Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a long period of uprisings, civil wars and political change in Mexico that began in 1910. It started as a movement to remove the dictator Porfirio Díaz and hold free elections, but it grew into a struggle over land, workers’ rights, the power of the Catholic Church and foreign companies, and the question of who should rule Mexico.

It was not one war between two sides. Many armies rose and fell, and yesterday’s allies often became tomorrow’s enemies. Some were led by landowners and politicians, others by farmers, ranch hands, miners and schoolteachers. That is why historians often speak of “revolutions” in the plural, with different regional movements that sometimes joined and sometimes clashed.

The Revolution was one of the first great social revolutions of the twentieth century, beginning several years before the Russian Revolution of 1917. It changed Mexico’s laws, culture and politics and became the founding story of modern Mexico.

Porfirio Díaz, a general and hero of the war against the French intervention, took power in 1876 and ruled, with one four-year break, until 1911. This period is called the Porfiriato. His government brought order and economic growth: railways connected the country, foreign investors built mines, oil wells and factories, and exports boomed. Its motto was “order and progress”.

The benefits were very unequal. Laws allowed companies and landowners to take over village common lands and Indigenous communities’ fields, and by 1910 a large majority of rural families owned no land. Many worked on haciendas (large estates), sometimes trapped by debts at the estate store. In Yucatán, Maya and Yaqui labourers and other workers were held in near-slavery on henequen plantations. Industrial workers had no legal protection; strikes at the Cananea copper mine (1906) and the Río Blanco textile mills (1907) were crushed with deadly force.

Politically, Díaz held elections, but the results were controlled. In 1908 he told the American journalist James Creelman that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would welcome an opposition. Encouraged, Francisco I. Madero, the son of a rich landowning family in Coahuila, wrote a book calling for effective suffrage and no re-election, and ran for president in 1910. Díaz jailed him and declared himself re-elected. An economic slowdown after 1907 and resentment among middle-class and regional elites added to the crisis.

Madero escaped to San Antonio, Texas, and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling on Mexicans to take up arms on 20 November 1910. At first little happened, but in the northern state of Chihuahua, Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa led growing bands of rebels, and in Morelos, south of Mexico City, Emiliano Zapata raised villagers who wanted their land back. In May 1911 rebels captured Ciudad Juárez on the U.S. border. Díaz resigned on 25 May 1911 and went into exile in Paris.

Madero was elected president and took office in November 1911. But he tried to keep much of the old federal army and administration and moved slowly on land reform. Zapata broke with him and issued the Plan of Ayala (November 1911), which demanded the return of lands taken from villages and the expropriation of part of the great estates. Orozco also rebelled in 1912.

In February 1913, during ten days of fighting in Mexico City known as the Decena Trágica (“Ten Tragic Days”), General Victoriano Huerta turned against Madero and seized power. The U.S. ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, helped arrange the agreement between the plotters. Madero and his vice-president, José María Pino Suárez, were killed on 22 February 1913, officially “while trying to escape”. Madero’s murder turned him into a martyr and started a much larger war.

Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, refused to recognise Huerta and issued the Plan of Guadalupe (March 1913), calling himself “First Chief” of the Constitutionalist Army. Álvaro Obregón led Constitutionalist forces from Sonora, and Pancho Villa built the powerful División del Norte in Chihuahua, moving troops and horses by railway. Zapata continued his own war in the south. The U.S. president Woodrow Wilson refused to recognise Huerta, and in April 1914 U.S. forces occupied the port of Veracruz, partly to stop arms shipments reaching Huerta. After Villa’s victory at Zacatecas in June 1914, Huerta fled into exile, and the old federal army was dissolved.

The winners then split. At the Convention of Aguascalientes in October–November 1914, representatives tried to agree on a government, but Carranza refused to accept the Convention’s authority. Villa and Zapata allied against Carranza and entered Mexico City together in December 1914, where they were famously photographed in the National Palace. Carranza and Obregón withdrew to Veracruz, which the United States evacuated in November 1914.

