The Mexican Revolution and Latin America

Lecture Slides 2024

[Content warning: some violent content]

Lecture Slides, 2023

Lecture Script 2023

CC class PPT

Questions

• Look at the primary sources together. Which elements of the revolution do they most represent? What circumstances produced them?
• Then think about these general questions:
• How radical was the revolution?
• What aims did its various groups have? (include women's participation and aims if you chose the Anna Macias piece)
• How significant was the role of the US? (you could look over your notes and see how many instances of US influence you can spot...)
• What differences were there between the aims and the results?
• When did the revolution end?

Required Readings: This week please read BOTH these 2 primary sources (they are very short!) AND choose a secondary article:

Plan de Ayala, 1911 (Translated and reproduced for Modern Latin America, Brown University). and

The Constitution of the United States of Mexico, 1917, articles 27 and 123:

• Articles 27 and 123 of the Mexican Constitution

And EITHER:

"The Mexican Revolution," In Our Time (BBC Radio 4, 2011, 45 mins)

OR Anna Macias. "Women and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920." The Americas, vol. 37, no. 1, 1980, pp. 53–82.

Further reading:

Primary sources and public history:

On the Mexican Revolution:

• The Constitution of the United States of Mexico, 1917. (1926 Translation in the MRC)-Read articles 27 and 123.

Artists' Manifesto on the Mexican Renaissance and the Revolutionary State

Library of Congress Exhibition,The Mexican Revolution and the United States

The Constitution of the United States of Mexico, 1917. (1926 Translation in the MRC)-Read articles 27 and 123.

TUC documents relating to Mexico, 1926-1940. MRC. (See especially the documents relating to the expropriation of the oilfields in 1938). 

For a discussion of the use of photographs as a source for the study of the Mexican Revolution see: Mraz, John. "What Can Photographs Tell Us about Mexico's History?". The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 257-276.

Some sources form Nicaragua and Peru that show similar ideas to those in the Mexican Revolution:

Augusto Sandino's Manifesto from San Albino, Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua, 1 July 1927

Jose Carlos Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, transl. Marjorie Urquidi, 1971 [first published: 1928] available at Library

Secondary sources:

• Thomas Benjamin. La Revolución: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History, New York, USA: University of Texas Press, 2021.
• Thomas Benjamin and Mark Wasserman (eds.). Provinces of the Revolution : essays on regional Mexican history, 1910-1929. University of New Mexico Press, 1990.
• Alan Knight, “The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a 'Great Rebellion'?,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, JSTOR
• Greg Grandin, A Century of Rebellion
• Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2
• Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, pp. 1-174
• Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review
• Alan Knight, "The Working Class and the Mexican Revolution, c. 1900-1920," Journal of Latin American Studies, 16:1 (May 1984): 51-79.
• Jocelyn H.Olcott. Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Duke University Press, 2006.
• Heather Fowler-Salamini. Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution : The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz. Nebraska, 2020. 
• Elizabeth Terese Newman. Biography of a Hacienda : Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico, University of Arizona Press, 2014.
• Heather Fowler-Salamini. Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution : The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz. Nebraska, 2020. 
• Mary Kay Vaughan, et al. (eds.) Sex in Revolution : Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Duke University Press, 2007.
• John Womack, “The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 125-200
• Podcast:
• "Was the Mexican Revolution a Success?" Alan Knight's lecture at the IHR, 2012.Link opens in a new window https://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/was-mexican-revolution-a-successLink opens in a new window

On Nicaragua:

• Michael Schroeder, “The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism, Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926-1934” in Gilbert Joseph (ed.), Close Encounters of Empire [See the Library Scanspage for this course]

On Peru:

• Paulo Drinot. "The Revolutionary Disgrace: Culture and politics in the origins of APRA". JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, 53:3 (2021) 629-63
• Geneviève Dorais. Journey to Indo-América: APRA and the Transnational Politics of Exile, Persecution, and Solidarity, 1918–1945. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Fiona Wison. Citizenship and political violence in Peru: An Andean town, 1870s-1970s. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

On Argentina:

• David Rock, 'Intellectual Precursors of Conservative Nationalism in Argentina, 1900-1927', Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol.67, No.2 (1987), pp.271-300.
• Jeane DeLaney, 'National Identity, Nationhood, and Immigration in Argentina: 1810-1930', accessible from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/delaney.html
• Jorge Nallim, Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). Chapters 1 and 2