In early May, UC Berkeley was honored to host Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on her first visit to the United States after completing her historic term as president. Her week-long visit included extensive interactions with a broad cross-section of Berkeley faculty and students, ranging from seismologists to cultural historians. Her itinerary also brought her to UC San Francisco, where she met with faculty, medical researchers and the Chancellor, and to Oakland’s all-immigrant International High School, where she spoke with the senior class, which included several refugees. The Review opens with President Bachelet’s talk on the “Chilean Path to Progressive Change,” a theme that has important resonance throughout the Americas.
This year, Mexico observes both the bicentennial of its 1810 struggle for independence and the centennial of its 1910 revolution. To commemorate these events, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas writes on “The Promise and Legacy of the Mexican Revolution,” a theme on which he also taught a course at UC Berkeley in spring 2010. A second article on this topic analyzes historian Lorenzo Meyer’s talk on the enduring meaning of Mexican independence and the revolution in the context of contemporary Mexican politics.
The spring 2010 meeting of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum focused on immigration and the high costs of delaying reform for a system that virtually all observers view as broken. The Forum brought together about 20 scholars, political figures, entrepreneurs, journalists and labor leaders from throughout Mexico and the United States. The meetings took place in Zacatecas, Mexico, a state of particular importance in both the War for Independence and the revolution and one that is critical for understanding immigration today. Governor Amalia García hosted the meetings, which are discussed in three articles in this issue.
The great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera appears in two articles. Graham Beal, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, discusses Rivera’s legendary Detroit Industry murals, which some critics view as his finest work. Beal weaves together an analysis of the power of Rivera’s art, the context in which the murals were painted and the history of Detroit. Rivera makes another appearance in historian Bertrand Patenaude’s article on Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s exile in Mexico and his eventual murder there in 1940.
While there are tough, even traumatic, challenges facing Mexico and Latin America, President Bachelet laid out the hope that these challenges can be met.
— Harley Shaiken