Who was a leader of the mexican revolution that took place in the early twentieth century?

The Mexican Revolution is the defining event of modern Mexican history and has provided a touchstone for political and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. Deeply entrenched economic inequality and undemocratic institutions provided favorable conditions for a wide-scale revolt. Although Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, a majority of Mexicans suffered during the nineteenth century as a result of political chaos and foreign intervention. The last decades witnessed the rise of Porfirio Dίaz. Dίaz's plan was to modernize Mexico by promoting foreign investment and making the country produce for international markets. He thus granted concessions for land use and mining rights to wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs and to US and European companies. In the process, he confiscated communally held land from peasant communities (ejidos. ) His corruption, favoritism, and dictatorial rule led to resentment by many upper- and middle-class Mexicans. They were educated, white or light-skinned landowners and professionals who resented the lack of democracy and opportunity, but considered themselves superior to the Indian and mestizo masses (Sources 1 and 3). Following the concept of the hierarchy of races, assumed by most intellectuals of the period, they believed that as white descendants of Europeans, they were the natural superiors of the Indians and mestizos.

Francisco Madero (Sources 2 and 3) ran against Porfirio Díaz during the presidential election of 1910. Madero agreed with Díaz's efforts to modernize the country but believed that Mexico was ready for a more democratic system (based on universal male suffrage. ) Madero was a political liberal who belonged to one of Mexico's richest families. Although Madero campaigned widely, Díaz ultimately jailed him and stole the election. Madero then fled to the United States and called for a revolution. Eventually, the revolution succeeded in toppling Díaz after 34 years in power. Although Madero instituted democratic reform as the new president, his program did not go far enough in the eyes of many who had supported him, especially in regard to land redistribution.

A major cause of the Mexican revolution was unequal distribution of land (Sources 1 and 9). Wealthy white landowners had owned vast estates since Spanish colonial times and increased their holdings during the Porfirian era. Foreign investors also came to control large estates. In the meantime, Indians and mestizos who had small plots of land, or who worked on communally held lands or ejidos, often lost their lands. By the early years of the twentieth century, most peasants (campesinos, or the more derogatory term, peons) were dependent on pitiful wages from wealthy landowners. The pressures of the growing international market economy meant that smaller peasant farms were increasingly unable to compete with the large estates, or haciendas, of the wealthy. When Dίaz began privatizing untitled lands and confiscating ejido land, popular resentment boiled over. Workers in the cities and towns, suffering also from low wages and harsh conditions, were similarly discontent. In 1910, popular uprisings spontaneously broke out in many parts of the country. Over the next ten years, peasant armies, led by Pancho Villa in the North and Emiliano Zapata in Morelos and the South, attacked wealthy landowners, destroyed haciendas, and redistributed land, defying the orders of the liberal governments of Madero, Carranza, and others.

The differing perspectives of the major participating groups meant those who had mobilized against Díaz did not agree on the purpose of the revolution or on its policies on land. This set provides sources to analyze the perspectives of four major groups. The first group was the wealthy landowners who supported Díaz (Source 1). The second group was upper- and middle-class people (mostly light-skinned) who wanted liberal democratic political change and supported Madero, Carranza, and Obregón, but not the land confiscation and social revolution that Zapata advocated (Sources 2 and 3). A third group was Indian and mestizo cowboys and rural poor of northern Mexico who wanted land or access to wealth and power and supported Villa (Sources 4, 5, and 8). The final group was Indian and mestizo campesinos, or peasants, in the South, who wanted more ejidos for their communities and supported Zapata (Sources 9 and 10). Although this set does not include the shifting power rivalries between leaders, the role of the United States, or the role of urban laborers, it allows students to probe deeply into the intersection of race, class, and aspirations in revolutionary Mexico.

One effect of the revolution was a brutal extended war. Rival armies held different parts of the country and engaged in guerrilla warfare and occasional large battles against each other. The countryside was devastated, and almost 1 million Mexican people were killed (from a total population of 15 million. ) Many others fled over the northern border into the United States. All of the major leaders, except Obregón, were assassinated. Writers mythologized Villa and Zapata as folk heroes (Sources 8 and 10).

Another effect is that large numbers of women, called soldaderas, joined the armies, and many fought as soldiers (Sources 6 and 7). The central importance of these women to the war effort is documented in corridos (popular songs) and in black-and-white photographs. Their political and military activities did not lead to increased rights for women, and their contributions were long ignored after the revolution. Nevertheless, documentation of these women's participation attests to their involvement in the revolution as more than just victims.

