This book details how contentious politics – everyday as well as exceptional, local as well as national – that took place in three communal villages of Mexico alternately reproduced and reshaped inequality. Narrated and analyzed as instances of the general process of contention, these events took place during three key periods of Mexico's history: the 1910–1920 revolution, the cold war period from the 1950s to the 1970s, and from the 1980s to the present. Together, these episodes of contention build and test a theory of the making and unmaking of inequality in theoretically ideal conditions, illustrating the dynamics of this all-pervasive facet of social organization.