THE MEXICAN

REVOLUTION
Tierra y Libertad

In the nineteenth century Mexico achieved

independence from Spain but did not
industrialize
By trading their raw materials and
agricultural products for foreign
manufactured goods and capital investments,
they became economically dependent on the
wealthier United States

Their societies, far from fulfilling the promises of

their independence, remained deeply split between
wealthy landowners and desperately poor peasants
Few countries in Latin America suffered as many
foreign invasions and interventions as Mexico
A Mexican saying observed wryly: Poor Mexico: so
far from God, so close to the United States

At the beginning of the twentieth

century Mexican society was divided
into rich and poor and into persons of
Spanish, Indian, and mixed ancestry
A few very wealthy families of Spanish
origin, less than 1 percent of the
population, owned 85 percent of
Mexicos land, mostly in huge haciendas
(estates)
Closely tied to this elite were the
Americans who controlled most of
Mexicos railroads, silver mines,
plantations, and other productive
enterprises

At the other end of the social scale were Indians,

many of whom did not speak Spanish
Mestizos, people of mixed Indian and European
ancestry, were only slightly better off; most of them
were peasants who worked on the haciendas or
farmed small communal plots near their ancestral
villages
The urban middle class was small and had little
political influence. Few professional and government
positions were open to them, and foreigners owned
most businesses

During the colonial period, the Spanish

government had made halfhearted efforts
to defend Indians and mestizos from the
land-grabbing tactics of the haciendas
After independence in 1821 wealthy
Mexican families and American companies
used bribery and force to acquire millions
of acres of good agricultural land from
villages in southern Mexico
Peasants lost not only their fields but also
their access to firewood and pasture for
their animals. They had little choice but
to work on haciendas

Despite many upheavals in Mexico in the

nineteenth century, in 1910, the government
seemed in control
For thirty-four years, General Porfirio Daz had
ruled Mexico under the motto Liberty, Order,
and Progress
The government imposed order through rigged
elections and a policy of pan o palo (bread or
the stick) or bribes for Dazs supporters and
summary justice for those who opposed him

Though a mestizo himself, Daz discriminated

against the nonwhite majority of Mexicans
There was a devaluing of traditional Mexican
culture in favor of European fashions and tastes
This devaluation of Mexican culture became a
symbol of the regimes failure to defend
national interests against foreign influences

The Mexican Revolution developed

haphazardly, led by a series of
ambitious but limited leaders, each
representing a different segment of
Mexican society
The first was Francisco Madero, the
son of a wealthy landowning and
mining family, educated in the United
States
When minor uprisings broke out in
1911, the government collapsed and
Daz fled into exile
The Madero presidency was
welcomed by some, but aroused
opposition from peasant leaders like
Emiliano Zapata

In 1913, after two years as president, Madero

was overthrown and murdered by one of his
former supporters, General Victoriano Huerta
Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States,
showed his displeasure by sending the United
States Marines to occupy Veracruz
The inequities of Mexican society and foreign
intervention in Mexicos affairs angered Mexicos
middle class and industrial workers
They found leaders in Venustiano Carranza, a
landowner, and in lvaro Obregn, a school
teacher
Calling themselves Constitutionalists, Carranza
and Obregn organized private armies and
succeeded in overthrowing Huerta in 1914

By then, the revolution had spread to the

countryside
As early as 1911, Emiliano Zapata, an
Indian farmer, had led a revolt against
the haciendas in the mountains of
Morelos, south of Mexico City
His soldiers were peasants, some of them
women, mounted on horseback and
armed with pistols and rifles
For several years, they periodically came
down from the mountains, burned
hacienda buildings, and returned land to
Indian villages to which it had once
belonged

Another leader appeared in Chihuahua, a northern

state where seventeen individuals owned two-fifths
of the land and 95 percent of the people had no
land at all
Starting in 1913, Francisco Pancho Villa, a former
ranch hand, mule driver, and bandit, organized an
army of three thousand men, most of them
cowboys
They too seized land from the large haciendas, not
to rebuild traditional communities as in southern
Mexico but to create family ranches
Zapata and Villa were part agrarian rebels, part
social revolutionaries

They enjoyed tremendous popular support but

could never rise above their regional and
peasant origins and lead a national revolution
The Constitutionalists had fewer soldiers than
Zapata and Villa, but they held major cities,
controlled the countrys exports of oil, and
used the proceeds of oil sales to buy modern
weapons
Fighting continued for years, and gradually the
Constitutionalists took over most of Mexico
In 1919, they defeated and killed Zapata; Villa
was assassinated four years later
An estimated 2 million people lost their lives
in the civil war, and much of Mexico lay in
ruins

During their struggle to win support against

Zapata and Villa, the Constitutionalists
adopted many of their rivals agrarian
reforms, such as restoring communal lands
to the Indians of Morelos
The Constitutionalists also proposed social
programs designed to appeal to workers and
the middle class
The Constitution promised a lot but for the
most part was not put into practice.

In the early 1920s, after a decade of

violence that exhausted all classes,
the Mexican Revolution lost
momentum
Nevertheless, the Revolution changed
the social makeup of the governing
class
For the first time in Mexicos history,
representatives of rural communities,
unionized workers, and public
employees were admitted to the inner
circle

In the arts, the Mexican Revolution sparked a

surge of creativity
The political murals of Jos Clemente Orozco
and Diego Rivera and the paintings of Frida
Kahlo focused on social themes, showing
peasants, workers, and soldiers in scenes
from the Revolution

In 1928, Obregn was assassinated

His successor, Plutarco Elas Calles, founded
the National Revolutionary Party, or PNR (the
abbreviation of its name in Spanish)
The establishment of the PNR gave the
Mexican Revolution a second wind

Lzaro Crdenas, chosen by Calles to be

president in 1934, brought peasants and
workers organizations into the party, and
renamed it the Mexican Revolutionary Party
(PRM), and removed the generals from
government positions

Then he set to work implementing the

reforms promised in the Constitution of 1917
Crdenas redistributed 44 million acres (17.6
hectares) to peasant communes
He closed church-run schools
He nationalized the railroads and numerous
other businesses

His most dramatic move was the

expropriation of foreign-owned oil
companies
In the early 1920s, Mexico was the worlds
leading producer of oil, but a handful of
American and British companies exported
almost all of it
In 1938, Crdenas seized the foreignowned oil industry, more as a matter of
national pride than of economics
The oil companies expected the
governments of the United States and
Great Britain to come to their rescue,
with military force

But Mexico and the United States

chose to resolve the issue through
negotiation, and Mexico retained
control of its oil industry
When Crdenas term ended in 1940,
Mexico was still a land of poor
farmers with a small industrial base
The Revolution had brought great
changes, however
The political system was free of both
chaos and dictatorships
A small group of wealthy people no
longer monopolized land and other
resources

The military was tamed

The Catholic Church no longer
controlled education
And the nationalization of oil
had demonstrated Mexicos
independence from foreign
corporations and military
intervention

But the Revolution did not fulfill the democratic

promise of Maderos campaign, for it brought to
power the political party that became the PRI, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party that monopolized
the government for eighty years

The Revolution also promised far-reaching social

reforms, such as free education, higher wages and
more security for workers, and the redistribution of
land to the peasants
The long-delayed reforms began to be
implemented during the Crdenas administration
Yet they fell short of the ideals expressed by the
revolutionaries, but they laid the foundation for
the later industrialization of Mexico