Book: Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution

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Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century

Gilbert M. Joseph, the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, and Jürgen Buchenau

(Duke University Press)

In this historical analysis of the Mexican Revolution, Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau explore the revolution’s causes, dynamics, consequences, and legacies. They do so from varied perspectives, including those of campesinos and workers; politicians, artists, intellectuals, and students; women and men; the well-to-do, the dispossessed, and the multitude in the middle. In the process, they ask major questions about the revolution: How did the revolutionary process and its aftermath modernize the nation’s economy and political system and transform the lives of ordinary Mexicans?

Rather than conceiving the revolution as either the culminating popular struggle of Mexico’s history, or the triumph of a new (not so revolutionary) state over the people, Joseph and Buchenau examine the process through which state and society shaped each other. The result is a history of Mexico’s “long twentieth century,” from Porfirio Díaz’s modernizing dictatorship to the neoliberalism of the present day.