Porfirio Diaz

<p>The fall of Porfirio Diaz has traditionally been presented as a watershed between old and new: an old style repressive and conservative government and the more democratic and representative system that flowered in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Now this view is being challenged by a new generation of historians who point out that Diaz originally rose to power in alliance with anti-conservative forces and was a modernising force as well as a dictator. Drawing together the threads of this revisionist reading of the <i>Porfiriato</i> Garner reassesses a political career that spanned more than forty years and examines the claims that post-revolutionary Mexico was not the break with the past that the revolutionary inheritors claimed.</p>