The Revolution That Wasn’t

Almost all the accounts about the Mexican Revolution treat it as one of the great sociopolitical upheavals of the twentieth century, in which masses of Mexican people revolted against a tiny elite of feudal landlords, U.S. imperialism, and an ancient military dictator. In this pithy, paradigm-shifting history of Mexico from 1910 to 1920, celebrated historian John Womack Jr. invites us to reconsider the fascinating and complicated story of modern Mexico’s founding moment. In a deeply researched and vivid historical account, Womack brings to life the story of Mexico’s bloody armed contests for political power—struggles, he argues, that did little to alleviate the country’s gross inequalities and injustices, which remained mostly unchanged in the wake of the revolution. `The Revolution That Wasn’t’ reveals that, although the so-called revolutionary forces declared they would reconstitute Mexico on democratic, liberal, and agrarian terms, no such revolution actually happened, then or in later decades.