Paul Gillingham: belief

Transcript context

…Right before World War II, the Cárdenas regime redistributes a lot of the cultivatable land. How does that fit into your story? That fits into my story in, it’s always good to say a work in trinity. I’m going to say in three ways, but then reserve the right to say a fourth. The first is that one of the key reasons for the Mexican Revolution is land. Mexico is a strongly rural country with strong traditions of this autonomy, small freeholding, or collective landowning in indigenous areas. The Porfiriato sees a revolution in this extraordinary concentration of land. This entails, obviously, dispossession of the peasantry. This is one of the key things that leads people like Emiliano Zapata to rebel. You have this pent-up demand for land from millions of families. That’s one. Two, it largely, for many, fails because they get land, but they get land on the condition that say they continue factory farming. Everyone’s going to grow sugar. Everyone’s going to grow wheat. Not quite a Soviet kolkhoz, but the peasant doesn’t have autonomy, which they want quite often to plant whatever they want. This is, in many ways, a failure from their point of view, but there’s always the psychological payoff that they have got land. Then, in more straightforward terms, this is one of the reasons that Mexico’s healthcare system, at a really nuts-and-bolts level, works. It’s because every communal farm, ejido they’re called, has a medical office. Even though, in the apparent terms of giving Mexico’s rural population a new level of wealth, autonomy, it doesn’t work particularly well. It brings a certain pride. It brings a certain independence. It brings good healthcare. There are all these less tangible benefits. There’s nothing like it in the Americas. It’s one of the key reasons, I think, that again, the countryside stays largely quiescent while it is stripped of resources in the 60 years after Cárdenas leaves office. Hasn’t the ejido system held Mexico back? Because without that system, many more people would sell their land to outsiders, move to the cities just to have much higher real wages, for instance, as you see in China.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.