The Mexican Revolution was a hugely significant moment in modern Mexican history. By 1911, the 34-year dictatorial rule from the Porfirian regime had come to an end, eventually overthrown at the Battle of Ciudad Juárez by a group of revolutionaries, thrusting the country into a decade of social unrest, uprising and uncertainty. Despite this defining moment in Mexican history, it is often hard to reduce the revolution to a singular driver. Political leaders like Francisco Madero represent bourgeois sentiment, yet populist figures like Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa and Emiliano Zapata played a significant role in mobilising the agrarian classes. What can we learn from the photography of the revolution?

Amidst empty streets in a fearful nation, Chilean women met at churches and in neighbours’ houses to stitch compassionately into fabric their stories of an uncompassionate truth. These pieces documented the realities of life under Pinochet’s military dictatorship and provided the women who made them with a voice, a community, and a means of receiving economic solidarity from abroad.