The Mexican Revolution

An Introduction

Few upheavals in the twentieth century reshaped a nation as thoroughly as the Mexican Revolution. Spanning the decade from 1910 to 1920, it toppled a thirty-four-year dictatorship, ignited a ferocious civil war among competing factions, drew the military intervention of the United States, and ultimately produced one of the most progressive constitutions the world had seen to that point. The revolution cost somewhere between one and two million lives, uprooted millions more, and permanently transformed the relationship between the Mexican state and its people on questions of land, labor, religion, and national sovereignty. To understand the revolution is to understand modern Mexico.

The conflict did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the product of decades of accumulated injustice under the regime of President Porfirio Diaz, a regime that had modernized Mexico's railroads and export economy while simultaneously concentrating wealth in the hands of a tiny elite and suppressing every form of political dissent. When Francisco I. Madero, a mild-mannered idealist from a wealthy northern family, challenged Diaz at the ballot box in 1910 and was thrown in jail for his trouble, the resulting outrage ignited a powder keg of rural grievances, indigenous dispossession, and urban frustration that had been accumulating for a generation.

The revolution that followed was not a single unified movement but a cacophony of regional uprisings, ideological conflicts, and personal ambitions. Emiliano Zapata fought in the south for agrarian reform, demanding the return of land to the peasant villages that had lost it to the hacienda system. Francisco "Pancho" Villa led a brilliant irregular cavalry force across the north, winning spectacular military victories and distributing the spoils of war to his followers. Venustiano Carranza, the bearded Constitutionalist patriarch, sought to restore legal order and eventually outmaneuvered all of his rivals. Each of these figures embodied a different vision of Mexico's future, and their conflicts gave the revolution its tragic, contradictory character.

What emerged from the decade of bloodshed was a new constitutional order enshrined in the Constitution of 1917, a document that proclaimed land reform, workers' rights, restrictions on foreign ownership, and limits on the power of the Catholic Church. Though many of its promises would take decades to fulfill, the Constitution of 1917 established the ideological framework of the Mexican state for the rest of the twentieth century. The revolution also produced a cultural renaissance, most visibly in the monumental murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who painted the story of Mexico's suffering and struggle on the walls of its public buildings for all to see.

This article traces the full arc of the Mexican Revolution, from the twilight of the Porfiriato through the fall of Madero, the rise and fall of Victoriano Huerta, the great struggles among Carranza, Villa, and Zapata, the foreign entanglements with the United States, the drafting of the new constitution, and the ultimate consolidation of the revolutionary state. It is a story of extraordinary courage, terrible violence, and enduring consequence.

The Porfiriato: Mexico Under Diaz