Mexican Revolution, c. 1910–1960

In 1910 Francisco Madero ran for the Mexican presidency, was thrown in jail, escaped, and then issued a call for revolution. A coalition of middle-class reformers and peasants promptly took up arms and propelled Madero to the presidency, toppling the regime of General Porfirio Díaz. In this way, the Mexican Revolution began more or less on schedule. It is much harder to say when it ended, or if it succeeded. Madero’s revolution ignited a decade of war and upheaval. Eventually, a party that claimed to be revolutionary emerged from the bloodshed and governed the country from 1929 to 2000. The revolution meant different things to different people. The famous Constitution of 1917 provided a hazy blueprint of sorts; it promised civilian democracy and bolstered labor and agrarian rights, economic sovereignty, anticlericalism, and presidential authority. But there was little consensus about how to reconcile these different aims, and the new regime implemented the constitution selectively and unevenly. After a surge of social reform, land redistribution, and economic nationalism in the mid-1930s, the regime’s radical commitments waned. In 1946 the ruling party started to call itself the Party of the Institutional Revolution—a name as paradoxical as it was appropriate. The Mexican Revolution inspired a huge historiography, but relatively little on warfare and the military. Generally, the traditional concerns of military historians—battles, arms, tactics, strategy—have been left to veterans. There is rather more on popular mobilization, as befits a revolution. But when it comes to the military’s broader relations with politics and society, even here Mexico lags well behind other countries in the region, let alone Europe and the United States. It may be that Mexico’s lack of Cold War–era coups drained scholarly interest. Some trends in the discipline—the new cultural history of 1990s, for example—paid little attention to violence or military affairs. Most important, the military itself has long resisted public scrutiny, rewarding secrecy, actively discouraging scholarship, and barring access to archives. After c. 2000, access to relevant archival sources improved somewhat, while the military’s growing prominence in policing and the so-called Drug War renewed interest in its history and violence in general. There are still many promising avenues for researchers to explore.