Mexican Revolution

This bloody upheaval (1910–1920), which left more than 1 million dead, brought profound political and economic change to Mexico. It caused the fall of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1877–1911), produced the radical Constitution of 1917, and furnished Mexico with a regime that has lasted more than seventy years.

The Revolution went through several stages. The first, the maderista era (1910–1913), encompassed the outbreak of rebellion, the victory of Francisco I. Madero over Díaz in May 1911, the interim presidency of Francisco León De La Barra, and the presidency of Madero until his murder in February 1913. The second comprised the reactionary dictatorship of General Victoriano Huerta, who ousted Madero, from 1913 to 1914. The third, the war of the winners, included the civil war between Venustiano Carranza (called the First Chief), Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, the latter two of whom were loosely allied. The fourth incorporated the victory of Carranza and his presidency (1916–1920). The final stage covered Carranza's failure and overthrow.

The Revolution had its origins in the changes brought about by the rapid economic growth that took place during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. During this period, economic development, fueled by foreign investment in export industries, permanently altered the Mexican class structure and created widespread unrest. The construction of a nationwide railroad network after 1880 enabled Mexico to compete on the world market for minerals and agricultural products. A burgeoning mining industry helped engender a growing working class that sought improved wages and working conditions. Flourishing commercial agriculture raised land values, which set off periods of land expropriations of small landholders and villages by owners of haciendas. These expropriations alienated peasants, who were forced to immigrate to the cities, mining camps, and across the border to the United States in search of employment.

The expanding economy and government produced a new middle class that, in the face of unfair privilege, sought equal access to politics and economic advancement. All of this dissatisfaction simmered beneath the surface for the most part until the first decade of the twentieth century, when two crises converged to spark the Revolution.

The first crisis was political. Porfirío Díaz would be eighty in 1910, when a new presidential election was to take place. His profession in 1908 that it was time to retire gave rise to a "loyal opposition" led by Madero, the scion of a rich Coahuilan family. Campaigning around Mexico despite threats and imprisonments, Madero won a large following.

The second crisis was economic. A worldwide depression that lasted from 1907 to 1909 adversely affected the export sector, causing a precipitous rise in unemployment that in great part ruined the new middle class. Desperate workers would join the Revolution in 1910, as would members of the middle class who saw no way other than violence to obtain a fair system.

The Revolution erupted in the fall of 1910, when rebels in the northern state of Chihuahua, under the leadership of Pascual Orozco, Jr., staged a series of guerrilla attacks in the name of the Anti-reelectionist movement, headed by Madero. Other regions, most notably Morelos and Sonora, also spawned armed movements. The federal army, incompetently led, undermanned, and badly trained, was overextended and unable to put down the rebellion. When Orozco, ignoring the orders of the timid Madero, captured the important border city of Ciudad Juárez in May 1911, dictator Díaz abdicated and went into exile. The victorious Maderistas installed a holdover from the Díaz dictatorship, Francisco León De La Barra, as head of an interim government. Madero was subsequently elected president of Mexico in October 1911. He took office on 6 November.

Madero found himself in an impossible situation, between the still-entrenched ancien régime, whose army was intact, and radicals who demanded land and labor reform. The new president, whose father, uncles, and brothers were great landowners and industrialists, was disposed to proceed slowly toward reform. The peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata refused to lay down his arms. To convince him, Madero sent the Porfirian army, which was unsuccessful.

In December the reactionaries led by General Bernardo Reyes Ogazón rose against the regime. Emiliano Vázquez Gómez added to the turmoil by proclaiming his revolt along the northern border in February. Pascual Orozco, Jr., disgruntled by Madero's passing him over in favor of Abraham González for the governorship of Chihuahua and backed by funds from the great landholder-political boss Luis Terrazas, rebelled the next month. Attempted coups and labor strikes added to the chaos. Madero's Mexico was being pulled apart by opposition from the states. His refusal to quicken the pace of economic reform badly eroded his support in the countryside. In February 1913, after ten tragic days of artillery fire and slaughter in Mexico City (La Decena Trágica), Victoriano Huerta betrayed Madero and overthrew him on 18 February. Madero and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, were murdered four days later. Through a series of political machinations, Huerta took over as president on 19 February.

The "usurper," as he became known to Mexicans, confronted three dangerous adversaries: Emiliano Zapata and his strong peasant-based movement in Morelos; Francisco "Pancho" Villa and his peasant-worker-middle-class coalition from Chihuahua and Durango; and Venustiano Carranza and his reformist followers from Coahuila and Sonora. The three joined against Huerta in an uneasy, mutually suspicious alliance, the Constitutional coalition, that would disintegrate with victory.

