The Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was like a crucible—once heated, it radically transformed everything it touched and reshaped Mexico for a century. Aspiring initially to the liberal reform of the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the movement quickly gave way to something more radical: the demand for land, indigenous rights, and even grassroots communal power. If 19th-century Latin America politics was fundamentally about independence, and the 20th century about socialism, what are we to make of this crucial but often overlooked interlude, before Cuba, and before even Russia, where socialist demands were being worked out in practice and in a political language not yet fully born? Standing at the threshold between past and present, at the borderlands of the First World and the Third, what can the Mexican Revolution teach us about not only Mexico, but also about revolutionary change more broadly?

In this course, we will approach the decade-long Mexican Revolution as “a tiger unleashed” (in the words of Díaz), whose ramifications continue to be felt not just in Mexico, but across the Western hemisphere. As we study the radically unpredictable unfolding of this process, we will be asking: What is the relationship between freedom and equality, between formal independence and substantive social transformation? What is the relationship between socialism and decolonization? Is revolution fundamentally a question of looking forward or of plumbing the past for insight and inspiration? How did such a rebellious process become ultimately institutionalized into a decades-long dictatorship, and what does this tell us about the relationship between revolutions and institutions more generally?