• Integrates the latest scholarship on relevant topics ranging from Mexico's ancient societies to contemporary migration issues and drug violence.
• Provides a necessary context for understanding the US policy on immigration and border patrols.
• Examines the cultural aspects--not just the politics--of Mexico's revolutionary period in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Focuses on people's narratives as well as broader movements to give a truly global perspective on Mexico's place in the world.

   
Drawing on materials ranging from archaeological findings to recent studies of migration issues and drug violence, William H. Beezley provides a dramatic narrative of human events as he recounts the story of Mexico in the context of world history. Beginning with the Mayan and Aztec civilizations and their brutal defeat at the hands of the Conquistadors, Beezley highlights the penetrating effect of Spain's three-hundred-year colonial rule, during which Mexico became a multicultural society marked by Roman Catholicism and the Spanish language. Independence, he shows, was likewise marked by foreign invasions and huge territorial losses, this time at the hands of the United States, who annexed a vast land mass-including the states of Texas, New Mexico, and California-and remained a powerful presence along the border. The 1910 revolution propelled land, educational, and public health reforms, but later governments turned to authoritarian rule, personal profits, and marginalization of rural, indigenous, and poor Mexicans. Throughout this eventful chronicle, Beezley highlights the people and international forces that shaped Mexico's rich and tumultuous history.