Jiquilpan

I knew the name Lázaro Cárdenas in the way a European who pays attention to history knows it: as the Mexican president who expropriated the oil companies in 1938, a fact that appears in the footnotes of twentieth-century economic history as an example of resource nationalism and then moves on. I did not know Cárdenas was born in Jiquilpan. I did not know Jiquilpan was a small city on the western edge of the Ciénega de Chapala region of Michoacán. I did not know the house where he was born was a museum you could walk into on a Wednesday afternoon with six other visitors and stay for an hour.

I drove to Jiquilpan from Guadalajara as a detour on the way to the Michoacán coast — the city sits on the highway that connects Guadalajara to Manzanillo, and the sign for it is easy to miss. I almost missed it and then remembered I had written it down for exactly this reason.

The Centro Cultural Cárdenas

The house is colonial, whitewashed, on a street just off the main plaza. The plaque outside does not oversell it. Inside, the rooms have been organized into a biographical museum that follows Cárdenas chronologically: his origins in this house in this city, his military career in the Revolution, his political rise through the machinery of post-revolutionary politics, his six-year presidency from 1934 to 1940.

The oil expropriation gets a room to itself, and this room is the reason to come. On March 18, 1938, Cárdenas announced on the radio that Mexico was nationalizing the holdings of seventeen foreign oil companies — British and American, primarily — and creating Pemex. The foreign companies had refused to comply with a Supreme Court ruling on wages and workers’ rights. Cárdenas had spent two years building a political coalition that would support the move. He had spoken with Roosevelt, who had indicated the United States would not intervene militarily. And then he did it.

I stood in that room reading the panel explanations with photographs of Cárdenas at his desk and the original documents framed on the walls, and I realized I had been thinking about Mexican history as a series of foreign policy crises viewed from the outside — and had never fully understood it as a series of economic sovereignty battles viewed from the inside. The 1938 expropriation was not an anti-American provocation. It was a Mexican government exercising control over Mexican natural resources that foreign companies had been extracting for decades without meaningful benefit to the Mexican population. This distinction had apparently been waiting for me in a small museum in Michoacán.

The agrarian reform section is the other surprise. Cárdenas distributed approximately 45 million acres to Mexican peasant communities during his presidency — more than all previous presidents combined. The photographs here show a man who spent a significant portion of his presidency in physical proximity to the people for whom the policies were designed: standing in fields with ejidatarios who had just received land titles, attending community meetings in rural Michoacán, present in a way that seems either genuine or very well documented.

The personal effects section — his reading glasses, handwritten letters to campesino organizations, his uniform from the military campaigns — brings the scale of the man down to the specific in a way that large historical narratives resist. He was born in this city, in this house, in a room whose dimensions you can stand in, and he changed the economic structure of the country.

The Orozco Murals

Two blocks from the Cárdenas museum, the Biblioteca Pública José Guadalupe Zuno has murals by José Clemente Orozco — one of the three great Mexican muralists of the twentieth century and, for my money, the most formally interesting of them. The murals here are from 1940, commissioned during the Cárdenas years, and they engage the themes of that moment: the indigenous heritage of Michoacán, the struggle of the rural campesino, the tension between tradition and what was then modernity.

Orozco’s figures have a quality that I find harder to look away from than Rivera’s: more angular, more emotionally unresolved, the compositions refusing easy legibility. The Jiquilpan murals are not his major work — that is in Guadalajara’s Hospicio Cabañas, which is extraordinary — but they are good and they are here, in a functioning public library in a small city on a Wednesday afternoon, which is precisely where muralism was supposed to end up.

The Strawberries and Getting There

The Ciénega de Chapala region is strawberry country. In season — roughly November through March — roadside stands sell flats of berries at prices that require a brief recalibration if you are accustomed to European supermarket fruit. I bought two containers on the way out of Jiquilpan and ate one before I reached the highway.

Jiquilpan is on the 15 federal highway between Guadalajara and Manzanillo, about two hours southwest of Guadalajara. The bus stops here; so does any driver going between the two cities who is paying attention to the signs. Half a day is sufficient for the museum and the library and a walk through the centro. A full day includes lunch, the strawberries, and a slow look at the valley.