Personal diaries during the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1917

This paper analyzes two personal diaries during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) in an urban setting. I will use Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett´s methodological arguments developed in Telling Stories:  The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, where they claim that the research on personal narratives implies intersubjective relationships that “involve attempts to understand another person´s subjective take on the world, and these can develop even where there is no direct contact between narrator and analyst”.  Following this perspective, first, I will examine a diary of a Mexican elite woman from Guadalajara.  Second I will compare it with a diary that belonged to a French consul in Guadalajara.   Third I will contrast the female and male constructions of gender and social relations about inequality, social justice, revolution, and war in an urban setting.  My paper will explore how both a Mexican elite woman and a French consul perceived the struggle for social justice of distinct revolutionary factions during the process of the armed movement in an urban environment.  The experience of an armed revolution brought diseases, hunger, and shortage of goods, violations, and migration from rural to urban areas, among other things.  Therefore, these edited diaries are excellent primary sources to scrutinize how men and women perceived the city during the Mexican Revolution, a rural, peasant, and popular movement that brought about cultural, political, and social changes in relation to peasant´s, worker´s and women´s rights, citizenship, and social justice.