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Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution (Spanish: Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from 20 November 1910 to 1 December 1920. [6][7][8]It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history"[9] and resulted in the destruction of the Federal Army, its replacement by a revolutionary army,[10] and the transformation of Mexican culture and government. The northern Constitutionalist faction prevailed on the battlefield and drafted the present-day Constitution of Mexico, which aimed to create a strong central government. Revolutionary generals held power from 1920 to 1940.[8] [11]The revolutionary conflict was primarily a civil war, but foreign powers, having important economic and strategic interests in Mexico, figured in the outcome of Mexico's power struggles; the U.S. involvement was particularly high.[12][13]The conflict led to the deaths of around one million people, mostly noncombatants.

For Mexico's war with Spain in 1810–1821, see Mexican War of Independence.

Although the decades-long regime of President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) was increasingly unpopular, there was no foreboding in 1910 that a revolution was about to break out.[12] The aging Díaz failed to find a controlled solution to presidential succession, resulting in a power struggle among competing elites and the middle classes, which occurred during a period of intense labor unrest, exemplified by the Cananea and Río Blanco strikes.[14] When wealthy northern landowner Francisco I. Madero challenged Díaz in the 1910 presidential election and Díaz jailed him, Madero called for an armed uprising against Díaz in the Plan of San Luis Potosí. Rebellions broke out first in Morelos, and then to a much greater extent in northern Mexico. The Federal Army was unable to suppress the widespread uprisings, showing the military's weakness and encouraging the rebels.[15] Díaz resigned in May 1911 and went into exile, an interim government was installed until elections could be held, the Federal Army was retained, and revolutionary forces demobilized. The first phase of the Revolution was relatively bloodless and short-lived.


Madero was elected President, taking office in November 1911. He immediately faced the armed rebellion of Emiliano Zapata in Morelos, where peasants demanded rapid action on agrarian reform. Politically inexperienced, Madero's government was fragile, and further regional rebellions broke out. In February 1913, prominent army generals from the Díaz regime staged a coup d'etat in Mexico City, forcing Madero and Vice President Pino Suárez to resign. Days later, both men were assassinated by orders of the new President, Victoriano Huerta. This initiated a new and bloody phase of the Revolution, as a coalition of northerners opposed to the counter-revolutionary regime of Huerta, the Constitutionalist Army led by Governor of Coahuila Venustiano Carranza, entered the conflict. Zapata's forces continued their armed rebellion in Morelos. Huerta's regime lasted from February 1913 to July 1914, and saw the Federal Army defeated by revolutionary armies. The revolutionary armies then fought each other, with the Constitutionalist faction under Carranza defeating the army of former ally Francisco "Pancho" Villa by the summer of 1915.


Carranza consolidated power, and a new constitution was promulgated in February 1917. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 established universal male suffrage, promoted secularism, workers' rights, economic nationalism, and land reform, and enhanced the power of the federal government.[16] Carranza became President of Mexico in 1917, serving a term ending in 1920. He attempted to impose a civilian successor, prompting northern revolutionary generals to rebel. Carranza fled Mexico City and was killed. From 1920 to 1940, revolutionary generals held office, a period when state power became more centralized and revolutionary reforms were implemented, bringing the military under the control of the civilian government.[17] The Revolution was a decade-long civil war, with new political leadership that gained power and legitimacy through their participation in revolutionary conflicts. The political party they founded, which would become the Institutional Revolutionary Party, ruled Mexico until the presidential election of 2000. Even the conservative winner of that election, Vicente Fox, contended his election was heir to the 1910 democratic election of Francisco Madero, thereby claiming the heritage and legitimacy of the Revolution.[18]

Interpreting the history of the revolution[edit]

There is a vast historiography on the Mexican Revolution, with many different interpretations of the history. Over time it has become more fragmented. There is consensus as to when the revolution began, that is in 1910, but there is no consensus when it ended. The Constitutionalists defeated their major rivals and called the constitutional convention that drafted the 1917 Constitution, but did not effectively control all regions. The year 1920 was the last successful military rebellion, bringing the northern revolutionary generals to power. According to Álvaro Matute, "By the time Obregón was sworn in as president on December 1, 1920, the armed stage of the Mexican Revolution was effectively over."[201] The year 1940 saw revolutionary general and President Lázaro Cárdenas choose Manuel Avila Camacho, a moderate, to succeed him. A 1966 anthology by scholars of the revolution was entitled Is the Mexican Revolution Dead?.[202] Historian Alan Knight has identified "orthodox" interpretation of the revolution as a monolithic, popular, nationalist revolution, while revisionism has focused on regional differences, and challenges its credentials revolution.[203] One scholar classifies the conflict as a "great rebellion" rather than a revolution.[204]


Major leaders of the Revolution have been the subject of biographies, including the martyred Francisco I. Madero. There are many biographies of Zapata and Villa, whose movements did not achieve power, along with studies of the presidential career of revolutionary general Lázaro Cárdenas. In recent years, biographies of the victorious northerners Carranza, Obregón, and Calles have reassessed their roles in the Revolution. Sonorans in the Mexican Revolution have not yet collectively been the subject of a major study.


