The Mexican Revolution (1884–1940)

Porfirio Díaz's long personal dictatorship over Mexico, from 1876/1884 until 1911.

"Bread or the stick" — reward loyal supporters with favours and land, or crush opponents with force.

Díaz's inner circle of technocratic advisers, who justified his rule using ideas of "order and progress".

A mounted rural police force used by Díaz to suppress banditry and political opposition in the countryside.

Roughly 1% of the population owned about 85% of Mexico's land, concentrated into large hacienda estates.

A system where hacienda workers were paid in credit at overpriced company stores (tienda de raya), keeping them permanently in debt and tied to the estate.

Striking miners and textile workers protesting pay and conditions were violently suppressed by Díaz's troops, exposing the regime's reliance on repression.

Díaz told US journalist James Creelman that Mexico was ready for democracy and he would welcome an opposition party in 1910 — a promise he then broke.

A liberal landowner from Coahuila who ran against Díaz in 1910 under the slogan "Effective Suffrage, No Re-election", demanding honest elections and no indefinite re-election.

Madero's declaration, issued from exile in Texas, voiding the fraudulent 1910 election and calling on Mexicans to rise in armed revolt on 20 November 1910.

Díaz's rigged, repressive rule concentrated land and wealth while crushing dissent (Cananea, Río Blanco) → Creelman Interview raised hopes of reform → Díaz jailed Madero and stole the 1910 election → Madero's Plan of San Luis Potosí called for armed revolt.

Long-term: land concentration, debt peonage, foreign economic control, no political outlet. Short-term: Creelman Interview raising false hopes, Madero's 1910 candidacy, his arrest, and the fraudulent election that triggered the Plan of San Luis Potosí.

Obregón agreed not to apply Article 27 retroactively against existing US oil companies, in exchange for US diplomatic recognition and an end to US arms sales to his rivals.

A strict enforcement of the Constitution's anticlerical articles — closing church schools, expelling foreign priests, and requiring priests to register with the state.

A Catholic peasant uprising against religious persecution under the Calles Law, which killed roughly 90,000 people before ending in an informal truce.

The period when Plutarco Elías Calles ruled Mexico indirectly as 'Jefe Máximo' through three puppet presidents, after Obregón's assassination in 1928.

The National Revolutionary Party, founded by Calles in 1929 to unify competing revolutionary factions under one party — ancestor of Mexico's long-ruling party.

After becoming president in 1934, he built his own support among peasants and workers, then exiled Calles from Mexico in 1936, ending Calles's indirect rule.

Redistributed about 18 million hectares, nearly double the total of all previous presidents combined, mostly as ejidos (communal peasant landholdings).

Cárdenas expropriated foreign-owned oil companies after they ignored a Mexican Supreme Court wage ruling, creating the state oil company Pemex.

The Party of the Mexican Revolution (1938), Cárdenas's reorganization of the PNR into four sectors — peasant, labour, military and popular — locking mass organizations into the party.

Before 1920: direct military action (Veracruz occupation 1914, Pershing's Punitive Expedition 1916-17). After 1920: diplomacy and recognition tied to agreements (Bucareli 1923), and by 1938 Roosevelt's non-interventionist Good Neighbor Policy.

A movement where artists like Diego Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco painted public murals celebrating indigenous history and revolutionary ideals, commissioned as part of Vasconcelos's cultural nation-building.

A cultural movement that celebrated Mexico's indigenous heritage as central to national identity, part of the Revolution's broader impact on arts, education and music.