Description:

This talk, arising from a collaborative project on violence in the US-Mexico borderlands, focuses on the very violent decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20); first, it analyses the nature of the northern Mexico/borderlands Revolution (including Pancho Villa and his Division of the North), the decisive role played by the frontier in the Mexican civil war, and the long-term consequences of both; secondly, it addresses the (i) switch to decentralized violence - on both sides of the border - after 1915 ('banditry', the Columbus raid, the Plan of San Diego); and (ii) the international conflict provoked by the Columbus raid, which led to the not-very-punitive Punitive Expedition.

Alan Knight is Emeritus Professor of Latin American history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony's College. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Essex (UK). He is the author of The Mexican Revolution (2 vols., 1986; Spanish translations, 1990 and 2010); two volumes of a general history of Mexico (CUP 2002); four volumes of essays on Mexican and Latin American history (most recently [2013]: La Revolución Cósmica and Repensar la Revolución mexicana); and numerous articles on related subjects. He has co-edited books on the Mexican oil industry, caciquismo ('boss politics'), superstition in history, and the Great Depression of the 1930s in Latin America. He ic currently working (very slowly) on a study of Mexico in the 1930s. In 2010 he was awarded the Aguila Azteca.

Sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Co-sponsored by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.

*The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Spring quarter event series is: Violence in Latin America: Culture and History. We hope you will join us at other events this quarter!