Essays On The Mexican Revolution

An anthology of essays dating from the 1890s and presenting a Mexican national outlook.

A collection of multidisciplinary essays by Mexico's foremost scholars on Mexico into the 21st century.

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.

Surveys major trends in Yucatán’s currents in Mexican historiography, and suggest new departures for regional and local-level research Increasingly, the modern era of Mexican history (c. 1750 to the present) is attracting the attention of Mexican and international scholars. Significant studies have appeared for most of the major regions and Yucatán, in particular, has generated an unusual appeal and an abundant scholarship. This book surveys major trends in Yucatán’s currents in Mexican historiography, and suggest new departures for regional and local-level research. Rather than compiling lists of sources around given subject headings in the manner of many historiographies, the author seeks common ground for analysis in the new literature’s preoccupation with changing relations of land, labor, and capital and their impact on regional society and culture. Joseph proposes a new periodization of Yucatán’s modern history which he develops in a series of synthetic essays rooted in regional political economy.