Few movements have ever started out less auspiciously than Francisco Madero’s rebellion against Porfirio Diaz, the man who had held Mexico in an iron grip for 35 years. The maderista movement’s unpromising start had a great deal to do with the background and personality of its founder. Where revolutionary leaders are usually disaffected middle-class intellectuals like Lenin and Robespierre or […]
Continue ReadingIn the darkest days of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill said of the RAF that “never has so much been owed by so many to so few.” To paraphrase the great statesman, it could be said of the Juan Rulfo’s literary output that never has such a small body of work been so widely […]
Continue ReadingWhere does one draw the line between iconoclastic satire and cynicism? It is commonly said that the purpose of satire is correction and this seems as useful an explanation as any. No matter how brutally a target is lampooned, the satirist usually has a vision of a better world created through a necessary process of […]
Continue ReadingEven by the rigorous standards of the Jesuit order, Father Francisco Eusebio Kino was an overachiever. During the three-century colonial period between the Conquest in 1521 and the end of the Independence War in 1821, the Spanish overseas empire produced such great religious activists as Bartolomé de las Casas and Vasco de Quiroga. Yet for pure energy Father […]
Continue ReadingIt is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn between José Morelos y Pavón and his mentor and predecessor, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Both were Roman Catholic priests of casual vocation who fathered illegitimate children, both were intensely drawn to political activism and both were charismatic leaders of Mexico’s independence movement. Yet it would be unfair to […]
Continue Reading1877–1945) President: 1924-28 Mexico is a land of intense faith. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the saints on automobile dashboards, the vast crowds making pilgrimages on their knees — all attest to the depth of religious feeling in a land where the culture of the Spanish conquistadores clashed and then melded with that of terrifying […]
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The only thing that is definitely known about Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked mystery man who leads the Zapatista rebels in the jungles of Chiapas, is that he is an intellectual. Conflicting sources who assure us that they know the true identity of the man behind the mask have variously identified him as a disillusioned government […]
Continue ReadingVicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña was the second president of Mexico and the first to come from las clases populares (the “popular” classes), which in Spanish is a euphemism for an individual of peasant or working class background. This circumstance of birth is important because it would have a decisive effect on both Guerrero’s life and death. Born […]
Continue ReadingTo most of us, the term “German agent” conjures up the image of a heel-clicking Bundist swilling beer and sieg heiling as he attends his monthly meeting at Camp Siegfried. If his vintage is pre-WWI rather than pre-WWII, then the Sieg Heil! will be replaced by something like Kaiser Hoch! What the terms do not evoke is the roistering figure […]
Continue ReadingEditor’s Note: Jim Tuck died in 2005. Jim approached his Mexico with a particular love of history that was strongly colored by his political and social beliefs. His articles on the various periods of Mexico’s development and the significant individuals who played a part in creating those times provides a perspective that is quite different […]
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