Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México University of California Institute For Mexico and The United States

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States
Backwater Bureaucrat to Revolutionary Myth-Maker: Bernardo M. de León, Caciquismo, and

Memory in Nayarit, 1920–1990
Author(s): Ryan M. Alexander
Source: Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 73-95
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the University of California Institute for
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Backwater Bureaucrat to Revolutionary
Myth-Maker: Bernardo M. de León, Caciquismo,
and Memory in Nayarit, 1920–1990
Ryan M. Alexander*
University of Arizona
This article examines two episodes in the career of Bernardo M. de León, an

agrarian reform leader and federal congressman from the state of Nayarit. During
the first period, from 1920 to 1940, De León emerged as a local cacique respon-
sible for both progressive politics and repressive maneuvers, particularly during
the 1930s land reform effort undertaken by the administration of Lázaro Cárde-
nas. During the second period, from 1970 to 1990, he functioned largely as a
political elder in Nayarit. In that capacity, he promoted the official history of the
Revolution, at the same time that he manipulated collective memories of his own
revolutionary participation. In doing so, he helped to define how successive gen-
erations of Mexicans remembered their Revolution and his role within it. Even
after his death in 1991, the legacy of De León informed civic engagement in Na-
yarit, as various groups, ranging from ejido-seeking peasants to local political
functionaries, invoked his memory in pursuit of their own political objectives.
Este artículo analiza dos episodios de la carrera de Bernardo M. de León, líder

de la reforma agraria y diputado federal del estado de Nayarit. En un primer mo-
mento, 1920–1940, De León se alzó como cacique local responsable tanto de
* The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of Mexican Studies/Estudios Me-
xicanos, as well as William Beezley, Bert Barickman, Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney, Tracy Goode,
Ziad Fahmy, Julia Hudson-Richards, and especially Anna Alexander for reading drafts of
this article.
Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 27, Issue 1, Winter 2011, pages 73–95. ISSN 0742-9797
electronic ISSN 1533-8320. ©2011 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Uni-
versity of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprint
info.asp. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2011.27.1.73
73

74 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
políticas progresivas como de maniobras de represión, particularmente durante

la reforma agraria de la década de 1930, emprendida por la administración de
Lázaro Cárdenas. En el segundo periodo, 1970–1990, De León fungió principal-
mente como consejero político en Nayarit. En su calidad de consejero, promovió
la historia oficial de la Revolución al tiempo que manipulaba las memorias colec-
tivas de su participación en ella. De esta forma, ayudó a definir el recuerdo que
las futuras generaciones de mexicanos tendrían de su Revolución y del papel que
él jugó en dicho acontecimiento. Incluso después de su muerte, en 1991, el legado
de De León incidió en la participación ciudadana en Nayarit, pues varios grupos,
desde campesinos en busca de ejidos hasta funcionarios políticos locales, invo-
caban su memoria al tiempo que perseguían sus propios objetivos políticos.
Key words: caciquismo, Cárdenas, Cardenismo, corporatism, cultural politics,

memory, Nayarit, Mexican Revolution, official history
Palabras clave: caciquismo, Cárdenas, cardenismo, corporativismo, políticas

culturales, memoria, Nayarit, Revolución mexicana, historia oficial
The first-generation leadership of Mexico’s de facto official revolutionary

party formed in the crucible of the violent 1910 Revolution.1 After bat-
tling the Porfirian regime and then each other over the course of a decade,
the conflict’s survivors finally united in 1929 to create the Partido Na-
cional Revolucionario (PNR). They also shared the spoils of their revo-
lution, which usually came in the form of wealth or political influence.
During the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), a significant
number of rural revolutionaries, ranging from caudillos on horseback to
bureaucrats with pencils in hand,2 capitalized on the opportunity to put
their own combinations of idealism, self-interest, and political capital into
practice. Bernardo M. de León fulfilled this role in the largely rural west-
ern state of Nayarit. De León, born the son of a wealthy and respected
hacendado in 1899, led a triad of revolutionary leaders who defined the
agrarian reform program for thousands of citizens.3
1. The party took on three names: the Partido Nacional Revolucionario in 1929,
the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano in 1938, and the Partido Revolucionario Institu-
cional in 1946.
2. Michael Ervin, “The Art of the Possible: Agronomists, Agrarian Reform, and the
Middle Politics of the Mexican Revolution, 1908–34,”Ph.D. Diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2002,
14–18.
3. Enrique Hernández Zavala, Historia política de Nayarit (1918–1945) (Tepic: Uni-
versidad Autónoma de Nayarit, 1984), 266; José Mario Contreras Valdéz, Reparto de tie-
rras en Nayarit, 1916–1940: un proceso de ruptura y continuidad (México: Instituto
nacional de estudios históricos, 2001), 37–49.

Alexander, Caciquismo in Nayarit, 1920–1990 75
Through a mixture of patronage, violence, charisma, and luck, De

León carved out a political career that took him from the position of back-
water bureaucrat to the PRI’s national ranks. His commitment to the rul-
ing party made him something of an informal spokesman for the Revo-
lution in his home state for the bulk of the twentieth century. After the
Revolution’s various phases had long since passed, he helped promote
the consistent, mythic, and heroic vision of the revolutionary past, as
utilized by the ruling party, to unify popular memory and legitimate the
regime, spinning the story of his own experience into the officially sanc-
tioned narrative.4
An analysis of De Leon’s career provides a better understanding of
the relationship between local agrarian struggles and national political
and cultural initiatives across the broad sweep of the twentieth century.
During the 1930s, De León represented what Alan Knight has aptly iden-
tified as a Janus-faced local cacique. On the one hand, he succeeded in
establishing strong patron-client relations with his local constituents
through a combination of pan and palo, that is, through a paternalistic
and often informal mixture of incentives and punishment.5 At the same
time, he successfully garnered the support of the national government,
forming personal and professional bonds with multiple presidents, be-
ginning with Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924). Nevertheless it was his re-
lationship with Cárdenas, that elevated him to the realm of national pol-
itics. Cardenas’s efforts to draw peasant and other rural sectors into an
encompassing corporate national party often took on violent charac-
teristics and necessitated the intervention of local mediators.6 De León
became such a powerbroker in his home state.
His relationship with Cárdenas, and later with the PRI, provided him
some measure of security and upward political mobility. This relation-
ship also indicates a peculiar and even paradoxical feature of Mexican
politics both during and after the Revolution: in their efforts to create a
corporatist, vertically integrated official party, PRI leaders often had to
rely upon local leaders, who had their own agendas and maintained in-
dependent bases of political support, to carry the party’s message and
establish its authority. Those agents who demonstrated their adherence
to the party reaped significant rewards in return. De León used his revo-
4. Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Myth, Memory,

and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 14–33; Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of
the Revolution:Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920–1940
( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 4–7.
5. Alan Knight, “Introduction,”in Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico, ed. Alan
Knight and Wil Pansters (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005), 3–20.
6. Paul Friedrich, The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 147.

