It is difficult to imagine a more visited topic in Latin American historiography than the Mexican Revolution. It is also hard to envision new paths of inquiry after tens of thousands of pages written on the subject in the last 40 years or so, including several waves of revisionist trends. However, among the many methodological approaches attempted during all these years, there is one that seems to preserve intact all its heuristic potential—that of regional and local history. Actually, it seems that there is no other way of progressing in our understanding of such a vast “event” as the Mexican Revolution, except through regional and local approaches to the subject. Each new local history of the revolution uncovers some previously undetected aspects of this enormous topic.
This is exactly the principal contribution of David LaFrance’s Revolution in Mexico’s Heartland, which focuses on the state of Puebla between 1913 and...
