Characteristics
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Violence in the Revolution[edit]
Civilians fleeing the danger zone in Mexico City February 16, 1913.
Revolutionaries seized trains. Photo by Hugo Brehme
Soldaderas were participants in the Revolution, as combatants and support of combatants
The most obvious acts of violence which occurred during the Revolution involved soldiers participating in combat or summary executions. The actual fighting which occurred during the Maderista phase of the Revolution (1910–11) did not result in a large number of casualties, but during the Huerta era, the Federal Army summarily executed rebel soldiers, and the Constitutionalist Army executed Federal Army officers. There were no prisoner of war internment camps. Often rank-and-file soldiers of a losing faction were incorporated as troops by the ones who defeated them. The revolutionaries were not ideologically-driven, so they did not target their rivals for reprisals and they did not wage a "revolutionary terror" against them after they triumphed, in contrast to the French and Russian Revolutions. An exception to this pattern of behavior in the history of Mexico occurred in the aftermath of its nineteenth-century wars against Indigenous rebels.
The death toll of the combatants was not as large as it might have been, because the opposing armies rarely engaged in open-field combat. The revolutionaries initially operated as guerrilla bands, and they launched hit-and-run strikes against the enemy. They drew the Federal Army into combat on terms which were favorable to them, they did not engage in open battle nor did they attack heavily defended positions. They acquired weapons and ammunition which were abandoned by Federal forces and they also commandeered resources from landed estates and used them to feed their men. The Federal Army was unable to stray from the railway lines that transported them to contested areas, and they were unable to pursue the revolutionaries when they were attacked.
The death toll and the displacement of the population due to the Revolution is difficult to calculate. Mexico's population loss of 15 million was high, but numerical estimates vary greatly. Perhaps 1.5 million people died, and nearly 200,000 refugees fled abroad, especially to the United States. The violence caused by the Mexican Revolution resulted in Mexican immigration to the United States increasing five-fold from 1910 to 1920, with 100,000 Mexicans entering the United States by 1920 , seeking better economic conditions, social stability, and political stability.
The violence which occurred during the Revolution did not just involve the largely male combatants, it also involved civilian populations of men, women, and children. Some ethnic groups were deliberately targeted, most particularly, the Chinese in northern Mexico. During the Maderista campaign in northern Mexico, there was anti-Chinese violence, particularly, the May 1911 massacre at Torreón, a major railway hub. In 1905, anti-Chinese sentiment was espoused in the Liberal Party Program of 1905.
Landed estates, many of which were owned by foreigners, were targeted for looting, the crops and animals were sold or they were used by the revolutionaries. The owners of some estates were killed. In the wake of the Revolution, a joint American-Mexican Claims Commission assessed the monetary damage and the amount of the monetary compensation which was due.
Cities were the prizes in revolutionary clashes, and many of them were severely damaged. A notable exception is Mexico City, which only sustained damage during the days leading up to the ouster and murder of Madero, when rebels shelled the central core of the capital, causing the death of many civilians and animals. The rebels launched the attack in an attempt to convince observers in Mexico and the world that Madero had completely lost control. The capital changed hands several times during the post-Huerta period. When the Conventionists held power, Villa and his men committed acts of violence against major supporters of Huerta and those who were considered revolutionary traitors with impunity. Villa's terror was not on the same scale as the reigns of terror which occurred during the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, but the assassinations and the kidnappings of wealthy people for ransom damaged Villa's reputation and they also caused the U.S. government's enthusiasm for him to cool.
