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The Mexican Revolution by
In 1910 insurgent leaders crushed the Porfirian dictatorship, but in the years that followed fought among themselves, until a nationalist consensus produced the 1917 Constitution. This in turn provided the basis for a reform agenda that transformed Mexico in the modern era. The civil war and the reforms that followed receive new and insightful attention in this book. These essays, the result of the 45th annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, presented by the University of Texas at Arlington in March 2010, commemorate the centennial of the outbreak of the revolution. A potent mix of factors--including the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few thousand hacienda owners, rancheros, and foreign capitalists; the ideological conflict between the Diaz government and the dissident regional reformers; and the grinding poverty afflicting the majority of the nation's eleven million industrial and rural laborers--provided the volatile fuel that produced the first major political and social revolution of the twentieth century. The conflagration soon swept across the Rio Grande; indeed, The Mexican Revolution shows clearly that the struggle in Mexico had tremendous implications for the American Southwest. During the years of revolution, hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens crossed the border into the United States. As a result, the region experienced waves of ethnically motivated violence, economic tensions, and the mass expulsions of Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent.
Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. by 
Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 by
In June 1943, the city of Los Angeles was wrenched apart by the worst rioting it had seen to that point in the twentieth century. Incited by sensational newspaper stories and the growing public hysteria over allegations of widespread Mexican American juvenile crime, scores of American servicemen, joined by civilians and even police officers, roamed the streets of the city in search of young Mexican American men and boys wearing a distinctive style of dress called a Zoot Suit. Once found, the Zoot Suiters were stripped of their clothes, beaten, and left in the street. Over 600 Mexican American youths were arrested. The riots threw a harsh light upon the deteriorating relationship between the Los Angeles Mexican American community and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1940s. In this study, Edward J. Escobar examines the history of the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Mexican American community from the turn of the century to the era of the Zoot Suit Riots. Escobar shows the changes in the way police viewed Mexican Americans, increasingly characterizing them as a criminal element, and the corresponding assumption on the part of Mexican Americans that the police were a threat to their community. The broader implications of this relationship are, as Escobar demonstrates, the significance of the role of the police in suppressing labor unrest, the growing connection between ideas about race and criminality, changing public perceptions about Mexican Americans, and the rise of Mexican American political activism.
Mexican American Literature: The Politics of Identity by
Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volumenbsp;presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.
A Brief History of Mexico by
From the rise of the first civilizations of North America and continuing through the cataclysm of the Spanish conquest and the explosive revolution of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa to the intensely contested presidential election of 2006, Mexico has had a vibrant and dynamic history. Mexico's pre-Columbian civilizations as well as contemporary indigenous cultures. This book also brings readers up to date on recent developments in Mexico and helps them understand the deeper significance of these headline-making events, including the 2006 presidential election that resulted in victory for the National Action Party's Felipe Calderon, a weakened Institutional Revolutionary Party, and the Democratic Revolutionary Party candidate's threatening a government in opposition.
Magic(al) Realism by