lutionary experience as a springboard to the Federal Chamber of Dep-

uties during the 1950s. Following that, he returned to his home state,
where he took on the role of elder statesman and devoted the majority
of his time to weaving together the story of the Revolution and his place
within it. By doing so, he simultaneously secured his legacy at the local
level and fulfilled a central objective of the national government. Even
after his death, his legacy and memory informed civic engagement in
Nayarit in a number of important ways. Various groups, ranging from ejido-
seeking peasants to local political functionaries, invoked his memory in
pursuit of their own political objectives.
Bernardo de León represents a relatively understudied type of mid-
level, local revolutionary agent.7 Scholars have produced scores of stud-
ies of revolutionary caciques in a number of contexts, analyzing the extra-
legal ways in which they influenced the implementation of policies and
the paternalistic means by which they crafted their positions of power.8
Although many scholars have also explored the various cultural functions
of these local leaders, few have looked much beyond the Cárdenas years
to examine the role they played in constructing the official narrative of
the Revolution. Enrique Guerra Manzo, in his study of state politics in
Michoacán, labels various individuals and groups, among them local caci-
ques and caudillos, rural teachers, mass organization leaders, and gov-
ernment geographers, as “cultural and political intermediaries,”9 a de-
scription that fits De León well. After his time in elected office, De León
remained important to state politics and the national regime well into
the twentieth century by functioning as a kind of cultural agent, a literal
embodiment of an ongoing Revolution.
The case study of De León’s life and career enriches our under-
7. Examples of other types of revolutionary agents who have received attention in

recent historiography include revolutionary schoolteachers and professional agrarian re-
form bureaucrats; see, respectively, Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution:
Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1997), passim; Ervin, “The Art of the Possible,” passim.
8. Knight and Pansters, Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico; Paul Friedrich,
“The Legitimacy of a Cacique,”in Marc J. Swartz, ed., Local-Level Politics: Social and Cul-
tural Perspectives (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1968), 243–269; Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot,
Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1988); Robert Kern, ed. The Caciques: Oligarchical Politics and the System
of Caciquismo in the Luso-Hispanic World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1973); Gilbert Joseph, “The Fragile Revolution: Cacique Politics and Revolutionary Process
in Yucatán,” in Latin American Research Review 15,1 (1980), pp. 39–64; Eric Wolf and
Edward Hansen, “Caudillo Politics: A Structural Analysis,” in Comparative Studies in So-
ciety and History 9,2 ( Jan., 1967), 168–179.
9. Enrique Guerra Manzo, Caciquismo y orden público en Michoacán, 1920–1940
(México: El Colegio de México, 2002), 15–16.

standing of how both the creation of a national revolutionary myth and

the extension of the PRI’s authority were, in large part, local processes
that relied on incorporating old revolutionary hands into government
ranks. At the national level, the official party sought to win the citizenry’s
support by attempting to appropriate the symbolic legacies of revolu-
tionary heroes such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Madero.10 Yet De
León’s political career, as well as his enduring significance in contem-
porary Nayarit, suggests that people have understood the Revolution,
along with their rights, roles, and responsibilities within it, through their
interactions with local figures who have symbolized its successes at the
local level.
De León’s story thus presents an opportunity to exploit the meth-
odological potential of political biography11—in this case, of a mid-level
politician—to further our understanding of the political and cultural el-
ements involved in constructing the authoritarian, corporatist PRI. His
story also provides a point of entry into a complex world, a local con-
text in which peasants, workers, and urban revolutionaries played a ma-
jor role in shaping not only his career, but also political debate and dis-
course. Although these processes, both during the revolutionary phases
and later in the century, are well understood from the perspective of
the political center, we have comparatively little knowledge of how they
were elaborated in local contexts. To draw broader conclusions about
the relationship between national projects and local circumstances over
the course of the century, this study examines two periods of De León’s
life and career, rather than providing a gloss of his entire life. In doing
so, I hope it does more than describe events in a local context; rather,
by examining these two periods, one from 1920 to 1940 and the other
from 1970 to 1990, De León’s story demonstrates how we can look to
the periphery to examine a national project.
Consolidation of Influence and Cardenismo, 1920 to 1940

Bernardo M. de León secured a permanent presence in the political land-
scape of twentieth-century Nayarit in the tumultuous decade of the
1930s. He based his successful electoral career as a state congressman
on prior experience as an agrarian reform bureaucrat in the 1920s, but
his political engagement began during the Revolution’s armed phase
10. Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institution-
alization of the Mexican State, 1920–1940 ( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986),
4–7.
11. For a discussion of the reemergence of biography as a useful approach to his-
torical research, see “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” American Historical
Review 114,3 ( June, 2009), 573–661; and Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural His-
tory to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 168.

(1910–1920). By his teenage years, as an activist in Veracruz, he had be-

friended national agrarian leaders Gildardo Magaña and Andrés Molina
Enríquez. Conditioned by the idealism of the Revolution’s early years and
his relationship with these prominent agraristas, he returned to work
in Nayarit in the 1920s. During that decade, he, along with then-Federal
Deputy Guillermo Flores Muñoz, founded the League of the Socialist
Party and the Agrarian League of Nayarit. De León ran as a candidate for
diputado federal of their new party without success.
By 1927, De León came to occupy the positions of Secretary, and
later President, of the Local Agrarian Commission. He traveled through-
out the state, organizing bands of armed peasants to fight against
Catholic Cristero soldiers, who had taken up arms in response to the anti-
clerical reforms of Plutarco Elías Calles’s government. At the same time,
he fulfilled largely bureaucratic functions for the Local Agrarian Com-
mission.12 His work even caught the attention of Álvaro Obregón, who
sent him a personal letter five days before his assassination, thanking him
for his efforts to protect worker and peasant organizations threatened
by Cristero elements.13
By 1933, he had emerged as one of the state’s most vocal propo-
nents of extensive land reform. During his time as a state congressman,
he advocated and co-authored the Law for the Breakup of Latifundios,14
which defined the legislature’s policy agenda and laid the groundwork
for making Nayarit a national leader in agrarian reform. The law outlined
provisions by which the state’s large agricultural estates—which spe-
cialized in the cultivation of citrus fruits, coffee, sugar, and tobacco—
would be parceled out to peasants. By 1939, the state government had
awarded 730,000 hectares of land, and by 1970, ejidos and similar col-
lective land tenure arrangements accounted for 78.7 percent of the state’s
agricultural land, whereas the national average stood at only 49.7. In the
period from 1934 to 1940 alone (the Cárdenas years), the state govern-
ment of Francisco Parra awarded 280 out of 300 ejido petitions, fulfill-
ing roughly 93 percent of requests.15
De León directly or indirectly affected the majority of land reform
measures taken in Nayarit from the early 1920s to the end of Cárdenas’s
term in 1940. Most significantly, he helped bridge the gap between what
12. “Currículo de vida,”Armando León Personal Archive, University of Arizona Spe-

cial Collections; Archivo del Registro Agrario Nacional, Tepic, Nayarit.
13. Obregón to León, July 13, 1928, Armando León Personal Archive, University of
Arizona Special Collections.
14. “Decreto Número 1185 and Decreto Número 1186: Ley del Fraccionamiento del
Latifundio,” 1934, Archivo General del H. Congreso del Estado de Nayarit.
15. Jean Meyer, “Reparto agrario en Nayarit, 1910–1934,” en Revista mexicana de
sociología 51,2 (1989), 243–245.

