The Mexican Revolution

Plot

A classic account of the first revolution of the twentieth century, which set the stage for a century of socialist revolt. Adolfo Gilly's A People's History of the Mexican Revolution is the definitive study of a critical stage in Mexico's history, spanning the years between the first peasant uprisings against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and Alvaro Obregan's inauguration as president in 1920, the event that marked the end of the revolution. Though Emiliano Zapata and Francisco "Pancho" Villa are the most celebrated figures of the period, Gilly also brings to the forefront lesser-known voicesof rural leaders and peasant soldiers fighting against the village pacifications, land enclosures, and forced labor that accompanied the expansion of the hacienda system and the industrialization of the Mexican countryside. By the end of the revolution, Zapata was assassinated, Villa was defeated, and a bourgeois government was in power, but the rebellion was not without its victories. Gilly's seminal work serves as an essential reminder that the Mexican Revolution provided the starting point for the socialist uprisings of the twentieth century, with reverberations still felt through social justice movements in Latin America and the rest of the world.