Railroads, Landholding, and Agrarian Protest in the Early Porfiriato

Under conditions of rigid social and political hierarchy, and especially where rural cultivators form a distinct and subordinate ethnic group, marked improvement in the profitability of agricultural enterprise tends to be associated with regressive movements in the distribution of property (land, livestock, implements, and the like) as well as direct assaults on the political liberties and other rights of peasants. While there has been some recognition that such a process accompanied the large scale penetration of foreign capital and technology into much of Indo-Latin America in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the process has not received the attention it deserves.¹

Perhaps the most visible and costly byproduct of nineteenth-century foreign intrusion were the railroads. Hundreds, even thousands, of miles of railroads often were built even before substantial direct investments were made in other kinds of enterprise. In fact railroads accounted for more than half of all British and United States investments in Latin America until well after the turn of the century.²

The close relationship between transport innovation and export sector development has been very evident to historians.³ However, much less is known of the impact of railroads on agrarian conditions except where the new transport system formed part of the agricultural export system. Yet railroads often induced profound transformations in more or less traditional patterns of rural social and economic life, even where agricultural exports did not predominate.

In the mountainous plateaus of Indo-Latin America particularly, railroads radically altered supply and demand schedules for agricultural products.⁴ By reducing transport costs dramatically and by connecting distant (domestic and international) markets with previously isolated rural areas, railroads made landowning more profitable than ever before.⁵ Of course, some landowners were disadvantaged when the location of transport facilities favored competitors or when the natural protection of local markets disappeared. A simultaneous process of integration and marginalization occurred, with some regions adjusting to new opportunities while others declined into more or less permanent backwaters. In either case, transport innovation was the cause of important shifts in crop structure, estate management, labor arrangements, land tenure patterns and rural welfare. Rural populations shared few of the benefits of this modernization and frequently suffered as a result. Often the only benefit the railroad brought was increased mobility, the opportunity to escape the railroad’s effects on rural social life.

It is the purpose of this paper to explore one aspect of this process in nineteenth-century Mexico, namely the link between railroad construction and the new concentration of landownership in the early Porfiriato. The argument is advanced that railroad construction between 1877 and 1884 was closely linked to widespread assaults on the property holdings of Indian free villages. Evidence is also introduced to suggest a possible link between transport innovation and the wholesale alienation of public domain associated with this period.

The hypothesis explored here is not entirely new. A half century ago, George McBride suggested that the effect of nineteenth-century railroad development in Mexico, as in the United States, was “to increase the value of lands already under cultivation rather than to relieve the demand by opening up new areas of development. Hence real estate now became of great prospective value. As a consequence, there followed an era of land grabbing.”⁶ The land-grabbing, according to McBride, included seizure of communal property from Indian villages as well as more “speculative” acquisition of public domain in the sparsely settled North and South. McBride did not pursue this concept further, and it does not appear to have been repeated in any subsequent accounts of Mexico’s nineteenth-century land systems.

To both Mexican and foreign entrepreneurs, the construction of railroads presented very real opportunities for personal advantage. As railroads reached productive areas formerly isolated or poorly connected to external markets, land values and production possibilities increased markedly.⁷ To maximize appropriation of these external benefits of railroads, entrepreneurs had to anticipate railroad construction and move quickly to secure additional property in the path of new lines. For such land acquistion to be fully profitable, the new properties had to be acquired at something near the prevailing prerailroad prices. Two methods were in fact employed to gain control of additional lands. The first method, usurpation, sometimes involved the Reform Laws which required alienation of Indian communal landholdings and the distribution of such lands in individual parcels. Once the formerly inalienable property had been distributed, the individual holdings were acquired at relatively low cost through artful combinations of legal sale and illegal acquisition.⁸ The second method involved purchase from the government at a low fixed price of “vacant” public lands. Both of these methods required permissive legislation and sympathetic intervention of public authorities, but neither can be explained on legal or political grounds alone.

