Stumbling Its Way through Mexico records the early attempts by the Moscow-based Communist International to organize and direct a revolutionary movement in Mexico. The period studied, from 1919 to 1929, was characterized at the beginning by a wave of revolutions in Europe that the Bolsheviks expected to grow into an international phenomenon. However, contrary to their expectations, the revolutionary tide ebbed, and the new age they had expected receded into an uncertain future. In response, Moscow sent agents and recruited local leaders worldwide to sustain and train local revolutionary movements and to foment what they saw as an inevitable seizure of power by Communist-led workers.

 

Unlike the Soviet seizure of power in Russia, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 had not changed the fundamental character of the nation-state. However, it did represent a sea change in the relationship between the state and society. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Mexican workers already had generations of experience in the struggle against oppression, in forming class solidarity, in organizing strikes, and had tasted both success and failure. For decades in their workplaces, Mexicans had debated how to end the exploitation of labor and practice international solidarity. Mexico had an indigenous labor movement acting with some success to establish a place in a new Mexico. The agents that Moscow chose to lead the Communist movement in Mexico lacked an understanding of the local situation and presumed a lack of indigenous confidence and experience that doomed to failure their efforts to impose external control over the labor movement.

 

Based on documents found principally in the Soviet archives recently opened to the public, Stumbling Its Way through Mexico is an invitation to rethink the history of Communism in Mexico and Latin America.

 

Daniela Spenser is a historian and researcher with CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), and is the author of The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s and coeditor of In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, and editor of Espejos de la guerra fria.

"Spencer (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social, Mexico) explores the impact of the Mexican and Bolshevik revolutions on the Communist International's 1919-1929 attempt to build a Communist Party and movement in Mexico. She concludes that the radicalization of traditional Mexican social organizations and community life during the prior Porfirian dictatorship, strengthened by a decade of armed revolution, led to a growing ideological platform embodied in the 1917 constitution. Workers' acceptance of corporate capitalism in exchange for the security of being included in the new revolutionary state project greatly hampered the penetration of Bolshevik ideas. Spencer first examines the Soviet, Mexican, and international contexts in which the Communist International arose and its emissaries sought to found a Communist Party in Mexico. She details the leading participants' efforts to recruit Mexican workers and intellectuals in the face of a fluid reality that contrasted with preconceived ideas of Mexico. A final section analyzes the consequences of the Soviet Union's change in foreign policy in 1921 from confrontation to collaboration with capitalist governments and then of simultaneous crises in both the USSR and Mexico at the end of the 1920s. Notably, Spencer uses Russian state archives that became available in the 1990s. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."
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