Setting the Virgin on Fire

the long version

"Provides convincing revision of the 'myth of secular redemption' surrounding Lázaro Cárdenas and his program of land distribution to the campesinos. Operating on a 'stripped-down image of land-hungry peasants,' Cárdenas and his supporters underestimated the difficulty of gaining peasant allegiance to the post-revolutionary government and initially failed to understand that they were confronting a cultural as well as an economic problem as they tried to extend revolutionary hegemony"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.