Chapter III
The Mexican Revolution
1910–1920 — One of the great upheavals of the twentieth century
The Porfiriato: Thirty-Five Years of Dictatorship
The revolution began as a revolt against Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1911 — longer than any leader in the country's history. The Porfiriato was a period of spectacular economic modernization: railways crisscrossed the country, telegraph lines connected distant cities, foreign investment poured in. But the benefits flowed almost entirely to a tiny elite allied with Díaz.
By 1910, an estimated one percent of the population owned 97 percent of the arable land. Rural peasants — the campesinos — lived in conditions closer to feudalism than modern capitalism, many bound to haciendas by debt peonage. Díaz's slogan was “Order and Progress.” The order was police and soldiers; the progress was for the few. When Díaz turned 80 and announced he would run for re-election yet again, the country had had enough.
Francisco Madero: The Idealist
In 1910, a slight, soft-spoken landowner named Francisco Madero published a book — The Presidential Succession of 1910 — calling for free elections. He was dismissed as a dreamer. But when Díaz rigged the election and imprisoned Madero, the dreamer became a revolutionary. Madero called for a nationwide uprising on November 20, 1910 — the official start of the Mexican Revolution.
Díaz resigned in May 1911 and sailed into exile. Madero was elected president in a free election later that year. But he was a reformer, not a revolutionary — he wanted political change, not economic redistribution. This proved fatal. The radicals he had inspired, especially Emiliano Zapata, demanded land reform immediately. When Madero refused, they rebelled against him. In 1913, General Victoriano Huerta, with the support of the US ambassador, betrayed and assassinated Madero.
The Revolutionaries
Emiliano Zapata — The Peasant Leader
A small farmer from Morelos who became the most iconic figure of the revolution. His slogan, “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty), captured the heart of the peasant revolution. He fought for one thing: the return of communal lands stolen by the haciendas. He was incorruptible — he never sought power for himself — and he was assassinated in 1919 by agents of President Carranza. His ghost haunts Artemio Cruz, who fought for the peasants and then became their landlord.
Pancho Villa — The Centaur of the North
A bandit and cattle rustler who became the most romanticized general of the revolution. Villa's División del Norte was the largest revolutionary army, and his cavalry was legendary. Unlike Zapata, Villa was not a coherent ideologue — he was a charismatic leader whose appeal was personal, not political. He was ambushed and assassinated in 1923, his body riddled with bullets.
Venustiano Carranza — The Constitutionalist
A wealthy landowner who opposed Huerta and became “First Chief” of the Constitutionalist Army. Carranza wanted a return to constitutional order — not social revolution. He was the gatekeeper through whom the chaos of the revolution became the Mexican state. Artemio Cruz serves as a young officer in Carranza's forces.
Álvaro Obregón — The General Who Won
The commander who defeated Villa's army at the Battle of Celaya in 1915, introducing machine guns and barbed wire to Mexican warfare. Obregón became president in 1920 — the first revolutionary leader to survive in power. He represented the consolidation of the revolution into a stable regime that would eventually become the PRI.
The Constitution of 1917
In the midst of civil war, the revolutionary factions convened a constitutional convention at Querétaro. The resulting Constitution of 1917 was the most progressive in the world at the time. It guaranteed land reform, labor rights (including the eight-hour day and the right to strike), secular education, and firm limits on the power of the Catholic Church. It also declared all subsoil resources — oil, minerals, water — the property of the Mexican nation, a provision that would prove explosive in relations with the United States.
The Constitution was a revolutionary document. But the distance between the document and the reality — between what was written and what was enforced — would become the subject of Fuentes's novel. The revolution wrote noble words; the revolutionary class that emerged from the chaos wrote very different ones on the ground.
The Aftermath: The Betrayal
The revolution killed approximately 1.5 million Mexicans — one in ten of the population. It destroyed the old order of the Porfiriato. But what replaced it was not the world Zapata dreamed of. Instead, a new ruling class emerged from the revolutionary faction that consolidated power: the “Revolutionary Family,” which institutionalized itself as the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 1929. The PRI ruled Mexico continuously from 1929 to 2000 — one of the longest single-party regimes in modern history. They used the rhetoric of the revolution while governing as a system of patronage, corruption, and authoritarian control.
This is the world Artemio Cruz inhabits — and the world he helped build. He survived the revolution's violence and then became its betrayal. The young man who fought for land reform became the old man who owned the land. The soldier who risked his life for the revolution became the tycoon who was richer than the landlords he once fought against. His trajectory is the trajectory of Mexico itself — a revolution that succeeded in destroying the old order, and failed in building a new one.
“You were a revolution, and you became a government.”
— Gonzalo Bernal to Artemio Cruz