José Mario Contreras Valdéz has identified as the popular agrarianism of

the 1920s and its corporatist counterpart in the following decade.16 While
he played an important role in the reforms of the 1920s by helping to
establish the Agrarian League and stirring up support for land reform
among peasants, his efforts in the 1930s to codify a more systematic, in-
stitutionalized approach to agrarian reform proved to be his most sig-
nificant contribution to the course of implementing revolutionary pol-
icy. Nevertheless, an analysis strictly of De León’s public, formal, and legal
participation yields only a partial understanding of his role in the im-
plementation of land reform policy.
De León spent much of his three-year congressional term opposing
the state’s popular governor, Francisco Parra, and other local officials.
Although the two had originally formed an electoral alliance, the mili-
tancy that De León encouraged in the rural sector did not sit well with
the more moderate governor.17 In his efforts to agitate Parra, he mar-
shaled the support of peasants and other citizens from his district to carry
out his political agenda. When they did not comply, he and a group of
loyal armed men frequently threatened or assaulted the peasants, and
on a few occasions, he allegedly intervened to reduce the size and qual-
ity of their ejidal land holdings. De León also spent a great deal of time
keeping rural sectors in line with the national regime. He punished peas-
ant and worker groups, including ejidal councils and unions that iden-
tified themselves as “red,”taking a hard line against the potential for un-
rest that became associated with communism.18 These multiple political
activities, at times progressive and at others repressive, came to define
the course of agrarian land reform for its supposed beneficiaries through-
out Nayarit.
Much of De León’s relationship with Governor Parra, which often
resulted in violence, echoes what Paul Friedrich identified as the “cac-
ical cycle” common to rural leadership during the period. In partic-
ular, Friedrich notes the common phenomena of factional struggle, fol-
lowed by attempts by rural strongmen to extend their influence by
bringing more and more actors under their tutelage.19 Indeed, De León
pursued similar strategies and, by delivering on many of his promises,
managed to secure considerable support among the rural sectors. In cases
16. Contreras Valdéz, Reparto de tierras en Nayarit, 37–49.

17. Investigaciones políticas y sociales, exp. 310(5.2) “35”, October 8, 1935, Archivo
General de la Nación (hereafter AGN).
18. Knight notes that communists had a significant role in mobilizing support for
several Cardenista initiatives, even though neither Cárdenas nor his regime self-identified
as communist; Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin Amer-
ican Studies 26,1 (Feb., 1994), 81–84.
19. Friedrich, Princes of Naranja, 136.

where he could not, or in which he encountered significant opposition,

the rural poor had at their disposal a number of tactics to mitigate his
authority.
Peasants penned letters to local and national authorities accusing
De León of illegal and frightening acts. Although the veracity of each accu-
sation cannot be substantiated, the patterns that emerge in the documen-
tation suggest some measure of truth to their claims. The 173–member
peasant council of La Escondida accused De León of arranging the as-
sassination of two men in their community and vandalizing the homes
of others.20 The Red Workers’Union of La Fortuna claimed that he burned
their council’s archive, destroyed their union office, implemented an un-
necessary tariff on firewood, and even went so far as to pull a pistol on
council members in order to convey the gravity of his threats. Accord-
ing to the account, he promised to kill any member of the Rural Guard
who was also revealed to be a union member, and he planted a member
of the Guard at the road entering the community to block any attempt to
solicit help from outside parties.21 These fears and accusations are further
reflected in letters and telegrams from the ejidal councils of Tepetiltic,22
El Gringo,23 and El Rodeo,24 as well as the Red Union of Teachers, Brick-
layers (Albañiles), and Peasants, whose members claimed to have expe-
rienced both extortion and assassination threats.25 Peasants from Lamedo
went so far as to accuse him of using his influence to reduce the size
and quality of ejidos they were supposed to receive.26 In addition to these
complaints from ejidal and union councils, the executive board of the
State Union of Young Revolutionaries wrote the Secretaría de Gober-
nación (Interior Ministry), claiming that De León and his principal con-
gressional accomplice, José Andrés Tejeda, had planned assassinations,
robbed peasants, and plotted to seize haciendas for themselves.27
Groups and organizations that self-identified as communist, “red,”
or “radical”appear to have generated particular scorn from De León. On
several occasions, he attempted to stamp out or break apart these
groups, primarily because they represented a threat to his authority. At
the same time, he was doing the national government’s work: the Cárde-
nas regime became increasingly intolerant of the radicalism associated
with communism as it sought to draw every sector of the population
20. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Sept. 3, 1935, AGN.

25. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Feb. 19, 1935, AGN.

into the corporate bodies of the ruling party—namely the Confedera-

ción Nacional Campesina (CNC) and the Confederación de Trabaja-
dores Mexicanos (CTM). De León’s willingness to undertake punitive
measures further suggests the degree to which he sought to attract the
support of the Cárdenas government, even if it meant harming the rural
citizens whose interests he claimed to represent. In all likelihood, the
accusations made against De León contain some mixture of truth, exag-
geration, and misrepresentation, and certainly do not acknowledge his
legislative and bureaucratic accomplishments.
Both the violence De León exercised and his interactions with his
constituents provide a glimpse into the personality of a local cacique.
He routinely held meetings with constituents from his district in his Tepic
home, portraying himself as a paternalistic and approachable leader. But
he also comported himself in such a way as to remind those around him
of his power. In one amusing, but nonetheless instructive instance, De
León set out in the early evening to purchase baby formula for his son,
who had fallen ill. He found a pharmacy that had closed for the night,
but the pharmacist was still visible through the door. In spite of his pleas,
the shopkeeper refused to open the store. De León paused for a moment,
then rapped on the door again, this time with a loaded pistol. Predictably,
he returned home with the formula.28
The interaction between the pharmacist and De León hints not only
at the brazen public behavior of a local cacique, but also at the extent
to which he and his entourage used firearms to convey their point of
view. In another telling instance, he became entangled in an altercation
with a military guard at a train station in Tepic in 1933. A member of the
guard shot De León’s bodyguard, killing him instantly. In response, De
León drew a weapon and shot the guard’s captain in the buttocks. After
successfully escaping, De León received threats from guard personnel
that forced him to remain underground for several weeks.29 These in-
stances, in addition to the complaints by ejidal councils and unions, con-
firm that De León utilized guns and appears to have had the ability to
command armed men loyal to him. Despite this advantage, members of
these councils, even operating from a comparatively weak position, man-
aged to mitigate his influence.
While De León used both formal authority and informal measures
to aid his political agenda, peasants and workers who operated from po-
sitions of relative weakness organized collective ejidal commissions and
unions to advocate for their mutual interests and to shape his influence
28. Armando León, Unpublished Memoirs, Armando León Personal Archive, Uni-
versity of Arizona Special Collections.
29. Ibid.

