Revolutionary Mexico

Looks at the Mexican Revolution against the background of world history, discusses the causes of the revolt, and compares it with those in Iran, Russia, and China.

During the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico, both intellectuals and government officials promoted ethnic diversity while attempting to overcome the stigma of race in Mexican society. Programs such as the Indigenista movement represented their efforts to redeem the Revolution's promise of a more democratic future for all citizens. This book explores three decades of efforts on the part of government officials, social scientists, and indigenous leaders to renegotiate the place of native peoples in Mexican society. It traces the movement's origins as a humanitarian cause among intellectuals, the involvement of government in bringing education, land reform, cultural revival, and social research to Indian communities, and the active participation of Indian peoples. Traditionally, scholars have seen Indigenismo as an elitist formulation of the "Indian problem." Dawson instead explores the ways that the movement was mediated by both elite and popular pressures over time. By showing how Indigenismo was used by a variety of actors to negotiate the shape of the revolutionary stateÑfrom anthropologist Manual Gamio to President L‡zaro C‡rdenasÑhe demonstrates how it contributed to a new "pact of domination" between indigenous peoples and the government. Although the power of the Indigenistas was limited by the face that "Indian" remained a racial slur in Mexico, the ind’genas capacitados empowered through Indigenismo played a central role in ensuring seventy years of PRI hegemony. In studying the confluence of state formation, social science, and native activism, Dawson's book offers a new perspective for understanding the processes through which revolutionary hegemony emerged.

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.

This book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on the Mexican Revolution by providing a detailed history of the northeastern state of Coahuila from the late Portifirian era to 1920. It evaluates the social, political, and economic developments that contributed to revolutionary activity within Coahuila, and that helped shape the revolutionary movements led by Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza. Pasztor explores the role played by the extensive Coahuila-Texas border in the financing of the Mexican Revolution and she addresses the revolution's immediate outcomes through a study of the reforms introduced during the governorships of Carranza and Gustavo Espinosa Mireles.

The year is 1921, and Francisco Madero is president of Mexico. Just last year he and his top general ousted the long-standing president (some say dictator), Porfirio Diaz, who is now in exile. But the country is far from stable. A basic cultural rift between the elite and the poor portends unrest and a sequence of revolts. Students are assigned to play characters that are charged with stabilizing their country and preventing further civil war. The goal is to reform Mexico and make it a better nation for all of its inhabitants—but Mexicans and foreigners worry that without a firm hand, Mexico's governance might spiral out of control. At what cost will progress come?

Much ink has been spilled over the men of the Mexican Revolution, but far less has been written about its women. Kathy Sosa, Ellen Riojas Clark, and Jennifer Speed set out to right this wrong in Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico, which celebrates the women of early Texas and Mexico who refused to walk a traditional path. The anthology embraces an expansive definition of the word revolutionary by looking at female role models from decades ago and subversives who continue to stand up for their visions and ideals. Eighteen portraits introduce readers to these rebels by providing glimpses into their lives and places in history. At the heart of the portraits are the women of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920)⁠—women like the soldaderas who shadowed the Mexican armies, tasked with caring for and treating the wounded troops. Filling in the gaps are iconic godmothers⁠ like the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche whose stories are seamlessly woven into the collective history of Texas and Mexico. Portraits of artists Frida Kahlo and Nahui Olin and activists Emma Tenayuca and Genoveva Morales take readers from postrevolutionary Mexico into the present. Portraits include a biography, an original pen-and-ink illustration, and a historical or literary piece by a contemporary writer who was inspired by their subject’s legacy. Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Elena Poniatowska, Carmen Tafolla, and other contributors bring their experience to bear in their pieces, and historian Jennifer Speed’s introduction contextualizes each woman in her cultural-historical moment. A foreword by civil rights activist Dolores Huerta and an afterword by scholar Norma Elia Cantú bookend this powerful celebration of women who revolutionized their worlds.

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico is an empirically rich history of women’s political organizing during a critical stage of regime consolidation. Rebutting the image of Mexican women as conservative and antirevolutionary, Jocelyn Olcott shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship. Piecing together material from national and regional archives, popular journalism, and oral histories, Olcott examines how women inhabited the conventionally manly role of citizen by weaving together its quotidian and formal traditions, drawing strategies from local political struggles and competing gender ideologies. Olcott demonstrates an extraordinary grasp of the complexity of postrevolutionary Mexican politics, exploring the goals and outcomes of women’s organizing in Mexico City and the port city of Acapulco as well as in three rural locations: the southeastern state of Yucatán, the central state of Michoacán, and the northern region of the Comarca Lagunera. Combining the strengths of national and regional approaches, this comparative perspective sets in relief the specificities of citizenship as a lived experience.

Waking the Dictator is a study of federalism in late nineteenth century Veracruz State. It is also a politico-military analysis and an evaluation of social-revolutionary relations in the epoch of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution. This study is the first modern, comprehensive, and analytical history of the Porfiriato and Mexican Revolution in Veracruz.