Hello you very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacquin podcast where we look in depth at political

topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacquin and

I'll be presenting the show. Ever since the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, Mexico

has been preyed upon by the world's most powerful states. But the country and its people

have also played their part in shaping world history. The Mexican revolution created

a system whose leaders tried to reshape the world economy in line with their own vision.

The failure of those efforts turned Mexico into a laboratory for the neoliberal economic

model that has since spread all over the world.

Our guest today is Christy Thornton. Christy teaches sociology and Latin American studies

at Johns Hopkins University and she's the author of Revolution in Development, Mexico

and the Governance of the Global Economy. Mexico might not have the same reputation as

a revolutionary power in world politics when compared with Russia or China or even Cuba.

Yet it was the location of one of the 20th century's first great revolutions. What was the

nature of the system that was created by that revolution?

That's a really great question and it's a complicated answer, particularly depending

on the kind of time frame that you use to answer it. So in the immediate aftermath of

the revolution was a kind of multi-sided, internecine battle to overthrow the previously

existing dictatorship of Puerto Rico, the US, who had been in power for decades leading

up to the beginning of the revolution in 1910 and so there were factions that were interested

largely in questions of sort of liberal democracy and ensuring that for instance a dictator

could not just be reelected over and over and over again.

There were factions that were very much interested in questions of land reform and breaking the

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