"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.