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The Mexican Revolution has most often been characterized as the revolt of the oppressed rural masses against the conservative regime of Porfirio Díaz. In Ranchero Revolt Ian Jacobs challenges this populist interpretation of the Revolution by exploring the crucial role played by the rural middle class—rancheros—in the organization and final victory of the Revolution.

Jacobs focuses on the Revolution as it developed in Guerrero, the rebellious Mexican state still frequently at odds with central authority. His is the first account in English of the genesis and development of the Revolution in this important Mexican state and the first detailed history in any language of Guerrero in the period 1876 to 1940.

Stressing as it does the conservative tendencies of the Revolution in Mexico, Ranchero Revolt is a major contribution to revisionist history. It is a striking example of the trend toward local and regional studies of Mexican history that are transforming much of the conventional wisdom about modern Mexico.

Among these studies, however, Ranchero Revolt is unusual in its chronological scope, embracing not only the origins and military struggle of the Revolution but also the emergence of a new revolutionary state in the 1920s and 1930s. Especially valuable are Jacobs' descriptions of the agrarian developments that preceded and followed the Revolution; the vagaries of local factions; and the process of political centralization that took place first under Díaz and later under the revolutionary regimes.

Rancheros hold a distinct place in the culture and social hierarchy of Mexico, falling between the indigenous (Indian) rural Mexicans and the more educated city-dwelling Mexicans. In addition to making up an estimated twenty percent of the population of Mexico, rancheros may comprise the majority of Mexican immigrants to the United States. Although often mestizo (mixed race), rancheros generally identify as non-indigenous, and many identify primarily with the Spanish side of their heritage. They are active seekers of opportunity, and hence very mobile. Rancheros emphasize progress and a self-assertive individualism that contrasts starkly with the common portrayal of rural Mexicans as communal and publicly deferential to social superiors.

Marcia Farr studied, over the course of fifteen years, a transnational community of Mexican ranchero families living both in Chicago and in their village-of-origin in Michoacán, Mexico. For this ethnolinguistic portrait, she focuses on three culturally salient styles of speaking that characterize rancheros: franqueza (candid, frank speech); respeto (respectful speech); and relajo (humorous, disruptive language that allows artful verbal critique of the social order maintained through respeto). She studies the construction of local identity through a community's daily talk, and provides the first book-length examination of language and identity in transnational Mexicans.

In addition, Farr includes information on the history of rancheros in Mexico, available for the first time in English, as well as an analysis of the racial discourse of rancheros within the context of the history of race and ethnicity in Mexico and the United States. This work provides groundbreaking insight into the lives of rancheros, particularly as seen from their own perspectives.

2022 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award
Tejas Foco Non-fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2021 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin
2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation
2021 Runner-up, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book

The first book on the history of escuelitas, Reading, Writing, and Revolution examines the integral role these grassroots community schools played in shaping Mexican American identity.

Language has long functioned as a signifier of power in the United States. In Texas, as elsewhere in the Southwest, ethnic Mexicans’ relationship to education—including their enrollment in the Spanish-language community schools called escuelitas—served as a vehicle to negotiate that power. Situating the history of escuelitas within the contexts of modernization, progressivism, public education, the Mexican Revolution, and immigration, Reading, Writing, and Revolution traces how the proliferation and decline of these community schools helped shape Mexican American identity.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz argues that the history of escuelitas is not only a story of resistance in the face of Anglo hegemony but also a complex and nuanced chronicle of ethnic Mexican cultural negotiation. She shows how escuelitas emerged and thrived to meet a diverse set of unfulfilled needs, then dwindled as later generations of Mexican Americans campaigned for educational integration. Drawing on extensive archival, genealogical, and oral history research, Barragán Goetz unravels a forgotten narrative at the crossroads of language and education as well as race and identity.

To speak of mining in newly independent Mexico is to speak of silver. And silver, historically abundant in the Real del Monte–Pachuca district, was the object of the Company of Adventurers in the Mines of Real del Monte. Organized in response to a plea by Pedro Romero de Terreros for help in rehabilitating his famous family’s once-rich properties, the English Real del Monte was led by men convinced that the application of English capital, management practices, and technology to those ruined mines and mills would reap them a profit and would revitalize the new nation’s most promising industry.

