# Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was a multi-faction civil war that overthrew the [[Porfiriato]], killed between one and two million people, and produced the 1917 Constitution — at the time the most progressive national charter in the world. It is the founding event of modern Mexico: every major political institution, from the party that became the [[PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)]] to the national oil company, traces its legitimacy to the revolution's promises, and every subsequent crisis is measured against the revolution's failures to keep them. ## Causes The revolution grew directly out of the contradictions of the [[Porfiriato]]. Porfirio Díaz had modernised infrastructure and attracted foreign investment while concentrating land in haciendas, suppressing labour organisation, and eliminating political competition. By 1910 a small landowning and foreign-investor elite controlled the economy; the rural majority had been dispossessed; the urban middle class had no political outlet; and Díaz, now eighty years old, had promised in a 1908 interview with the American journalist James Creelman that he would welcome opposition — then arrested his opponent, Francisco Madero, when Madero actually ran. ## The war Madero's Plan de San Luis Potosí called for armed revolt on November 20, 1910. The early insurgency was carried by northern ranchers and the peasant armies of the south, not by the urban bourgeoisie Madero represented. The war fractured almost immediately into competing factions: Emiliano Zapata's Ejército Libertador del Sur fought for land redistribution under the Plan de Ayala — "Tierra y Libertad" — and never trusted any government that did not begin by returning the hacienda land to the villages. Francisco "Pancho" Villa's División del Norte was the most formidable conventional army of the revolution, operating out of Chihuahua with a mix of cowboys, miners, and bandits. Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón represented the northern constitutionalist faction that ultimately won by combining military discipline with a willingness to co-opt the other factions' demands on paper. The war killed Madero (assassinated in a 1913 coup by Victoriano Huerta), Zapata (assassinated in a 1919 government ambush), Carranza (assassinated in 1920 while fleeing a rebellion), and Villa (assassinated in 1923 after his retirement). Obregón survived long enough to win the presidency, lose an arm at the Battle of Celaya, and be assassinated during his second term in 1928. The revolution consumed its leaders as thoroughly as the French and Russian revolutions consumed theirs. ## The 1917 Constitution The constitution drafted at Querétaro in 1916–1917, while the war was still being fought, is the revolution's most durable product. Its key provisions included Article 27, which vested ownership of all subsoil resources (oil, minerals, water) in the nation, laying the legal foundation for the [[Mexican Oil Expropriation]] of 1938. Article 123 established an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the right to strike, and protections for women and children — provisions that preceded equivalent legislation in most of the industrialised world. Article 3 mandated secular public education, directly challenging the Catholic Church's centuries-old control of schooling. Article 130 stripped the Church of legal personality and barred clergy from political activity, a provision that triggered the Cristero War of 1926–1929. The constitution was radical on paper and selectively enforced in practice — a pattern the [[PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)]] later perfected as a governing style. ## Legacy The revolution's institutional legacy is the party-state system that governed Mexico for the rest of the twentieth century. Plutarco Elías Calles founded the PNR (later the PRI) in 1929 explicitly to end the cycle of [[Caudillismo]] that the revolution had both opposed and reproduced. The revolution's land-reform promise was partially delivered under Cárdenas in the 1930s and then quietly abandoned under subsequent presidents who favoured commercial agriculture. The oil-nationalization promise was kept and became the basis of Pemex and of Mexican economic sovereignty as a political idea. The revolution also created the mythology — muralism, the cult of Zapata, the narrative of popular struggle against oligarchy — that every subsequent Mexican government has invoked and every subsequent Mexican opposition has accused the government of betraying. --- ## See also [[Mexican History Hub]] · [[Porfiriato]] · [[PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)]] · [[Caudillismo]] · [[Mexican Oil Expropriation]] · [[Manifest Destiny]] · [[Mexican-American War]]