Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century

Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press)

Jürgen Buchenau is a professor and chair of the History Department in UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

HIs concise historical analysis of the Mexican Revolution explores the revolution’s causes, dynamics, consequences, and legacies. Its varied perspectives include those of campesinos and workers; politicians, artists, intellectuals and students; women and men; the well heeled, the dispossessed, and the multitude in the middle. In the process, the book engages major questions about the revolution: How did the revolutionary process and its aftermath modernize the nation’s economy and political system and transform the lives of ordinary Mexicans?

Rather than conceiving the revolution as either the culminating popular struggle of Mexico’s history or the triumph of a new (not so revolutionary) state over the people, the book examines the textured process through which state and society shaped each other. The result is a lively history by Buchenau and co-author Gilbert M. Joseph of Mexico’s “long 20th Century,” from Porfirio Díaz’s modernizing dictatorship to the neoliberalism of the present day.

Buchenau, who earned his Ph.D. at UNC Chapel Hill, has authored and/or edited nine books, including the award-winning Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution (2007), and a textbook, Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico (2008), currently in preparation for a second edition. He is editor of Viewpoints: Puntos de Vista: Themes and Interpretations in Latin American History, a book series with Wiley-Blackwell.

Buchenau currently is writing a history of the winners of the Mexican Revolution, a group of leaders from the northwestern state of Sonora that established the cultural, economic, and political blueprint of the modern Mexican state in the 1920s and early 1930s.