Editing Mexican Revolution (section)

==Legacies==

===Strong central government, civilian subordination of military===
Although the ignominious end of Venustiano Carranza's presidency in 1920 cast a shadow over his legacy in the Revolution, sometimes viewed as a conservative revolutionary, he and his northern allies laid "the foundation of a more ambitious, centralizing state dedicated to national integration and national self-assertion."<ref name="Knight p. 573"/> In the assessment of historian [[Alan Knight (historian)|Alan Knight]], "a victory of Villa and Zapata would probably have resulted in a weak, fragmented state, a collage of revolutionary fiefs of varied political hues presided over by a feeble central government."<ref name="Knight p. 573"/> Porfirio Díaz had successfully centralized power during his long presidency. Carranza was an old politico of the Díaz regime, considered a kind of bridge between the old Porfirian order and the new revolutionary.<ref name=":7"/> The northern generals seized power in 1920, with the "Sonoran hegemony prov[ing] complete and long lasting."<ref>Meyer, Jean. "Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s" in ''Mexico since Independence'', [[Leslie Bethell]], ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 201</ref> The Sonorans, particularly Álvaro Obregón, were battle-tested leaders and pragmatic politicians able to consolidate centralized power immediately after 1920. The revolutionary struggle destroyed the professional army and brought to power men who joined the Revolution as citizen-soldiers. Once in power, successive revolutionary generals holding the presidency, Obregón, Calles, and Cárdenas, systematically downsized the army and instituted reforms to create a professionalized force subordinate to civilian politicians. By 1940, the government had controlled the power of the revolutionary generals, making the Mexican military subordinate to the strong central government, breaking the cycle of military intervention in politics dating to the independence era. It is also in contrast to the pattern of military power in many Latin American countries.{{sfn|Lieuwen|1981}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Camp |first=Roderic Ai |title=Mexico's Military on the Democratic State |location=Westport CT |publisher=Praeger Security International |date=2005 |pages=15–25}}</ref>

===Constitution of 1917===
{{Main|Constitution of Mexico}}

An important element of the revolution's legacy is the 1917 Constitution. The document brought numerous reforms demanded by populist factions of the revolution, with article 27 empowering the state to expropriate resources deemed vital to the nation. These powers included expropriation of hacienda lands and redistribution to peasants. Article 27 also empowered the government to expropriate holdings of foreign companies, most prominently seen in the 1938 expropriation of oil. In Article 123 the constitution codified major labor reforms, including an 8-hour workday, a right to strike, equal pay laws for women, and an end to exploitative practices such as child labor and company stores. The constitution strengthened restrictions on the Catholic Church in Mexico, which when enforced by the Calles government, resulted in the [[Cristero War]] and a negotiated settlement of the conflict. The restrictions on the religion in the Constitution remained in place until the early 1990s. The Salinas government introduced reforms to the constitution that rolled back the government's power to expropriate property and its restrictions on religious institutions, as part of his policy to join the U.S. and Canada Free Trade Agreement.<ref>Blancarte, Roberto "Recent Changes in Church-State Relations in Mexico: An Historical Approach". ''Journal of Church & State'', Autumn 1993, vol. 35. No. 4.</ref> Just as the government of [[Carlos Salinas de Gortari]] was amending significant provisions of the constitution, [[Metro Constitución de 1917]] station was opened.

===Institutional Revolutionary Party===
{{main|Institutional Revolutionary Party}}
[[File:PRI logo (Mexico).svg|thumb|right|upright|Logo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which incorporates the colors of the Mexican flag]]

The creation of the [[Institutional Revolutionary Party]] (PRI) emerged as a way to manage political power and succession without resorting to violence. It was established in 1929 by President Calles, in the wake of the assassination of President-elect Obregón and two rebellions by disgruntled revolutionary generals with presidential ambitions. Initially, Calles remained the power behind the presidency, during a period known as the [[Maximato]], but his hand-picked presidential candidate, Lázaro Cárdenas, won a power struggle with Calles, expelling him from the country. Cárdenas reorganized the party that Calles founded, creating formal sectors for interest groups, including one for the Mexican military. The reorganized party was named Party of the Mexican Revolution. In 1946, the party again changed its name to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The party under its various names held the presidency uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000, and again from 2012 to 2018 under President [[Enrique Peña Nieto]]. In 1988, [[Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas]], son of president Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI, forming an independent leftist party, the [[Party of the Democratic Revolution]], or PRD. It is not by chance that the party used the word "Revolution" in its name, challenging the Institutional Revolutionary Party's appropriation of the Mexican Revolution.

The PRI was built as a big-tent corporatist party, to bring many political factions and interest groups (peasantry, labor, urban professionals) together, while excluding conservatives and Catholics, who eventually formed the opposition [[National Action Party (Mexico)|National Action Party]] in 1939. To incorporate the populace into the party, Presidents Calles and Cárdenas created an institutional structure to bring in popular, agrarian, labor, and popular sectors. Cárdenas reorganized the party in 1938, controversially bringing in the military as a sector. His successor President Avila Camacho reorganized the party into its final form, removing the military. This channeled both political patronage and limited political options of those sectors. This structure strengthened the power of the PRI and the government. Union and peasant leaders themselves gained power of patronage, and the discontent of the membership was channeled through them. If organizational leaders could not resolve a situation or gain benefits for their members, it was they who were blamed for being ineffective brokers. There was the appearance of union and peasant leagues' power, but the effective power was in the hands of the PRI. Under PRI leadership before the 2000 elections which saw the conservative National Action Party elected most power came from a Central Executive Committee, which budgeted all government projects. This in effect turned the legislature into a rubber stamp for the PRI's leadership. The Party's name is aimed at expressing the Mexican state's incorporation of the idea of revolution, and especially a continuous, nationalist, anti-imperialist, Mexican revolution, into political discourse, and its legitimization as a popular, revolutionary party.<ref name="Monthly Review Press">{{cite book|last=Cockcroft|first=James|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iie4AAAAIAAJ|title=Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, & the State|publisher=Monthly Review Press|year=1992|isbn=978-0-85345-560-8}}</ref> According to historian Alan Knight, the memory of the revolution became a sort of "secular religion" that justified the Party's rule.<ref>Knight, Alan "The Myth of the Mexican Revolution" pp. 223–273 from ''Past & Present'', No. 209, November 2010 pp. 226–227.</ref>