The adventurers were to be disappointed. The story of the English company is one of financial disaster: the loss of more than $5 million between its beginning in 1824 and its dissolution in 1849. Yet this failure was ironic, for upon the foundations of the English company was built a modern concern that yielded great rewards to Mexican and American successors to the hapless Englishmen.

A full account of a single risky venture, this inquiry is a microcosm of early foreign economic penetration into the Mexican mining industry. It offers specific solutions to poorly understood historical problems concerning the wave of capital that flowed from Great Britain into Latin America upon the disruption of the Spanish Empire, problems hitherto treated only in generalizations.

This remarkable first novel depicts life in the small Mexican town of Ixtepec during the grim days of the Revolution. The town tells its own story against a variegated background of political change, religious persecution, and social unrest. Elena Garro, who has also won a high reputation as a playwright, is a masterly storyteller. Although her plot is dramatically intense and suspenseful, the novel does not depend for its effectiveness on narrative continuity. It is a book of episodes, one that leaves the reader with a series of vivid impressions. The colors are bright, the smells pungent, the many characters clearly drawn in a few bold strokes. Octavio Paz, the distinguished poet and critic, has written that it "is truly an extraordinnary work, one of the most perfect creations in contemporary Latin American literature."

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book, 2002

The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from prehispanic times to the present.

Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants.

First published in 1979, this guide has become the standard resource for scientists, divers, and spearfishers interested in the fishes of the tropical Pacific Coast. The authors have revised and updated this edition to include the most current taxonomic information, additional species descriptions, and new illustrations.

Reframing Paquimé: Community Formation in Northwest Chihuahua is a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Casas Grandes region by scholars Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis. This final installment in their comprehensive study challenges the dominant view of Paquimé as a hierarchical society founded by outsiders, presenting instead a compelling case for a largely locally organized society with Mesoamerican and Puebloan characteristics. Drawing on twenty-five years of extensive survey and excavation data, the authors offer a fresh perspective that reframes our understanding of this remarkable archaeological site.

Whalen and Minnis bring forth significant new data that illuminates the cultural and ecological history of Paquimé and its neighboring communities. The book features more than fifty new radiocarbon dates, hundreds of analyzed archaeobotanical and faunal samples, plus tens of thousands of other artifacts. The data reveal a network of settlements characterized by corporate and ritual-based authority, challenging traditional models of the center’s rise, collapse, and subsequent regional abandonment and arguing that aspects of the Paquimé culture continued to exist up to the Spanish Colonial period.

Reframing Paquimé is poised to become an essential reference for archaeologists interested in Northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. By addressing the complex dynamics of community formation and dissolution, Whalen and Minnis provide invaluable insights that will ignite scholarly debate and inspire future research. This meticulously researched volume, authored by leading experts with decades of fieldwork experience, is a vital addition to any collection on the archaeology and ethnobotany of ancient North American societies.

Colonia Hermosa, now considered a suburb of Oaxaca, began as a squatter settlement in the 1950s. The original residents came in search of transformation from migrants to urban citizens, struggling from rural poverty for the chance to be part of the global economy in Oaxaca.

Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar charts the lives of a group of residents in Colonia Hermosa over a period of thirty years, as Mexico became more closely tied into the structures of global capital, and the residents of Colonia Hermosa struggled to survive. Residents shape their discussions within a larger narrative, and their talk is the language of the heroic individual, so necessary to the ideology and the functioning of capital. However, this logic only tenuously connects to the actual material circumstances of their lives.

Mahar applies the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to her data from Mexico in order to examine the class trajectories of migrant families over more than three decades. Through this investigation, Mahar adds an important intergenerational study to the existing body of literature on Oaxaca, particularly concerning the factors that have reshaped the lives of urban working poor families and have created a working-class fraction of globalized citizenship.

