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Mexican Revolution
*** Shopping-Tip: Mexican Revolution
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Image:Mural Diego Rivera.jpg thumb|300px|Mural by Diego Rivera at Palacio de Gobierno (Mexico City)
The '''Mexican Revolution''', sometimes called the '''Mexican Revolution of 1910''', was a violent social and cultural movement, colored by
socialism socialist,
nationalism nationalist, and
anarchism anarchist tendencies, that began with the popular rejection of
dictator Porfirio DÃaz Porfirio DÃaz Mori in
1910 and continued even after the promulgation of a new
constitution in 1917. Violence continued until the late
1920s, ending only when the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (which later became the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional or "PRI") sealed its monopoly on political power in and after
1928. Even after that, the idea that the Revolution was "ongoing" was reinforced in party doctrine and national thought with its notional division into an "armed phase" and an "institutional phase". The "institutional phase" rhetoric only began to disappear from official discourse under
President of Mexico President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the late
1980s.
This
revolution had an impact on those associated with
Labour movement labor,
agriculture, and
anarchism at the international level, as the
Mexican Constitution of 1917 was the first in the world to recognize social guarantees and collective labor rights; moreover, it produced international
left-wing politics leftist icons such as the painter
Diego Rivera, the rebel
Emiliano Zapata, and the journalist
Ricardo Flores Magón. And then...
End of the ''Porfiriato''
The armed conflict began over alleged
electoral fraud perpetrated by General Porfirio DÃaz in 1910; DÃaz had been
President of Mexico president virtually uninterruptedly since
1876. While his presidency was characterized by promotion of industry and the pacification of the country, it came at the expense of the working and farmer/peasant classes, which generally suffered extreme exploitation. As a result, wealth, political power, and access to education was concentrated in just a handful of families with large estates as well as some companies of foreign origin (mostly from the
United Kingdom,
France, and the
United States).
In 1908, DÃaz committed a political blunder when he told a U.S. journalist that he would like to retire and would welcome opposition parties. This article was translated and reprinted throughout Mexico. DÃaz later denied his statements and decided to run for president in 1910. By this time, his opponent in that election was
Francisco I. Madero of the
Liberal Party (Mexico) Liberal Party. Madero was a foreign-educated industrialist who sympathized with the social reforms that had been promoted by such intellectuals as
Antonio Horcasitas or the
Ricardo Flores Magón Flores Magón brothers. In order to ensure his reelection, DÃaz ordered Madero and his supporters thrown in jail. The next day, DÃaz declared himself the winner, claiming Madero had only received 221 votes. In the prevailing discontent and after a brief period of exile in the
United States, Madero promulgated the
Plan de San Luis San Luis Plan, which declared the election to be null and void and called for an armed uprising by the populace against the DÃaz government, to begin at 18:00 on
November 20,
1910.
Assorted rebels and popular leaders — including
Emiliano Zapata,
Pascual Orozco and
Aquiles Serdán — responded to the clarion call, but they were never able to form a unified movement nor did they even possess the same ideals. Farmers led by Zapata fought to reclaim their ancestral lands in the South, while the troops of the guerrilla
Pancho Villa Francisco "Pancho" Villa fought all the way up to and across the border of the United States and as far south as Mexico City.
The fighting against the federal army lasted for only a short time as DÃaz resigned and went into exile five months later; after his fall, however, infighting between rebels and ideologies cost a million Mexican lives, or ten percent of the entire population at the time.
Madero's presidency
A provisional government headed by
Francisco León de la Barra was formed, which made efforts to disband the revolutionary troops — such as sending forces in
Morelos against the
Zapatistas (Mexican Revolution) Zapatistas for their confiscation and distribution of ''hacienda'' land.
In
1911,
Francisco I. Madero was elected overwhelmingly. However, Madero enjoyed neither support from his former allies, who claimed the revolution's goals had been betrayed, nor from the members of the old regime. Madero's refusal to enact land reforms caused a break with Zapata who announced the
Plan de Ayala, which called for the return of lands "usurped by the ''hacendados''" (
hacienda hacienda owners).
In 1911, counterrevolutionary revolts — the most serious led by
Pascual Orozco — were crushed under General
Victoriano Huerta. This led to a dependency on the disloyal army. In 1913, Madero was overthrown and killed, along with vice president
José MarÃa Pino Suárez, in a
coup d'état headed by the army's commander-in-chief, the same General Victoriano Huerta.
Huerta's reign
With Madero dead, Huerta seized power. This usurpation of power was supported by the landed aristocracy, who saw this as an effort to restore the DÃaz system.
