Mexican Game Of Thrones

Episode 1 of the new Frontier Partisans Podcast Series Mexican Game of Thrones is up. You can listen here or on Spotify and most other podcasting platforms.

In this episode I try to give a brief and cogent overview of the Mexican Revolution — which is harder than it sounds. There were many twists and turns to this decades-long upheaval that shaped modern Mexico — and the modern United States, too. Shifting alliances, betrayal and conspiracy were rife.

Ever since I read George RR Martin’s fantasy epic A Game of Thrones back in 1996, I have thought of the Revolution as the Mexican Game of Thrones. This isn’t mere whimsy. For all the ideological trappings — the Revolution produced a blizzard of Plans — from the beginning it was really just a contest to see who could win and hold the Presidential Chair. The picture above tells a story (though maybe not the one that seems obvious, since neither Villa nor Zapata had presidential ambitions themselves).

General Francisco Villa sat there, with Zapata at his side in December 1914. By the next year, it had a new occupant.*

The admonition that:

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die — there is no middle ground…”

… could not be more fitting.

In fact, in the Mexican Game of Thrones, you could win and still die violently. Most of the key Revolutionary figures did, including two of the men who climbed onto that throne.

I cannot overstate how compelling this era and this story is to me. The collision of “Old West” and the modern era, — embodied in a gunslinging horseman like Villa going up against trenches, barbed wire and machine guns — is endlessly fascinating to me. As it was to Sam Peckinpah in his masterpiece The Wild Bunch, and as it is in the wildly successful game Red Dead Redemption.

I’m thrilled to be riding this trail. Saddle up and join me. Tonight we ride!

 

 

 

*“That fucking chair. To gain it, it demands you win partners, call them friends, make them promises. To keep it, it demands you break them all. One day when all is settled here, we should burn that fucking chair.”

– Max to Eleanor in Black Sails-XXV.