Administrators of the Revolution: Law and Rural Governance in the Mexican Gulf, 1870–1940

This dissertation, 'Administrators of the Revolution: Law and Rural Governance in the Mexican Gulf, 1880–1940,' argues that revolutionary regimes reproduce pre-revolutionary governance practices not primarily through conservative elite backlash, but rather through local administrators' interpretations and implementation of revolutionary rights. Examining the Mexican Revolution through Veracruz's sugar-producing regions, it addresses a paradox common to many social revolutions in the Global South: Why would a movement profoundly original in creating new legal institutions develop governance practices similar to those of the regime it overthrew? Administrators of the Revolution traces how this paradox unfolded from the ground up. In Veracruz's sugar-producing regions, peasant and proletarian leaders who joined postrevolutionary bureaucracies became pivotal interpreters of the new social rights. However, rather than implementing these rights as instruments of social and political transformation, the new bureaucrats—shaped by their experience in the sugar industry—reconceptualized them as tools of industrial policy. This reinterpretation had critical consequences: labor rights and agrarian reform were subordinated to productivity objectives; peasant and proletarian interests fragmented into opposing political blocs; and coordination of production took precedence over democratic participation in workers' organizations. Veracruz's sugar districts provide an ideal vantage point for analyzing this transformation. After the collapse of Morelos's sugar sector—the home of Zapatismo—Veracruz became an epicenter of radical movements and a testing ground for revolutionary institutions. Moreover, because sugar production was seen as a model for the industrialization of Mexican agriculture, local administrators' reframing of social rights into instruments of industrial policy set a national template for reform. This administrative shift was neither inevitable nor uncontested. Local bureaucrats built clientelist networks and violently suppressed dissent to advance their vision of industrial modernization. Yet, as this dissertation demonstrates, many rural and industrial workers also embraced this approach, attracted by its material promises. In subsequent decades, these revolutionary administrators emerged as local bosses who laid the foundation for Mexico's later "miraculous" growth, while reproducing the authoritarian governance practices and stark inequalities of the pre-revolutionary order. The dissertation thus reveals how revolutionary legalism can entrench the very inequalities it seeks to dismantle, even when crafted from below by former peasants and workers. By shifting focus from national elites to local bureaucrats, it challenges conventional explanations that attribute revolutionary shortcomings primarily to conservative backlash or top-down impositions. Instead, it emphasizes how local interpretations of rights decisively shape revolutionary outcomes.