The Great Adventure: Mercenaries in The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1915

Abstract

Scholarly studies of the Mexican revolutionary period seldom have approached the subject from the standpoint of how this momentous struggle was actually waged by its combatants. While considerable investigation has rendered valuable insights into leading personalities and movements of the time, no comparable effort has been made to unravel the myriad military complexities and paradoxes of one of the major wars waged on the North American continent.A case in point concerns the foreign soldiers who fought side by side with Mexican troops in the rebel armies. Such military personnel are commonly referred to in modern-day parlance as mercenaries, a term indicating “paid soldiers in the service of a foreign country.” However, not all foreigners who served in the Revolution were professional soldiers for hire, nor did all have previous military experience. Such words and phrases as soldiers of fortune or adventurers, in vogue during the period, more clearly define the status of these combatants as “men fighting for pay or love of adventure under the flag of any country.” Be that as it may, all of the terms given above are basically synonymous and can be used interchangeably to refer to the foreign volunteers who joined the various armed factions contending for supremacy in Mexico.