over them. The cases pertaining to his political maneuvers in the mid-
1930s reveal as much about the capacity of the rural poor to seek re-
dress as they do about his ability to dictate policy. Peasants opposed the
authority De León exercised over them by petitioning higher authori-
ties at both the state and national levels. Their utilization of government
channels testifies to their high degree of political consciousness and par-
ticipation. Moreover, they achieved positive, measurable results, espe-
cially at the state and local levels.
Several ejidal councils persuaded the state congress to investigate
De León and achieved a temporary, though nonetheless significant, vic-
tory in 1935, when the congress issued a desafuero30 order against him
and his principal congressional associate José Andrés Tejeda. The ruling
effectively debilitated the careers of the two men, stripping them of le-
gal immunity and congressional benefits. The two legislators bounced
back several months later after the First Court of the Federal District an-
nulled the order,31 but the incident nevertheless reveals the ways in
which ordinary private citizens tempered and shaped the power of gov-
ernment agents through collective action. Even after the court nullified
the desafuero, the careers of De León and Tejeda suffered.
The scandal drove a fissure through the state’s politics. De León,
Tejeda, and Guillermo Flores Muñoz represented a minority faction op-
posed to Governor Parra, while fellow congressmen Agustín Lomelí and
Lamberto Luna led a five-legislator bloc in favor of the governor. In let-
ters to the Secretaría de Gobernación (Interior Ministry) and President
Cárdenas, each side expressed a different interpretation of the desafuero
situation. The governor and his legislative allies argues that the punish-
ment De León and Tejeda endured was justified and within the bound-
aries of the law. De León and Tejeda retorted that Parra had failed to re-
imburse them for lost legislative compensation. Eventually, the Secretaría
ordered that Parra comply. The two men also accused Parra and his five
legislative supporters of having broken up a recent agrarian congress
with pistoleros and of exercising arbitrary violence against rural con-
stituents. Finally, they claimed that they, rather than their opponents,
stood behind Cárdenas, a claim reflected in multiple forums.32
The debates surrounding the desafuero situation also split the state’s
peasant organizations into two camps. Dozens of ejidal councils and
unions sent telegrams directly to President Cárdenas or to the Secretaría
30. Although the word has no direct equivalent in English, it can best be described
as the removing of criminal immunity from public officials, thus making it possible to try
them in court.
31. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Sept. 25, Oct. 19, Nov. 18, 1935,
AGN.
32. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Feb. 17 and Feb. 29, 1936, AGN.

de Gobernación declaring their solidarity with either the De León-Tejeda

faction or the congressional majority seeking to reprimand them. The
telegrams suggest the real and perceived bonds between ordinary civil-
ians and their political leaders, particularly Cárdenas. Their letters form
part of a larger pattern of solidarity with the president. Personal corre-
spondence written to the president illuminates the broad populist ap-
peal the president built by convincing everyday citizens of their personal
connection with their national leader. As a result of this process, those
engaged in political conflict attempted to legitimate their positions by
demonstrating their commitment to Cárdenas and, hence, to the Revo-
lution he embodied.33
Throughout the conflict, parties at all levels proclaimed their alle-
giance to Cárdenas and often painted their opponents as anti-Cardenista
and, in cases, Callista—in reference to disgraced and recently exiled for-
mer president Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928). The Union of Young
Revolutionaries accused Senator Flores Muñoz, a longtime ally of De León
and part of the three-member anti-Parra faction, of obstructing the le-
gitimate work of pro-Cardenista politicians in the state.34 De León and
Tejeda attempted to trump Parra by accusing him of sabotaging the ideas
and ideals propounded by Cárdenas. In similar fashion, a collective state-
ment from the state senate proclaimed that De León and Tejeda’s work
did not conform to the Cárdenas government’s sexenial plan.35 Constit-
uents directly affected by De León’s political activities also actively em-
ployed such symbolic references to Cárdenas. In numerous cases, those
who opposed his authority or activities linked him directly to Calles, a
strategy evident in a joint letter from several unions of chauffeurs, soap-
makers, hatmakers, and bakers, and the PNR-controlled Municipal Coun-
cil of Tuxpan.36
These symbolic struggles were consistent with the dual processes
by which Cárdenas became mythologized as the redeemer of the Revo-
lution and by which he built a multiclass base of popular support. As
Alan Knight has argued, Cárdenas used both a populist rhetorical style
and numerous local caciques to build up political consensus.37 Like many
of these caciques, De León achieved greater success than many of his
33. Letters and telegrams are interspersed throughout the file AGN, Dirección de
Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, from Sept. 21–Oct. 6.
36. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Sept. 22, 1935, AGN; These
telegrams and letters, too numerous to list, are interspersed throughout this file in late
1935.
37. Alan Knight, “Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America, Especially Mexico,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 30,2 (May, 1998), 226–227.

adversaries in attaching himself to the popular president by bringing the

rhetoric of the Revolution and the messages of Cardenismo to his rural
constituents. As a result, the Cárdenas administration respected his au-
thority ( perhaps because it had no other choice)38 to conduct the
process of agrarian reform, which also gave him room for informal and
sometimes violent political action. His connections to the regime did
not dissuade peasants, political activists, and local bureaucrats from at-
tempting to demonstrate their commitment to Cardenismo in their op-
position to De León.
Whether peasants, workers, politicians, and bureaucrats utilized
common reference to Cárdenas as symbolic capital or because of a gen-
uine belief in the Revolution and its supreme leader cannot be deter-
mined. Nonetheless, letters, petitions, telegrams, and other forms of
correspondence illustrate how peasants and other citizens with com-
paratively little power or influence understood and expressed, through
collective action and statements, their place within these revolution-
ary processes. Moreover, these examples demonstrate that the popular
elements of the Revolution had not morphed into a strictly top-down,
post-revolutionary project by the 1930s. Rather, the nation’s poorest
citizens directly and substantially influenced the shape of revolution-
ary reform through the Cárdenas years.39 Finally, their correspondence
resoundingly confirms that references to the people, events, and places
of the Revolution—and Cárdenas, in particular—became common cur-
rency in the political discourse of the day. Adherence to Cárdenas, at
least in word, represented commitment to the Revolution.
Despite the competing attempts to establish legitimacy through the
adoption of pro-Cárdenas declarations, De León achieved a higher de-
gree of success in attracting the favor of the president than his oppo-
nents did. He formed a personal rapport with the popular president and,
in June 1934, even welcomed him during his presidential campaign in
front of an enormous crowd in central Tepic.40 When cast in a national
38. Cárdenas had little choice but to accept inconsistencies in rural leadership be-
cause he relied on local governors, caciques and caudillos, and congressmen to carry out
his reforms. His relationship with Sonoran governor Román Yocupicio is a notable exam-
ple. See Adrian A. Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth: Cárdenismo, Sonora, and the
Mexican Revolution ( Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), 176–180.
39. Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?”, 79–80; For examples of works that
regard the Cárdenas programs as post-revolutionary state-building efforts, see Vaughan,
Cultural Politics in Revolution and Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro
Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995).
40. “El Gral. Lázaro Cárdenas en Tepic (1934), acompañado por don Bernardo M.
León,” Asociación Cívica “Lázaro Cárdenas” A.C., Delegación Nayarit, Armando León Per-
sonal Archive, University of Arizona Special Collections.

