During the sixty years following 1870, the rural people of Spanish America probably underwent a greater change than at any previous time in their history except for the conquest of America itself.
Arnold Bauer, 1986206
During the late nineteenth century, agricultural workers were linked to the land through a variety of arrangements. Some, known as peones acasillados, lived full time on haciendas. Others lived in villages that owned land that they could cultivate. A few villages retained enough land to support all their residents. More commonly, though, villagers would work part time for wages on a nearby hacienda to earn cash, which allowed them to purchase what their village plot could not provide them. The landless formed the lowest rung of the rural social ladder. The number of landless rural laborers regularly exceeded the demand for their labor, leaving them with little bargaining power. These workers, known as jornaleros, frequently moved from region to region to find work. Increasingly, the landless began to migrate to the United States in search of work, and, after 1910, joined revolutionary armies.207
Porfirian economic development did not produce a uniform transformation from communal landholding to wage labor. Peasants were most likely to lose their land in states such as Veracruz, Morelos, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, where there was a rapid expansion of capitalist agriculture. While many villages lost land, 92 percent of the villages of Oaxaca retained communal lands in 1910. This was especially true in isolated regions that offered few marketing opportunities. There were few dispossessed peasants in some parts of Oaxaca who could be attracted by the low wages offered. Plantation owners there resorted to forced labor. Muckraking investigative reporter John Kenneth Turner, who visited one such area posing as a potential investor, exposed the forced labor system on Valle Nacional’s tobacco plantations. He described the abuses he witnessed there in his book Barbarous Mexico. Workers would be attracted by false promises of high salaries, shanghaied off the streets of urban centers, or sent from jails.208
Villagers across Mexico did not accept liberal rhetoric and strenuously opposed the legally mandated sale of communal lands. Uplands, which provided pasturage and firewood, would be closed to the community if privatized. Other holdings were dedicated to generating income to support local government and religious life. Auctioning them would necessitate new fees and taxes to replace income from village-owned land. If land were privatized, local officials would no longer have an interest in defending municipal lands and resources. Finally, villagers felt that privatization of land would greatly increase social stratification, as some individuals would inevitably control more land than others.209
Through their access to political leaders and their ability to summon armed force, hacendados exercised power that extended well beyond the market. They maintained close ties to the local priest, supported the hacienda school, meted out their own justice, and brought in the only merchandise available, which was supplied at the hacienda store. The hacienda set the pattern for rural wages and working conditions generally. The hacienda also formed the principal link between rural Mexico and the city.210
Most of those working on haciendas did so because they had no better alternative. In some instances, though, if high profits were anticipated and labor was scarce, the state willingly supported planters who forced laborers to work their land. Officials also supplied the planters with convicts, “vagrants,” and political dissidents. The henequen fields of Yucatan and the tobacco fields of Valle
Nacional, Oaxaca, provide classic examples of the use of such forced labor. In other cases, planters secured labor to work under dangerous or harsh situations by providing a worker, often when drunk, with an advance of goods or future wages. This obligated him to work until he liquidated the debt.211
During the Porfiriato, several factors shifted the balance of power between the village and the hacienda in favor of the latter. Policy makers regarded the villages of southern and central Mexico as relics of the colonial past, which formed an obstacle to national development. They felt progress required that the peasant be transformed into a wage laborer or a capitalist agricultural entrepreneur. In the north, villages were no longer needed to protect against raids by nomadic Indians. As Diaz built a stable, solvent regime, his need for rural backing diminished, and the paternalism he had shown rural people faded. Throughout Mexico, the railroad provided distant markets for agricultural produce, thus providing an incentive for the appropriation of village land. After 1870, the growth of the market became a bigger threat to the village than liberal legislation. The seizure of village land by sugar-producing hacendados in Morelos so they could meet increased market demand provides a classic example of this. Such a fragment of economic history would be long forgotten if it had not been for Emiliano Zapata, who rebelled in defense of these lands.212
The loss of community lands deprived villages of communal income used to finance education and provide social services. This reduced the number of hospitals and schools well before the state could fill the void in education and medical service. The loss of communal land also reduced villagers’ access to wood, pasture, and charcoal. As villages lost land, their residents further swelled the ranks of the rural unemployed. Village life, even though it might have been lacking in monetary terms, was far superior to the impersonal market forces residents faced after losing their land.213
Between 1877 and 1879, 300 villages in central Mexico formed a coalition and hired a lawyer to appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to regain their lands. Other peasants rejected the legal process and rebelled, seriously undermining Juarez’s efforts to reestablish the supremacy of civil law. Most of these rebellions occurred in densely populated central Mexico, where villages attempted to cling to their ancestral holdings. Rebellions between 1878 and 1883 were spurred by the coming of the railroad, land privatization, and road building. Federal troops suppressed these uprisings without addressing their root cause.214
In Chihuahua, many lived in communities that had been established in the eighteenth century as a means of defending against Indian attack. By the late nineteenth century, the Chihuahuan elite no longer needed military colonies to defend against Indians. As a result, a 1905 law permitted wealthy ranchers, hacendados, and public officials to purchase the land of these villages, including house lots where people lived. This created bitter enemies who would bring down both Terrazas and Diaz in 1911.215
Rural Mexico, whose inhabitants were overwhelmingly illiterate, hungry, ill-housed, and marked for an early death due to disease, bore the brunt of the Porfirian economic development model. Rural people not only lost land but control of their community and social life. In 1910, only 2.4 percent of rural household heads owned land. The corresponding figure for the United States was almost 70 percent.216
As a result of increased corn prices, increased population, and number of those seeking wage labor after losing access to land, the purchasing power of agrarian wages declined 17 percent between 1895 and 1910. In that last year, peasants, more than 70 percent of Mexico’s population, received only 3.3 percent of Mexico’s national income.217
World History
