멕시코혁명 및 혁명 후 체제에 대한 연구 동향의 변화 -1980년대 말 이래 영·미 학계의 연구를 중심으로

Abstract

This article attempts to examine the recent research trend of the Mexican Revolution with a special emphasis on English & American academia. As exemplified in a popular title the Mexican Revolution, 1910~1940, many works have claimed that after 1940, the institutionalized Revolution began to change its preceding radical orientation. According to the populist interpretations by prorevolutionists, the Mexican Revolution was considered to be a social revolution from the bottom up, for instance, represented by the Zapatista peasant movement, and a consensual process for modernity and social justice. However, the revisionists, reinforced especially after the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968 in that the so-called revolutionary police and army killed more than 200 resistant students, have criticized diverting revolutionary myths and the governing coalitions top-down imposition against the popular will. For them, the Mexican Revolution resulted in a mighty centralizing Leviathan that would crush poor, god-fearing, and localized people to turn them into new submissive elements for capitalist development. Since the late 1980s, a new historical perspective called post-revisionist viewhas tried to synthesize the populist and revisionist interpretations of the Revolution and post-revolutionary Mexico. Questioning the strength of postrevolutionary regime and the gullibility of the peasants, this new research based on cultural approaches has attempted to understand popular participation in local and national politics, and the cultural dimension of interaction between state and peasantry. Its practitioners tend to rely on the concept of negotiation to grasp this interaction. For example, while the Lázaro Cárdenas presidency (1934~1940) was either extolled as the culmination of the Mexican Revolution in the populist perspective, or criticized as an effective manipulator of the masses in the interest of modernizing national bourgeoisie by the revisionist interpretations, post-revisionist view has reshaped the era as a contested terrain in that top-down elite planning was in conflict and negotiation with regional popular forces, both progressive and conservative, on the way to forming a new Mexican nation.