On October 15, 1983, a young mother of six was murdered while walking across her village of Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico, with her infant son and one of her daughters. This woman, Victoria Bonilla, was among more than one hundred villagers who perished in violence that broke out soon after the Mexican army chopped down a cornfield that had been planted on an unused cattle pasture by forty Nahuat villagers.

In this anthropological account, based on years of fieldwork in Huitzilan, James M. Taggart turns to Victoria's husband, Nacho Angel Hernández, to try to understand how a community based on respect and cooperation descended into horrific violence and fratricide. When the army chopped down the cornfield at Talcuaco, the war that broke out resulted in the complete breakdown of the social and moral order of the community.

At its heart, this is a tragic love story, chronicling Nacho's feelings for Victoria spanning their courtship, marriage, family life, and her death. Nacho delivered his testimonio to the author in Nahuat, making it one of the few autobiographical love stories told in an Amerindian language, and a very rare account of love among the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. There is almost nothing in the literature on how a man develops and changes his feelings for his wife over his lifetime. This study contributes to the anthropology of emotion by focusing on how the Nahuat attempt to express love through language and ritual.

On February 2, 1848, representatives of the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ending hostilities between the two countries and ceding over one-half million square miles of land to the northern victors. In Mexico, this defeat has gradually moved from the periphery of dishonor to the forefront of national consciousness. In the United States, the war has taken an opposite trajectory, falling from its once-celebrated prominence into the shadowy margins of forgetfulness and denial.

Why is the U.S.–Mexican War so clearly etched in the minds of Mexicans and so easily overlooked by Americans? This book investigates that issue through a transnational, comparative analysis of how the tools of collective memory—books, popular culture, historic sites, heritage groups, commemorations, and museums—have shaped the war's multifaceted meaning in the 160 years since it ended. Michael Van Wagenen explores how regional, ethnic, and religious differences influence Americans and Mexicans in their choices of what to remember and what to forget. He further documents what happens when competing memories clash in a quest for dominance and control.

In the end, Remembering the Forgotten War addresses the deeper question of how remembrance of the U.S.–Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends. It thus provides a new lens through which to view today's cross-border rivalries, resentments, and diplomatic pitfalls.

Employed on Good Friday, the texts provided mute actors with roles and props with which to reenact the removal of Christ from his cross, his placement into the arms of his grieving mother, and his burial—his Deposition. Through rare translations, vivid historical accounts, and rich cultural insight, the book uncovers how these ceremonies moved audiences to tears, shaped local Catholicisms, and still have the power to stir hearts today.

Such theatrical reenactments were common among Nahuas and Mayas during the colonial period only to become largely overlooked by the scholarly literature on religion. The texts examined here provide not only examples of performances but also insight into how translation altered their content and meaning. More than simply plays or sermons, these hybrid performances  merged European tradition with Nahua and Maya storytelling, creating unforgettable moments of faith, grief, and beauty. Familiarized through local worldviews, concerns, preferences, and language, these texts provide additional and important insights into myriad issues including those of gender, agency, and how Christianity adapted its message of the Deposition to accommodate Indigenous audiences of different cultures. Christensen also mines the deep well of existing European literature on the subject to clearly distinguish the aspects derived from the Old World from those from the New.

The first book examining how the Aztec and Maya were taught about and engaged in the Deposition, Removing Christ from the Cross exposes the colonial origins of modern Latin American commemorations, showing the past clearly reflected in the present and making a significant contribution to the literature on the evangelization of New Spain. This is more than history—it is the rediscovery of performances that connected worlds.

Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association

How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.

Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.

The redesign and revitalization of traditional urban centers is the cutting edge of contemporary urban planning, as evidenced by the intense public and professional attention to the rebuilding of city cores from Berlin to New York City's "Ground Zero." Spanish and Latin American cities have never received the recognition they deserve in the urban revitalization debate, yet they offer a very relevant model for this "return to the center." These cultures have consistently embraced the notion of a city whose identity is grounded in its organic public spaces: plazas, promenades, commercial streets, and parks that invite pedestrian traffic and support a rich civic life. This groundbreaking book explores Spanish, Mexican, and Mexican-American border cities to learn what these urban areas can teach us about effectively using central public spaces to foster civic interaction, neighborhood identity, and a sense of place.

