Bridge of the World

The history of socialism in Mexicoy goes back 150 years. Intimately linked with the labor movement, agrarian rebellion, and the radicalism of the intelligentsia, it has profoundly influenced all of these movements without controlling any of them. Mexican socialism has been marked by periods of ferment and prolonged periods of obscurity, waves of repression and government tolerance; its history consequently is quite difficult to reconstruct. Often forced to hide behind the masks of liberalism, populism, and even Christianity, Mexican socialism frequently has appeared as a diffuse influence or as a component of other strains of political heterodoxy. Even in the twentieth century few Mexicans have defined themselves as socialists, but many have admitted to harboring particular socialist ideas or sympathies.

Indeed, it is only truly possible to speak of a Mexican socialism starting in the early twentieth century. Surging in the 1930s, Mexican socialism peaked in 1970s, just before socialism entered a profound crisis worldwide. Behind the various avatars of Mexican socialism three broad trends can be discerned: Magonist anarchism, which calls for immediate socialist revolution; revolutionary Marxism, which calls for a long process of transformation utilizing all forms of struggle; and social democratic reformism, which insists on acting only within the framework of the current political system. The history of socialism in Mexico should not be confused with the history of the Mexican left, however, which has included many reformist and revolutionary movements which did not define themselves as socialist.

The early origins of socialism in Mexico can be found in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. The 1853 declaration of principles of the mutual aid society of Mexico City hatters spoke of two types of slavery —the “old one” linked to Spanish rule and “the modern, which snatches the profit of our work from us.” Shortly thereafter, the tailors of Mexico City followed suit, warning that “workers cannot be on the side of the bosses.”

In February 1861 Plotino C. Rhodakanaty, the “first socialist of Mexico” (as the historian José C. Valadez calls him), arrived in the port of Veracruz. Born in Greece and educated in Vienna and Berlin, Rhodakanaty hoped to establish an agrarian community in Mexico. Although his original plan failed, in 1865 he was able to set up a Club Socialista de Estudiantes in Mexico City and from 1866 to 1868 ran what he called a “school of reason and socialism” in nearby Chalco. Author of several books and many articles, Rhodakanaty was a persistent and active organizer, bringing together many young people who later would play a key role in the development of Mexican socialism. Rhodakanaty’s thinking was an eclectic blend of Proudhon, Fourier, and Christian socialism. Although he was a determined foe of private property and the state, he declared himself a partisan of peaceful revolution and “agrarian law.”

Sierra was not alone in his attack on the racial dimensions of social Darwinism. Matías Romero, long-time Mexican ambassador to the United States, wrote that education could turn Indians into “distinguished men.” While José Lápez Portillo y Rojas, Mexico’s most eminent novelist of the time, affirmed that the Spanish conquest of Mexico constituted the “triumph of the most fit” and thus conformed with “natural law,” he believed that culture, not race, determined success or failure in the human struggle for survival. Therefore, the Indians were capable of improving their situation through education. The Westernization of the Indian, López Portillo believed, would bring about a fusion of races in Mexico, to the ultimate benefit of the entire nation. Finally, Vicente Riva Palacio turned the genetic determinism of European social Darwinism on its head. The fusion of the Indian and the Spaniard would, he argued, one day produce a race superior to those of the rest of the world. After the Revolution, similar arguments would flow from the pen of intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos, who posited the famous notion that Mexico was the cradle of a “cosmic race.”

Porfirian intellectuals, then, generally stressed culture rather than biology (i.e., race) as the determinant factor in the human struggle for survival. All of them agreed with European social Darwinists that social competition was the prime motivation behind human progress. They thought that Mexico —with its social and racial divisions impeding progress —had fallen behind Europe and the United States and faced annexation unless it could catch up. They concurred that Mexico’s indigenous population constituted an obstacle to modernization, one that could be overcome either by white immigration or by thorough Hispanicization. With the exception of Bulnes, however, Mexican intellectuals believed that benign, paternalistic, and authoritarian rule could help their country attain the prosperity and stability that they observed in the industrializing nations of the North Atlantic. Again excepting Bulnes, they did not believe that the survivors in this competition owed their victory to racial determinants. Instead, thinkers such as Sierra and Portillo y Rojas called for the kind of rural education program that President Alvaro Obregón would implement in the early post-Revolutionary years. Such an education program was designed to lift Mexico’s indigenous population out of its plight and therefore contribute to a better performance of the Mexican nation in the universal struggle for survival.

Sierra’s eulogy of Indians and mestizos as the essentially Mexican ingredients of his country’s ethnic mixture shows why most Mexicans have never been able to embrace social Darwinist notions comfortably. While most Porfirians could readily identify with the elitist aspect of social Darwinism, the racist component of that ideology clashed with the interests of a ruling class that was no longer exclusively white by the end of the nineteenth century. Hence, social Darwinism a la mexicana became a truncated and debated ideology far removed from its European origins.

The social and political background of most of the Porfirian intellectuals might lead one to expect that they also agreed on the political precepts implicit in social Darwinist thought. Affiliated with the group known as the Cientificos, the four aforementioned individuals all came from prosperous families and played key roles in the Porfirian regime: Gamboa as minister to Guatemala, Limantour as secretary of finance, Bulnes as congressional representative, and Sierra as secretary of education. Indeed, Limantour and Bulnes proposed social Darwinist solutions to Mexican underdevelopment. The most powerful of the Cientfficos, Limantour advocated the rule of “natural elites,” specialists in public administration like himself. Bulnes favored European immigration to “whiten” the Mexican genetic stock, an idea that had emerged as a wholesale failure by the end of the nineteenth century. Both Limantour and Bulnes denigrated Mexico’s native population. An “orthodox” social Darwinist, Bulnes in particular portrayed the “Indians” as biologically inferior owing to their consumption of corn rather than wheat, the staple of choice of the inhabitants of the United States and Europe. Although Limantour’s technocratic impulse allowed greater hope for Mexico than Bulnes’s racial determinism, both solutions contained social Darwinist ideas.

