The Mexican left’s debates on race and nation
First published at Mexico Solidarity Project.
When British-Mexican Tony Wood talks about the debates of the Mexican left in the 1920s and 30s, some of the questions sound familiar. For example, when a more progressive but still capitalist government is in power, as in Mexico after its 1910 revolution, some in the broad left condemned it, others supported it as a positive step. This debate is occurring again today. Is the Morena party a revolutionary force, a “4th transformation”? Or is it still fundamentally a capitalist party like the old PRI, just throwing the poor a bigger bone?
In the 20s and 30s, another debate arose as Mexican socialists considered how their post-revolutionary nation should relate to Indigenous peoples. The Russians led the international communist movement, and, in 1928, US communist Harry Haywood put forward his thesis that African Americans constituted a nation in the southern US states where the majority of African Americans lived; this was accepted as the Comintern’s official position. This sparked debate in Mexico about whether Indigenous peoples should constitute their own nations separate from Mexico, be merged into the Mexican mainstream or be accorded some level of autonomy.
While the questions discussed were similar, the debates in Mexico and the US emphasized different issues due to different histories of national formation. In Mexico, Afro-Mexicans were not included in the debate about nations within a nation, while in the US, the discussion was only about African Americans, not Native Americans.
Today, with the right wing sweeping the globe, discussion among international radicals is needed more than ever. Tony Wood reminds us that one nation’s left cannot insist, as the Russians once did, that they have the answers that fit every other nation. Understanding the different frames that arise out of local conditions can help us achieve the unity that the left sorely needs.
Wood’s research focuses on the Latin American radical left in the interwar period. His most recent book, titled Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America, appeared in 2026. He was deputy editor of New Left Review from 2007 to 2014 and is a member of its editorial board. He has written on a range of subjects for the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation and the Guardian (UK), among other outlets.
The following interview with Wood was conducted by Meizhu Lui.
The 20s and 30s were a time of political ferment around the world, including Latin America. Why did Mexico City become the “transnational hub” for these discussions?
In a time of political ferment, with ordinary people around the world rising up against oppressive societies, the 1910 Mexican Revolution was a momentous event for Latin America. It galvanized people across borders as an example of how to break the old oligarchies’ power. Beginning in Argentina, students began fighting for university reform, labor movements were growing, anarchist and then socialist and communist currents arose along with other progressive anti-imperialist thinking and organizing. Although not the only place where radicals gathered to debate and strategize, Mexico was the one place in Latin America where a new government looked somewhat favorably on radical currents.
After Russia’s 1917 revolution, communist parties sprang up across Latin America, including in Mexico in 1919. Russia was positioning itself to lead Marxist movements all over the world, and new parties had to consider how much to adopt Russian models versus how much to follow local precedents.
The Mexican left debated whether the state arising from the Mexican Revolution was actually a progressive or left entity. Some saw its progressive potential and defended its gains; others said it’s just another bourgeois state, and we want nothing to do with it; we should overthrow it too. The Russians eventually took the latter view, and the Mexican Communist Party entered a sectarian phase, with some in the party advocating armed insurrection.
Who were involved in these debates about the shape of Mexico’s future?
Not just educated political theorists but also industrial workers, railway workers and artisans were involved. And artists! — like Communist Party activists and muralists Diego Rivera and David Siquieros. Many large peasant leagues existed and also initially affiliated with the communists. But we shouldn’t overstate the Communist Party’s influence. At the end of the 1920s, the peasant leagues split from them because they saw the Mexican state, with all its flaws, as the best guarantee of keeping what they had gained so far.
Mexico has always had its own national-popular tradition, which at times overlapped with socialist and communist agendas. The socialists and communists had to decide whether to support popular movements because their demands moved the country in a good direction or to oppose them because their victories stopped short of socialism.
For us researchers, it’s hard to capture the contributions of those who didn’t write down their ideas, but the agendas of social movements often show us what they were thinking. Peasants and workers were practical and strategic. The 20s and 30s opened a window for long-desired demands — finally the government might actually fulfill them.