Photo of Zapata's corpse, Cuautla, 10 April 1919
Political assassination became a frequent way to eliminate rivals both during and after the Revolution. All of the major leaders of the Revolution were later assassinated: Madero in 1913, Zapata in 1919, Carranza in 1920, Villa in 1923, and Obregón in 1928. Porfirio Díaz, Victoriano Huerta, and Pascual Orozco had gone into exile. Believing that he would also go into exile, Madero turned himself into Huerta's custody. Huerta considered that too dangerous a course, since he could have been a rallying point. Huerta did not want to execute Madero publicly. The cover story of Madero and Pino Suárez being caught in the crossfire gave Huerta plausible deniability. He needed it, since he only had a thin veil of legitimacy in his ascention to the presidency. The bodies of Madero and Pino Suárez were not photographed nor were they displayed, but pictures of Madero's clothing were taken, showing bullet holes in the back. Zapata's death in 1919 was at the hands of Carranza's military. There was no need for a coverup since he had remained a threat to the Carranza regime. Photos of the dead Zapata were taken and published, as proof of his demise, but Carranza was tainted by the deed.
The economic damage which the revolution caused lasted for years. the Population losses which were due to military and civilian casualties, the displacement of populations which migrated to safer areas, and the damage to the infrastructure all had significant impacts. The nation would not regain the level of development which it reached in 1910 for another twenty years.
The railway lines which were constructed during the Porfiriato facilitated the movement of men, horses, and artillery and they were extensively used by all of the factions. This was much greater in northern Mexico, it was less so in the areas controlled by Zapata. When men and horses were transported by rail, the soldiers rode on the tops of boxcars. Railway lines, engines, and rolling stock were targeted for sabotage and the rebuilding of tracks and bridges was an ongoing issue. Major battles in the north were fought along railway lines or railway junctions, such as Torreón. Early on, northern revolutionaries also added hospital cars so the wounded could be treated. Horses remained important in troop movements, they were either directly ridden to combat zones or they were loaded on trains. Infantry also still played a role. Arms purchases, mainly from the United States, gave northern armies almost inexhaustible access to rifles and ammunition so long as they had the means to pay for them. New military technology, particularly machine guns, mechanized death on a large scale. El Paso, Texas became a major supplier of weaponry to the Constitutionalist Army.
Cultural aspects of the Mexican Revolution[edit]
There was considerable cultural production during the Revolution itself, including printmaking, music and photography, while in the post revolutionary era, revolutionary themes in painting and literature shaped historical memory and understanding of the Revolution.
Journalism and propaganda[edit]
Anti-Díaz publications before the outbreak of the Revolution helped galvanize opposition to him, and he cracked down with censorship. As President Madero believed in freedom of the press, which helped galvanize opposition to his own regime. The Constitutionalists had an active propaganda program, paying writers to draft appeals to opinion in the U.S. and to disparage the reputations of Villa and Zapata as reactionaries, bandits, and unenlightened peasants. El Paso, Texas just across from Ciudad Juárez was an important site for revolutionary journalism in English and Spanish. Mariano Azuela wrote Los de Abajo ("The Underdogs") in El Paso and published in serial form there. The alliance Carranza made with the Casa del Obrero Mundial helped fund that appealed to the urban working class, particularly in early 1915 before Obregón's victories over Villa and González's over Zapata. Once the armed opposition was less of a threat, Carranza dissolved Vanguardia as a publication.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Mexican-Americans created newspapers to help with the war effort, denouncing Diaz's regime as well as professing their support to the revolution. There were multiple newspapers written in the Spanish language, most notably, La Cronica, (The Chronicle in English) created by Nicasio Idar and his family in Laredo, Texas, a city which saw much action as a border town. La Cronica, as well as other Chicano newspapers, would mostly cover stories about the Mexican-American and Tejano communities in the border regions, as well as supporting the revolution. These articles were named fronterizo ("by the border" in English), a newspaper dedicated to describing life in the border regions which would write about Mexican-Americans and their long rooted history and culture pertaining to these lands, as people living by the international border would be called fronterizos (border-dwellers). These fronterizos would start out with two goals: to decry the racism and discrimination experienced by Mexicans and Mexicans-Americans in the United States, and to support the ongoing reforms in Mexico, equating the tyranny of Porfirio Díaz to that of white Texan politicians. A month after the start of the conflict, Idar from La Cronica argued that Mexican immigrants and American born Mexican-Americans should be inspired by the revolution's promise of land reform to fight for more civil rights in the United States. Fronterizos worked to produce a nationalistic perspective placing the borderlands as an integral part of Mexican culture, history, and as a crucial part to the revolution, as the borderlands and its communities have been ignored by both the United States and Mexican governments.
