Sonora in the Mexican Revolution
Four Sonorans became Presidents of Mexico, Adolfo de la Huerta, Álvaro Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles, and Abelardo L. Rodríguez.
Seven other important figures of the revolution also come from Sonora or in nearby states, José María Maytorena and Benjamín G. Hill, both middle class; Manuel Diéguez, Salvador Alvarado, and Juan G. Cabral; and Francisco R. Serrano and Arnulfo R.
Only in recent years have historians begun focusing on the role of Sonora and the Sonoran Dynasty in Mexican Revolution, shifting from an emphasis on populist leaders like Francisco Villa of Chihuahua and Emiliano Zapata of Morelos.
After 1885, some Mormons from Utah, Idaho, and Colorado saw northern Mexico as a destination for starting a new life, since the central government and the Catholic Church had a weak hold there.
The Díaz government facilitated Chinese immigration as part of its larger strategy of economic development that encouraged new business enterprises of foreigners.
Although the Sonorans played a decisive role in the Constitutionalist faction winning the Revolution, they have not been the subject of the kind of revolutionary hagiography of Villa or Emiliano Zapata.
Mexican historian Héctor Aguilar Camín has portrayed the Sonorans as "brutal strangers who conquered a nation to which they remained alien ... anticlerical and creole frontiersmen who overwhelmed a Catholic, indigenous and mestizo old Mexico.
A huge Obregón monument was built on the spot in the San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City where he was assassinated and for decades held the preserved arm he lost in a victorious against Villa, while his body was buried in Huatabompo.
[13][14] Obregón's maternal cousin, Benjamín Hill, has also not been spotlighted for his contributions, but he "played a crucial role as one of the principal generals in the Sonoran theater" and organized the Liberal Constitutionalist Party for the 1920 elections.