Resistance from below forced political leaders to accept demands for genuine democracy, preservation of peasant communities, and land reform. The Constitution of 1917 (Source 11) authorized the redistribution of land and water from large estates to poor communities and created new ejidos of communal village holdings protected from alienation. It gave protections to workers that were revolutionary for the time and also granted extensive rights to trade unions. However, these ambitious goals were often not carried out; despite that, one of the enduring accomplishments of the revolution was stability. There has not been another large-scale social revolution in Mexico since.

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Mexico reached a cease-fire in time for the July 1920 election, and in September, it was announced that Obregón had won with 1,131,751 votes; while his opponent, Alfredo Robles Domínguez, received only 47,442 votes. Obregón took the oath of office at midnight on 30 November 1920 and reshaped Mexico. The country still had little infrastructure, no means of economic support and was bankrupt. Obregón crushed remaining rebellions; he is thought to have ordered Pancho Villa’s assassination in July 1923, and put down de la Huerta’s revolt in Sonora. He knew he had to cut the military to save money; its forces declined from 61% in 1921 to 36% by 1923.

Obregón established the Ministry of Public Education to create a national culture, started national beautification projects, mural painting, and other educational reforms, all aimed at enriching the lower classes of Mexico. In 1921, Obregón’s Ministry of Public Education, under José Vasconcelos, opened 1,000 rural schools across the country. During his presidency, Obregón gave 3,250,000 acres of land back to 400,000 citizens, but large estates, such as Luis Terrazas’ 2.5 million acre property, continued as before. Obregón returned Mexican currency to the gold standard and invited foreign visitors and companies to invest in Mexico’s infrastructure, revitalized Mexico’s economy and increasing Mexican oil exported abroad. Under de la Huerta and Obregón after him, oil exports rose from 77,703,289 barrels in 1919 to 190,000,000 by the end of 1921. The Obregón government signed the Bucareli Agreements with the U.S. in 1923, normalizing relations between the two nations.

Obregón encouraged U.S. and European intellectuals and journalists to come to Mexico to see the Revolution up close. In 1921, Obregón commissioned a number of muralists, including Diego Rivera, to paint the walls of various empty buildings around Mexico to tell the story of the Revolution. Obregón served as president until 1924, promising not to run for reelection because he supported the clause in the 1917 Constitution forbidding a president from serving a second term. In 1923, Adolfo de la Huerta, Obregón’s Finance Secretary, launched a rebellion because Obregón backed Plutarco Elías Calles for president in 1924 and not him. Obregón quickly quashed the rebellion and executed many of his former allies. When his term was over, Obregón left power and returned to Sonora, the first peaceful transition of the presidency since Porfirio Díaz was overthrown 14 years before. The Mexican Revolution was finally over.

This photograph shows President Álvaro Obregón addressing the people of Mexico City from a balcony near the National Palace around 1920. To add to his stature, the president wore a false beard.

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Zapata grew up in a village in Morelos, a state to the south of Mexico City. He learned how to read and write, but had little formal schooling. During his early years, haciendas producing for the internal and external market began to gobble up land that had belonged to villages for centuries. By 1906, Zapata had already begun his struggle to return land to those who farmed it and in 1909 local people elected him president of the village council.

After Madero began his revolt against President Díaz, Zapata recruited a group of men, which by May had captured the city of Cuautla. Zapata soon discovered that Madero, a hacendado, was much more interested in reinstating democratic processes than in land reform. Given what he had learned, Zapata refused to disarm his men and fled to the hills instead, starting a rebellion against Madero.

In November 1911, Zapata and a school teacher Otilio Montaño wrote the Plan of Ayala. It was the most radical document of the revolution, calling for the return of lands stolen by haciendas and the confiscation and reassignment of other haciendas to villages without land titles. After Huerta had Madero assassinated, Zapata continued his struggle as men from a wider range enlisted in the fight. By summer 1914, his forces commanded Morelos, wide swaths of other nearby states, and looked to overrun Mexico City.

In November 1914, Zapata chose to ally with Pancho Villa, more a man of the people than the hacendado and senator of the Old Regime, Venustiano Carranza. On December 4, the two met in Mexico City, and twelve days later, Zapata took Puebla. Instead of continuing, however, Zapata returned home to Morelos to begin his promised land reform. While 1915 was an utopian period in Morelos, it was a disaster for the Villa-Zapata alliance. Villa lost a major battle to Obregon (Carranza’s general) and Zapata was thrown out of Mexico City. The following year was even worse as Carranza’s troops even invaded Morelos.

The movement went into an irreversible decline, and several major leaders defected to the enemy. On April 10, 1919 Zapata rode to meet a supposed Carrancista turn-coat, when he was assassinated.

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