Petroleum Nationalism and Mexico’s Futuro

The announcement of the Mexican oil expropriation by President Lázaro Cárdenas shocked the world on March 18, 1938. It was almost unthinkable. In addition to the precipitating issues of Mexican oil workers and the sovereignty of the Mexican Supreme Court, this paper argues that intellectual currents regarding resource nationalism had changed, making the expropriation politically and culturally thinkable.

This paper examines the magazine Futuro, which was edited by labour leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, head of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL), between 1933 and 1946. It assesses changing ideas relating to nationalism and the oil industry as a case study of the changing intellectual climate of the decades surrounding the Second World War in Latin America, which saw significant shifts in the way Latin American governments considered the resources of the nation. Futuro included articles by some of the most outstanding Latin American thinkers of the era – from Pablo Neruda to Alfonso Reyes – and its pages document evolving ideas about the role of government in society and its role in managing workers, the economy, and the natural environment.