The first eight years of the Porfirian era (1877-1884) provide the focus of this investigation for two reasons. First, these years witnessed a marked increase both in assaults on Indian communal landholding and in sales of public domain (the so-called terrenos baldíos).⁹ Historians have usually attributed this phenomenon to the application of Liberal land laws and to the social bias, economic goals and military capacity of the Porfirian regime.¹⁰ However, application of the Reform laws seems to account for only a small portion of early Porfirian concentration of landownership, while the characteristics of the Porfirian regime usually advanced to explain the phenomenon did not become evident until the process was well under way. Second, the effects of the worldwide depression of the mid-1880s, and other factors affecting “commercialization” and land tenure patterns thereafter make it more difficult to isolate a specific railroad impetus to land-grabbing after 1884.¹¹ While the distribution of public domain continued to increase after the period studied here, agrarian protests as well as railroad concessions (and mileage constructed) reached a peak in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

The evidence is presented in four parts. In the first section there is reviewed a quantity of research on agrarian conflict in nineteenth-century Mexico which suggests that most of the Indian communities of the Center managed to retain their lands until some time after 1876. The second section consists of an analysis of fifty-five incidents of rural protest and rebellion which took place between 1877 and 1884, indicating the suggestive proximity of these incidents to actual or projected railroad routes. The third section focuses on the alienation of the so-called “vacant” public lands out of which many of the vast estates of the far North and South were carved during the Porfiriato. Temporal links between railroad construction activity and the last stages of the Yucatecan Caste War also are indicated. In the concluding section, some additional evidence is introduced which bears on the development of the Porfirian hacienda and its possible interest to students of contemporary external dependence.

I

Reliable historical statistics on land tenure patterns in Mexico do not exist.¹² Historians therefore have had to rely on a confusing and often contradictory array of qualitative evidence from which to make judgements about the timing, location, magnitude and direction of changes in the agrarian system. The most ample body of qualitative evidence used for this purpose is that produced by conflict between the opposing land hunger of hacendado and Indian villager. Despite the pioneering work of a few scholars, including Jean Meyer most recently, considerable basic research on this important topic remains to be done.¹³ What follows is a tentative discussion of some of the known characteristics of this conflict as it evolved in the period between Independence and the Porfiriato. In the process two possible viewpoints are challenged: (1) that rural violence was usually, or even frequently caused by the usurpation of village lands before the Porfiriato, and (2) that application of the Reform laws between 1856 and the late 1870s resulted in widespread destruction of Indian communal landholding.¹⁴

Conflict between Indian villager and hacendado took many forms. Evidence from early in the Colonial period demonstrates the capacity or tendency of villagers for prolonged litigation over real estate, water rights, pasturage, and the like.¹⁵ Petitions to officials, including the Viceroy, apparently were not unusual.¹⁶ There is little evidence of land seizures or occupations by villagers until after Independence. Violence was endemic on the northern frontier between colonists and nomadic tribes, but much less common in the Center and South.¹⁷ Much of the violence which did occur pitted Spanish authority against Indian groups which had never been successfully integrated into the colonial social and economic structure.

After Independence, the locus of rural violence shifted steadily to the Center and South. While Indian warfare continued sporadically in the far North, widespread violence erupted repeatedly within Mexican society in the Center of the Republic as well as throughout the less assimilated regions of the extreme South and Yucatán.¹⁸ From the Hidalgo revolt to the Porfirian coup d’etat, agrarian violence appears to have been roughly correlated with periods of political instability. According to Meyer’s “Chronology,” Indian disturbances clustered in the years 1844, 1849, 1856-57, 1869, 1873 and 1877.¹⁹ In some cases, Indian villagers capitalized on the political struggles which preoccupied mestizo and criollo elites and resulted in the breakdown of local and national authority. In others, disturbances and revolts appear to have been deliberately mobilized, or at least encouraged and manipulated, by parties to national political disputes.²⁰

The evidence which has been uncovered on the nature of agrarian disturbances suggests that until the late 1870s most of them did not erupt in response to usurpations of village lands by the haciendas. Instead, the little research which has been done suggests that (1) where land was an issue, it usually involved Indians seizing hacienda lands rather than the reverse; (2) where land was not clearly an issue, the uprising often appears attributable more to the behavior of politicians rather than of hacendados directly; and (3) where Indian disturbances appeared based on political or religious issues, agrarian complaints were sometimes voiced, but almost always in general terms.²¹

