The November 1910 plan, issued from exile in Texas, that called the country to arms against a thirty-year dictatorship (1910)
Francisco Madero's Plan de San Luis Potosí, which named 20 November 1910 as the day to rise.
History · The 20th century
The Mexican Revolution
1910–1920
Agrarian and constitutional upheaval that ended the Porfiriato and produced the 1917 constitution
A decade of revolt, civil war and shifting alliances that began with Francisco Madero's call to arms against Porfirio Díaz, whose rule, the Porfiriato, had lasted more than thirty years. Díaz fell in 1911, but Madero's presidency ended in his murder in 1913 after a coup by Victoriano Huerta, and the revolutionaries then fought one another: Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón against Emiliano Zapata's land reformers in the south and Pancho Villa's cavalry in the north. Obregón broke Villa at Celaya in 1915, and the constitution drawn up at Querétaro in 1917 enshrined land reform, state ownership of the subsoil and labour rights. Zapata was assassinated in 1919, Carranza in 1920.
How to spot them
- ▸A dictator of more than thirty years, toppled in 1911 and dying in exile in Paris
- ▸A southern leader whose slogan was Land and Liberty, and whose plan was named for a village
- ▸A northern cavalry commander who raided a town in New Mexico and was chased by an American expedition
- ▸A constitution of 1917 with a famous article on land and subsoil rights
- ▸Muralists and corridos as its afterlife in art and song
What happened
A southern leader's 1911 plan, named for a village in Morelos, demanding the return of village lands (1911)
Emiliano Zapata's Plan de Ayala, with the slogan Tierra y Libertad.
Ten tragic days in the capital in February 1913, ending with the president's murder (1913)
La Decena Trágica; Francisco Madero and his vice-president José María Pino Suárez were killed after Victoriano Huerta's coup.
A 1915 battle in Guanajuato where barbed wire and machine guns destroyed a famous cavalry division (1915)
Celaya, where Álvaro Obregón defeated Pancho Villa's División del Norte; Obregón lost an arm later that year at Santa Rosa.
A raid on the New Mexico town of Columbus in March 1916, and the American expedition that followed (1916)
Villa's raid brought General John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition into the country.
The constitution drawn up at Querétaro, whose Article 27 vested subsoil rights in the nation (1917)
The Constitution of 1917, still in force; Article 123 set out labour rights.
An ambush at the hacienda of Chinameca in Morelos, 10 April 1919 (1919)
The assassination of Emiliano Zapata, lured there by Colonel Jesús Guajardo.
Quick-fire facts
- •Porfirio Díaz had ruled from 1876, with one break, until his resignation in May 1911; he died in Paris in 1915
- •Pancho Villa was born Doroteo Arango and commanded the División del Norte
- •Villa and Zapata met in the capital in December 1914 and were photographed in the presidential chair
- •Venustiano Carranza led the Constitutionalists and became president in 1917; he was killed in Tlaxcalantongo in 1920
- •Álvaro Obregón became president in 1920 and was assassinated in 1928, after re-election
- •Women who followed and fought with the armies were known as soldaderas; the corrido La Adelita commemorates them
- •Estimates of deaths across the decade vary widely, with figures of one to two million often cited, including those lost to famine and the 1918 influenza pandemic
- •The muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros made the revolution the subject of a state-sponsored art
- •The party that grew out of the settlement, eventually named the PRI, held the presidency from 1929 until 2000
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- Alan Knight — The Mexican Revolution
- John Womack Jr. — Zapata and the Mexican Revolution