Often studied as an event solely of Mexican history, or one also involving Mexico's northern neighbor, scholars now recognize that "From the beginning to the end, foreign activities figured crucially in the Revolution's course, not simple antagonism from the U.S. government, but complicated Euro-American imperialist rivalries, extremely intricate during the first world war."[205] A key work illuminating the international aspects of the Revolution is Friedrich Katz's 1981 work The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution.[25]

Legacies[edit]

Strong central government, civilian subordination of military[edit]

Although the ignominious end of Venustiano Carranza's presidency in 1920 cast a shadow over his legacy in the Revolution, sometimes viewed as a conservative revolutionary, he and his northern allies laid "the foundation of a more ambitious, centralizing state dedicated to national integration and national self-assertion."[107] In the assessment of historian Alan Knight, "a victory of Villa and Zapata would probably have resulted in a weak, fragmented state, a collage of revolutionary fiefs of varied political hues presided over by a feeble central government."[107] Porfirio Díaz had successfully centralized power during his long presidency. Carranza was an old politico of the Díaz regime, considered a kind of bridge between the old Porfirian order and the new revolutionary.[208] The northern generals seized power in 1920, with the "Sonoran hegemony prov[ing] complete and long lasting."[216] The Sonorans, particularly Álvaro Obregón, were battle-tested leaders and pragmatic politicians able to consolidate centralized power immediately after 1920. The revolutionary struggle destroyed the professional army and brought to power men who joined the Revolution as citizen-soldiers. Once in power, successive revolutionary generals holding the presidency, Obregón, Calles, and Cárdenas, systematically downsized the army and instituted reforms to create a professionalized force subordinate to civilian politicians. By 1940, the government had controlled the power of the revolutionary generals, making the Mexican military subordinate to the strong central government, breaking the cycle of military intervention in politics dating to the independence era. It is also in contrast to the pattern of military power in many Latin American countries.[10][217]

United States involvement in the Mexican Revolution

Mexican Border War (1910–1919)

Military history of Mexico

List of factions in the Mexican Revolution

List of wars involving Mexico

List of Mexican Revolution and Cristero War films

Partido Revolucionario Institucional

Sonora in the Mexican Revolution

Bourgeois revolution

(1981). The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Katz, Friedrich

(1998). The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Katz, Friedrich

(1986a). The Mexican Revolution, Volume 1: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants. University of Nebraska Press.

Knight, Alan

(1986b). The Mexican Revolution, Volume 2: Counter-revolution and Reconstruction. University of Nebraska Press.

Knight, Alan

(1981) [1968]. Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, Greenwood Press.

Lieuwen, Edwin

(2005). Death and the Idea of Mexico. New York: Zone Books.

Lomnitz, Claudio

Meade, Teresa A. (8 January 2016). History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present. Concise History of the Modern World (2nd ed.). . ISBN 978-1118772485.

Wiley-Blackwell

Meyer, Jean (2004). La Revolucion mexicana [The Mexican Revolution] (in Spanish). Mexico: Tusquets.  978-607-421-141-2.

ISBN

Meyer, Michael C. (1972). Huerta: A Political Portrait. Lincoln, Nebraska: .

University of Nebraska Press

Shadle, Stanley F. (1994). Andrés Molina Enríquez: Mexican Land Reformer of the Revolutionary Era. Tucson: .

University of Arizona Press

(1969) [1910]. Barbarous Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Turner, John Kenneth

Brunk, Samuel. The American Historical Review. Washington: April 1996, Volume 101, Issue 2, Page 331.

The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican Revolution

Brunk, Samuel. “‘The Sad Situation of Civilians and Soldiers’: The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican Revolution.” The American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 331–53. .

"The Sad Situation of Civilians and Soldiers": The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican Revolution

Brunk, Samuel. "Zapata and the City Boys: In Search of a Piece of Revolution". Hispanic American Historical Review. Duke University Press, 1993.

"" Zapatista Direct Solidarity Committee. University of Texas.

From Soldaderas to Comandantes

Gilbert, Dennis. "" Mexican Studies. Berkley: Winter 2003, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 127.

Emiliano Zapata: Textbook Hero.

Hardman, John. Archived 9 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine. "Postcards of the Mexican Revolution"

"Soldiers of Fortune" in the Mexican Revolution

Merewether Charles, Collections Curator, Getty Research Institute, ", January 2002.

Mexico: From Empire to Revolution"

Rausch George Jr. "", The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 42, No. 2, May 1963 pp. 133–151.

The Exile and Death of Victoriano Huerta

Tuck, Jim. "" Mexico Connect, 1996–2006.

Zapata and the Intellectuals.

from the Library of Congress at Flickr Commons

Mexican Revolution

Library of Congress – Hispanic Reading Room portal, Distant Neighbors: The U.S. and the Mexican Revolution

Encyclopædia Britannica

Mexican Revolution

from EDSITEment, "The Best of the Humanities on the Web"

EDSITEment's Spotlight: The Centennial of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–2010

U.S. Library of Congress Country Study: Mexico

latinoartcommunity.org

Mexican Revolution of 1910 and Its Legacy

Stephanie Creed, Kelcie McLaughlin, Christina Miller, Vince Struble, Archived 7 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Latin American Revolutions, course material for History 328, Truman State University (Missouri)

Mexican Revolution 1910–1920

photographs and commentary on the site of the J. Paul Getty Trust

Mexico: From Empire to Revolution

Photos and postcards in color and in black and white, some with manuscript letters, postmarks, and stamps from the collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University

Mexican Revolution, ca. 1910–1917

held at Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University

Papers of E. K. Warren & Sons, 1884–1973, ranchers in Mexico, Texas and New Mexico

in the "Children in History" website. This is an overview of the Revolution with a treatment of the impact on children.

Mexican Revolution

from the DeGolyer Library contains photographs related to the Mexican Revolution.

Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints

Time line of the Mexican Revolution

from the DeGolyer Library, SMU.

Elmer and Diane Powell Collection on Mexico and the Mexican Revolution

from the University of Michigan Museum of Art

Collection: "Era of the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Muralist Movement"