Introduction Part Two: Forty Years of Latin American—Especially Mexican—History

Abstract

The title roughly reflects the brief I was given when asked to give this talk: a talk that would be broad, reflecting my interest in Latin America (especially Mexico), and signaling the forty years during which the La Trobe University’s Institute of Latin American Studies has ploughed this furrow, sometimes uphill and in harsh weather. In any case, to the credit of those who put their hand to the plough, it has ploughed on. What is more, over the years, it has yielded a bumper harvest. Of course, to a historian like myself, the last forty plus years are a chronological space mostly inhabited by journalists (who often got things wrong) and political scientists (who, like the Gadarene swine, tend to rush headlong after the latest methodological wheeze or fashion). In other words, it is a nasty, slippery, muddy area, full of false dawns and failed predictions, therefore better avoided. As for the future, that is even worse, and I can do no more than echo the Scottish historian Tom Devine, who when asked his opinion of the imminent referendum on Scottish independence, replied: “the future is [. . .] not my period.” I should, first, qualify—matizar—my take on the last forty years, in at least three respects. First, there are brave souls known as contemporary historians who seek to add historical gravitas to journalistic or political-scientific flights of fantasy, but they are hampered by both the lack of available archival evidence and also hindsight (the ability to see long-term trends in context and to discern their dénouement). Historians do not live by archival bread alone, but without archival bread their diet is likely to be thin and unsustaining. Thus, within the big family of historical genres, contemporary history risks being the runt of the litter. A second qualification is that forty years does take us back across the no-man’s-land where journalism ends and serious history starts (and it starts for the reasons just mentioned: archival access plus hindsight). The liminal point—I pat myself on the back for at last managing to drop “liminal” into the conversation—is not, of course, fixed; it will vary according to the kind of history under consideration. But, taking into account common archival practices (such as the UK’s thirty-year rule), forty years—a long generation—gets us to the point at which serious history can be attempted. Therefore, in the case of Mexico, which I will discuss below, the events of the 1970s— the presidency of Luis Echeverría, student protest and repression, the so-called dirty war, trade union dissidence, the counter-culture, inflation, and the start of Mexico’s second oil boom—are now all the subject of serious research, combining archival, oral and other