Book Description

The classic account of the mexican revolution from the acclaimed author. First published in Spanish in 1971, "The Mexican Revolution" has been praised by Mexico's Nobel Prize-winning author Octavio Paz as a notable contribution to history and is widely recognized as a seminal account of the Mexican Revolution. Written during the author's time as a political prisoner in the famous penitentiary of Lecumberri in Mexico, it sold thousands of copies in its first edition, becoming widely accepted as the official textbook by history faculties in Mexico despite Gilly's continued incarceration. It has gone through more than thirty editions in Mexico and been translated into French and Greek. This is a comprehensively revised and updated edition of the original text with a foreword by Latin American history scholar Friedrich Katz and a new preface to the English edition by the author. A true "people's history," "The Mexican Revolution" is a stirring, bottom-up account of an event whose reverberations are still felt throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. What you didn't know about the Mexican Revolution: - In December 1914 the peasant armies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata conquered Mexico City and established a peasant government there. - Mexico's 1917 constitution granted the right of peasants and peasant communities to own the land they tilled. - Mexico's 1917 constitution established an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the rights to establish unions and to collectively bargain, and a right to strike--rights not seen in the United States until the 1930s and later.