Prints and cartoons[edit]
José Guadalupe Posada. The Calavera Maderista
During the late Porfiriato, political cartooning and print making developed as popular forms of art. The most well known print maker of that period is José Guadalupe Posada, whose satirical prints, particularly featuring skeletons, circulated widely. Posada died in early 1913, so his caricatures are only of the early revolution. One published in El Vale Panchito entitled "oratory and music" shows Madero atop a pile of papers and the Plan of San Luis Potosí, haranguing a dark-skinned Mexican whose large sombrero has the label pueblo (people). Madero is in a dapper suit. The caption reads "offerings to the people to rise to the presidency." Political cartoons by Mexicans as well as Americans caricatured the situation in Mexico for a mass readership. Political broadsides including songs of the revolutionary period were also a popular form of visual art. After 1920, Mexican muralism and printmaking were two major forms of revolutionary art. Prints were easily reproducible and circulated widely, while murals commissioned by the Mexican government necessitated a journey to view them. Printmaking "emerged as a favored medium, alongside government sponsored mural painting among artists ready to do battle for a new aesthetic as well as a new political order." Diego Rivera, better known for his painting than printmaking, reproduced his depiction of Zapata in the murals in the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca in a 1932 print.
Photography, motion pictures, and propaganda[edit]
Child soldier
The Mexican Revolution was extensively photographed as well as filmed, so that there is a large, contemporaneous visual record. "The Mexican Revolution and photography were intertwined." There was a large foreign viewership for still and moving images of the Revolution. The photographic record is by no means complete since much of the violence took place in relatively remote places, but it was a media event covered by photographers, photojournalists, and professional cinematographers. Those behind the lens were hampered by the large, heavy cameras that impeded capturing action images, but no longer was written text enough, with photographs illustrating and verifying the written word.
The revolution "depended heavily, from its inception, on visual representations and, in particular, on photographs." The large number of Mexican and foreign photographers followed the action and stoked public interest in it. Among the foreign photographers were Jimmy Hare, Otis A. Aultman, Homer Scott, and Walter Horne. Images appeared in newspapers and magazines, as well as postcards. Horne was associated with the Mexican War Postcard Company.
Iconic image of Villa in Ojinaga, a publicity still taken by Mutual Film Corporation photographer John Davidson Wheelan in January 1914
Most prominent of the documentary film makers were Salvador Toscano and Jesús H. Abitía, and some 80 cameramen from the U.S. filmed as freelancers or employed by film companies. The footage has been edited and reconstructed into documentary films, Memories of a Mexican (Carmen Toscano de Moreno 1950) and Epics of the Mexican Revolution (Gustavo Carrera). Principal leaders of the Revolution were well aware of the propaganda element of documentary film making, and Pancho Villa contracted with an American film company to record for viewers in the U.S. his leadership on the battlefield. The film has been lost, but the story of the film making was interpreted in the HBO scripted film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself. The largest collection of still photographs of the Revolution is the Casasola Archive, named for photographer Agustín Casasola (1874–1938), with nearly 500,000 images held by the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca. A multivolume history of the Revolution, Historia Gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, 1900–1960 contains hundreds of images from the era, along with explanatory text.
Painting[edit]
José Clemente Orozco, The Trench, mural in the San Ildefonso College, Mexico City
Venustiano Carranza attracted artists and intellectuals to the Constitutionalist cause. Painter, sculptor and essayist Gerardo Murillo, known as Dr. Atl, was ardently involved in art production in the cause of the revolution. He was involved with the anarcho-syndicalist labor organization, the Casa del Obrero Mundial and in met and encouraged José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in producing political art. The government of Álvaro Obregón (1920–24) and his Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos commissioned artists to decorate government buildings of the colonial era with murals depicting Mexico's history. Many of these focused on aspects of the Revolution. The "Big Three" of Mexican muralism, Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros produced narratives of the Revolution, shaping historical memory and interpretation.