Herzog weaves the book around case studies of Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Mexico City and Querétaro, Mexico; and the Tijuana-San Diego border metropolis. He examines how each of these urban areas was formed and grew through time, with attention to the design lessons of key public spaces. The book offers original and incisive discussions that challenge current urban thinking about politics and public space, globalization, and the future of privatized communities, from gated suburbs to cyberspace. Herzog argues that well-designed, human-scaled city centers are still vitally necessary for maintaining community and civic life. Applicable to urban renewal projects around the globe, Herzog's book will be important reading for planners, architects, designers, and all citizens interested in creating more livable cities.

In two of the most fateful months of Mexican history, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1916–1917 came to grips with the basic problem of twentieth-century Mexico. They hammered out pragmatic solutions to establish the legal foundations of the Mexican Revolution, the definitive break between the old Mexico and the new, the constitutional bases for the socioeconomic changes from 1917 onward. Honored and obeyed, dishonored and disobeyed, many times amended, the constitution they wrote still serves as the instrument for achieving the national purpose.

Revolution at Querétaro is the first book in English to study in depth the remarkable convention that produced the Constitution of 1917. It chronicles the unfolding of ideas expressed in the debates on the most significant articles of the constitution, those that have given it a revolutionary flavor and have served the groundwork for the emergence of Mexico as a modern nation. These articles concern the Catholic church and its role in the sphere of education (Article 3); the relationship of the church to the state (Articles 24 and 130); the attack on vested interest and the establishment of guidelines for agrarian reform (Article 27); the drafting of a detailed labor code (Article 123); and attempts to implement municipal reform (Article 114). Other debates described in the book concern unsuccessful attempts to institute prohibition, outlaw bullfights, abolish capital punishment, and grant suffrage to women.

This study also sheds light on the delegates themselves, who they were and where they came from, their idiosyncrasies and attitudes, and their individual contributions to the writing of the constitution. Much material is taken from unpublished albums in which the delegates recorded their sentiments during the convention.

2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section

Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system.

Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country.

Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatán’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.

Zinacantan, Chamula, and Chenalhó are neighboring Mayan communities situated in highland Chiapas, Mexico, near the city of San Cristóbal Las Casas. The inhabitants of the three communities speak dialects of the Tzotzil language. Five religious fiestas, celebrated by these communities in honor of their saints, provide the data for Victoria Bricker's comparative study of ritual humor.

In Chenalhó and Chamula performances of ritual humor are concentrated in the five-day period of a single fiesta, while in Zanacantan similar performances are distributed over threee fiestas. In these fiesta settings, performers in distinctive costumes make obscene and sacreligious remarks in the context of religious ritual. These performances are defined as ritual humor because they occur only in ritual settings.

Bricker's study constitutes a controlled cross-cultural comparison of ceremonial or ritual humor in its social and cultural setting. Much new information is provided in verbatim texts, recorded during actual fiesta performances. The study reveals that, although the three communities share a common pool of ritual symbols, they elaborate them differently in ritual humor. The study analyzes the symbolic expression of values, social organization, and interethnic relations.

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.

In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—American writer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, British architect Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the French émigré photographers Désiré Charnay and Augustus Le Plongeon. Setting these figures in historical and cultural context, Evans uncovers their varying motives, including the Manifest Destiny-inspired desire to create a national museum of American antiquities in New York City, the attempt to identify the ancient Maya as part of the Lost Tribes of Israel (and so substantiate the Book of Mormon), and the hope of proving that ancient Mesoamerica was the cradle of North American and even Northern European civilization. Fascinating stories in themselves, these accounts of the first explorers also add an important new chapter to the early history of Mesoamerican archaeology.

Prize for Best Book in Environmental Studies, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book Prize in Visual Culture, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book on Mexico, Latin American Studies Association 

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. 

This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature.

Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history.