Homegrown Revolution: The Hacienda Santa Catalina del Alamo y Anexas and Agrarian Protest in Eastern Durango, Mexico, 1897-1913

Abstract

IN the broad field of Latin American history few topics have drawn the interest of more scholars than the Mexican Revolution. From Frank Tannenbaum's Mexican Agrarian Revolution (1929) to Ramon Ruiz' Great Rebellion (1980) to Alan Knight's Mexican Revolution (1986) and John Hart's Revolutionary Mexico (1987), historians have explored and argued questions about the nature of this great conflict.' Was it the epic agrarian revolution that Tannenbaum celebrates? Or was it, as revisionists such as Ruiz suggest, only a series of lesser revolts with significant elite and middle-class direction and participation and with agrarian radicalism confined to specific areas like Morelos? Resolution of this historiographical impasse awaits the completion of studies of localized revolutionary movements in northern Mexico, where the revolution began in LgLo and where its main thrust originated during most of the revolutionary decade. Historians have studied exhaustively the prominent leaders (Madero, Zapata, Carranza, Obregon, and others), but until recently have displayed less interest in the anonymous doings of more ordinary agrarian revolutionaries who usually have minimal historical visibility outside their own communities.2 Similarly, scholars have