Local leaders redirected their efforts, this time fighting against the new government and accusing Huerta of plotting Madero's murder in cahoots with the United States ambassador,
Henry Lane Wilson. Leaders such as Villa, Zapata, Carranza and Obregón led the fighting against Huerta. Pressure from the United States, brought to bear with the occupation of
Veracruz, Veracruz Veracruz after the
Tampico Affair Tampico incident, combined with the assaults of the rebels, eventually led to the fall of Huerta. After Huerta's defeat in Mexico he fled to El Paso, Texas where he died, and his body lies in Concordia Cemetery.
After Huerta
In an attempt to restrain the slaughter, the governor of the northern state of
Coahuila,
Venustiano Carranza, formed the
Constitutional Army with an eye towards bringing peace via adoption of the majority of the rebel social demands into a new constitution. He managed to incorporate most of the demands into the
1917 Constitution of Mexico Constitution of 1917. The Constitution addressed foreign ownership of resources, an organized labor code, the role of the
Roman Catholic Church in
education and land reform.
The Carranza government also did not last or enforce many of the reforms in the Constitution of 1917. In
1920, General
Ã?lvaro Obregón, who had served as Minister of War and of the Navy, revolted against him along with two other leading generals —
Plutarco ElÃas Calles and
Adolfo de la Huerta. Carranza was assassinated on
May 21,
1920; Carranza had already had Zapata killed in an ambush in 1919.
Obregón assumed power and by bringing peace to the country proved himself to be not only a capable military man, but also an able politician. Under Obregón's control, an artistic and creative renaissance took place in Mexico: a style of monolithic official architecture similar to
Soviet Union Soviet Socialist realism emerged, and mural and fresco techniques from Pre-Columbian cultures were revived and again honored. He fomented the creation of — and subsequently headed — a number of unions. Obregón sought reelection in 1928, an illegal act under the Constitution of 1917, and was in fact reelected, but was assassinated by a
Roman Catholicism Catholic extremist before taking office.
He was succeeded by the extremely
anticlericalism anticlerical General
Plutarco ElÃas Calles, who would later promote anti-religious laws that provoked the
Cristero War. Calles also started the ''Partido Nacional Revolucionario'' (National Revolutionary Party or "PNR") which would later become the ''Partido Revolucionario Institucional'' (Institutional Revolutionary Party or "PRI"), the ruling party that would hold the presidency until the year 2000. The PNR succeeded in convincing most of the remaining generals to dissolve their personal armies and create a single
Military of Mexico Mexican Army.
The triumph of the PNR marked the beginning of a political tradition of loyalty (some claim submission) to the current president, a tradition that lasted approximately seventy years, as each president distributed patronage and effectively chose the state governors and named his successor, through the PRI's monopoly on power.
United States involvement
The U.S. ambassador to Mexico,
Henry Lane Wilson, was involved in plotting the February 1913 coup d'état that overthrew Francisco I. Madero and installed
Victoriano Huerta.
On
April 9 1914, officials in the port of
Tampico, Tamaulipas, arrested a group of U.S. sailors — including, crucially, at least one taken from on board his ship, and thus from U.S. territory. Mexico's failure to apologize in the terms demanded led to the U.S. navy's bombardment of the port of
Veracruz, Veracruz Veracruz and the occupation of that city for seven months; see
Tampico Affair.
In 1916,
Pancho Villa crossed the U.S. border and attacked the town of
Columbus, New Mexico; this was the sole invasion by a foreign armed corps of the continental U.S. in the 20th century. This raid led the U.S. to send a force under General
John Pershing into Mexico, which spent 11 months unsuccessfully chasing him in the punitive
Pancho Villa Expedition (March 1916 – February 1917).
The
Zimmermann Telegram affair of January 1917, while it did not lead to direct U.S. intervention, also took place against the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention and exacerbated tensions between the USA and Mexico.
Mexican Culture
Film
The revolution constitued a major theme in cinema, as in literature, since the beginning of the war in 1910, However, contrary to literature the images of the revolution that appeared on the screen became significantly modified over time as a result of state censorship. During the initial years of the Revolution, the Mexican film industry produced many revolutionary documentaries, as they proved popular with the struggle. These films attempted to objectively document the armed struggle. In 1913, the de la Hueta regime began to impose both political and moral censorship on cinema, which led to the replacement of the documentary with the fiction film.
During the 1920's cinema produced was extremely weak as a result of intense competition from Hollywood. Thus film never played a major role in cultural nationalism during this period. However, this situation changed in the early 1930's.
