The Mexican Revolution was one of the defining episodes of Mexican history. It broke out in 1910 in response to the decades-long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. In its early stages, the revolution was led by Emiliano Zapata as Mexican agricultural laborers and the poor sought extensive agrarian reform and land distribution in a country where an unequal system of landholding had prevailed since the days of Spanish rule centuries earlier. This would be the spark for a decade of conflict which lasted down to 1920, with numerous coups and political changes. The Mexican Constitution was established in the midst of this in 1917, guaranteeing universal male suffrage and enshrining the principles of land reform, workers’ rights, and an end to the excessive power of the Roman Catholic Church. However, all of this was extremely violent, with around 2.7 Mexicans losing their lives during the Revolution. As a result, millions of Mexicans were also displaced and over one million fled to the United States.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
Chronology of events
The Mexican Revolution came at the end of nearly a century of tumultuous politics in Mexico ever since it attained independence from Spain in 1821. The country had seen periods of republican government, imperial rule by a French-backed Austrian prince in the 1860s and finally the military dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz for three and a half decades from 1876 to 1910. By 1910, Díaz was approaching his eightieth year and was increasingly unpopular in a country where living standards were very dismal and the majority of the land was held in the hands of a small elite. It was in this context that unrest began to break out over the result of the 1910 presidential election in which Francisco Madero had challenged Díaz. The following year, Díaz resigned and Madero became president, but this would not be a great enough change to allay violence and insurrection.[2]
In 1911, the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata launched a revolt against the government in Morelos in central Mexico, calling for wide-sweeping reforms including those in the voting system, local government, landholding, and economic reform. Further regional rebellions followed in the mid-1910s. An extremely bloody period followed this, in which coup and counter-coup were initiated by the military and other parties in Mexico City and there were numerous changes of government even as violence spread across the provinces and states.[3]
Eventually, in 1917 a new constitution was promulgated by Venustiano Carranza, one which offered universal male suffrage and enshrined the principles of societal, legal, economic and agrarian reforms; Carranza had become president that same year. Yet violence continued as the new government attempted to reclaim control of the situation. Eventually, Zapata, who remains a national hero in Mexico, was killed in an ambush in the spring of 1919 and the Zapatistas were gradually curbed in their actions. One final coup occurred to overthrow Carranza in 1920 and the new military commanders who led it soon reached an accommodation with one of the last major rebel leaders, Pancho Villa, that same year.[1]
Extent of migration
By the time the Mexican Revolution ended, approximately 2.7 million people had lost their lives and millions more were displaced owing to a decade of extreme violence and unrest. There were two different types of migration associated with the Mexican Revolution; some of it was inward as people left one part of Mexico which was war-ravaged and moved to another; this was especially the case in the southern and central regions. However, the greater migration occurred from Mexico into the United States. It is estimated that upwards of 1.3 million Mexicans left their homeland and headed to states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas between 1910 and 1925, with some subsequently moving on further to cities like St Louis. Large communities of Mexicans even ended up as far north as Iowa.[4]
Demographic impact
There had been a significant community of people of Spanish-Mexican descent living in the United States prior to the migrations of the 1910s and early 1920s. After all, the vast region lying between Texas and California and including Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and sections of states like Colorado had once formed part of the Spanish Empire and then Mexico. These had only become part of the United States as the spoils of the American-Mexican War of 1846 to 1848.[5] Consequently, there was a population of people of Spanish-Mexican ancestry living across the southern United States by the early twentieth century, but this was relatively limited as these northern parts of what had then been Mexico had been thinly populated by people of European extraction. The first major European settlements in California, for example, were not established until the 1760s and 1770s when Franciscan missionaries led by Junípero Serra had laid down the foundations of settlements like San Diego and San Francisco. As a result, the migration associated with the Mexican Revolution massively expanded the level of Mexican settlement in the United States. It led to well over a million people entering a country whose population was growing towards 100 million at the time. By the early 1920s, there were upwards of 100,000 Mexicans arriving in the United States every year. As such, approximately 1.5% of the American population by 1925 was made up of Mexican Americans. Moreover, this laid the foundations for the wider trend whereby Mexicans migrated north to the United States, one which has continued in the century since.[6]
It is estimated that there are at least 30 million Mexican Americans in the United States today. These include everyone from scores of Olympians to actors and actresses like Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Anthony Quinn, who are of mixed heritage. Yet it is difficult to determine what percentage of the Mexican American community in the United States is descended from settlers who arrived during the 1910s and early 1920s for the simple reason that there have been several successive waves of Mexican migration to the US ever since. For instance, the Bracero program, which was set up towards the end of the Second World War to address labor shortages in America, led to some four million Mexicans arriving in the US over the next twenty years. But what was perhaps most significant about the Mexican Revolutionary period was that it set the tone for Mexican migration northwards to the US for the century that followed.[7]
Explore more about the Mexican Revolution
- Mexican historical records on MyHeritage
- Newspapers in Mexico on Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Newspaper collections on MyHeritage includes information about historical events, births, deaths, marriages, businesses, naturalizations, court cases, and more.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 The Mexican Revolution. History Today
- ↑ Mexico profile - Timeline. BBC News
- ↑ Pettit, Arthur G. Emiliano Zapata's Revolt Against the Mexican Government, 1908-1911. The Historian, Vol. 31, No. 2 (FEBRUARY, 1969), pp. 233-250
- ↑ 3 Revolution and War, 1910 to 1921. Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897–1931, 1980, pp. 38-54
- ↑ Mexican-American War. Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ How Mexican Immigration to the U.S. Has Evolved. Time
- ↑ 1942: Bracero Program. Library of Congress