This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

The first classroom reader devoted exclusively to nineteeth-century Mexican history, this volume brings together twenty-six essays and primary documents treating Mexico's Age of Caudillos. The readings—many by Mexican politicians, historians, and commentators and available here in English for the first time—are organized into four groups representing major eras in the early national development of Mexico: Independence, the age of Santa Anna, La Reforma and the French Intervention, and the Porfiriato. The selections range from autobiography to political and economic history, from the history of ideas to philosophy and social history. The interpretive essays represent both traditional and revisionist views, while the primary materials comprise both political documents and contemporary personal accounts.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of Chinese men made their way to the northern Mexican border state of Sonora to work and live. The ties--and families--these Mexicans and Chinese created led to the formation of a new cultural identity: Chinese Mexican. During the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, anti-Chinese sentiment ultimately led to mass expulsion of these people. Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho follows the community through the mid-twentieth century, across borders and oceans, to show how they fought for their place as Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad. Tracing transnational geography, Schiavone Camacho explores how these men and women developed a strong sense of Mexican national identity while living abroad--in the United States, briefly, and then in southeast Asia where they created a hybrid community and taught their children about the Mexican homeland. Schiavone Camacho also addresses how Mexican women challenged their legal status after being stripped of Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese men. After repatriation in the 1930s-1960s, Chinese Mexican men and women, who had left Mexico with strong regional identities, now claimed national cultural belonging and Mexican identity in ways they had not before.