This is an accessible and sweeping history of a crucial yet overlooked and misunderstood subject in Mexican history: the rise and fall of the victors of the Mexican Revolution, the revolutionary faction from the northwestern state of Sonora. It is more than a collective biography of the most well-known Sonoran leaders Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles and their affiliates. The book clearly explains many of the historical factors, connections, and alliances that prepared them to manage power, and to ultimately lose it. It traces how the Sonorans used the military and political experience they gained during the Revolution that began in 1910 to rise to power a decade later. They belonged to, but did not dominate, the revolutionary constitutionalist forces, then under the leadership of Venustiano Carranza from the northeastern state of Coahuila, that formally created Mexico’s modern state and framed its constitution in 1917. However, the Sonorans overthrew Carranza and seized state power in 1920. For the next decade and a half—especially during Obregón’s presidency from 1920 to 1924 and Calles’s from 1924 to 1928—they constituted the dominant force in Mexican politics and governance.
This book explains all of this and more, including the reasons why the main characters in such a critical historical drama have suffered such historiographical neglect. These reasons include the fact that later events in the 1930s, and retrospective understandings of those years, overshadowed the importance of how Mexican state leaders managed power in the 1920s. As the book also argues, scholarship on the period since World War II has contributed to teleologies in which the previous decades tended to figure more as part of an origin story of single-party governance rather than a contingent period in which Mexico’s revolutionary power brokers exercised substantial agency over the state and in the creation of its allied party. This book overcomes those obstacles in several ways.
One way was the author’s prior research on and publication of significant works on Obregón, Calles, and the 1920s that served as a strong foundation for this book. Other ways were the author’s persistent research in previously inaccessible personal archives of those leaders, as well as many other original sources, for example, from the Vatican on the Mexican state’s conflict with the Catholic Church, which gave rise to the state’s war with the faithful in the Cristero Rebellion, from 1926 to 1929. The book’s careful reconstruction of these and other controversial events—including failed military rebellions from 1923 to 1924 and in 1929, and the massacre of military candidates opposed to the regime in 1927—made it more than a synthesis of the author’s prior work.
Its close examinations of the leaders’ origins and motives in the contexts of crises, including wars and successions, also contributed to the book’s interconnected and expansive reach. Evidence of this includes insights from sound and growing scholarship on this time period in Mexican history; the integration of Sonora’s pre-revolutionary and revolutionary history into a national narrative; multi-level analyses of regional, interregional, and national histories; and original research not only into Obregón or Calles but also their erstwhile Sonoran allies and short-term presidents Adolfo de la Huerta and Abelardo L. Rodríguez, among many others.
Specific insights, based on dedicated research into the leaders’ business and other property records such as last wills and testaments, proved indispensable to the book’s arguments. In the case of Obregón, the book convincingly argued that his mounting debts, and his refusal to pay, significantly influenced his decision to run for reelection in 1928, before his victory and assassination that summer. While no one can know how a second Obregón term would have turned out, the book’s balanced appraisal of the different historical circumstances and challenges that he and Calles faced during their respective presidencies demonstrated more of an equilibrium between the two leaders and their political qualities than the scholarship usually allows.
