Examines Mexican politics and government from the dictatorship of General Porfirio Dâiaz to the presidency of General Lâazaro Câardenas.

In 1910 insurgent leaders crushed the Porfirian dictatorship, but in the years that followed fought among themselves, until a nationalist consensus produced the 1917 Constitution. This in turn provided the basis for a reform agenda that transformed Mexico in the modern era. The civil war and the reforms that followed receive new and insightful attention in this book. These essays, the result of the 45th annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, presented by the University of Texas at Arlington in March 2010, commemorate the centennial of the outbreak of the revolution. A potent mix of factors—including the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few thousand hacienda owners, rancheros, and foreign capitalists; the ideological conflict between the Diaz government and the dissident regional reformers; and the grinding poverty afflicting the majority of the nation’s eleven million industrial and rural laborers—provided the volatile fuel that produced the first major political and social revolution of the twentieth century. The conflagration soon swept across the Rio Grande; indeed, The Mexican Revolution shows clearly that the struggle in Mexico had tremendous implications for the American Southwest. During the years of revolution, hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens crossed the border into the United States. As a result, the region experienced waves of ethnically motivated violence, economic tensions, and the mass expulsions of Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent.

“An excellent account and analysis of the Mexican Revolution, its background, its course, and its legacy . . . an important contribution [and] a must read!” (Samuel Farber, author of Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959). The most significant event in modern Mexican history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 remains a subject of debate and controversy. Why did it happen? What makes it distinctive? Was it even a revolution at all? In The Mexican Revolution, Stuart Easterling offers a concise chronicle of events from the fall of the longstanding Díaz regime to Gen. Obregón’s ascent to the presidency. In a comprehensible style, aimed at students and general readers, Easterling sorts through the revolution’s many internal conflicts, and asks whether or not its leaders achieved their goals.

In the first half of the 20th century, Mexico was home to a burgeoning of art comparable in energy to the political revolution that shook the country between 1910 and 1920. This surge of artistic activity is the subject of this compelling new book, which presents the work of Mexican artists—from the social-realist painters Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros to the photographers Agust�n Jim�nez and Manuel �lvarez Bravo—alongside that of their international contemporaries, figures as diverse as Philip Guston, Josef and Anni Albers, and Edward Burra. Illustrated with some 150 striking images, Adrian Locke’s incisive text explores the artistic documentation of the dramatic changes wrought by the revolution, the government’s role in employing artists to promote its reforms, the emergence of a native modernism, and the remarkable contribution of European and American artists and intellectuals, including Eisenstein, Trotsky, and Andr� Breton, to Mexico’s cultural renaissance.

The Mexican Revolution gave rise to the Mexican nation-state as we know it today. Rural revolutionaries took up arms against the Díaz dictatorship in support of agrarian reform, in defense of their political autonomy, or inspired by a nationalist desire to forge a new Mexico. However, in the Gran Nayar, a rugged expanse of mountains and canyons, the story was more complex, as the region’s four Indigenous peoples fought both for and against the revolution and the radical changes it bought to their homeland. To make sense of this complex history, Nathaniel Morris offers the first systematic understanding of the participation of the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples in the Mexican Revolution. They are known for being among the least “assimilated” of all Mexico’s Indigenous peoples. It’s often been assumed that they were stuck up in their mountain homeland—“the Gran Nayar”—with no knowledge of the uprisings, civil wars, military coups, and political upheaval that convulsed the rest of Mexico between 1910 and 1940. Based on extensive archival research and years of fieldwork in the rugged and remote Gran Nayar, Morris shows that the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples were actively involved in the armed phase of the revolution. This participation led to serious clashes between an expansionist, “rationalist” revolutionary state and the highly autonomous communities and heterodox cultural and religious practices of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants. Morris documents confrontations between practitioners of subsistence agriculture and promoters of capitalist development, between rival Indian generations and political factions, and between opposing visions of the world, of religion, and of daily life. These clashes produced some of the most severe defeats that the government’s state-building programs suffered during the entire revolutionary era, with significant and often counterintuitive consequences both for local people and for the Mexican nation as a whole.

This comprehensive two-volume history of the Mexican Revolution presents a new interpretation of one of the world's most important revolutions. While it reflects the many facets of this complex and far-reaching historical subject it emphasises its fundamentally local, popular and agrarian character and locates it within a more general comparative context.-- Publisher.

During the Mexican Revolution a remarkable alliance of peasants, working and middle classes, and elites banded together to end General Porfirio Diaz’s thirty-five year rule as dictator-president and created a radical new constitution that demanded education for all children, redistributed land and water resources, and established progressive labor laws. In this collection, Mark Wasserman examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of the revolution and carefully untangles the shifting alliances of the participants. In his introduction Wasserman outlines the context for the revolution, rebels’ differing goals for land redistribution, and the resulting battles between rebel leaders and their generals. He also examines daily life and the conduct of the revolution, as well as its national and international legacy. The accompanying selected sources include political documents along with dozens of accounts from politicians and generals to male and female soldiers, civilians, and journalists. Collectively they offer insight into the reasons for fighting, the politics behind the war, and the revolution’s international legacy. Document headnotes, a chronology, selected bibliography, and questions for consideration provide pedagogical support.

The Mexican Revolution was a 'great' revolution, decisive for Mexico, important within Latin America, and comparable to the other major revolutions of modern history. Alan Knight offers a succinct account of the period, from the initial uprising against Porfirio Diaz and the ensuing decade of civil war, to the enduring legacy of the Revolution.

Winner of the Alfred B. Thomas Award and sponsored by the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, Revolutionary Parks tells the surprising story of how forty national parks were created in Mexico during the latter stages of the first social revolution of the twentieth century. By 1940 Mexico had more national parks than any other country. Together they protected more than two million acres of land in fourteen states. Even more remarkable, Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico in the 1930s, began to promote concepts akin to sustainable development and ecotourism. Conventional wisdom indicates that tropical and post-colonial countries, especially in the early twentieth century, have seldom had the ability or the ambition to protect nature on a national scale. It is also unusual for any country to make conservation a political priority in the middle of major reforms after a revolution. What emerges in Emily Wakild’s deft inquiry is the story of a nature protection program that takes into account the history, society, and culture of the times. Wakild employs case studies of four parks to show how the revolutionary momentum coalesced to create early environmentalism in Mexico. According to Wakild, Mexico’s national parks were the outgrowth of revolutionary affinities for both rational science and social justice. Yet, rather than reserves set aside solely for ecology or politics, rural people continued to inhabit these landscapes and use them for a range of activities, from growing crops to producing charcoal. Sympathy for rural people tempered the radicalism of scientific conservationists. This fine balance between recognizing the morally valuable, if not always economically profitable, work of rural people and designing a revolutionary state that respected ecological limits proved to be a radical episode of government foresight.

"Innovative study of the cultural legacy of the Mexican Revolution, using the story of rural schools. Focuses on Puebla and Sonora and the attempt by the central government to implement socialist education and to advance its nationalist agenda. Stresses the importance of negotiation among national and local leaders, teachers and peasants"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.