The most recommended Mexican Revolution books

This book was inspired by the author’s family stories of the Mexican Revolution. When government armies destroy twelve-year-old Petra’s village and home, she’s forced to lead her grandmother, younger sister, and baby brother through the trackless desert to survive. They encounter kindly monks, ruthless federales, and a band of Villistas who want Petra to join them, but she never veers from her determination to take her family to safety and freedom. This is a powerful read, and I’m thankful and appreciative for the insight it offers into war’s effect on helpless citizens, and the enormous courage, strength, and determination required of every refugee forced to flee their homeland.

I’ve selected this title as it’s one of the first Jeeves and Wooster books but, to be honest, you could choose any one; they’re all brilliant.

That goes for pretty much all of Wodehouse’s stories. I realise everyone knows these two characters from the various TV series produced over the years. But they may not have read the books. They should. It’s a great credit to the author that whichever actors portray this pair, and others such as Lord Emsworth of Blandings, the characters are instantly recognisable.

I think PG Wodehouse’s characterisation is superb. I admire his eye for details, not only in appearance but in mannerisms and speech. Wooster – the young gentleman – is wealthy, foppish, dapper, scatterbrained and idle. Jeeves – the gentleman’s gentleman – is someone who “from the collar upwards, stands alone.” That phrase alone tells the reader everything they need to know about the… show more.

One of the things I love about reading short story collections is that I can read a story, enjoy it, and then put the collection aside and then read another story later.

This was a short story collection I literally could not put down. As soon as I finished one story, I needed to turn the page and see what the next story had to offer. This collection explores the supernatural lore of Mexico while spanning its history and peering into its near future.

My favorite stories were “Bed of Scorpions” about a brother and sister running a con and “Cemetery Man” about a mad scientist during the Mexican Revolution resurrecting soldiers.

Subcomandante Marcos’ weapon, as the title of the book indicates, are his words, coming from his experience as a member and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). As a writer myself, I admire the clarity and fluidity of Marcos’ writing, which links the political and moral, the moral and the racial, racial issues with social concerns, social problems with economic ones. The result is a complex and multidimensional image of Mexican reality. The Zapatista revolt is the culmination of a history of rebellions such as the ones by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and the student revolts of 1968. I recommend this book because it also touches me personally, both as a participant in the student revolt of 1968 in Mexico, which later became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, and as an author writing about the Mexican Revolution, Una muerte sencilla justa eterna. Cultura y guerra durante… show more.

Having read The Winds that Swept Mexico and seen the amazing photographs in that book, you’ll want to know more about the photographers who risked their lives to accompany Mexican troops in battle and in haphazard camps waiting for something to happen.

This book includes many photographs, but focusses on the history of the Revolution as shown in those photographs, and the processes of photography itself:  how photographers worked in the early twentieth century in the midst of war, and how their photographs were collected and published as the Revolution raged on.

John Mraz is an excellent “visual historian.” I admire the way he explains how photographers got their “shots” of mounted revolutionaries and battles and camp followers—the sweethearts and wives and children who followed the troops, cooked for them, and sometimes tended to their wounds.

Mraz also explains how their photographs became instant propaganda for particular leaders and causes—and… show more.

I love this book because it shows the real complexities of the socioeconomic realities that Mexicans experienced leading to the revolution. By focusing on the life of Porfirio Diaz, Paul Garner offers a nuanced narrative challenging six decades of the revolutionary government and most historians consistently condemning Diaz as an unredeemable tyrant. Instead, Garner offers a more realistic explanation of the achievements and failures of the dictator responsible for simultaneously resurrecting the Mexican economy and producing the biggest social upheaval in Mexican history.

I’ve tried several times to understand the Mexican Revolution, with its cast of martyrs and rouges scrambling in a violent tornado of noble intentions and bloody treachery. Nava artfully demonstrates his chops as a writer by paring this seemingly incomprehensible sweep of Mexican history into an accessible and compelling narrative.

His characters are complicated and nuanced—Nava gives us no easy answers—and we watch them flail for salvation and fleeting promises even as society collapses around them.

I am not a fan of fantasy, but this is magical realism at its best. Not too much, not too little, just enough to remind everyone that the spirits are still working on behalf of true love and goodness and that justice prevails despite all obstacles…like a fairy tale with complications. Just my cup of tea. 

How realistic is it that food transmits any emotions the cook may be feeling while making the food? This idea captivated me immediately; it was something I had never thought about. And yet, growing up in my family, women always made the food. So again, a very female tale.

In the beginning, Tita, the heroine, is passionate and in love, but she succumbs to tradition and rejects true love and passion to submit to tradition, which dictates she takes care of her mother. In time, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of that tradition… show more.

My book club rescued this classic Mexican novel from my TBR pile, where it had languished far too long.

I am grateful because when I finally read it, I found Pedro Páramo bewitching. On her deathbed, a mother commands her son to return to their original village to find his father. Everyone he meets there is dead, and the dead have stories to tell. 

When Pedro Páramo was first published in 1955, readers didn’t know what to think of this precursor to magical realism, but then it caught on in a big way. Gabriel García Márquez claimed he could recite the entire novella.

A new movie version starring Tenoch Huerta Mejía from Wakanda Forever will be out soon. You’ll want to read the book before seeing the film.

For me, history is the richest when it is explored from different perspectives. The Worm in the Wheat explores a perspective seldom feature in the narratives of the revolution. It focuses on the struggles of Rosalie Evans to defend her hacienda against the revolution. The story itself is a fascinating narrative enveloped in tension and drama. It is full of political intrigue and shifting alliances shaped by the violence of the social revolution.