What was so revolutionary about the Mexican Revolution?

  



            What is a revolution?  This phenomenon is best defined at the overthrow of an existing power structure and its replacement by a new one.

 

            There are those who say that the Mexican Revolution was not a revolution.  Of these, some call it an insurrection, others call it a civil war.  Those who favour the former point to the fact that Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata did not seize power but returned to their homes.  Those who favour the latter, emphasise the regional nature of the conflict with the peripheries fighting the federal government.  The problem is that it has been customary to date the Mexican Revolution to 1910-1920, the violent decade when most of the armed conflicts took place, culminating with the adoption of the new constitution in 1917.  However, if one follows the story of reform and implementation, then one must extend the years of the revolution to 1940, for it was in the years from 1917 to 1940 that the revolutionary aspects of that document were implemented, sometimes against violent resistance.

            The most important of these revolutionary changes were the reduction in size of the military and its elimination from the political sphere, land reform, and the organization of all economic sectors, including the military, into labour unions.  These changes together set Mexico apart from the rest of Latin America where powerful militaries, conflicts over land, and disaffection among workers led to phases of upheaval ended by military coups and the establishment of repressive strong man governments.  The lack of real land reform in these other countries is often the festering sore that keeps the cycle going.  The revolutionary government of Mexico implemented limits on the size of estates and distributed the freed-up land into ejidos: communally owned land along the lines of traditional aboriginal land tenure.  There were other revolutionary policies as well.  The new government implemented (albeit unevenly) the anticlerical laws set out in the 1857 constitution but previously left unenforced.  By limiting presidents to serving only one six-year term, the trap of long-reigning strong men, like Porfirio Diaz in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was avoided.  One could say that the culmination of this process was the establishment of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which went on to rule Mexico until 2000, when it freely gave up power in free elections.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends of History Beware: This is a Preposterous Map

Image
    The above map is preposterous.  I came across it online.  I do not know its author, but it is clearly problematic, giving people some very wrong ideas.   It presents us with a Europe of current borders and proposes to give the year for the founding of each country. While some of the years are reasonable in the literal sense of the founding a modern state ( Ireland 1916 ), others are pure nonsense, such as the suggestion that Greece was founded in 330 , the year Constantine I established the new capital of the Roman Empire at Constantinople .  The modern state of Greece was founded in 1821 and has been notable for distancing itself from its Byzantine past and leaning on the heritage of Athens.  Much of the preposterousness of the map arises from the inconsistent application of “rules of thumb.”  Germany (1871) and Italy (1861) are based on the official founding of the modern state, while Ukraine (1119) and Russia...
Read more

Pax Americana Mortua Est (The Pax Americana is Dead)

Image
  Detail from the US Capitol building   There have been two unusually long periods of global stability in the modern world: the Pax Britannica (1815-1914) and the Pax Americana (1945-2025).  These were named after the Pax Romana, the “Roman Peace”, which was how ancient Romans saw the period of their halcyon days.   Pax Romana (The Roman Peace) In that pre-globalized world, what those ancient Roman observers noted was, that by bringing the entire Mediterranean Sea and the territories extending beyond it under their control, the previous age of war and rampant piracy in the region had come to an end.  With the sea lanes kept safe by Rome’s navy and an ever-expanding network of high-quality roads, commerce and people could move freely.  While there was certainly poverty, and the suffering of the enslaved was terrible, the well-planned, well-built (or re-built) cities of the empire give testimony to a rise in the quality of life for urban citize...
Read more

Picasso, Gernika, and Mariupol: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Francisco Franco

Image
  The tapestry version of Picasso's " Guernica " that hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York On November 18 of this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Spain to discuss more military aid for Ukraine in its fight to fend off the Russian aggressor and remain an independent, democratically governed people.  He and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid to view Pablo Picasso ’s famous painting, “Guernica”.  Zelenskyy noted how the work portrays so well the horrors of war, especially the bombing of civilians, such as that which Russia is currently inflicting on the cities of Ukraine.  It was not the first time Zelenskyy had made the connexion.  In April of 2022, on a video call with Sánchez, he noted the relevance of the famous painting for Ukrainians.  The months of both of those times Zelenskyy connected with Spanish authorities and referred to this painting—April and November—are s...
Read more