Histories of Mexico's revolution often conclude the story with President Cárdenas's retirement from public life. The year 1940, then, marks a watershed, the moment when so many revolutionary hopes had been fulfilled and the revolutionary project therefore concluded. In the six years following his inauguration, the state sanctioned the unionization of hundreds of thousands of workers. The government distributed millions of acres of land to farm workers and peasant villages. Key industries like the railways and oil had been nationalized by the state. The Cárdenas regime established the foundations for stability by taming the last of the rebellious generals and by fashioning a corporatist political machine that ran on the votes of loyal workers, peasants, and a growing middle class. A party that ruled for the rest of the century safeguarded the reforms that did away with Porfirian Mexico and ushered in a new, postrevolutionary order, the one of political stability and economic growth known as the “Mexican miracle.” So read the “official” history of the revolution, the one fashioned by ruling party ideologues and taught to generations of Mexican schoolchildren. The story endured because much of it rang true.

By the late twentieth century, few events in modern Latin American history had produced greater scholarly output than the Mexican Revolution. Scholars who witnessed the upheaval portrayed it as a “social revolution.”