Forced Marches is a collection of innovative essays that analyze how the military experience molded Mexican citizens in the years between the initial war for independence in 1810 and the consolidation of the revolutionary order in the 1940s. The contributors—well-regarded scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom—offer fresh interpretations of the Mexican military, caciquismo, and the enduring pervasiveness of violence in Mexican society. Employing the approaches of the new military history, which emphasizes the relationships between the state, society, and the “official” militaries and “unofficial” militias, these provocative essays engage (and occasionally do battle with) recent scholarship on the early national period, the Reform, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution. When Mexico first became a nation, its military and militias were two of the country’s few major institutions besides the Catholic Church. The army and local provincial militias functioned both as political pillars, providing institutional stability of a crude sort, and as springboards for the ambitions of individual officers. Military service provided upward social mobility, and it taught a variety of useful skills, such as mathematics and bookkeeping. In the postcolonial era, however, militia units devoured state budgets, spending most of the national revenue and encouraging locales to incur debts to support them. Men with rifles provided the principal means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding-ground for rowdiness and discontent. As these chapters make clear, understanding the history of state-making in Mexico requires coming to terms with its military past.

Mexican Colonial architecture is beautifully presented in Tradition of Craftsmanship in Mexican Homes, featuring photographs of homes, architectural details, and furniture. Relive the ambience of the old Spanish aristocracy, where every form of construction and all the furnishings of a home were made by artists and artisans with a knowledge of their handicrafts and a love of beautiful objects. From adobe designs, to terracotta and tiles, to ironwork, metals, and glass, this book will be an inspiration to the homeowner, decorator, architect, furniture maker, and craftsman

An essential history of how the Mexican Revolution gave way to a unique one-party state In this book Paul Gillingham addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) gave way to a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience, where a single party ruled for seventy-one years. Yet while soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in Mexico it was civilians who formed governments, moving punctiliously in and out of office through uninterrupted elections. Drawing on two decades of archival research, Gillingham uses the political and social evolution of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as starting points to explore this unique authoritarian state that thrived not despite but because of its contradictions. Mexico during the pivotal decades of the mid-twentieth century is revealed as a place where soldiers prevented military rule, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was despised but decisive, and a potentially suffocating propaganda coexisted with a critical press and a disbelieving public.

At the beginning of the 21st century, only a few can deny that the Mexican State is in full decline, as there exist axioms of political theory that show it, and economic indicators that confirm it. In addition, recent sociological studies agree in explaining the substantial loss of values in the present generation. The breakdown of the presidential institution, which still serves as the supreme organ because of its constitutional powers, is evident. Mexico: The Genesis of its Political Decomposition (Miguel Alemn Valds: 1936 to 1952) was written with theoretical rigor, and at the same time, directed and supported by the renowned Dr. Luis Javier Garrido. In this text, the reader will find the origin of political decomposition in Mexico, and the various causes which have led to its structural degeneration. In content, you will comprehend the two most important political cycles in the life of this nation: the first, governed by the post-revolutionary military presidents, and the second, the one which started with Miguel Alemn Valds, considered as the civilian governments.

A History of Infamy explores the broken nexus between crime, justice, and truth in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Faced with the violence and impunity that defined politics, policing, and the judicial system in post-revolutionary times, Mexicans sought truth and justice outside state institutions. During this period, criminal news and crime fiction flourished. Civil society’s search for truth and justice led, paradoxically, to the normalization of extrajudicial violence and neglect of the rights of victims. As Pablo Piccato demonstrates, ordinary people in Mexico have made crime and punishment central concerns of the public sphere during the last century, and in doing so have shaped crime and violence in our times.

Clifford Algebras continues to be a fast-growing discipline, with ever-increasing applications in many scientific fields. This volume contains the lectures given at the Fourth Conference on Clifford Algebras and their Applications in Mathematical Physics, held at RWTH Aachen in May 1996. The papers represent an excellent survey of the newest developments around Clifford Analysis and its applications to theoretical physics. Audience: This book should appeal to physicists and mathematicians working in areas involving functions of complex variables, associative rings and algebras, integral transforms, operational calculus, partial differential equations, and the mathematics of physics.