Sierra’s ideas, however, demonstrate the diversity of Mexican social Darwinist thought. According to Sierra, the poverty and illiteracy of the Indian population lay at the root of his country’s social and political problems; education, he thought, could remedy both problems. Sierra severely criticized Bulnes for his racial determinism, and he even praised Indians and mestizos as the quintessential Mexican. In his insistence that all Indians needed to learn Spanish and the white man’s ways to be successful, however, he was certainly no less paternalistic than Limantour and Bulnes. Moreover, Sierra, like other Mexican intellectuals of the time, reviled Africans and their descendants. Nevertheless, Sierra’s belief in the Indians’ educability contradicts the widespread notion that the Porfirians used social Darwinism to justify their social and economic policies that aggravated the manifold sufferings of the indigenous population.

Indeed, the fact that Justo Sierra, as secretary of education, never pursued the rural education program that would have put his ideas into practice makes an important point about Mexican social thought. While Díaz and his retainers might have desired to justify their racist and elitist policies with social Darwinist attitudes, Porfirians like Sierra undermined these attitudes. Sierra did propose to build a great number of rural schools, but he never could overcome the resistance of Limantour and Díaz. Thus, Sierra the politician continued to serve a regime that kept Mexico’s rural population in poverty and illiteracy, while Sierra the historian and philosopher desired to uplift them. This contradiction in many ways resembles the indigenista charade of today’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional ( PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party), a party that has co-opted its share of socially conscious intellectuals only to render them ineffectual.

In the words of the historian Charles A. Hale, the term social Darwinism “has become a universal catchword for late nineteenth-century social attitudes.” Attitudes that could be labeled social Darwinist indeed abounded in Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico, but they were at times more contradictory than in agreement. None of the influential intellectuals of late-nineteenth-centuryMexico ever would have called himself a social Darwinist. To begin with, the Catholic Church reviled Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man as the work of the devil; to identify oneself with Darwinism of any sort invited bitter criticism in heavily Catholic Mexico. Moreover, most of the leaders of Porfirian Mexico acted on an intuitive sympathy with Darwinian ideas rather than a systematic study of Darwin’s work. Nevertheless, the set of ideas commonly known as social Darwinism —the belief that Darwin’s notion of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest” applies to social relationships —exerted a powerful influence on Mexican elites of the late-nineteenth century and remains influential today.

The reception of social Darwinism in Mexico constituted a double transfusion of concepts and ideas. First, the British sociologist Herbert Spencer transformed Darwin’s ideas on the origin of species into a social theory. Following the influence of Spencer, social Darwinism emerged as a set of two related assumptions: 1) human progress is the product of intergroup competition; and 2) elites are biologically conditioned to lead society. Then, Mexican intellectuals, acting on intuitive sympathy with Spencer’s and Darwin’s works, applied this social theory to their own country. Some of them combined Spencer’s ideas with Auguste Comte’s notion that society followed the same hard, inexorable laws that scientists found in chemistry, biology, and physics; others interpreted them as a call for order and progress as a prerequisite for attaining the economic development of the United States and the perceived cultural sophistication of Europe. In general, social Darwinism a la mexicana justified a rigidly stratified social pyramid, and it rationalized an authoritarian, technocratic regime. Within this overall consensus, however, the reception of Spencer’s and Darwin’s ideas entailed profound disagreements among Mexican intellectuals.

Mexican intellectuals such as Federico Gamboa, José Y. Limantour, Francisco Bulnes, and Justo Sierra agreed that their country faced a disadvantage in the global struggle for survival. Mexico, they concurred, lacked the technological sophistication of the industrializing nations of the North Atlantic. In Gamboa’s mind, this disadvantage was a relative one: he portrayed the small Central American nations as much more “backward” than Mexico and in need of Mexican tutelage. Compared to the United States and Europe, however, it was Mexico that was backward in the view of Limantour and Bulnes. The more racist and pessimistic Bulnes even asserted that the Mexican people had not “progressed” since Independence, remaining barbarian and living in darkness.

An elite-elite compromise, to which the Cristeros were not partners, formally ended the rebellions, although sporadic violence continued into the 1930s. This ending recalls the pre-Revolutionary strategy of social action, which sought to strengthen the parish structure while at the same time delegating to laity the responsibility for leading social organizations. An assessment of social action in terms of lay leadership as an organization goal suggests the failure of church strategy in Mexico, whereas it was particularly successful in western Europe during the same period. During 1911-13, the period of most clearly articulated political participation, Catholic laity was unable to function autonomously of clergy in Mexico. After the PCN debacle, Catholic social action ebbed and flowed, reacting to the strengths and weaknesses of the state. Middle-class intellectuals, both laity and clergy, led organizations often constituted from a mixed social base. However, this pattern generally disappeared with the Cristero Rebellion, and the 1926-29 social movements, articulated through civil disobedience, riot, and guerrilla warfare, rarely followed an intelligentsia or an elite clerical leadership.

When church and state reached an agreement and public worship resumed, the insurgency ended. Ironically, we must understand this end to the Cristero Rebellion as an autonomous act taken by pueblos across the country. However, it also meant the end of social Catholicism, because the bishops would not soon enact another social policy through groups headed by laity. Catholic social organizations had not been the principal mobilized force in the rebellion, yet the rebellion revealed a church unable to accept the democratic opening resulting from their own policy of using lay participation to push religious and social issues and solutions.