The first general strike in Uruguayan history, which completely paralyzed Montevideo for three days in May 1911, provides a useful vantage point from which to view the transformation of the third largest capital in South America from a sleepy “Belle Epoque” horse town into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Coming many years after general strikes in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the 1911 Montevideo conflict appeared to erupt virtually overnight, at a moment when the labor movement itself was in some disarray, and caught the city by surprise. Merchants closed their doors, transport ground to a halt, and theaters and cinemas remained dark as the city became strangely quiet. An estimated 50,000-60,000 workers in 37 unions left their jobs in factories, breweries, frigoríficos, stores, and newspapers. In the words of a journalist for a conservative daily paper, “every sign of activity vanished from the city as completely as if it had been stricken by a pestilence—as in truth it was.” The anarchist labor confederation, which organized the mass strike, took over control of the streets and the food supply, and vehicles were only allowed to run with its authorization, thus inverting the city's power structure, at least temporarily.

Patterns of land ownership and availability define pre-industrial society. Land defines wealth and translates into political power and social status. Thus historians of Latin America have been interested in land usage and distribution before economic and social history came into vogue. However, the major focus has been on the hacienda, not the small holders, and the assumed model was Mexico, not Paraguay or Colombia. A series of colonial regional studies on Mexico and Peru published in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated the variation in economic power and regional differences of the hacienda but only incidentally probed the status of small holders. The recognition of the persistence of a variety of early land patterns, including indigenous communal landholdings, however, has challenged earlier interpretations of the socioeconomic power of the hacienda. The awareness of differences of market factors and population density within regions laid the basis for new questions about ownership, land usage, labor, and the forms of internal and external community relations.

Revolution and women did not mix well, at least in the eyes of most leaders of the insurrection that swept Mexico in 1910-17. Moreover, common wisdom suggested that armies were no place for the “gentler sex” and hence the two kinds of women that did accompany men to the battleground–female soldiers and soldaderas–were generally regarded as marginal to the fighting and extraordinary, or strange, in character.

Female soldiers received much notice in the press and arts during the revolution and in its aftermath. They were portrayed as fearless women dressed in men's garb flaunting cartridge belts across the chest and a Mauser rifle on one shoulder. But they were invariably shown in the guise of curiosities, aberrations brought about by the revolution. Soldaderas received their share of attention too. They were depicted as loyal, self-sacrificing companions to the soldiers or, in less sympathetic renderings, as enslaved camp followers: “the loyalty of the soldier's wife is more akin to that of a dog to its master than to that of an intelligent woman to her mate.” But even laudatory journalistic accounts, corridos, and novels did not concede soldaderas a prominent role in the revolutionary process, much less in the success of the military campaigns.

Historians often date the “professionalization” of the Latin American military establishments to the late nineteenth century. At that time, widely accepted “positivist ” beliefs equating technological modernization with “progress” resulted in the military's perceived need for superior defense forces, to be commanded by officer graduates of newly inaugurated military academies. In Brazil, the military was already emboldened by its successes in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864-1870); it now sought to consolidate its gains in the competitive institutional climate of the late 1800s by presenting a more recognizably professional appearance.