As an example, Zapata’s 1911 Plan de Ayala galvanized peasants, even though its land reform proposal was pretty modest. During that revolution against Porfirio Diaz, the Plan asked for the return of lands “usurped” by big haciendas and for the expropriation of one-third only of the land of Diaz supporters. In 1911, Zapata probably understood there was a limit to what campesinos could demand. But by 1917, the terrain had shifted, and the constitution nationalized all the land — much more radical than what Zapata asked for!
What was the involvement of Indigenous peoples?
In that period, the Indigenous generally didn’t couch their demands in terms of ethnic identity but more on locality — x village wants farm credits and seeds. You can infer they were Indigenous, but they aren’t saying “we as Indigenous people…” The language of class — we’re campesinos or we’re proletarians — was much more prominent.
Not until the late 30s, when the progressive Cárdenas government called for congresses of individual Indigenous groups, like the Mixtecs or the Chontal Maya, did many groups form organizations in response. But even then, their demands were like any other campesino demands — running water, seeds, loans, education. Identifying as Indigenous was simply a tool in their toolbox for getting their demands met. If it helped to say they were Indigenous, then good — if not, they tended not to use it.
Was there interest in the question of national self-determination?
Stalin’s definition of a nation dominated on the left, and one of his criteria was inhabiting a defined shared territory. Indigenous peoples themselves did not participate much in the nationhood debate. Mostly Marxist circles theorized about it, both inside the Mexican Communist Party in the early 30s and then outside it in the late 30s among leftist ethnographers. The Communist Party initially thought that backing self-determination would be supported by Indigenous groups, but it didn’t work out that way. In 1935, the Party dropped the policy.
Afro-Mexicans were a relatively small, more dispersed population, and they didn’t share a distinct language, so their status wasn’t part of the conversation. One of the first Mexican presidents in the 1820s, Vicente Guerrero, was Afro-Mexican, but at the time he would have been described using other categories, so his racial identity would have been framed very differently from how it is today.
What did the left mean by “self-determination”? The ideas ranged from creating something like a new municipality and remaining part of Mexico to forming a separate sovereign state independent of Mexico. A basic question throughout Mexican history has been about how the state should relate to Indigenous peoples. Two main responses emerged. One was assimilationist, which was to absorb Indigenous people into a mestizo population — the mainstream view for most of the 20th century. As President Cárdenas said in 1940, the problem is not to keep the “indian indian,” but to “mexicanize” the indian.
But in the 1930s, a pluralist response developed that declared that Mexico is a country made up of many nations, and they all have the right to maintain their distinctiveness within the whole. After the 30s, the separate nations idea disappears, replaced by the idea of greater political autonomy within Mexico.
Did those ideas reverberate up to the present?
I never found a direct through-line from the 20s and 30s to the debates of the late 60s. It’s more like there was a similar framing of the problem in two different historical moments. As I’ve discovered, groups like the campesinos have the same demands over time, even over centuries — but find different language in different historical movements, depending on what they deem as strategically possible.
In the debates about separate nations within the nation, participants also took into account that a Latin American country isn’t the same as Russia or the US. Breaking them up into smaller nation-states could make them more vulnerable to colonization by an imperialist country.
What actual reforms were passed?
In 1992 and 2001, Mexico passed constitutional reforms that support Indigenous people’s right to “free determination,” not “self-determination,” and that describe the nation as “pluricultural,” not “plurinational.” In other words, the state doesn’t recognize indigenous “nations” — it permits them their own cultural practices but no independence from the economic and legal structures of the state.
In 2025, under the new Morena government, a constitutional reform gave indigenous and Afro-Mexicans the authority to govern their own internal affairs. Now for the first time, an Indigenous person not only sits on the Supreme Court but is also its Chief Justice. In this historical moment Mexico’s Indigenous peoples are finding opportunities to couch longstanding demands in new language and with stronger governmental support.
AMLO’s actions on behalf of Indigenous peoples were mostly practical and strategic; sometimes he aimed for quite different goals that happened to benefit some Indigenous peoples. For example, he invested heavily in the infrastructure of Mexico’s southern regions, its most underdeveloped and poor area, but without saying, “This is to address Indigenous issues.” Though posed as more of an issue of regional development, the resulting economic growth benefited many Indigenous communities.
I think my key observation is that Mexico and Latin America use different frames and categories than the United States, and at the same time, their frames, the language of their demands, and even their identities are not fixed over time even in the same places.
No comments:
Post a Comment