Art
This period saw the initial effect of one of the primary figures of the Mexican art movement, the celebrated Dr. Atl. In 1914, he returned to Mexico to take a leading part in the early stirrings of the art movement, preaching mural painting for the first time and the Mexicanization of high culture (he had dropped his family name, Murillo, for the Nahuatl Indian ''atl'', meaning water). He organized expeditions, subsidized artists, led strikes, defended neo-Impressionism, and wrote criticism, prose, and poetry. At this point, the fiery Dr. Alt anarchist aesthetic paralleled the political and social attitudes of the Casa del Obrero Mundial, which he himself had recently organized.
The beginning of political revolution in Mexico was paralleled by the 1911 revolt among the art students of the National Academy of San Carlos aginst the academic methods of the past. From this essentially anti-Diaz gesture there developed easily in 1913, a number of outdoor schools under Alfredo Ramos Martinez, the enthusiastic impressionist recently returned from Europe. That same year, during the brief incumbency of Huerta, Ramos was made director of the academy in an effort to appease insurgent forces.
The students of the outdoor school studied this painter's version of Impressionism in their Barbizon-like retreat in the suburbs of Mexico City, benefitting from direct contact with nature but somewhat behind the times aesthteticaly. Many of these youngsters plotted aginst Huerta and joined the revolutionary forces attempting to unseat him. The 1913 coup of Huerta brought Dr. Atl back to Mexico City, who had joined the Carranza forces and organized “red battalions� of workers. He also brought together a young band of writers and intellectuals, and one night in 1914, convinced a
Pancho Villa villista band of workers to support Carranza, then fled to Orizaba, carrying away precious painting equipment. In Orizaba, in a complex of abandoned church buildings, Atl enlisted the aid of his writers and artists (among the latter the young Orozco) to produce an illustrated newspaper, as well as posters and other propanganda material
The Mexican nativism implied in the paintings of Herrán and the preachings of Atl received a powerful impetus during this early period from the works of Francisco Goitia, one of the most important precursors of the Mexican modern-art movement. In 1912, Goitia returned to Mexico and began following the militia of General Angeles under Villa in the north, portraying their activities as well as depicting naturalistic scenes of Mexican life. He continued this until 1917, the year that the great tradegy of the Mexican people finally began to emerge in art. His art took an important step away from folkorism, from the picturesque nativism of Herrán toward the new, more socially-conscious point of view that was to be developed through the 1920s by others. Goitia's growing awareness of Mexican heritage and culture is typical of artists who had direct contact with the realities of the revolution, like Orozco and Siqueiros. Their broadened knowledge and sympathy with the people were expressed in a constantly expanding aura of naturalistic fervor. Even painters and writers who were not in Mexico for the actual fighting realized—perhaps because of the spreading vogue for primitivism—that they had an Indian tradition.
Literature
The first decade of the Mexican Revolution put an end to the years of peace that the country enjoyed during the Diaz dictatorship. The turbulent political decade that followed the Diaz reign showed little cultural activity, according to David Foster. But the revolutionary events did have some impact on literature and the plastic arts. Some poets, like Nervo, never showed the conflict of the times in his poetry, but other poets like Tablada, Gonzalez Martinez, and Lopez Velarde, who produced during this period between modernism and the Vanguardia movement have been credited as the major figures who contributed to the devlopment of twentieth-century poetry in Mexico. In 1911, Gonzalez Martinez published "Tuercele el cuello al cisne"(Wring the Neck of the Swan), which called for a change to the new image and a new language. In Dario's "Cantos de vida y esperanza"(Songs of Life and Hope), he writes without breaking with the past, but returns to society and expresses concern with political events.
See also
*
History of Mexico
*
List of Combatants in the Mexican Revolution
Category:Mexican Revolution *
ca:Revolució Mexicana
da:Mexicanske revolution
de:Mexikanische Revolution
es:Revolución Mexicana
eo:Meksika revolucio
fr:Guerre civile mexicaine
he:המהפכה ×”×ž×§×¡×™×§× ×™×ª
ms:Pemberontakan Mexico
nl:Mexicaanse Revolutie
ja:メã‚シコé?©å‘½
no:Den meksikanske revolusjon
pl:Rewolucja meksykańska
pt:Revolução Mexicana
fi:Meksikon vallankumous
see
Mexican Revolution
Category:1910 in Mexico
Category:Porfiriato Revolution
Category:Revolutions
Category:Military history of Mexico
ko:분류:멕시코 �명
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