Music[edit]
Soy zapatista del Edo. de Morelos ("I'm a Zapatista from the State of Morelos"), a southern corrido written by the revolutionary Marciano Silva [es].
Corrido sheet music celebrating the entry of Francisco I. Madero into Mexico City in 1911.
A number of traditional Mexican songs or corridos were written at the time, serving as a kind of news report and functioned as propaganda, memorializing aspects of the Mexican Revolution. The term Adelitas an alternative word for soldaderas, is from a corrido titled "La Adelita". The song "La Cucaracha", with numerous verses, was popular at the time of the Revolution, and subsequently, and is too in the present day. Published corridos often had images of particular revolutionary heroes along with the verses.
Literature[edit]
Few novels of the Mexican Revolution were written at the time: Mariano Azuela's Los de Abajo (translated as The Underdogs) is a notable one, originally published in serial form in newspapers. Literature is a lens through which to see the Revolution. Nellie Campobello is one of the few women writers of the Revolution; her Cartucho (1931) is an account of the Revolution in northern Mexico, emphasizing the role of Villistas, when official discourse was erasing Villa's memory and emphasizing nationalist and centralized ideas of the Revolution. Martín Luis Guzmán's El águila y el serpiente (1928) and La sombra del caudillo(1929) drew on his experiences in the Constitutionalist Army. In the fiction of Carlos Fuentes, particularly The Death of Artemio Cruz, the Revolution and its perceived betrayal are key factors in driving the narrative.
Gender[edit]
The revolution that occurred during 1910 greatly affected gender roles present in Mexico. However, it continued to create a strict separation between genders although both men and women were involved in the revolution. Women were involved by promoting political reform as well as enlisting in the military. Women who were involved in political reform would create reports that outlined the changes people wanted to see in their area. That type of activism was seen inside and outside of the cities. Women not only took political action but also enlisted in the military and became teachers to contribute to the change that they wanted to see after the revolution. Women were seen as prizes by many men involved in the military. Being involved in the military gave men a greater sense of superiority over women, which gave women the connotation of being a prize. That idea often lead to violence against women, which meanwhile increased. After the revolution, the ideas women contributed to the revolution were put on hold for many years. Women would often promote the ideas of establishing a greater justice system and creating ideals surrounded by democracy. The revolution caused many people to further reinstate the idea that women were meant to be taking care of the household. Women were also put in the lower part of the social class because of this idea.
Female soldiers during the revolution[edit]
Women who had been discarded by their families would often join the military. Being involved in the military would lead to scrutiny amongst some male participants. In order to avoid sexual abuse many women would make themselves appear more masculine. They would also dress more masculine in order to gain more experience with handling weapons, and learning more about military jobs.
María de Jesús González[edit]
An example of this is presented by María de Jesús González who was a secret agent involved in Carranza's army. She would often present herself as a man in order to complete certain tasks assigned to her. After she completed these tasks she would return to her feminine appearance.
Rosa Bobadilla[edit]
Rosa Bodilla, however, maintained her feminine appearance throughout her military career. She joined the Zapata's military with her husband. When he died, she was given his title, which became "Colonel Rosa Bobadila widow of Casas." She gave orders to men while continuing to dress as a woman.
Amelio Robles[edit]
Main article: Amelio Robles Ávila
After the revolution, Amelio Robles continued to look like and identify as a male for the rest of his life. Robles abandoned his home in order to join the Zapata military. Throughout the war, Robles began to assume a more masculine identity. After the war, he did not return to his former appearance like other females had. Robles carried on with his life as Amelio, and remained to look as well as act masculine. He reestablished himself into the community as a male, and was recognized as a male on his military documents.
