Shifting Currents in Mexican Histiography: From Crisis to Canon in the Mid-20th Century

While the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a prolific output in the historiography of ideas, the 1960s saw a sharp decline. The earlier surge was fueled by a new generation of historians with strong ties to the social sciences and influenced by economic history from the United States and France's Annales School, particularly Fernand Braudel. However, post-war political realignment and an inward focus on Mexico's "revolutionary family" bred intellectual disenchantment. Figures like Daniel Cosío Villegas and Jesús Silva Herzog critically questioned the developmental path of the revolutionary government, beginning with President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), as the Mexican Revolution itself lost credibility as a unifying narrative.

In this climate of perceived crisis, Daniel Cosío Villegas launched a seminal research seminar in 1949, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican agencies, to investigate the immediate antecedents of the 1910 Revolution. This project assembled Mexico's first generation of professional historians, including Luis González y González, Berta Ulloa, and Moisés González Navarro. Their collective work culminated in the monumental, ten-volume Historia Moderna de México (1955-72), a landmark publication unparalleled since the 19th-century México a Través de los Siglos.

Guided by the philosophical approach of Wilhelm Dilthey, the project pursued a "pragmatic" history, seeking to understand modern Mexico through its concrete works and actions. Echoing Leopold von Ranke's methodology, Cosío insisted on building every affirmation on authoritative documentary proof. This crusade for empirical, source-driven history reinforced the model earlier championed by Silvio Zavala. Cosío admired the "American scholar" and aimed to replicate this objective model in Latin America to counterbalance the ideological interpretations of both left and right.

This empirical tradition solidified through institutional seminars. The Seminars on Modern History established a lasting stylistic legacy, producing influential regional and general histories. A subsequent seminar led by Luis González focused on contemporary history, resulting in 19 volumes on the 1910-1960 period (1977-1997). These collaborative efforts involved political scientists, economists, and sociologists, culminating in widely successful syntheses like the Historia General de México (1976) and the Historia Mínima de México (1973).

Despite Cosío's own ambivalence about professionalization, U.S. historian Robert A. Potash celebrated around 1960 the triumph of an "objective and impartial" history in Mexico. He contrasted the work of Cosío and Jesuit historian José Bravo Ugarte with the more philosophical "historicist" school of Edmundo O’Gorman. Potash’s analysis highlighted the decisive victory of the Rankean school of methodology within Mexican academic historiography, affirming the state-sponsored model of scientific history that prioritized documentary rigor over ideological or existential interpretation.