Two decades ago, when Mexico’s remarkably durable one-party state was showing signs of imminent collapse, historians began dissecting the immediate postrevolutionary Mexican state (1920–1940) searching for clues to its longevity. They found it to be surprisingly fragile. Lacking the political muscle to impose its will, the state was forced to work through (often counterrevolutionary) regional strongmen. Cultural policy had to be negotiated with peasants, Catholics, and the parents of schoolchildren. Even the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), which expropriated the foreign-held oil fields and redistributed nearly 50 million acres of land, was, in the words of Knight, more “jalopy” than “juggernaut.”1
Today’s scholars of modern Mexico are turning their attention to the middle decades of the twentieth century, a time of robust economic growth and political stability known as the dictablanda, or “soft” dictatorship. This timely edited volume explores how the country that launched the first social revolution...