Whatever the immediate cause of the Indian uprising, the “restoration” of village lands, or legislation granting land to the villages, was usually included among the rallying slogans and avowed objectives. Accusations of usurpation are frequently encountered, but seldom is any distinction made between the usurpation of lands which recently had belonged to the villages and “usurpations” perpetrated in the distant past. In most cases for which any evidence has been adduced, charges of usurpation involved lands that the Indians used or coveted and to which they believed themselves morally entitled, but which they never had legally owned or could claim to have owned only “long ago.”²²

It is my belief that until the late 1870s Mexico’s political instability together with the miserable state of the economy inhibited wholesale absorption of village lands by the haciendas. True, ownership of estates could confer social status and probably involved less risk than investments in trade, industry or finance. It also provided access to Church credit at a low fixed rate of interest. Nonetheless, it is not certain that latifundist agriculture had been highly profitable even before economic and political conditions deteriorated after 1810.²³ Hacienda ownership may then have become even less stable than it had been in colonial times. Indeed, there is some basis to suggest that the landed estate may have been contracting, rather than expanding, during the first half century of Independence. The Hacienda de Cojumatlan, for example, was subdivided in 1861 and sold to arrendatarios in the municipality of San José de Gracia (Michoacán) because the owner could apparently find no one to rent the whole estate for the customary $4,700 per year.²⁴

Long before passage of the Reform Laws, a number of states passed legislation requiring the breaking up of communal property holdings. Only rarely was the legislation enforced.²⁵ Encroachment on village lands probably did take place, in a variety of forms, but what evidence exists does not suggest that this encroachment was widespread, systematic, or increasing in frequency.²⁶ Jean Meyer is certainly right in stating that “the Reform law of 1856 appears at the end of a long process more than at the inauguration of a new one.”²⁷

The Reform Laws did make alienation and division of communal lands a matter of national policy. But evidence concerning enforcement is needed before historians can accept the assumption that widespread destruction of communities occurred. In the Central District of Oaxaca, Charles Berry found prospective buyers reluctant to purchase disamortized real estate because of the region’s unsettled political and military conditions after 1857.²⁸ Village lands were disamortized and sold, but at least in this part of Oaxaca Berry concluded that they were sold “freely,” by delegations of villagers who appeared before the authorities “to state that in a village meeting, a decision had been reached to sell the lands as required by law.”²⁹ Implementation of the Reform Laws to favor the haciendas against the villages depended both on official capacity and private initiative. In most of Mexico, not just Oaxaca, neither condition existed to a sufficient degree to render this assumption plausible, at least not until the Porfiriato. Until more research has been carried out, McBride’s conclusion that by 1876 ‘ few [Indian] communities had. . . been broken up” should stand.³⁰

II

The first three years of Porfirian rule probably witnessed the most widespread agrarian disturbances in nineteenth-century Mexico. Agrarian rebellions began or erupted anew in at least fourteen states and the Federal District between 1877 and 1879. Many occurred in areas which had previously experienced such conflict. In nearly every case, the new military regime and its local authorities proved capable of suppressing the rebels. During the presidency of Manuel González, agrarian conditions slowly stabilized again.³¹

A survey of contemporary newspaper accounts in the capital and a quantity of published material produced a list of fifty-five incidents of agrarian protest between 1877 and 1884, ranging from attempts to institute law suits on behalf of villages to uprisings which required federal troops to suppress.³² Nearly all of the incidents involved alleged usurpations of village lands and most of the usurpations referred to had only just occurred. To test the hypothesis of a significant link between railroad construction and usurpation of village lands, the location of each of the fifty-five incidents was plotted on a map of the actual and projected railroad network in each year. The results, illustrated in maps 1 to 4 at the end of this article, are suggestive. Of the fifty-five incidents reported, only five (9.1 percent) took place more than 40 kilometers from a railway line or the route of a projected railroad for which the federal government’s concession was still active.³³ Nearly 60 percent (thirty-two of the fifty-five) of the incidents took place within 20 kilometers of an actual or projected rail line. Most of the incidents took place some time before the actual construction of the nearby rail line. Of the fifty incidents within 40 kilometers of a railroad route, twelve were reported after a concession had been issued, but before any construction had begun, while thirty-two occurred after construction had begun, but before the line had reached the immediate area. Two occurred in areas where the projected line was never built.

