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• four  Grandfather’s Revolution tHe Historian T oward the latter part of 1911 my grandfather Lorenzo de la Garza engaged in a flurryof correspondencewith the men who had emerged victorious in the struggle to end the thirty-year rule of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz. The most important of these communications—all composed on his indispensable Underwood typewriter —was a letter of congratulations to the recently installed president of Mexico, Francisco I. Madero. The new president, with commendable promptness, acknowledged my grandfather’s good wishes within the same month of his inauguration—November—on his personal stationery . The reply read: “Correspondencia particular del Presidente de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos” (Personal correspondence of the President of the United States of Mexico), followed by the text of the note: “Francisco I. Madero, Presidente Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos , agradece a Ud. Su atenta felicitación” (Francisco I. Madero, Constitutional President of the United States of Mexico, thanks you for your courteous letter of congratulations). The note concluded by reciting the place and date: México, Noviembre de 1911. The words are perfunctory and were undoubtedly repeated in response to hundreds, if not thousands, of well-wishers throughout the country. Nevertheless, the communication is significant because it reveals that Grandfather Lorenzo, like many others in Mexico, was conscious that a new era had begun in 1910 with the uprising that had led to the end of the Porfiriato, as the thirty-year rule of Porfirio Díaz was known. After all, Grandfather had not seen the need to write letters of congratulations during Don Porfirio’s multiple reelections. Although my grandfather was a prolific letter writer who usually retained copies of his correspondence, no letters to Don Porfirio were found among his papers. GrandfatHer’s revolution: tHe Historian • 75  That fall of 1911 todo México (all of Mexico), including Madero and his circle of revolutionaries, was amazed—and not a little apprehensive—at the enormous feat that Madero’s followers had accomplished by toppling the political edifice of the Porfiriato. Men in their early forties, like Grandfather Lorenzo, scarcely remembered a time when the stern visage of Don Porfirio had not stared at them out of the official portraits that hung in schools and public buildings. It was, indeed, difficult to believe that Don Porfirio was gone, when a scant fourteen months earlier, in September of 1910, he had posed for photographs surrounded by his cabinet as he received the foreign dignitaries and emissaries who had come to burnish the celebration of one hundred years of Mexican independence and thirty years of “Order and Progress” under the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. And yet, nine months after the centennial celebrations, in May of 1911, Don Porfirio had boarded the steamship that carried him to exile in France. Mexico’s Man of Iron had become from one day to the next just another eighty-year-old grandfather taking his first trip to Europe, albeit a trip from which he would not return. My paternal grandfather, Lorenzo de la Garza—or, in the style of Guerrero, Papá Lorenzo—was born in 1867 and was therefore nine years old when Porfirio Díaz achieved his goal of becoming president of Mexico by toppling the incumbent, President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Grandfather and his contemporaries grew up in the atmosphere of the Porfiriato , which subordinated individual rights and political beliefs to domestic order and economic progress. Papá Lorenzo was born in Agualeguas, Nuevo León, but his parents, Blas María de la Garza and Francisca Garza, moved their family in early 1872 to Guerrero,Tamaulipas, where Don Blas María engaged in commerce, dealing in agricultural products such as cattle, hides, cotton, and other crops. Lorenzo, the youngest son, attended school in Guerrero, most likely that founded by Don Sabás Vázquez, a fellow countryman from Agualeguas (who may have been a relative, since Francisca’s full name was Garza Vázquez) who had migrated to Guerrero in the early 1860s. When he finished his studies in Guerrero, Lorenzo was apprenticed in his father’s business, and when he reached a suitable age, he was taken on as a partner. From early on, Lorenzo manifested a civic-minded nature that led him to participate in a variety of community activities. For example, among the family papers collected in a small trunk, I found an old theater program announcing that on July 31, 1887, the Teatro Benavides of Ciudad Guerrero was to present...

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