Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana

En esta novela Serna muestra una rigurosa labor de investigacion sobre la vida de Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana en la que la ficcion y la fantasia se entretejen para dar paso a un personaje verosimil y complejo.

Lacking detailed regional studies, most historians continued to be influenced by partisan perspectives of writers such as Lucas Alaman who argued conservative-centralist views of the urban elites, and supported the regimes of Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. While the available answers to many questions were unsatisfactory, most readers simply persevered and university lecturers in survey courses pressed forward to the Mexican American War, the Wars of the Reform and the French Intervention, or on to the regime of Porfirio Diaz.

In the process, he eschews the tendency to lay blame for the crises on certain personalities such as Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, and poses broad questions that will require later testing by field research in regional and national archieves.