Despite obstacles to easy communication, there is no question that news of railroad concessions and even of the exact routes ran far ahead of actual construction. Landowners could read the texts of each concession in the Diario Oficial. Newspapers in the capital as well as those in the provinces reported fully on every detail of progress in construction and financing. State governors in 1876 and 1877 applied for local concessions and attempted to form private companies based on provincial as well as national and foreign capital to build newly authorized lines.³⁴ Lotteries were created in several states as a device to tap the income of the poorer classes for new railroads.³⁵ In San Luis Potosí, the state government issued new paper currency in 1878 in denominations of one centavo to five pesos which had to be used for payment of a special ten percent capitation tax surcharge imposed on all male citizens. New paper issues were printed in 1879 and 1880. The purpose of the tax was inscribed on each note: “Ferrocarril de San Luis a Tampico.”³⁶

Of the fifty-five incidents, seven which took place in 1877 occurred along the route of a projected Mexico City to León railroad line, the concession for which had been issued in 1874 and revoked two years later.³⁷ In this case, the concession was cancelled only after an initial survey for the route had been completed and a considerable sum of money had been spent on preparation and construction of the roadway. While seven of the incidents reported here took place after the revocation of the concession, the government had already indicated that it assigned a high priority to finding a new concessionaire, and Mexico City newspapers had optimistically expressed the view that the government would be successful. A number of promoters reportedly were seeking the concession, which was finally issued to the Mexican National Construction Company as part of its line from Mexico City to the northern border in late 1880.³⁸ Because of the special circumstances surrounding this line, the map for 1877 includes the México-León line, despite the revocation of that concession the previous year.

Four of the incidents involved court proceedings which resulted in the return of some lands to the protesting villagers. Two of these four cases were among the five located more than 40 kilometers from a rail line.³⁹ In another one of these four cases, involving San Andrés Tuxtla in Veracruz state, lands belonging to the town (and some belonging to a neighboring village called Catemaco) were adjudicated to one Pedro García Mantilla in 1879. The villagers fought the case to the Supreme Court which ordered the lands returned.⁴⁰ Four years later, a routine official report from San Andrés Tuxtla blandly announced that “the communal lands of this municipality are being divided, and the price of the lots has been fixed at $10.50 per hectare.”⁴¹ Located some 90 kilometers from the route of the projected Tehuantepec National Railroad across the isthmus, San Andrés Tuxtla stood less than 30 miles from the Gulf coast port town of Montepío.

The most serious agrarian disturbances in this period occurred in the states of Sonora, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potosí. In Sonora, the construction of a rail line from Guaymas to Nogales, and concessions for a line from Guaymas to coal fields on the Río Yaqui and for a railroad down the Pacific coast coincided with efforts by local landowners and officials to denounce and seize lands long occupied by Indian cultivators. The Yaqui War, which lasted more than two decades, was renewed as a direct consequence of these land seizures.⁴²

In Hidalgo, violence had erupted soon after the restoration of the Republic. Four of the fourteen incidents recorded here took place in the part of the state which had experienced a bloody rebellion led by Francisco Islas and Manuel Domínguez beginning in December 1869.⁴³ While only four of the fourteen Hidalgo incidents of conflict over land took place in the districts of Actopan and Pachuca, where this violence appears to have been centered, others probably can be traced in part to the events of this year and its lingering effects in the social banditry of the succeeding years.⁴⁴ By 1877, however, reports from Hidalgo have changed; it is now the Indians who are attacked, not the haciendas. In November, “a force of cavalry under the command of one Barreiro” passed through two towns in the Actopan district and carried off a number of villagers as prisoners. Whatever the official reason for the arrests, the reports in El Hijo de Trabajo and El Socialista charged that the assault had been arranged by the Hacienda de la Concepción in order to eliminate resistance to its seizure of lands belonging to Santiago Tlapacoya and Jilenautla. In Tornacustla, also in the Actopan district, “soldiers” from the same hacienda were employed to drive villagers off their lands.⁴⁵

