Buchenau, Jurgen. Plutarco Elias Calles and the Mexican Revolution.

• Author: Eineigel, Susanne
• Position: Book review

Buchenau, Jurgen. Plutarco Elias Calles and the Mexican Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007, xxvii + 275 pages. Paper, $34.95.

From 1924 to 1934, Plutarco Elias Calles (1877-1945) served as a key consolidator of the Mexican state, severely weakened by a violent and destructive revolution (1910-17). Calles served as president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928 and was an early architect of the one-party political system that held power in Mexico until 2000. Despite his importance to Mexico's political history, Calles has received relatively little attention from biographers who otherwise have written volumes on other revolutionary leaders such as Alvaro Obregon, Pancho Villa, and Emilio Zapata. In Plutarco Elias Calles and the Mexican Revolution, historian Jurgen Buchenau fills this gap with a fine biography of the man known by Mexicans as the Jefe Mdximo (Head Chief) during the formative years of twentieth-century Mexican politics.

Although the book focuses on Calles's public life between 1911 and 1935, Buchenau succinctly contextualizes his subject's childhood and middle-class upbringing on Mexico's northeastern border region during the late Porfiriato era (1867-1911). Buchenau explains how the particular characteristics of the border region, with its proximity to the United States and absence of rail connection to Mexico City along with its economy based on ranching and U.S.-owned mining operations, shaped Calles's attitudes towards reform, politics, and the Revolution. In addition, Calles's experiences as a student and teacher in the late Porfirian education system, heavily imbued with positivist philosophy, inspired the ambitious educational reforms and projects he undertook during his presidency.

Calles's political connections grew despite economic setbacks resulting from several failed business ventures while working as a hotel manager, farmer, and mill operator. According to Buchenau, the northern state of Sonora served as a "training ground for [Calles's] eventual political career" (p. 21). In 1911, he became comisario (police chief) of the border town of Agua Prieta. His political appointment, combined with his commercial (and smuggling) enterprises, turned Calles into a strategically important "border broker" (p. 31) who supplied the Constitutionalist movement during the Revolution with weapons, ammunition, and supplies purchased in the United States. The winning revolutionary faction rewarded Calles with the post of...