Carranza’s side then made important promises to win support: a decree of January 1915 promised to restore village lands, and an agreement with the urban workers’ organisation Casa del Obrero Mundial produced “Red Battalions” of workers. In April 1915, at the battles of Celaya, Obregón used trenches, barbed wire and machine guns, lessons learned from the war in Europe, to defeat Villa’s cavalry charges. Obregón lost his right arm later in the campaign. Villa’s army was broken, and by late 1915 the United States recognised Carranza’s government.

In late 1916 Carranza called a constitutional convention at Querétaro. Many delegates were more radical than Carranza himself, and they wrote a constitution that went far beyond the liberal 1857 Constitution it replaced. It was proclaimed on 5 February 1917 and, with many amendments, is still Mexico’s constitution today.

Several articles became famous. Article 3 required free, secular public education. Article 27 declared that land, water and underground resources such as oil and minerals belong originally to the nation, which allowed land reform and later the nationalisation of oil. Article 123 guaranteed workers an eight-hour day, the right to organise and strike, and other protections; it was one of the most advanced labour codes in the world at the time. Article 130 and others placed strict limits on the Catholic Church.

Putting these promises into practice took decades. Carranza himself distributed relatively little land. The Constitution’s anticlerical articles later helped provoke the Cristero War (1926–1929), a rebellion by Catholic peasants in western Mexico. Large-scale land reform and the oil expropriation came only under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940).

Angry at U.S. recognition of Carranza, Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico, on 9 March 1916. In response, the United States sent a Punitive Expedition under General John J. Pershing deep into northern Mexico. It never caught Villa and withdrew in early 1917, as the United States prepared to enter the First World War. In January 1917 the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann proposed in a secret telegram that Mexico join Germany against the United States in return for lost territories; Mexico declined, but the telegram’s publication helped push the United States into the war.

In the south, Carranza’s forces fought a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Zapatistas, burning villages and deporting people. On 10 April 1919 Zapata was lured into a trap at the hacienda of Chinameca by a Carrancista officer, Jesús Guajardo, and shot dead. In 1920, when Carranza tried to choose his own successor, Obregón and other Sonoran generals rebelled under the Plan of Agua Prieta. Carranza fled and was killed on 21 May 1920. Obregón was elected president later that year.

Villa made peace with the new government in 1920 and retired to a ranch at Canutillo, Durango, but he was assassinated in 1923. Obregón himself was assassinated in 1928 after being re-elected. In 1929 his successor Plutarco Elías Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), which, under later names (PRM, and from 1946 the PRI), governed Mexico without interruption until 2000. For this reason, many historians date the end of the armed revolution to 1920, but see the institutionalisation of the revolutionary state as continuing into the 1930s and 1940s.

The Revolution affected almost every family in Mexico. Armies requisitioned food, horses and people; forced recruitment (the leva) swept up men; railways and mines were destroyed; and many towns changed hands again and again. Famine struck several regions in 1915–1917, and the 1918 influenza pandemic added to the deaths. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans fled north to the United States, a movement that shaped Mexican American communities in Texas, California and elsewhere.

The number of deaths is very uncertain. Mexico’s census recorded about 15.2 million people in 1910 and about 14.3 million in 1921. From this decline, and from the growth that would have been expected, historians have estimated the total “demographic cost” at one to two million or more, but this includes births that did not happen and emigration, not only deaths. Demographers such as Robert McCaa have tried to separate these factors; estimates of excess deaths commonly range from several hundred thousand to over a million, most of them civilians who died of disease and hunger rather than in battle.

Women were central to the Revolution. Soldaderas followed the armies, cooking, nursing, carrying supplies and sometimes fighting; a few, such as Petra Herrera and Amelia Robles, commanded troops. Women also served as spies, journalists and political organisers. The popular song “La Adelita” made the soldadera a national symbol, though that image often hid the hardship and violence, including sexual violence, that women suffered.

The war touched other communities too. Chinese immigrants in northern Mexico were targets of racist violence; at Torreón in May 1911, more than 300 Chinese residents were massacred by revolutionary troops and local people. Korean labourers who had arrived in Yucatán in 1905 to work on henequen plantations lived through the Revolution there as well.