Construction of the San Luis Potosí railroad began, with much fanfare, at the state capital in late 1878.⁴⁶ Complaints about usurpation of village lands are first reported in the press in early 1879. Violent seizures of hacienda lands began after Juan Santiago and a delegation of Indians returned from Mexico City where they claimed to have found titles to their lands in the Archivo General de la Nación.⁴⁷ Santiago informed the villagers that President Díaz had authorized the village leaders to make war on the hacendados of the district. A second center of rebellion developed shortly afterwards at Tancanhuitz. From 1879 until 1882, much of the Huasteca region was in turmoil.⁴⁸ A new uprising broke out in 1883. Centered at Ciudad del Maíz, it was led by the parish priest Fr. Mauricio Zavala who had apparently visited Santiago at his headquarters in the mountains at least once after the initial revolt at Tamazunchale.⁴⁹ Smaller outbreaks and protests involving several villages occurred in districts scattered through the states of México, Morelos, Puebla, and Veracruz.⁵⁰

Of the fifty-five incidents, ten involved violent Indian uprisings, and another four reported attempts at reoccupation of hacienda lands by Indian villagers. The remaining forty-one cases involved various forms of peaceful protest ranging from petitions to President Díaz to “agitation” accompanying legal proceedings. Looked at from the other side, the protests alleged nineteen cases of physical dispossession by violence on the part of hacendados, and thirty-six cases of usurpation in which violence appears as terror tactics in the form of assassinations and kidnapping (four cases) or involves the use of state or federal troops to retake lands seized by Indians (twelve cases). In fifteen cases allegations of violence do not appear at all in the reports.

Nine of the incidents reported between 1877 and 1884 involved lands affected by the application of the Reform Laws. Additonal incidents may have owed their origins to that legislation but there is no specific mention of it in the published accounts. Of the nine, only three are reported to have involved village lands affected by proceedings “under Juárez.” Two involved land disputes adjudicated in 1879. The rest give no indication as to date. In most of the cases, however, the disputed lands continued to be occupied by the villagers at the time the stories were reported in the Mexico City press.⁵¹

In addition to the specific conflicts between individual villages and neighboring haciendas, a number of more generalized forms of protest also occurred. In the spring of 1878 and again in 1879, Mexico City papers carried stories of meetings and even a congress of village representatives from states throughout the central plateau at which speeches were made demanding the return of usurped communal lands.⁵² A project for a ley agraria circulated in several states acquiring the signature of thousands of campesinos.⁵³ In May of 1879, some 80 “pueblos unidos” formed a “Coalición,” and named commissioners to petition the government for return of lands taken from them.⁵⁴

Occasionally, villages acted together through sympathetic lawyers who represented them in litigation as well as in the preparation of petitions directed to government officials. Fernando Castro and his associates were reported in 1879 to be representing some forty-five pueblos in the states of Michoacán and Guanajuato. In June of 1879, El Hijo del Trabajo reported “this gentleman has just sent a petition to Don Porfirio Díaz asking him to support the rights of the pueblos and to enact a ley agraria, or at least to insure that the courts make proper decisions under existing law without interference from political authorities.”⁵⁵ Unfortunately, the exact location of the villages represented at these meetings and congresses and that 01 the villages which cooperatively employed attorneys like Fernando Castro have not been preserved. None of them are represented in the fifty-five communities plotted on the maps.

Not all of the conflicts over property rights along railroad routes involved hacendados pitted against Indian villagers. In several cases, not included in the fifty-five recorded on the maps and tables, villages were reportedly fighting among themselves over land, and in one case two traditional community rivals nearly came to open warfare in a conflict over which should be the site of a projected railway station.⁵⁶ Conflict also arose between railroad companies and villagers over the companies’ practice of taking land for right-of-way without providing proper compensation.⁵⁷ Occasionally such conflicts broke out between hacendados and the railroad companies, but, more frequently, these larger landowners actively sought railroad lines and even donated the lands required for the roadbed.⁵⁸

