In Search of the Political Heritage of the Mexican Revolution. An Analytical Proposal

Abstract

The democratic deficit that characterizes Mexican contemporary politics is rooted in a political tradition and imaginary that are rooted neither on political freedom nor on citizenship empowerment but rather on various modulations of centralism, patronage, and paternalism that were inherited from both our revolutionary heritage and the historical construction of the post-revolutionary regime. This article is aimed at analyzing and explaining how the examination
and recovery of what I call the “political heritage of the Revolution” –i.e., projects whose central axis was political freedom and instances
of spontaneous and autonomous political organization created in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval– could be fundamental for a contemporary
rearticulation of a tradition of political participation in Mexico. Thus, we examine the approach used by Hannah Arendt in her study of modern revolutions and propose an approach to the Mexican Revolution that may trace and rescue a tradition of revolutionary political thought and action that has remained buried under the weight of either the unifying and/or
official colossal account of the Revolution or the fragmented historical landscape offered by social revisionism.