The Social-Scientific Turn and New Historiographical Currents in 20th-Century Mexico

By 1960, a significant methodological shift had reshaped Mexican historiography. The history of ideas migrated to philosophy and literature faculties, while institutional history was increasingly practiced within departments of anthropology and ethnohistory. This transition was accelerated by a growing desire to align historical methodology with the social sciences, reflected in a surge of interdisciplinary journal publications. A 1966 bibliographic inventory reveals a broad repertoire of subjects, dominated by efforts to replace traditional political history with new economic, social, and demographic history. This shift was a direct response to the challenges of rapid urbanization and population growth, while social history, focusing on class structure and movements, gained prominence amid the ideological ferment following the Cuban Revolution (1959) and growing criticism of the PRI regime after the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968.

The re-evaluation of the Mexican Revolution became a central field for a new generation of historians. Seminal works by foreign scholars, such as John Womack’s Zapata y la Revolución Mexicana (1966) and Jean Meyer’s La Cristiada (1971), became bestsellers and were complemented by critical studies from Mexicans like Héctor Aguilar Camín, Adolfo Gilly, and Enrique Krauze. This revisionist trend peaked in the 1980s with influential syntheses by Alan Knight and François-Xavier Guerra. Inspired by Althusserian Marxism and theorists like Barrington Moore, these works provided a new theoretical touchstone for analyzing revolution and state formation, though they often overlooked the cultural phenomena accompanying industrialization and mass media.

Concurrently, the influence of the French Annales School profoundly shaped Mexican economic history. Enrique Florescano pioneered this approach, applying Ernest Labrousse’s serial history and Fernand Braudel’s concepts to Mexican studies. This paradigm fostered institutions like the Comisión de Historia Económica of CLACSO and expanded the Departamento de Estudios Históricos at INAH. Following the 1968 student movement, historians sought guidelines for the future in the past, a pursuit supported by state-funded publication of theses. This popularized social-scientific history, exemplified by manuals like Ciro F. Cardoso’s Los Métodos de la Historia (1977), which advocated for a Latin American history independent of European models.

The Braudelian influence did not preclude a robust Marxist historiography, particularly active at UNAM. Scholars like Enrique Semo, author of Historia del Capitalismo en México (1973), and Pablo González Casanova, who chronicled the workers’ movement, provided a class-conscious alternative to the Colegio de México’s canon. While committed to a class analysis, these historians largely adhered to established academic rules. Alongside these currents, the "new" economic history from the United States also gained traction. Today, this econometric approach remains more lastingly influential than the serial history of the Annales, which has largely faded from prominence, marking the complex, enduring legacy of mid-century methodological debates.