at Charlotte. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century; The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican Revolution; and Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico.
Buchenau applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico: Revolution, Reform, and Repression, and reported the following:
From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:Learn more about The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico at the University of Nebraska Press website.Arizona, where they would “encounter a difficult situation shameful to our race.” Sure enough, Arizona authorities broke a strike in Bisbee and arrested twelve hundred miners, most of them immigrants. Behind this bluster, Calles used the good offices of the manager of the Moctezuma Copper Company in Nacozari to negotiate. When the CCCC rebuffed these attempts, Calles traveled to Mexico City to consult with Carranza and left Cesáreo Soriano in charge as interim governor.Page 99 is an excellent example of one of the themes in my book represented in the subtitle: repression. The page describes the measures the Sonoran group took to repress their opponents, especially the Catholic Church and the Yaqui--and this theme reverberates in the entire book. The bottom of the page, dealing with anti-Chinese racism, also represents an important theme in the book, which is the ability of my protagonists to triangulate the political landscape. In the end, to this modernizing and nationalist group, the Chinese were marginally more acceptable than Indigenous or Catholic Mexicans who stood in the way of the Mexico they were imagining: a secular, modern nation. So, all in all, the browser's shortcut works well in revealing important themes in the book.
Calles authorized Soriano to roll back some reforms to facilitate a solution. Arguing that the promulgation of article 123 of the new federal constitution made the Cámara Obrera obsolete, Soriano closed it to the acclaim of Calles, who believed that radical agitators from the Industrial Workers of the World had infiltrated the workforce of the copper mines.116 The gesture worked: on November 17, 1917, the CCCC resumed operations. Calles rewarded the CCCC by cracking down on activists. In January 1918 he ordered the execution of Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, the vice president of the American Federation of Labor in Arizona.
The ongoing Yaqui War also posed a serious challenge. In October 1917 state authorities massacred seventy broncos, and Yaqui rebels retaliated by attacking trains and stealing cattle from Yori farmers. On October 24 Soriano and Calles, who once again served as zone commander, promised an “energetic, definitive, and, if necessary, terrible campaign against that relatively insignificant group of individuals who are hostile to any civilizing influence.” They even resumed the deportation of Yaqui rebels, this time to central Mexico. But the Yaqui refused to be cowed. Borrowing from the Zapatistas’ Plan de Ayala, in February 1918 Yaqui leaders published a manifesto under the motto of Tierra y Libertad (land and liberty).
Calles’s posture toward the Yaqui contrasted with a relatively tolerant position regarding the Chinese community, compared to that of other leaders in Sonora. As the home of one-third of all Chinese residents of the nation, Sonora became a hotbed of anti-Chinese sentiment at a time when popular xenophobia primarily targeted Spaniards and Chinese immigrants, especially merchants and moneylenders. In January 1918 Calles ordered the presidente municipal of the town of Magdalena to “give protection to those foreigners [or] you will suffer the consequences.” This statement questions the assertion of one historian that Calles “enthusiastically embraced anti-Chinese racism.”
Obviously, the other two themes--revolution and reform--receive no attention on page 99, because that page is concerned with repression. Those themes are better discussed in the remainder of the book. The discussion of the Chinese and labor would also misrepresent the interpretation of the book if the reader were to fail to read the rest of the book. In the late 1920s, the Sonoran group turned against the Chinese. When Calles's son, Rodolfo, was governor of Sonora, he expelled the entire Chinese population, in contrast to his father's relative toleration a decade earlier. Also, as interior secretary and president, Calles forged an alliance with organized labor, and particularly the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM) under the leadership of Luis Napoleón Morones. While he still repressed more radical labor organizations that refused to cow to his government, the alliance with the CROM is noteworthy for its ability to co-opt a significant part of the labor movement, in exchange for concessions. A decade earlier, in Sonora, this co-optation was represented by Governor Adolfo de la Huerta's creation of the Cámara Obrera, or Worker's Chamber.
In all, I believe the Page 99 Test works fairly well for this book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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