The Mexican Revolution (1884–1940)

The 34-year rule of Porfirio Díaz over Mexico (1876–1911), marked by modernization, foreign investment, and repression.

Social factors (land loss, poverty, inequality), economic factors (foreign ownership, wage stagnation), and political factors (dictatorship, rigged 1910 election).

Huge landed estates. Under Díaz they swallowed communal village lands (ejidos), leaving peasants landless and dependent on low-wage labor.

Díaz jailed rival candidate Francisco Madero, rigged his own re-election, and Madero issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí calling for armed revolt.

He toppled Díaz in 1911 and won free elections, but as president he was too cautious on land reform, alienating Zapata and Villa, and was overthrown/killed in Huerta's 1913 coup.

He seized power in 1913 by betraying and murdering Madero (the Ten Tragic Days), ruling as a brutal military dictator until driven out in 1914.

Villa led cavalry armies of ranch hands and cowboys in the north (Chihuahua); Zapata led peasant guerrillas fighting for land reform in the south (Morelos) under the Plan of Ayala.

Zapata's manifesto demanding land seized under Díaz be returned to villages immediately — he rejected Madero for stalling on this.

As a conservative landowner-turned-Constitutionalist leader, he allied with general Álvaro Obregón to defeat Villa (Battle of Celaya, 1915), sidelined Zapata, and became president in 1917.

Because Villa and Zapata fought for land and local power while Carranza's Constitutionalists fought mainly for legal/political reform — their goals and social bases differed sharply.

Railways, foreign investment, and order (paz porfiriana) came at the direct cost of peasant land, Indigenous communities, and any political opposition — modernization for few, misery for many.

Carranza's forces lured Zapata into an ambush at Chinameca hacienda and shot him in 1919.

Article 27 said the nation (not individuals) owned all land, water, and subsoil resources. It let the government break up haciendas for ejidos and nationalize foreign oil holdings.

Communal land granted to a village by the state under Article 27 — worked by peasants together rather than owned individually, reversing Díaz-era land concentration.

Labour rights: an 8-hour day, a minimum wage, the right to strike and unionize, and factory safety rules — among the most progressive labour protections in the world in 1917.

Article 3 made education free, secular, and state-controlled (banning Church-run schools). Article 130 stripped the Catholic Church of legal status, property, and clergy's civil rights.

Carranza, a landowner himself, enforced Articles 27 and 123 weakly — real land redistribution and labour organizing only accelerated under later presidents, especially Cárdenas.

He stabilized the state after a decade of civil war, won US recognition (Bucareli Agreements, 1923), expanded rural schools under Vasconcelos, and began modest land redistribution.

The period (1928-1934) when Plutarco Elías Calles, though no longer president, controlled Mexican politics from behind the scenes through three puppet presidents.

The Partido Nacional Revolucionario (1929) united revolutionary factions and generals under one party umbrella, ending the cycle of coups and assassinations over succession.

Calles's strict enforcement of anti-clerical Articles 3 and 130 (closing churches, expelling foreign priests) provoked a Catholic peasant uprising, mainly in central-western Mexico.

US-brokered 'arreglos' (1929) between the government and Church restored church services without repealing the anti-clerical laws — an uneasy truce, not a clear victory for either side.

He redistributed more land than all previous presidents combined, nationalized the oil industry (1938, creating Pemex), backed labour unions, and expelled Calles from Mexico.

Calles was harshly anti-clerical and cautious on land reform; Cárdenas eased tensions with the Church while dramatically accelerating land redistribution — a shift in revolutionary priorities.

A mix of economic self-interest (protecting US-owned oil, mines, and railways) and strategic concern (border security, keeping Germany out, and Wilson's claimed wish to promote democracy).

US Marines occupied the port to block a German arms shipment to Huerta and pressure his illegitimate government; it embarrassed Huerta but angered Mexicans across factions.

A US military campaign led by General Pershing into northern Mexico to capture Pancho Villa after his raid on Columbus, New Mexico; Villa was never caught, and Wilson withdrew the troops in 1917.

US toleration of arms sales and smuggling helped Villa's Division of the North grow powerful (1913-14); when US support shifted to Carranza in 1915, Villa's supply lines dried up and his army weakened.

A secret German proposal for Mexico to ally against the US in exchange for help reclaiming Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico; it was intercepted, and Carranza rejected it.

Argentina, Brazil, and Chile mediated talks at Niagara Falls between the US and Huerta's government to avoid a full-scale war after the Veracruz occupation.

A decade of fighting (1910-20) damaged railways, mines, and farmland and caused major population loss, but Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution set the legal foundation for later land reform and the 1938 oil nationalization.

Large public wall paintings (by artists like Diego Rivera and Siqueiros) telling political and historical stories; the government sponsored it to build a shared national identity after the revolution.

Women who fought or supported troops during the Mexican Revolution, cooking, nursing, and sometimes fighting directly in combat.

Feminist congresses in Yucatán (1916) demanded suffrage and education, but Mexican women did not win the national vote until 1953 — decades after the revolution.

He redistributed millions of hectares of land as ejidos (communally farmed land) and nationalized oil in 1938, delivering on long-delayed revolutionary promises, though poverty and discrimination persisted.

Veracruz (1914) targeted Huerta's government via a port blockade tied to arms and recognition politics; the Punitive Expedition (1916-17) targeted Villa directly with an armed manhunt on Mexican soil — both strained US-Mexico relations without achieving their full aims.