After 1920 the new governments turned the Revolution into a national story that joined rival leaders into a single pantheon: Madero the apostle of democracy, Zapata the defender of peasants, Villa the champion of the poor, Carranza the lawmaker. The Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City holds the remains of Madero, Carranza, Villa, Calles and Cárdenas, men who in life were often enemies. Revolution Day, 20 November, is a national holiday. The ruling party claimed to embody this single, continuing Revolution.

Culture carried this memory. Under education minister José Vasconcelos in the 1920s, the state commissioned murals by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros that portrayed the Revolution, Indigenous history and the struggles of workers and peasants. Novels such as Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1915), Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente (1928), Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931), Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) offered more disillusioned views. Corridos (ballads) and photographs, especially those preserved in the Casasola archive, spread images of the Revolution everywhere.

Memory was also contested. Zapata’s image was invoked by later peasant movements, and in 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas took his name to protest that the Revolution’s promises had been betrayed. Villa, long excluded from official honours, was only moved to the Monument to the Revolution in 1976. In the United States, Villa was first celebrated in newsreels and then denounced as a bandit after Columbus; the Punitive Expedition is remembered very differently on the two sides of the border. For many in Latin America and elsewhere, the Revolution became a model of nationalist and agrarian reform.

Key documents include the revolutionary plans that defined each faction’s goals: the Plan of San Luis Potosí (1910), the Plan of Ayala (1911), the Plan of Guadalupe (1913) and the Plan of Agua Prieta (1920), along with the debates of the Querétaro convention and the 1917 Constitution itself. Government archives in Mexico, U.S. State Department and military records, and British, German and French diplomatic files are important for high politics and foreign intervention; Friedrich Katz’s work showed how much European archives reveal about great-power involvement.

Personal and local sources are just as important. There are memoirs of revolutionaries and generals, the correspondence of the Zapatista headquarters, local judicial and municipal records, and oral history projects conducted with veterans from the 1960s onward. Journalists, including the American John Reed, whose book Insurgent Mexico (1914) described Villa’s army, left vivid but partisan accounts. Photographs and early film made this one of the first revolutions recorded visually; Villa even signed a contract with an American film company in 1914.

All these sources must be read critically. Revolutionary plans stated ideals that leaders did not always follow; memoirs were often written decades later to justify their authors; and U.S. reports reflected American interests. Statistics collected during the fighting were incomplete, which is why demographic estimates vary so widely.

For several decades the dominant, “official” interpretation presented the Revolution as a popular, agrarian and nationalist movement that culminated in the 1917 Constitution and the post-revolutionary state. John Womack Jr.’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1968) became a classic account of a peasant movement that “did not want to change and therefore made a revolution”, stressing the Morelos villagers’ own goals.

After the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968, many scholars grew sceptical of the ruling party’s claims. “Revisionist” historians emphasised continuity with the Porfiriato, the role of middle-class and northern elites, and the building of a powerful, authoritarian state. Some argued that the result was less a social revolution than a “great rebellion”, as Ramón Eduardo Ruiz put it in The Great Rebellion (1980). Adolfo Gilly’s La revolución interrumpida (1971) offered a Marxist interpretation of a revolution cut short. Regional studies, such as Luis González’s microhistory Pueblo en vilo (1968), showed how differently the Revolution was experienced from place to place.

Alan Knight’s two-volume The Mexican Revolution (1986) answered the revisionists by arguing that it was a genuine popular revolution, driven largely by agrarian grievances, even if its outcome favoured new elites. Friedrich Katz placed the Revolution in an international setting in The Secret War in Mexico (1981) and wrote the major biography of Villa (1998). John Mason Hart stressed the role of foreign, especially American, capital. Later “post-revisionist” and cultural historians have studied state formation from below, the negotiation between communities and the new state, gender, Indigenous peoples, religion and the Cristero War, and the making of revolutionary memory.

Debate continues over when the Revolution ended (1917, 1920, 1940), over the number of deaths, and over whether its promises of land, labour rights and democracy were fulfilled or betrayed. These questions are not only academic: Mexican politics still argues about the Revolution’s legacy.