guiding Cuba through the crisis of the post-Soviet globalised world, as if in a war zone (this was one reason why the Castro leadership studied Churchill ' s World War II steering of Britain). It is by no means gratuitous that Skierka should draw on Gabo, who has spent much time in Cuba and with Castro. Skierka, a German journalist who has had assignments in Latin America, including Cuba, requested but was never given an interview with his subject-his only encounter being at the German Embassy in Cuba in 2002, a year after its German publication. Skierka succeeds in steering a middle ground on Castro and his legacy. Like previous accounts, his is political rather than personal, as there is little beyond rumour and hearsay about Castro ' s private life after coming to power. Readers familiar with other Castro biographies will fi nd well-trodden ground in Skierka ' s account, especially in the early chapters, which draw almost exclusively on those biographies-some by British authors, giving the lie to the claim that this is the fi rst to give a European perspective (unless the UK is not to be considered part of Europe).