Antonio L¢pez de Santa Anna (1794?1876) is one of the most famous, and infamous, figures in Mexican history. Six times the country?s president, he is consistently depicted as a traitor, a turncoat, and a tyrant?the exclusive cause of all of Mexico?s misfortunes following the country?s independence from Spain. He is also, as this biography makes clear, grossly misrepresented. ø Will Fowler provides a revised picture of Santa Anna?s life, offering new insights into his activities in his bailiwick of Veracruz and in his numerous military engagements. The Santa Anna who emerges from this book is an intelligent, dynamic, yet reluctant leader, ingeniously deceptive at times, courageous and patriotic at others. His extraordinary story is that of a middle-class provincial criollo, a high-ranking officer, an arbitrator, a dedicated landowner, and a political leader who tried to prosper personally and help his country develop at a time of severe and repeated crises, as the colony that was New Spain gave way to a young, troubled, besieged, and beleaguered Mexican nation. ø ø

A clear and concise treatment of Mexico's foremost military hero.

A story about baseball, family, the American Dream, and the fight to turn Los Angeles into a big league city. Dodger Stadium is an American icon. But the story of how it came to be goes far beyond baseball. The hills that cradle the stadium were once home to three vibrant Mexican American communities. In the early 1950s, those communities were condemned to make way for a utopian public housing project. Then, in a remarkable turn, public housing in the city was defeated amidst a Red Scare conspiracy. Instead of getting their homes back, the remaining residents saw the city sell their land to Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now LA would be getting a different sort of utopian fantasy -- a glittering, ultra-modern stadium. But before Dodger Stadium could be built, the city would have to face down the neighborhood's families -- including one, the Aréchigas, who refused to yield their home. The ensuing confrontation captivated the nation - and the divisive outcome still echoes through Los Angeles today.

This is a study of one of the leading politicians of Independent Mexico, Jose Maria Tornel y Mendivil, whose loyalty to Santa Anna and whose skills as a writer led him to play a crucial role in enabling the caudillo's repeated rise to power during this period. This first biography of Tornel in English provides a new insight into the political thought of the santanistas and the ways in which Santa Anna was able to return to power time and again in spite of the fact that he was deemed responsible for such major national disasters as the Texas campaign of 1836 and the 1847 defeat against the United States. A close analysis of Tornel's own political evolution, from advocating a radical federalist agenda in the 1820s to defending reactionary dictatorship in the 1850s, illustrates the extent to which the santanistas' policies changed as the hopeful, early 1820s degenerated into the despair of the late 1840s. As the leading ideologue of the santanistas, a study of his politics, paying close attention to the way they evolved in response to the different crises Mexico underwent, highlights, for the first time, the extent to which Santa Anna and his followers upheld a particular political agenda which was essentially populist, militaristic, antipolitics, and nationalistic, and varied depending on the prevailing circumstances and the different historical contexts in which it surfaced. A study of Tornel's activities as Santa Anna's main informer in the capital, his leading propagandist, and as a key player in the orchestration of revolts such as the 1834 Plan of Cuernavaca, serves to show the extent to which Santa Anna's success relied on Tornel's services. Coincidentally or not, without Tornel, Santa Anna was not able to return to power after his fall in 1855.

Osprey's examination of the Mexican Army of Santa Anna, from 1821 to 1848. Detailed information on the Mexican Army which fought the Texans in the Battle of the Alamo (1836) and the US Army in its first important foreign war ten years later, is notoriously elusive. In this ground-breaking book an internationally respected military historian presents a mass of new information from Mexican archives and a variety of other contemporary sources. For the first time the armies of the notorious General Santa Anna are explained coherently for the English-speaking reader, and their frequently changing and unevenly issued uniforms are illustrated with early prints, portraits, photos of rare surviving items, and meticulous colour reconstructions.

This book takes readers into the Mexican-majority neighborhoods of Santa Ana, California, a city once dubbed the hardest place to live in the U.S. Jonathan E. Calvillo explores the challenges faced by Mexican immigrants in this working-class city, highlighting how faith practices are central to social interactions and community building. How does faith shape residents' sense of ethnic identity? Drawing on five years of participant observation and in-depthinterviews, The Saints of Santa Ana offers a rich portrait of a fascinating American community.

Much of the so-called Age of Santa Anna in the history of independent Mexico remains a mystery and no decade is less well understood than the years from 1835 to 1846. In 1834, the ruling elite of middle class hombres de bien concluded that a highly centralised republican government was the only solution to the turmoil and factionalism that had characterised the new nation since its emancipation from Spain in 1821. The central republic was thus set up in 1835, but once again civil strife, economic stagnation, and military coups prevailed until 1846, when a disastrous war with the United States began in which Mexico was to lose half of its national territory. This study explains the course of events and analyses why centralism failed, the issues and personalities involved, and the underlying pressures of economic and social change.

A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.

In mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, garrisons, town councils, state legislatures, and an array of political actors, groups, and communities began aggressively petitioning the government at both local and national levels to address their grievances. Often viewed as a revolt or a coup d’état, these pronunciamientos were actually a complex form of insurrectionary action that relied first on the proclamation and circulation of a plan that listed the petitioners’ demands and then on endorsement by copycat pronunciamientos that forced the authorities, be they national or regional, to the negotiating table. In Independent Mexico, Will Fowler provides a comprehensive overview of the pronunciamiento practice following the Plan of Iguala. This fourth and final installment in, and culmination of, a larger exploration of the pronunciamiento highlights the extent to which this model of political contestation evolved. The result of more than three decades of pronunciamiento politics was the bloody Civil War of the Reforma (1858–60) and the ensuing French Intervention (1862–67). Given the frequency and importance of the pronunciamiento, this book is also a concise political history of independent Mexico.

Describes what happened during the siege at the Alamo in 1836, as experienced by young Enrique Esparza and his family, and includes a script and instructions for staging a theatrical performance of this adventure.