Mexican Revolution, c. 1910–1960

by

Thom Rath

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0265

Introduction

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.

Overviews

The best overviews of the Mexican Revolution engage with two interpretative trends that have transformed the field since the 1970s. First, the wave of revisionism that—much like scholarly counterparts elsewhere—questioned the popular credentials and achievements of the revolution. Second, the proliferation of regional or “microhistorical” studies, kick-started in Mexico by Luis González y González. Knight 1986, Knight 2016, and Buchenau and Joseph 2013 are the most successful. Much English-language scholarship since the 1990s worked in a broadly “post-revisionist” vein, seeking to integrate revisionist critiques with recognition of popular perspectives and avoid simplistic readings of class interests by paying attention to politics and culture. There is no single survey of Mexico’s military history per se, but several monographs offer wide chronological and thematic coverage. Lieuwen 1968 remains brisk and readable but is now out of date—interesting primarily as an artifact of a time when optimistic views of the revolution’s legacy dominated historical scholarship. Camp 2005 provides a very useful overview of the military’s role in national politics and the most rigorous analysis of military sociology, although the focus is on more recent trends. Two collections provide the best entry points for recent historical research. The essays published in Valdez-Bubnov and Villegas Revueltas 2023 are synthetic; the essays collected in Fallaw and Rugeley 2012 are focused case studies of particular figures and policies. Rath 2013 covers a wide range of thematic angles on the military as an institution, and Piccato 2022 explores different types of violence across the twentieth century and connections with the revolution and its legacy.

• Buchenau, Jürgen, and Gilbert Joseph. Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century. Durham, NC. Duke University Press, 2013.

  Synthesizes a large body of “postrevisionist” scholarship, covers the twentieth century, and points to new transnational perspectives.

• Camp, Roderic A. Mexico’s Military on the Democratic Stage. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

  This is essentially an updated edition of the author’s earlier monograph, Generals in the Palacio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). An important sociological analysis focusing on the officer corps, with a firm grasp of the historical background.

• Fallaw, Benjamin, and Terry Rugeley, eds. Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.

  Chapters by Neufeld, Fallaw, Smith, Rath, and Gillingham all offer new perspectives on the military’s role in society and tasters for more in-depth studies.

• Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  These two volumes still set the standard in many ways, for their commitment to generalization in the face of regional diversity, critical engagement with revisionism, and judicious defense of earlier populist interpretations. Volumes cover the period up to c. 1920.

• Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780198745631.001.0001

  Knight’s two-volume history is still essential for researchers, but this version helps beginners and undergraduates cut to the chase.

• Lieuwen, Edwin. Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968.

  An accessible overview, but most useful now a baseline to measure more recent scholarship.

• Piccato, Pablo. Historia mínima de la violencia en México. México, DF: El Colegio de México, 2022.

  An impressive work of synthesis, both sweeping and cautiously analytical. Links the revolution to varied and distinct types of agrarian, gendered, and religious violence.

• Rath, Thomas. Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

  DOI: 10.5149/9781469608358_Rath

  Draws on new military, intelligence, and diplomatic sources to explore a range of themes: military education and discourse; conscription; national and regional politics; policing; and veterans.

• Valdez-Bubnov, Iván, and Silvestre Villegas Revueltas, eds. Fuerzas armadas y formación del Estado en la historia de México, siglos XIX y XX. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2023.

  Useful synthetic chapters explore the social base and organization of different revolutionary armies, military institutionalization from 1920 to 1947, and the armed forces during the Cold War.