context, De León’s career highlights the disorganized and variable na-

ture of both the agrarian reform program and the process of political
centralization, as politicians, bureaucrats, and rural and urban constit-
uents carried out political processes in relatively isolated locations like
Nayarit with little intervention from the national government.
Recently opened documentation from the Office of Social and Po-
litical Investigation, a division of the Secretaría de Gobernación that func-
tioned as a secret police force, reveals that its authorities in Mexico City
had identified De León as an occasional nuisance in state politics because
of his maneuvers against the supposedly altruistic revolutionary gover-
nor.41 The agency described him as a “worker agitator” and as a person
of “questionable respectability.”In another instance, the Interior Ministry
received a number of complaints from one of Parra’s opponents, Estéban
Calderón, suggesting that De León had intervened in the gubernatorial
election in favor of Parra (De León had begun his electoral career as a
Parrista). Despite substantial evidence that De León had possibly engaged
in at least some measure of electoral fraud,42 authorities did not initiate
even a cursory investigation. De León clearly held the favor of the na-
tional government.
While the Office of Social and Political Investigation devoted human
and financial resources to keeping track of De León’s activities, officials
did not pursue any action to correct the problems that its officers iden-
tified. De León’s ability to operate outside the threat of central govern-
mental intervention appears consistent with the shaky process of bu-
reaucratic centralization undertaken by the Cárdenas administration.43
Surveillance efforts served to some extent as their own mechanisms of
control. Moreover, the process of keeping De León and other leaders in
line with Cárdenas occurred unevenly, as the president necessarily ac-
cepted inconsistencies in peripheral contexts. Finally, De León and the
president shared reciprocal interests. Cárdenas lent support to De León
because he demonstrated his willingness to carry the message and rhet-
oric of Cardenismo, along with the claims to social justice and revolu-
tionary policy implementation that came with it, to his rural constituents,
just as he had done for Calles during the violent Cristiada.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, as successive presidents preached
an end to caciquismo in favor of institutionalism, he managed to strike
a political balance that endeared him to those who stood both above
and below him. As the revolutionary policies of the Cárdenas years sub-
41. Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, exp. 310 “35”, 8 October, 1935, AGN.
42. Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, exp. 2.311 D.L.(15), box 3, 8–9 November,
1933, AGN.
43. Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” 92.

sided, De León maintained this balance and ascended politically even as

agrarian reform ran out of steam. Through the 1940s, he occupied a num-
ber of largely symbolic posts in Nayarit, Sinaloa, and Michoacán. He en-
tered onto the national stage in 1952, representing Nayarit’s Second Dis-
trict in the Federal Chamber of Deputies. While in office, he served as
the elected Secretary of Organization and Economic Planning of the Ex-
ecutive Committee of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC), as
the President of the Commission on Hacienda Oversight and the Com-
mission on Social Prevision, and as the President of the National Union
of Sugarcane Producers.44
Remarkably little documentation exists about the specific respon-
sibilities, activities, and accomplishments that characterized his time in
these offices. Instead of speculating on those matters, the remainder of
this article is devoted to understanding his informal role in Nayarit pol-
itics following his return in 1955. In multiple forums and while occu-
pying a number of posts, he reiterated the accomplishments of the Rev-
olution and its leaders. Along the way, he aided in the construction of a
national revolutionary myth, also giving it local character and securing
his own legacy within its grand narrative. The posthumous recognition
of his achievements by several groups suggests a high degree of success
in these efforts.
Consolidation of the Revolutionary Party and Construction

of the Revolutionary Myth, 1970 to 1990
The career of Nayarit’s most durable agrarista took on a largely informal
character after his congressional term. During the last two decades of
his life, De León held the position of Agrarian Advisor to the state gov-
ernment, a post with little actual sway over policy. The course of the na-
tional government’s priorities in the rural sector, which came to reflect
concerns with modernizing the countryside in a “green revolution,”drew
the party and its leaders away from any substantial commitment to agrar-
ian reform. Yet the stability of this government rested on establishing an
accepted degree of legitimacy through claims to its revolutionary legacy.
The PRI, with its institutional roots stemming from the 1929 establish-
ment of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), fashioned itself
as the representative of the vanguard of agrarian land reform.45 As the
44. “Currículo de vida,”Armando León Personal Archive, University of Arizona Spe-

cial Collections.
45. Peter H. Smith, “Mexico Since 1946,”in Mexico Since Independence, ed. by Leslie
Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246–297; Howard F. Cline, Mex-
ico: Revolution to Evolution, 1940–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 34;

decades following the Cardenista reform of the 1930s wore on, the es-
tablishment of new collective ejidal arrangements became little more
than an afterthought. However, PRI leaders at the national, state, and lo-
cal levels continued to promote the successes of the reforms up to the
start of the 1990s, when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, standing in
front of a statue of agrarian martyr Emiliano Zapata, announced the for-
mal termination of land reform in favor of modernizing the countryside
through ejido privatization.
The parallel processes by which the party-controlled government
abandoned any sustained effort at land reform and simultaneously
sought to harness collective memory of its role as the deliverer of the
Revolution’s agrarian promise necessitated representatives in local con-
texts. In Nayarit, De León came to occupy this role. After enduring the
violent episodes of the 1920s Cristero Revolt and the 1930s agrarian re-
organization, he had emerged as a familiar face among Nayarit’s residents
as a committed representative of the PRI. Through the 1970s and 1980s,
following his tenure as a federal congressman and high-ranking bu-
reaucrat, he gave a number of speeches to various organizations that
lavished praise on the PRI and its leaders throughout the century. More-
over, he wrote articles in local newspapers, participated in university
conferences, and gave public lectures. His presence in these public fo-
rums testifies to the institutional support afforded him by the govern-
ment, media, and university system. This support gave him the oppor-
tunity to count himself among the company of the nation’s and state’s
revolutionary heroes, even including those with whom he had engaged
in significant conflict throughout his life. De León used his position as
a personal agent of the PRI to ensure that he occupied a lasting and gen-
erally favorable place in the collective memory of Nayarit’s citizens at
the same time that he served the practical interests of the party and its
government.
In a 1975 speech given at the Third Colloquium of Regional Anthro-
pology and History at the Colegio de Michoacán, De León recounted
his revolutionary experiences to notable guests, including historians
François Chavalier, Jean Meyer, and Alicia Hernández Chávez. With hyper-
bole common to the political discourse employed by members of the
revolutionary party, he recalled the “situation of terror, ignominy, abuse,
without any liberty”that rural workers had endured under hacendados.46
He connected with his audience by noting that he had visited the Taras-
Wayne Cornelius and David Myhre, eds., The Transformation of Rural Mexico (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–25.
46. Bernardo M. León, Untitled Speech, 1975, Armando León Personal Archive, Uni-

