The Mexican Revolution took place along the entire length of the border between the United States and Mexico. Most of the intense battles and revolutionary intrigue, however, were concentrated in the border region of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad JuAArez, Mexico. For 20 years, the U.S. and Mexico border communities dealt with revolution, beginning before the 1909 Taft-DAA-az visit and ending with the Escobar Revolution of 1929. In between were battles, assassinations, invasions, and attempts at diplomacy. El Paso was center stage for many of these events. Newspapers and media from all over the country flocked to the border and produced numerous stories, photographs, and colorful renditions of the Mexican Revolution. The facts and myths have been kept alive over the last 100 years, and the revolution remains an important topic of discussion today.

Presents a comprehensive history of the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and the cities of El Paso and Juarez, and contains essays and archival photographs about Pancho Villa and other revolutionaries of the time.

The authors document the secret role of the Mexican president in the insurgency against Anglos during the Mexican Revolution and the Texas Rangers' role in ending the uprising.

Scholars contributing to this volume consider topics ranging from the effects of the Mexican Revolution on Tejano and African American communities to its impact on Texas' economy and agriculture. Other essays consider the ways that Mexican Americans north of the border affected the course of the revolution itself. .

Winner of the 2010 Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction from Western Writers of America The Mexican Revolution could not have succeeded without the use of American territory as a secret base of operations, a source of munitions, money, and volunteers, a refuge for personnel, an arena for propaganda, and a market for revolutionary loot. El Paso, the largest and most important American city on the Mexican border during this time, was the scene of many clandestine operations as American businesses and the U.S. federal government sought to maintain their influences in Mexico and protect national interest while keeping an eye on key Revolutionary figures. In addition, the city served as refuge to a cast of characters that included revolutionists, adventurers, smugglers, gunrunners, counterfeiters, propagandists, secret agents, double agents, criminals, and confidence men. Using 80,000 pages of previously classified FBI documents on the Mexican Revolution and hundreds of Mexican secret agent reports from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations archive, Charles Harris and Louis Sadler examine the mechanics of rebellion in a town where factional loyalty was fragile and treachery was elevated to an art form. As a case study, this slice of El Paso's, and America's, history adds new dimensions to what is known about the Mexican Revolution.

In 1910 insurgent leaders crushed the Porfirian dictatorship, but in the years that followed fought among themselves, until a nationalist consensus produced the 1917 Constitution. This in turn provided the basis for a reform agenda that transformed Mexico in the modern era. The civil war and the reforms that followed receive new and insightful attention in this book. These essays, the result of the 45th annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, presented by the University of Texas at Arlington in March 2010, commemorate the centennial of the outbreak of the revolution. A potent mix of factors—including the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few thousand hacienda owners, rancheros, and foreign capitalists; the ideological conflict between the Diaz government and the dissident regional reformers; and the grinding poverty afflicting the majority of the nation’s eleven million industrial and rural laborers—provided the volatile fuel that produced the first major political and social revolution of the twentieth century. The conflagration soon swept across the Rio Grande; indeed, The Mexican Revolution shows clearly that the struggle in Mexico had tremendous implications for the American Southwest. During the years of revolution, hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens crossed the border into the United States. As a result, the region experienced waves of ethnically motivated violence, economic tensions, and the mass expulsions of Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent.

The untold story of El Paso and its role as the scene of clandestine operations during the Mexican Revolution is revealed here for the first time.