Two Books on the Mexican Revolution

Two recent books offer sharply contrasting perspectives on the Mexican Revolution, one of the most bloody and consequential upheavals of the early twentieth century. In her breezy retelling of the origins of the 1910 insurrection, Lytle Hernández elevates the role of the intrepid anarchist leader Ricardo Flores Magón and his dissident Mexican Liberal Party. Fighting to oust the aging Mexican autocrat Porfirio Díaz, the rebels took advantage of the U.S.-Mexican border, which was quite porous at the time, to seek sanctuary in the United States, where they could print broadsheets, organize militias, and conduct daring cross-border raids. It was the Díaz administration—not the U.S. government—that dubbed these insurgents “bad Mexicans,” but Washington did collude with Díaz to protect U.S. investors and harass, jail, and deport the radical Magonistas. Lytle Hernández strives to reframe these well-substantiated stories as foundational to U.S. history—in terms of the United States’ domestic as well as foreign policy—and as exemplary of an ongoing violent clash between “white settler supremacy” and dispossessed peoples of color. But she does not provide compelling evidence for her revisionist thesis. Although her book offers an engaging narrative, those looking for a rigorous, multidimensional analysis of Díaz’s hotly contested 30 years in office and the maelstrom that followed will have to turn elsewhere.

William Buckley, Sr., was the father of William Buckley, Jr., the influential founding editor of the reactionary magazine The National Review. As a young lawyer and petroleum entrepreneur, the senior Buckley was an eyewitness to and sometimes a participant in the various phases of the tumultuous revolution. Adams’s sympathetic yet worthy biography relies heavily on Buckley’s voluminous personal papers. Having grown up in a rural Texas populated by Mexican Americans, Buckley spoke fluent Spanish and mixed easily in Mexican political and business circles. “Guillermo” Buckley courted Díaz and the business-friendly U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, but also met with the peasant leader Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Buckley walked the corridors of power in Washington, where he witnessed the sharp debates and utter confusion so characteristic of U.S. foreign policy decision-making. As a corporate lobbyist, he disdained President Woodrow Wilson’s liberal idealism. In assessing the causes of the Mexican upheaval, Buckley acknowledged grinding rural poverty and Mexicans’ distrust of unchecked foreign investments—and, begrudgingly (as a devout Catholic), popular antipathy toward the wealthy Catholic Church. Unlike Lytle Hernández, Buckley made little mention of racial divides as a driving force in history.