cos de la Cañada region in the 1920s while battling the Cristeros. Ten
years later, he had returned under entirely different circumstances to help
redistribute the latifundios of Lombardía, Nueva Italia, Tepenahua, and
Ibérica to their rightful campesino owners, under the local leadership
of his since-deceased friend Govenor Gildardo Magaña and the auspices
of “Tata Lázaro” (the affectionate nickname given to Cárdenas by his ru-
ral Michoacán constituents).47 These opening remarks typify the content
of De León’s public discussions during the 1970s and 1980s. All at once,
he offered an officially sanctioned historical narrative, asserted his role
in a successful campaign to empower peasants, and paid tribute to the
Revolution’s favorite son, Lázaro Cárdenas.
De León used his own life story in this speech and others to cele-
brate the Revolution. As an adolescent during the Revolution’s violent
first decade, the cause of Zapatismo “hit him like a ray of light, which
was emblazoned on [his] conscience.”48 In schools, on the street, and
elsewhere, he heard about the Anti-Reelectionist Party and its leader,
Francisco Madero. He became increasingly drawn to his party’s appeals
to social justice and material improvement. Moreover, he attributed his
revolutionary consciousness to the fact that he lived in Tepic during the
violent clashes between Huertista and Constitutionalist forces in the
early years of struggle. Despite his mother’s objections, De León moved
from his tranquil rural home near Santiago Ixquilpan to the tumultuous
state capital. The social injustices occurring throughout the country,
along with the violence initiated by the Madero revolt, inundated his con-
sciousness, and these formative years led to his lifelong pursuit of revo-
lutionary struggle. After enumerating with precise detail the bloody strug-
gles between 1910 and 1920, and also his first encounters with military
leaders in the region, De León devoted considerable discussion to his
place within the land reform measures of the 1930s.
The life history that De León put forth in this and other speeches
conveys an optimism that was typical of party rhetoric. The narrative he
offered, combined with the documented evidence of the period, indi-
cate that he was sincere in his revolutionary convictions and the mem-
ories he carried of the period. Nevertheless, we must read these public
proclamations with a measure of skepticism. After all, De León not only
had a far more ambivalent political record during the 1930s land reform
process than his retellings would suggest; he also was the son of a wealthy
hacendado. Rather than emphasizing the good fortune that family money
and connections brought him, he instead focused on those things that
led him to take up one of the great causes of the revolutionary struggle.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.

He recalled, for instance, that beginning with the anarchist Flores Magón
brothers, then the 1906 and 1907 strikes at the Cananea mines and Rio
Blanco textile mills, and finally when Francisco Madero “denounced the
farce that was the new re-election of don Porfirio Díaz,”49 he was forced
to confront the question of how the few could exploit the labor of the
many.50 We can certainly read De León’s speech, at least partially, as an
effort to dispel any notion that, due to his privileged upbringing, he might
lack the authenticity of other revolutionaries who came from situations
of comparatively greater misfortune.
While recounting his role in the bureaucratic and legislative com-
ponents of land reform, he recalled the memory of Governor Francisco
Parra.51 While Parra’s administration undertook more land redistribu-
tion than all previous and subsequent ones combined, De León failed
to mention in the speech that he had initiated a broad effort to unseat
Parra. His audience forty years later heard a narrative in which he treated
himself and Parra as revolutionary colleagues jointly committed to the
betterment of their mutual constituents. Since both he and Parra
emerged after the 1930s as popular figures in state-level politics, it is not
surprising that De León opted to regard Parra as one of his revolutionary
collaborators.
De León rose to prominence in part because of his ability to main-
tain a degree of political autonomy at the local level and adherence to
the party at the national level. Late in his career, he lavished praise on
the party that had given him the support upon which he built his own
political career. In a 1979 speech in Tepic celebrating the fiftieth an-
niversary of the PRI, he attributed the nation’s revolutionary transfor-
mation to its ruling party. The PRI, he argued, had freed peasants from
the yoke of tyrannical hacendados and had stamped out caudillismo in
favor of institutionalism. He was nonetheless careful not to provide only
a top-down account of the party’s role in the nation’s development. On
the contrary, he argued that the workers’ organizations “had succeeded
in forming a granite block to consolidate the party around the mandates
of the Revolution.”52 He noted, moreover, that women had become in-
tegrated into national political life as a result of actions taken under the
tutelage of the party and its leaders. Because De León had served in the
legislature in 1953, he rightly claimed some fraction of credit for the en-
franchisement of women that year.53
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
53. Ibid.

Celebrating the virtues of the party also meant celebrating the cru-
cial figures of the Revolution. For many, men such as Pancho Villa and
Emiliano Zapata, not the institution of the party, represented the Revo-
lution’s virtue and success.54 By the second half of the decade, and es-
pecially after the terrifying 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico
City, the party represented more of what had gone wrong than right dur-
ing the century. Public celebration of revolutionary heroes reminded
citizens of the connections between the current governing apparatus
and the nation’s glorious revolutionary past. In 1981, De León delivered
a speech commemorating the life of Emiliano Zapata, the figure perhaps
most emblematic of the peasantry’s long and still unfinished struggle for
land reform. Given to a number of groups, including former combatants
of the Eighth Military Zone, the Twenty-Eighth Ayuntamiento of Tepic,
the League of Agrarian Communities, and the Peasant Unions of Nayarit,
and delivered in the public Plutarco Elías Calles Auditorium in Tepic, De
León’s speech eulogized the martyr who brought hope to many of Mex-
ico’s poorest rural residents. Exaggerating Zapata’s moral virtue, he re-
called the “sacrifice of Emiliano Zapata, son of the people, who with faith,
ardor, and bravery defended the rights of the enslaved campesino . . .”55
Even though Zapata had died a full decade before the formation of the
PNR (not to mention at the hands of a fellow member of the mythic pan-
theon known as the Revolutionary Family, a fact party leaders conve-
niently ignored), government functionaries at all levels could invoke his
name and appropriate its symbolic capital on the behalf of the official
party.
De León did not neglect to infuse his discussion of the development
of the official ruling party with a retelling of his own role in the process.
He recounted, for instance, that the upstart political party that he had
helped form, the League of the Socialist Party of Nayarit, had participated
in the 1929 Querétaro Convention, the PNR’s first. He relayed a story
about his party shielding citizens in Tepic from the aggressions of the
Vasconcelistas (in reference to presidential candidate and former Edu-
cation Minister José Vasconcelos), citing a particular example in which
pistoleros from the Vasconcelos camp attacked rival Ortizrubistas (PNR
sympathizers of candidate Pascual Ortíz Rubio). In similar fashion, he
reminded his listeners that the party resolutely defeated the real threats
coming from the camps of Vasconcelos, Juan Andreu Almazán, and Miguel
54. De León was hardly alone in tapping into the same mythologized hero cults that
the PRI promoted, and perhaps no figure gained as much admiration as Emiliano Zapata.
See Samuel Brunk, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata:Myth, Memory, and Mex-
ico’s Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 6–18.

