Mexican revolutionary de Lara is probably best known in the U.S. for his early history of the Mexican Revolution translated and published in 1914, for which the below is an epitome. De Lara would be summarily executed in 1918 after his arrest during the 1918 Cananea miners’ strike.

‘The Mexican Revolution’ by Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara from The Masses. Vol. 5 No. 7. April, 1914.

WHEN big crowds of plain people, farmers, men and boys and even girls, toss up all their practical chances, desert their kinsmen and their homes, arm themselves and go out of their own free will, to march and fight and shoot and get shot by the thousand, you can be fairly sure that they want something, and they want it bad. Maybe that is the “Economic Interpretation of History,” maybe it is just common sense. But it is a thing that few Americans realize when they think about Mexico. Americans think Mexico is a place where shoot-your-neighbor is the leading popular pastime. Mexico is a place where human beings are interested in their own interests about as they are in the United States, and willing to fight for them if they have to. This truth, and some even more startling ones, I will be made known to those who are willing to know, when De Lara’s history of the Mexican struggle is published. De Lara is a full-blood Mexican, and he is not only an agrarian revolutionist, but also a social revolutionist, and that is why THE MASSES is able to publish in advance a little epitome of his true story of Mexico’s internal war. M.E.

TO ACQUIRE the land as the source of life is the aspiration today, not only of the men who are fighting on the field in the Mexican revolution, but of the millions of peons who are still tilling these lands. They have not succeeded yet in realizing this ambition, but they will fight until they do.

It is necessary, in order to understand clearly the issues of the present uprising in Mexico, to retrace the bloody history of this great land question, which is the underlying cause of this and all of her previous revolutions during the past one hundred years.

It was for the land that the people fought in the War for Independence. That war was in reality an agrarian revolt of the people against the Church, which constituted at that time the greatest land-monopoly in modern history. It took a half century of bloodshed before the Constitution of 1857 was proclaimed, confiscating the enormous land-holdings of the Church and distributing them among the people–hitherto wretched serfs of the Church. The Church, however, was not thus easily to be shorn of her age-long plunder. Finding the home resources insufficient for her reestablishment, she evoked the aid of the French army in 1861 and made one last desperate effort to dispossess and enslave her freed serfs. Eight years of war ensued, ending in the overthrow of both Church and alien army, and the triumph of the people.

These eight years of warfare, however, had left the Mexican nation in a state of utter exhaustion. It was this exhaustion of the motherland that enable Porfirio Diaz with the help of the Church, to organize an army and establish himself, through a series of military revolts, as the Military Dictator of Mexico. The people could make no resistance, and the Constitution of 1857, for which they had poured out seas of their best blood, was overthrown. Then began a terrible era of land dispossession. The land, torn by a starving nation from the clutches of the Church, was in turn torn from the people by the land-sharks of the Diaz clique. The friends and protegés of the Dictator began at once to increase their estates by the direct seizure of the land of the common people, and hundreds of thousands of peons who had been prosperous land-holders under the Constitution of 1857, were turned into propertyless men. For daring to resist this barbaric spoliation, thousands of these simple industrious folk were impressed into the army, walled up in the penitentiary, hanged and shot, all over the country.

In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where the lands were appropriated by the father-in-law of Diaz, whole towns and villages were completely wiped out by the wholesale and bloody evictions which ensued.

In the valley of Papantla in Vera Cruz, over five thousand peaceable farmers were murdered by the government soldiery for refusing to yield up their lands, and a thousand fatherless families were driven forth to seek where they might for a new home. In the mountains of Chihuahua in the little town of Tomachic, numbering some four thousand souls, occurred the most incredible tragedy of modern times. For refusing to evacuate their lands, every man, boy, and young woman was massacred, and when the old women and little children hid for safety in the town Church, the soldiers of President Diaz poured coal-oil on the doors of the building and set fire to it and the huddled crowd of shrinking women and children were burned alive.

It was this state of affairs endured by the people through the long and bloody regime of thirty-two years during which President Diaz remained in power, which led to the last revolution–a revolution that, in spite of a change of presidents from Diaz to Madero and of Madero to Huerta, is still in progress and must yet continue.

