Content area
Full text
Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith, eds., Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press 2014)
A veritable revolution is underway in the historiography of mid-century Mexico. Until recently, historians were willing to cede this territory to colleagues in other disciplines, but with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, especially those of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Mexico's federal security agency, a new cadre of researchers has begun to take on this neglected period. No longer happy to accept the narrative promoted by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or pri, the political party that dominated Mexico from 1929 to 2000 and which recently returned to the presidency, these authors have begun to disentangle state propaganda and academic truisms from everyday lived experience during the period of Mexico's so-called economic miracle.
Benjamin Smith and Paul Gillingham's edited volume, Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, describes the state of the historiographical turn and moves the literature forward by attempting to bring some theoretical clarity to this emerging body of work. In their introduction, Gillingham and Smith survey the literature on the regime that emerged from the Cárdenas presidency (1934-1940) and changed the orientation of the government from redistribution and equality to industrialization and incessant growth. Finding the existing social science concepts of authoritarianism, hybrid regimes, and democratic authoritarianism lacking, the editors instead posit the term dictablanda, loosely translated as "soft authoritarianism", which they define as a "hybrid regime that combines democratic and authoritarian elements" and which demands "heterodox approaches" (vii) to its study. The term's specificity appeals to the historian's sense of contingency, and as Jeffrey Rubin summarizes in his final comments, it is "appealing," (391) even if, after the exercise, one returns to the more generalizable theories of Gramscian hegemony that historians of Mexico have found so apt.
As an organizing idea, dicatablanda is superb, and Smith and Gillingham have used it...