Henríquez Guzmán, the respective defeated opponents of Presidents

Pascual Ortíz Rubio, Manuel Avila Camacho, and Adolfo Ruiz Cortínes.56
In effect, his speech created a uniform enemy that, in fact, represented
various movements under the leadership of different people, all in dis-
parate contexts. De León, much like the party he represented, succeeded
in collapsing these multiple periods, people, and processes into the idea
of one counter-revolutionary force that threatened to interrupt the
benevolent course that the ruling party had set.
In addition to the public speeches he delivered, De León regularly
contributed articles to local newspapers. His position as an agrarista who
had served as an integral revolutionary figure when the land reform ef-
fort stood at high tide lent him considerable legitimacy, which, in turn,
allowed him privileged access to the print media. First, in a 1972 issue
of El Sol de Tepic,57 and two years later in a seven-day series of articles
adapted from lectures he gave at the Economics Department of the Au-
tonomous University of Nayarit, De León offered a historical discussion
of the country’s long struggle for land reform.58 In each instance, he sit-
uated the revolutionary program in a continuous context that had its
roots in pre-Columbian and colonial societies. His discussion of this long
history led into a laudatory discussion of the successes of the revolution-
ary agrarian reform program and of his role within the program.
As a spokesman for the party and the state’s government, De León
addressed the public in official spaces—large auditoriums, the Municipal
Palace of Tepic, and the local university. His various engagements with
university students suggests the government made it a priority to keep
young, educated citizens in touch with those who had revolutionary ex-
perience. Despite the fact that De León did not have any higher educa-
tion, the university welcomed him as an expert speaker. His authority
within the university system suggests his importance in securing the loy-
alty of generations of young, educated citizens who often had no con-
nection, even through family, to the revolutionary struggles of the first
third of the century. And since many of De León’s constituents and col-
leagues had died over the preceding decades, reaching young residents
by way of a strong presence in the universities served as one way to guar-
antee a positive legacy.
Whether De León was addressing university students about the
course of agrarian struggle, the general public about the achievements
56. Ibid.
57. Bernardo M. León, “Año de 1905: Haciendas en Nayarit,”in El Sol de Tepic, July 12,
1972.
58. Bernardo M. León, “Conferencia dictada por Bernardo M. León en la sala de la
Dirección de Economía de la Uni-Nay,” in El Sol de Tepic, Tepic, Nayarit, Nov. 8–Nov. 15,
1974.

of the nation’s ruling political party, or a group of peasant and agrarian

leaders about the savior of their cause, his speeches and writings all
exhibited similar characteristics and served similar ends. In each, he
braided an official rhetoric of the Revolution—focusing on its leaders,
events, and accomplishments—together with a discussion of his own
contributions to these processes and to the livelihood of peasants. In
doing so, he helped cement in the memory of the state’s citizenry the
story of a national Revolution that had, in fact, lost its momentum and
the story of an agrarian idealist in his last years.
Posthumous Accolades and Popular Memory

During much of his last decade, De León received numerous awards. Be-
cause of his contribution both to revolutionary change in the agrarian
sector and to the academic life of his home state, he received an hon-
orary degree from the Autonomous University of Nayarit.59 Additionally,
he received the Estéban Baca Calderón Award from the state government,
which included two lavish ceremonies and a banquet for the state’s so-
cial leaders, along with a feature article and another multiday series in
the Tepic newspaper El Observador.60 These accolades came near the
end of his life. Just prior to his ninety-second birthday in 1991, De León
passed away. In his honor, the governor of Nayarit awarded him a state
funeral before he was buried in Tepic. The funeral marked the first of a
series of posthumous acts that a number of groups took in his name.
Bernardo M. de León’s death came at a critical turning point in the
nation’s history. Particularly for peasants, the early 1990s represented
the end of an era.61 Before the official announcement that the govern-
ment’s sixty-year-old agrarian reform would face the reversing effects of
ejido privatization, a group of rural citizens in Nayarit petitioned for a
chance to establish their own ejido. In December 1989, twenty-seven
potential ejiditarios from the municipality of San Pedro Lagunillas sent
the Registro Agrario Nacional a letter informing its bureaucrats of their
desire for an ejido. After the petition had passed through a number of
channels and the land had been surveyed, the group received its land
59. Diploma al C. Bernardo M. León, por su destacada labor en favor de nuestro Es-
tado en Agrarismo, Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit, July 18, 1983, from Armando León
Personal Archive, University of Arizona Special Collections.
60“Homenaje a Don Bernardo M. León,” in El Obervador, Tepic, Nayarit, June 24,
1991;”Bernardo León Moreno, Luchador Agrario Nayarita,”in El Observador, Tepic, Nayarit,
June 1–3, 1991; “Fomentar la unidad,”in La Voz de Nayarit, Tepic, Nayarit, May 31, 1990.
61. Billie R. DeWalt and Martha W. Rees, eds., The End of Agrarian Reform in Mex-
ico: Past Lessons, Future Prospects (San Diego: University of California, San Diego Center
for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1994), 54–56.

in July 1990. As of 1999, the ejido still existed, withstanding the priva-
tization efforts initiated by the administration of President Carlos Salinas
de Gortari. The peasants included in their solicitation a provision that
they would name their ejido after Bernardo M. de León.62
The individuals who decided to name their communal land plot for
De León likely based their decision not only on a desire to commemorate
a man who had stood for and dominated the course of revolutionary land
reform but also, we can reasonably speculate, for strategic reasons. In a
sense, they had appropriated the name and legacy of an agrarian leader
and a dedicated party functionary in order to legitimate their effort be-
fore the national government. Their attempt to ally themselves with De
León apparently succeeded. It remains unclear what specific perceptions
of De León these peasants held. Decades had passed since De León had
held any substantive policy-making roles. Yet, as we have seen, he had
helped to shape his own legacy by adhering to revolutionary rhetoric
and broadcasting his own place within the century’s agrarian reform ef-
fort. Thus, it is plausible that the peasants who named their ejido after
De León had a largely favorable impression of him and his past accom-
plishments, despite a record that contained both positive contributions
and sinister maneuvers.
Just as these rural residents employed De León as a symbol upon
which to base their moral authority, the municipal government of Tepic
and the state government of Nayarit also attempted to tap into his legacy.
The city, upon the urging of local peasant organizations, constructed
the Plaza Campesina Bernardo M. de León in 1990, just prior to his death.
In the public dedication ceremony, representatives of the government,
as well as private citizens, presented him the park.63 This small urban
space, though not a dominant structure in the city, nonetheless sym-
bolized what government officials wanted to convey about their com-
mitment to the peasant population of the region. The Secretaría de
Educación Pública (SEP) named a school after De León in the town of
Pantanal, located in the district of Xalisco. Most of the state’s schools
bore the names of national leaders, particularly revolutionary presidents
and other nationally recognizable figures.64 Yet the government elected
to name a rural public secondary school, itself a symbol of revolution-
ary success, after him. The school thus bore a name that future genera-
tions of young citizens would encounter on a daily basis.
62. Exp. Ejido Bernardo M. León, Tepic, Nayarit, July, 1990, Archivo del Registro
Agrario Nacional.
63. “Crearemos la Plaza campesina ‘Bernardo M. León’,” Armando León Personal
Archive, University of Arizona Special Collections.
64. List of Schools in Nayarit, Secretaría de Educación Pública. http://mexico.pueblos
america.com/c/bernardo-m-leon-moreno,. Accessed December 2, 2010.

