Mexico : Biography of Power

"A book which fulfills to perfection the two-fold requirement for works of history: it combines rigorous investigation with an imagination that makes the past and people and events come alive."

--Octavio Paz, author of The Labyrinth of Solitude

"Krauze offers a unique perspective of modern Mexico by interweaving the biographies of a number of consequential nineteenth- and twentieth-century leaders into a cohesive historical overview of the Mexican nation....An insightful examination of how this unbroken cycle of power has played a decisive role in the political and social history of Mexico."

--Margaret Flanagan, Booklist

"This shrewd and in many ways brave book is necessary reading. With luck it will help Americans appreciate that Mexico is more than an abstract policy dilemma."

--Sarah Kerr,New York Times Book Review

"A magisterial history...Mr. Krauze's book will surely stand for many years as the standard history of postcolonial Mexico...with its scope and color, his mural makes its powerful, unique impression."

-- Wall Street Journal

Submitted by Publisher, July, 2001

The concentration of power in the caudillo (leader) is as much a formative element of Mexican culture and politics as the historical legacy of the Aztec emperors, Cortez, the Spanish Crown, the Mother Church and the mixing of the Spanish and Indian population into a mestizo culture. Krauze shows how history becomes biography during the century of caudillos from the insurgent priests in 1810 to Porfirio and the Revolution in 1910. The Revolutionary era, ending in 1940, was dominated by the lives of seven presidents -- Madero, Zapata, Villa, Carranza, Obregon, Calles and Cardenas. Since 1940, the dominant power of the presidency has continued through years of boom and bust and crisis. A major question for the modern state, with today's president Zedillo, is whether that power can be decentralized, to end the cycles of history as biographies of power.