===Social changes===
[[Image:PRD logo (Mexico).svg|thumb|right|upright|Logo for the leftist Party of Democratic Revolution]]

The Mexican Revolution brought about various social changes. First, the leaders of the Porfiriato lost their political power (but kept their economic power), and the middle class started to enter the public administration. "At this moment the bureaucrat, the government officer, the leader were born […]".{{sfn|Meyer|2004|p=294}} The army opened the sociopolitical system and the leaders in the Constitutionalist faction, particularly Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, controlled the central government for more than a decade after the military phase ended in 1920. The creation of the PNR in 1929 brought generals into the political system, but as an institution, the army's power as an interventionist force was tamed, most directly under Lázaro Cárdenas, who in 1936 incorporated the army as a sector in the new iteration of the party, the Revolutionary Party of Mexico (PRM). The old federal army had been destroyed during the revolution, and the new collection of revolutionary fighters were brought under state control.{{sfn|Lieuwen|1981}}

Although the proportion between rural and urban population, and the number of workers and the middle class remained practically the same, the Mexican Revolution brought substantial qualitative changes to the cities. Big rural landlords moved to the city escaping from chaos in the rural areas. Some poor farmers also migrated to the cities, and they settled on neighborhoods where the Porfiriato elite used to live. The standard of living in the cities grew: it went from contributing to 42% of the national GDP to 60% by 1940. However, social inequality remained.{{sfn|Meyer|2004|pp=297–298}}

The greatest change occurred among the rural population. The [[agrarian reform]] allowed some revolutionary men to have access to land, ([[ejido]]s), that remained under control of the government. However, the structure of land ownership for ''ejidetarios'' did not promote rural development and impoverished the rural population even further.<ref>Appendini, Kirsten. "Ejido" in ''[[Encyclopedia of Mexico]]'', 450.</ref>{{sfn|Meyer|2004|p=299}} "From 1934 to 1940 wages fell 25% on rural areas, while for city workers wages increased by 20%".{{sfn|Meyer|2004|p=303}} "There was a lack of food, there was not much to sell and even less to buy. […] the habit of sleeping in the floor remains, […] diet is limited to beans, tortilla, and chili pepper; clothing is poor".{{sfn|Meyer|2004|p=205}} Peasants temporarily migrated to other regions to work in the production of certain crops where they were frequently exploited, abused, and suffered from various diseases. Others decided to migrate to the United States.{{sfn|Meyer|2004|p=304}}

A modern legacy of revolution in the rural sphere is the Chiapas insurgency of the 1990s, taking its name from Emiliano Zapata, the [[Zapatista Army of National Liberation]] ({{lang|es|Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional}}). The [[Neozapatismo|neo-Zapatista]] revolt began in [[Chiapas]], which was very reliant and supportive of the revolutionary reforms, especially the ejido system, which it had pioneered before Cárdenas took power. Most revolutionary gains were reversed in the early 1990s by President Salinas, who began moving away from the agrarian policies of the late post revolution period in favor of [[neo-liberalism|modern capitalism]]. This culminated in the dismantling of the ejido system in Chiapas, removing many landless peasants' hope of achieving access to land. Calling to Mexico's revolutionary heritage, the EZLN draws heavily on early revolutionary rhetoric. It is inspired by many of Zapata's policies, including a call for decentralized local rule.

===Reaction of Mexican Americans===
While the war was raging in Mexico, Mexicans and [[Mexican Americans ]] living in the United States had a multitude of reaction and responses to the war. These responses were not unified, however, as class, race, regional origins, and political ideologies contributed to a large amount of different reactions from the Mexican diaspora in the United States.<ref name=":1" /> Furthermore, not all Mexicans had the same citizenship status, with some being immigrants, refugees, exiles, or people whose family had lived in the south-western states from Texas to California since before the [[Mexican–American War]].<ref name=":1" /> Within Mexicans and Mexican Americans, there was a wide political spectrum present, from extreme anarchists, to conservative counterrevolutionaries. Some of these groups included Tejano Progressives who supported the revolution and actively helped out by raising awareness to social justice, and Border Anarchists who were a more radical group that participated in violence.<ref name=":1" />

===Memory and myth of the Revolution===
The violence of the Revolution is a powerful memory. Mexican survivors of the Revolution desired a lasting peace and were willing to accept a level of "political deficiencies" to maintain peace and stability.<ref>Camp, ''Mexico's Military on the Democratic Stage'', 17.</ref> The memory of the revolution was used as justification for the [Institutional Revolutionary] party's policies with regard to economic nationalism, educational policies, labour policies, {{lang|es|indigenismo}} and land reform.<ref>''Garrard,Virginia; Henderson, Peter.; McMann, Bryan. [Latin American in the Modern World]. Oxford University Press Academic US, 2022. https://oup-bookshelf.vitalsource.com/reader/books/9780197574102''</ref> Mexico commemorates the Revolution in monuments, statues, school textbooks, naming of cities, neighborhoods, and streets, images on peso notes and coins.