With the exception of cases involving railroad companies directly, all these conflicts over land engaged traditional antagonists. Conflicts between estate owners and villagers, as well as those between neighboring villages, occurred in the colonial era. Even conflicts with railroad companies have a familiar counterpart in disputes over the taking of village (or hacienda) lands by public authority exercising the right of eminent domain. Legal controversies over land form an important source of data for historians of colonial society. Invasions of haciendas by villagers and usurpations of village lands by hacendados became a familiar aspect of the Mexican rural scene long before railroad building and continued in many places long afterwards. This continuity in the nature of disputes over land, and in the social types who appear as opponents, has probably obscured significant shifts in the intensity, magnitude and spatial distribution of agrarian conflict. This has certainly been true for the early Porfiriato, although the extent of the shifts in this period cannot be measured with any precision until more systematic research is available for the pre-Porfirian era. At least as important as the changing pattern of conflict however, was the changing balance of winners and losers. Here the evidence speaks more clearly. While the level and frequency of protest and conflict may be more symptomatic than explanatory of land tenure shifts, the villagers probably lost more, and more rapidly, during the Porfiriato than ever before.⁵⁹

III

The first federal law permitting cash sales of vacant public lands was an 1863 wartime measure adopted by the Juárez government. In four years, the embattled republican regime distributed titles to 1.7 million hectares at a price averaging $.06 per hectare.⁶⁰ Much of this land was apparently acquired by merchants and traders willing to accept titles to public lands in payment of debts owed them by the Liberal government. Forced loans to the Liberal cause in wartime frequently amounted to virtual confiscations. Public debt issues printed to cover such loans circulated at enormous discounts. In such circumstances, public land titles were probably preferred to Liberal government bonds. They represented a claim, however tenuous and speculative, to tangible assets. Recognition of such titles in case of Liberal defeat was not highly probable, of course, but recognition of Liberal government bonds by a victorious Conservative or Imperial regime could be ruled out with certainty.⁶¹

The sale and distribution of vacant public lands slowed considerably after the Liberal victory in 1867. With regular sources of revenue restored, Liberal governments were reluctant to resort to methods which might undermine public confidence. Juárez, under attack in Congress from a number of opposition factions, did not want to continue large scale alienations of the national patrimony. He also opposed further sales because of a desire to prevent greater concentration of landholding.⁶² Immediately after the restoration of the republic in 1867, Juárez issued a new decree making all titles to vacant public lands conditional on the absence of injury to third parties.⁶³ Furthermore the prices fixed by the government for sales of public lands were raised by decree to an average nearly four times higher per hectare than the wartime levels. Thus, in addition to changed conditions, in which titles to vacant public lands were no longer sought as a less onerous alternative to public debt issues, the government itself adopted policies which further reduced the attractiveness of public lands as a speculative investment. Sales declined dramatically. In the first two full years of the restored republic, the Fomento ministry reported sales aggregating only 161,212 hectares (considerably below the acreage involved annually in the 1863-67 period) at an average price of $.23 per hectare.⁶⁴ Sales remained low throughout the decade before the Porfirian coup d’etat, increasing substantially after the initial year of Díaz’s rule.⁶⁵

Toward the end of 1877, according to Francisco de la Maza, head of the new Department of Vacant Lands in the Ministry of Fomento, the number of claims for such lands began to increase dramatically.⁶⁶ The new Díaz regime had issued an unprecedented number of railroad concessions beginning in that year. Maza attributed the rising interest in vacant lands to the inauguration of the Porfirian regime which, he said, “presaged an era of conciliation, peace and protection for the social conventions . . . (and) reanimated the spirit of enterprise and with it the desire to acquire lands. . . .” He added that “In aid of this desire came the projects and the construction of easy means of communication as well as the decided success of the government in preserving the public order, and because of this the desire was converted into a plausible reality and the claims for vacant lands increased repeatedly day by day. . . .,”⁶⁷ Railroads and public order appeared, to the official most directly involved, intimately related to rising land claims.

