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Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border. By Elliott Young. American Encounters/Global Interactions. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 407. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8223-3320-1; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 0-8223-3308-2.)
In 1891 Catarino Garza launched a revolution aimed at toppling Mexico's increasingly dictatorial president, Porfirio Diaz. Based in Texas and supported by wealthy Tejanos, many sympathetic Anglos, and virtually the entire Mexican population of south Texas, the revolution lasted less than two years. The revolutionary army had just under thirteen hundred members. On the Mexican side of the border, though some military officers and the general populace covertly sided with Garza, there was little open support. Yet despite its brevity and scale, Garza and his revolution were covered by the New York Times, brutally repressed by the U.S. military, and sufficiently feared by Diaz to prompt him to dispatch not only troops but also assassins.
The revolution, Elliott Young argues, was "part of a broader Latin American movement for liberalism and against imperialism" and surely resonated with...