In the month of November of the year 1910, a body of mountaineers in the State of Chihuahua broke out in open rebellion against the dictatorship of Diaz. The battle cry of this uprising was: “effective suffrage, no re-election and LAND FOR THE PEOPLE.” For thirty-two years despotism had paralyzed Mexico. Now again was heard the voice of the people.

Once loosed, the red flame of revolt spread over all the mountains of Chihuahua and leapt to the State of Durango, where a few days after the first uprising groups of revolutionists sprang to arms with the same battle-cry. In turn Sonora, Sinaloa, Zacatecas, Coahuila, Aguas Calientas, caught the blaze, which extended to the southern States of Mexico covering most of the country. A “war for independence” was on again.

After some time and several encounterings between the federal army and the revolutionists, Diaz the dictator agreed to depart from the country, leaving Francisco Leon de La Barra as provisional president, who in due time, called upon the people for presidential elections. Francisco I. Madero was elected to this office with Jose Pino Suarez as vice-president.

The people were willing to lay down their arms, believing that Madero would soon settle, or at least become active in settling the land question; but to their disappointment, he failed not only to realize the aspirations of the people in this regard, but to fulfill the other promises made to them. As a consequence, the most energetic element of the agrarian. revolutionists continued the revolt as the only expression of the desire of the masses for the ownership of the lands, while Madero gave himself up to the old reactionary element, endeavoring the best he could to gain their favor with every concession, tolerance, and submission to them that he was able to conceive. It was a case of constant betrayal of the revolution. But he could not gain the reactionary element. They looked upon him as an intruder and a disturber of their peace and old privileges, and their crushing him finally was the natural consequence.

With the usurping of power by Huerta, more impetus was given to the agrarian revolt, because. Huerta’s dictatorship outlined more clearly the issue before the eyes of the people than Madero’s policy had. But it was still the same revolt. The same two forces were face to face on the battlefield, on one side the federal army enforcing the old system of big landlordism, and on the other side the revolutionists or “Constitutionalists,” so named because the Constitution decrees the small ownership of land.

The creation of small farms in Mexico–that is the program of the present revolution as of all the past revolutions. It is the aspiration of every man in the revolutionary ranks. On the day that these men have each his little patch of land, there will be peace in Mexico–and not before. Give back to the people their stolen birthright and you may send every soldier, rurale and revolutionist in Mexico back to the plow, and to the forge, and to productive labor, which makes for joy and progress. Withhold this birthright, and so long as a cartridge remains, the fight is on.

The Masses is among the most important, and best, radical journals of 20th century America. It was started in 1911 as an illustrated socialist monthly by Dutch immigrant Piet Vlag, who shortly left the magazine. It was then edited by Max Eastman who wrote in his first editorial: “A Free Magazine — This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers — There is a field for this publication in America. Help us to find it.” The Masses successfully combined arts and politics and was the voice of urban, cosmopolitan, liberatory socialism. It became the leading anti-war voice in the run-up to World War One and helped to popularize industrial unions and support of workers strikes. It was sexually and culturally emancipatory, which placed it both politically and socially and odds the leadership of the Socialist Party, which also found support in its pages. The art, art criticism, and literature it featured was all imbued with its, increasing, radicalism. Floyd Dell was it literature editor and saw to the publication of important works and writers. Its radicalism and anti-war stance brought Federal charges against its editors for attempting to disrupt conscription during World War One which closed the paper in 1917. The editors returned in early 1918 with the adopted the name of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, which continued the interest in culture and the arts as well as the aesthetic of The Masses. Contributors to this essential publication of the US left included: Sherwood Anderson, Cornelia Barns, George Bellows, Louise Bryant, Arthur B. Davies, Dorothy Day, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Wanda Gag, Jack London, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Inez Milholland, Robert Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Carl Sandburg, John French Sloan, Upton Sinclair, Louis Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Art Young.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/masses/issues/tamiment/t37-v05n07-m35-apr-1914.pdf