Together, these accolades and monuments represent the effort by

both De León and by local, state, and national leaders to commemorate
him and to fit him into the reified official history of the Revolution. Just
as De León had engaged with peasants seeking a number of political
objectives during the 1930s, the memory of De León affected the life
and political engagement of peasants in the 1990s. Thus, the figure of De
León represents a unique opportunity to view the ongoing significance
of revolutionary agrarian leaders in the cultural politics of Mexico for
the remainder of the twentieth century.
Conclusions
In 1962, Carlos Fuentes published The Death of Artemio Cruz, a pro-
phetic masterpiece with a pathetic, dying protagonist serving as a para-
ble of the country’s failed revolution. Don Artemio, a former revolution-
ary military leader, built an immense personal fortune from the political
connections he made during his combat years. His status rested on a
bedrock of corruption, and as his wealth increased, he grew distant from
his family and disdainful of his wife. In his novel, Fuentes captured the
popular image of a revolutionary cacique: self-interested, charismatic,
calculating.65
While not representing the same uniformly sinister characteristics
as Artemio Cruz, the course of De León’s life and career also mirrored
the course of the Revolution. From fractured violence and two decades
of instability emerged a stable political system and a ruling party. A flurry
of policy initiatives and cultural projects followed, peaking in the 1930s
before the last vestiges of the Revolution faded away and finally died.
What remained was La Revolución, what Thomas Benjamin has termed
an official discourse of memory reiterated to account for both the pos-
itive and negative political decisions made during the remainder of the
century. The responsibility of propagating this myth, the legitimating nar-
rative upon which the PRI grounded itself, fell as much upon local agents
as it did upon the president and other national leaders. De León, serv-
ing at once as a political functionary and as a cultural agent, endured and
helped to define political life in his home region. His multifaceted iden-
tity made him a significant part of the lived collective and individual rev-
olutionary experiences of thousands of citizens from the rural state of
Nayarit.
Armed with charisma, idealism, family resources, and guns, De León
capitalized on a historical moment to build a position of power and pres-
65. Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991).

tige for himself. In most respects, he made good on the promises he of-
fered those who made him a successful politician, so long as they did
not obstruct his own political plans. Those who did often faced a repres-
sive response. Nevertheless, these people had weapons of their own.
De León’s story thus rests on understanding, even if in necessarily gen-
eralized collective terms, the demands and capabilities of the large group
of rural constituents around whom he built his career. Their attitudes
toward the Revolution, so vividly narrated in their letters of correspon-
dence, petitions, and telegrams, aid in elucidating the popular charac-
ter of the Revolution, a phenomenon that sustained itself through the
1930s. These individuals understood their place as the rightful heirs of
the promises espoused in the 1917 Constitution. Moreover, their activ-
ities reveal the extent to which the careers of middle-tier politicians ne-
cessitated compromise.
De León also had to maintain productive relations with those above
him. He cultivated a relationship with each president from Obregón on-
ward, generating particularly favorable attention from Cárdenas. Align-
ment with and commitment to these leaders, along with a willingness
to use his stature in his local sphere to tout the success and permanence
of the Revolution throughout the successive decades of the century, an-
chored De León in the political gray space between national and local
spheres.
I have attempted to bring to life the multiple political, social, and
cultural functions of a rural cacique within the historical context of
twentieth-century Mexico. De León’s long career cohered around the
seemingly contradictory traits of fervent idealism and brazen violence.
He had a profound effect on how Nayarit’s citizens experienced the rev-
olution, and they had an equally profound effect on the course of his ca-
reer. More importantly, his career presents a host of implications, not
simply about Mexico’s twentieth-century experience, but about the na-
ture of political leadership, popular engagement, and collective mem-
ory in the process of social revolution. Figures such as De León carried
the Revolution through its multiple phases and perpetuated its legacy
after the government had deviated from any previously plausible com-
mitment to revolutionary policies or to the ideologies that underpinned
them.


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Backwater Bureaucrat to Revolutionary Myth-Maker: Bernardo M. de León, Caciquismo, and

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This article examines two episodes in the career of Bernardo M. de León, an

Este artículo analiza dos episodios de la carrera de Bernardo M. de León, líder

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políticas progresivas como de maniobras de represión, particularmente durante

Key words: caciquismo, Cárdenas, Cardenismo, corporatism, cultural politics,

Palabras clave: caciquismo, Cárdenas, cardenismo, corporativismo, políticas

The first-generation leadership of Mexico’s de facto official revolutionary

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Through a mixture of patronage, violence, charisma, and luck, De

4. Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Myth, Memory,

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lutionary experience as a springboard to the Federal Chamber of Dep-

7. Examples of other types of revolutionary agents who have received attention in

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standing of how both the creation of a national revolutionary myth and

Consolidation of Influence and Cardenismo, 1920 to 1940

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(1910–1920). By his teenage years, as an activist in Veracruz, he had be-

12. “Currículo de vida,”Armando León Personal Archive, University of Arizona Spe-

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José Mario Contreras Valdéz has identified as the popular agrarianism of

16. Contreras Valdéz, Reparto de tierras en Nayarit, 37–49.

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where he could not, or in which he encountered significant opposition,

20. Dirección de Gobierno, exp. 2–316.(15), box 5, Sept. 3, 1935, AGN.

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into the corporate bodies of the ruling party—namely the Confedera-

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de Gobernación declaring their solidarity with either the De León-Tejeda

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adversaries in attaching himself to the popular president by bringing the

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context, De León’s career highlights the disorganized and variable na-

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sided, De León maintained this balance and ascended politically even as

Consolidation of the Revolutionary Party and Construction

44. “Currículo de vida,”Armando León Personal Archive, University of Arizona Spe-

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This content downloaded from 185.44.78.115 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:24:57 AM

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.115 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:24:57 AM

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.115 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:24:57 AM

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Henríquez Guzmán, the respective defeated opponents of Presidents

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of the nation’s ruling political party, or a group of peasant and agrarian

Posthumous Accolades and Popular Memory

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Together, these accolades and monuments represent the effort by

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