Primarily as a result of the military talents of Villa and Carranza's most important general, Álvaro Obregón Salido, and the diplomatic and armed intervention of the United States, the Constitutionalist coalition defeated Huerta. In a series of bloody battles in the center of the country (Torreón and Zacatecas), Villa defeated and demoralized the Huertista army.

President Woodrow Wilson undermined the dictator by refusing to recognize his government and by shutting off access to arms and munitions supplies. In April, ostensibly because a Mexican officer in Tampico refused to apologize for a minor incident involving U.S. sailors, Wilson dispatched occupation forces to both Tampico and Veracruz, Mexico's two major ports. U.S. forces deprived Huerta of easy access to supplies and of the use of customs revenues. The dictator resigned on 15 July 1914; the U.S. occupation ended in late November.

The most destructive part of the revolution lay ahead. At a convention the winners held in Aguascalientes in October 1914, it quickly became evident that the allies had widely disparate goals, and moreover that Villa and Carranza had become personal enemies. The rough, former bandit and man of the people could not have been more different from the haughty, aloof hacendado.

Carranza with drew support from the convention, thus assuring the split between him and the Zapatistas and Villistas, who then joined forces against him. A costly, brutal civil war ensued. It is estimated that between October 1914 and October 1915 200,000 soldiers died, a total surpassed only by the suicidal battles of World War I in Europe during the same era.

Carrancista general Obregón defeated Villa in a series of battles at Celaya, León, and Aguascalientes between April and July 1915. In March 1916 a group of Villista raiders crossed the border into Columbus, New Mexico, provoking the second military intervention by the United States in the Mexican Revolution. U.S. troops, led by General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, futilely chased Villa for nearly a year until February 1917. At several points clashes with Carrancista troops came close to sparking full-scale war.

Carranza convoked a congress of revolutionaries at Querétaro in November 1916. The Convention of Aguascalientes (1914) produced a new constitution that offered a program of far-reaching reform over the bitter objections of the more conservative Carranza. By contrast, the Constitution of 1917 was notable for three aspects: its virulent anticlericalism, its radical land reform, and its wide-ranging intervention in labor-management relations. Carranza, however, ignored most of the new reforms, and actually reversed the process of land reform.

Carranza won the presidential election of March 1917 and assumed office on 1 May. He still faced diminished but stiff opposition from Villa in Chihuahua and from Zapata in Morelos. Zapata was killed in an ambush in 1919, but Villa outlived the First Chief. The primary goals of the victorious Constitutionalists were to restore order and rebuild the economy. As Carranza's popularity plummeted, he sought allies among the old prerevolutionary elite to whom he returned lands expropriated by Villa and others.

Carranza fell when he tried to impose his successor, Ignacio Bonilla, a civilian, as president. The army would not stand still for this imposition and overthrew the First Chief in the April 1920 revolt of Agua Prieta. A month later Carranza was killed trying to escape. Obregón won election to the presidency.

The violence of the Revolution was unrelenting (and lasted long after 1920). All of its major leaders were murdered: Madero and Pino Suárez at the hands of Huerta; Orozco and Huerta in aborted efforts to organize revolts from the United States; Zapata in an ambush; Villa by assassins in 1923; and Obregón by a religious fanatic in 1928. Some whole families were wiped out. Although it is impossible to calculate with certainty, between 1.5 and 2 million Mexicans (perhaps one of eight) perished in the decade of the Revolution. The economy lay in ruins. The nation would not regain the level of development reached in 1910 for another twenty years.

Recent trends in the study of the Mexican Revolution continue to broaden the historical perspective. Marjorie Becker examines the cultural history of the Cárdenas era in order to highlight the process of state building. Along with Katherine Bliss, Becker also pays special attention to gender relations in the Revolution. A recent general study that is useful for teaching the Revolution to undergraduate students is Michael Gonzales's The Mexican Revolution (2002). In 2006 Adolfo Gilly published an updated version of his classic Marxist history of the Mexican Revolution.

See alsoMexico, Constitutions: Constitution of 1917 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The magisterial two-volume study by Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (1986), is the best single work on the Revolution. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (1981), is the standard examination of the role of other nations in the upheaval. See also Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (1933); Charles C. Cumberland, Mexican Revolution: Genesis Under Madero (1952), and Mexican Revolution: The Constitutionalist Years (1972); Robert Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 1914–1915 (1960); John Womack, Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1970); Michael C. Meyer, Huerta: A Political Portrait (1972); Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution, translated by Patrick Camiller (1983); and John M. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Becker, Marjorie. Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Gilly, Adolfo. The Mexican Revolution: A People's History. New York: New Press, 2006.

Gonzalez, Michael J. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: The Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Vaughan, Mary Kay, and Stephen E. Lewis, eds. The Eagle and the Virgin: National and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

                              Mark Wasserman