Mexico Under Siege Review

If you don’t have existing material why not start with what you already have? Below is a review I wrote for a class. The book, “Mexico Under Siege,” is a sort of unfolding of the left after the 1910 revolution and is what moved me to pick up Mexican and Latin American history and left movements for about two years.

-Adam W. 

Between Revolution and Perfect Dictatorship:Hodges and Gandy’s Narrative of the Mexican Left and Social Movements

 

Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy,  Mexico Under Siege, Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism. New York: Zed Books, 2002. 

 “What happened at this finca now was exactly the same as occurred later throughout the whole Republic: the peons, accustomed for years to masters, tyrants, oppressors, and dictators, were not in truth liberated… They remained slaves, with the single difference that their masters had changed, that mounted revolutionary leaders were now the wealthy.” 

-B. Traven, General from the Jungle (1939)

The Mexican Revolution brought forth one of the most powerful and far reaching social revolutions in the twentieth century. But after only two decades, the era quickly came to an close as the nationalist-populist social pact between worker movements and the state dissolved, paving the way for one of the longest periods of single party rule in twentieth century.  Marking this point is the consolidation of power by the conservative wing of the PRI (then the PNR or National Revolutionary Party) with the installation of the Camacho Presidency in 1940. Beginning at this period of juncture is Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy’s narrative of the major players and important themes of the popular resistance movements that followed in their work Mexico Under Siege, Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism.