Into this illuminating study of the meaning of Mexico’s recent history Frank Tannenbaum has put the distillation of more than three decades of the familiarity with that country. Having traveled Mexico from the Rio Grande to the Guatemalan border, from the Gulf to the Pacific, and having been friendly with peasants, city folk, politicians, philosophers, artists and presidents, he understands Mexico as few foreigners can understand it. This is not one more travel book, but a serious, well-founded survey of what, humanly speaking, Mexico is—in terms of sociology, politics, economics, and psychology. It tells how Mexico came to be that way, and ponders on what it is likely to become. This book begins with a rapid survey of significant events from Hernan Cortés to Porfirio Díaz; continues with a searching analysis of the foreign and domestic policies of the present Mexican regime. In a final chapter it demonstrates the enormous importance to general United States foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s conduct of Mexican-American relations. Here is a book to put on the shelf of enduring books about our fascinating southern neighbors, along with the classic works of Bernal Díaz, Mme Calderón de la Barca, Charles M. Flandrau, Ernest Gruening, Eyler Simpson, Henry Bamford Parkes, and Miguel Covarrubias.

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.

Written to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the first predominantly anti-capitalist revolution in the world, Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now is the perfect introductory text and one that will also sharpen the understanding of seasoned observers. Cockcroft provides readers with the historical context within which the revolution occurred; explains how the revolutionary process has played out over the past ten decades; tells us how the ideals of the revolution live on in the minds of Mexico’s peasants and workers; and critically examines the contours of modern Mexican society, including its ethnic and gender dimensions. Well-deserved attention is paid to the tensions between the rulers and the ruled inside the country and the connected tensions between the Mexican nation and the neighboring giant to the north. Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now also explores the possibility of Mexico’s revolutionary history finally bearing the fruit long hoped for by the country’s disenfranchised—a prospect kept alive by the unyieldingstruggle of the last one hundred years. This is the definitive introduction to one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities.

Presents an account of the Mexican War, providing an analysis of its cause, battles, weapons, and outcome.

Through a pathbreaking study of the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, looks at the complexities of the political movement for Chiapas's indigenous peoples.