The Mexican Revolution was the first great popular upheaval of the twentieth century. It had begun modestly enough in 1910, as a modernizing bourgeoisie sought to reform the ramshackle oligarchic state. It was to last for ten years, locking Mexico into a complex and violent struggle. The southern peasantry raised the explosive demand for land reform. Their struggle reached its highest pitch with the entry of Zapata and Villa into Mexico City in December 1914. But the inability of the revolutionary forces to forge a genuine national structure and the political weakness of the working class doomed the radical impulse of the revolution to eventual frustration. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has ruled Mexico without a break for over sixty years, was the beneficiary of Obregon's stabilization of the state in 1920. It has nonetheless failed to erase the memory of peasant power.
This classic study has gone through sixteen editions in Spanish. An understanding of Mexico's turbulent history is vital today, as world attention is once again focussed on the country's strategic position in the Americas.
Adolfo Gilly was born in Buenos Aires in 1928. A Trotskyist since his youth, immersed in the workers' movement, he worked in Bolivia for the Fourth International and Marcha, a leading Latin American political and cultural weekly. In Italy in 1960-62 he witnessed the beginnings of the autonomia movement. He reported from Cuba for Monthly Review and travelled with leftist guerrillas in Guatemala. In 1966 he was arrested in Mexico and spent six years in Lecumberri Prison, where he produced La revolución interrumpida (in English, The Mexican Revolution). On his release he was deported to France, returning in 1976 when he secured a teaching job at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has lived in Mexico ever since.
