When I was in graduate school, I audited a class taught by Friedrich Katz (1927–2010), one of the great historians of Mexico of his generation. During the Second World War, Katz’s father Leo was a journalist who was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Berlin and later smuggled weapons from France to the Spanish Republic in its time of dire need. When the Nazis invaded France, Leo and his wife Bronia Rein – both Jewish communists – fled to Mexico, where President Lázaro Cárdenas’s government had opened its doors to anyone fleeing from fascism or who had fought for the Spanish Republic.

Friedrich Katz grew up in Mexico and remained grateful to the country for the rest of his life. In his seminar on the Mexican Revolution, he would regale us with remarkable tales about the ordinary people who overthrew the Porfiriato, the military dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911).

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