The largest claims for terrenos baldíos in this period were made in the northern states of Sonora, Coahuila and Chihuahua.⁶⁸ The Sonoran claims rose from slightly over 2,000 hectares in 1875 to nearly a quarter of a million in 1886 and 1888. Sales of baldíos in Sonora faithfully mirror the history of the Sonora Railroad. The first concession was issued in mid-1875.⁶⁹ Claims jumped from 2,126 in that year to 29,255 in 1876 and 30,639 in 1877. The first construction company having failed to make the progress stipulated in its concession, the government cancelled the contract in June of 1877 and reissued it to a new company. Land claims in 1878 jumped to 42,973. When construction failed to begin as quickly as anticipated, land claims declined to 28,507 in 1879. Late that year construction began in earnest, and in 1880 the number of land claims rose sharply to 99,377 and, as construction progressed, increased to peaks of 245,782 and 244,797 in 1886 and 1888 respectively. The Coahuila grants cluster around two years, 1884 and 1888. In the earlier year the Mexican Central Railroad completed its line from Mexico City through Torreón to the U.S. border at El Paso. In the later year, the Mexican National finally completed its trunk line through the state to Laredo on the Río Grande.⁷⁰ In Chihuahua, sales of baldíos reached a peak in 1884 and 1885 with the completion of the Mexican Central.⁷¹

In Yucatán, the Caste War between Mexican authorities and the Mayan Indians had begun in the 1840s simultaneously with the expansion of large scale plantation agriculture.⁷² Railroad construction was limited to non-Mayan dominated areas until the 1890s.⁷³ With scarcely 30 miles of track laid from Mérida along the route to Peto (over a hundred miles away) near the Mayan frontier, the Mérida-Peto Railroad Company predicted in its annual report for 1886, that “the Caste War of Yucatán will end without doubt when this railroad arrives at its last station. . . .”⁷⁴ In the next annual report, the company repeated its claim that the railroad held the key to ending the Caste War, adding that the end of the war would make a large expanse of terrenos baldíos available for exploitation.⁷⁵

In the early 1890s, railroad construction quickened. Two small lines, under construction from the coast of Quintana Roo (one inland from Puerto Morelos, the other from Ascensión Bay) encountered Indian resistance.⁷⁶ As the Ferrocarril Peninsular pushed construction of its line from both ends (Mérida and Campeche), land-grabbing along the route sparked a violent uprising among the heretofore pacified Mayas at Maxcanú in 1891.⁷⁷ As the Mérida-Peto line moved slowly forward, similar symptomatic incidents occurred. In 1892, Indians in the Peto district rose up against a series of usurpations, apparently inspired by the approaching Iron Horse.⁷⁸ Difficulties in finance and in obtaining adequate labor slowed construction during the mid-1890s. The Peninsular was not completed until 1898. The Mérida-Peto line was inaugurated on September 15, 1899, at ceremonies presided over by State Governor Francisco Cantón, whose family controlled the railroad company.⁷⁹ After Governor Cantón hammered the last spike in the line, General Nicolás Bravo, just sent by federal authorities to take charge of the new campaign against the Mayas, “took the sledge hammer and drove the first spike of the projected Ferrocarriles Sudorientales de Yucatán, to be driven straight through the Cruzob jungle to Ascensión Bay.”⁸⁰ In the case of Yucatán, then, the extension of the railroad network beyond the older henequen areas in the 1890s is linked not only to sales of public domain and usurpation of village lands, but to the intensification of the Caste War in its last phase.

IV

The process of usurpation and concentration of landowning was more widespread and continuous than the incidents of protest or the land sales data reveal. The peaceful transformation of Naranja, a Tarascan Indian village near Pátzcuaro, illustrates this quite well. In Paul Friedrich’s account, the transformation begins when surveyors arrived in 1881 and discovered beneath the Zacapu swamp “a black soil of rare fertility.”⁸¹ In 1883, “two Spanish brothers named Noriega . . . managed to acquire the ancient legal titles through collusion with the mestizos of the village, notably the mayor. . . .” In 1886, the Noriegas “formed a commercial company with eight other Spanish and mestizo parties . . .” to drain the swamp. The Naranjeños did not resist the usurpation of their swamplands “mainly because they lacked competent leaders.” By 1900, five haciendas, including the Zacapu Hacienda de Cantabria, surrounded the village, encroaching on its lands. “Thus,” concludes Friedrich, “did the villagers pass through a classic sequence. . . Naranja had become a village of hired men and migrant plantation hands, a sort of rural semi-proletariat.”⁸²

The history of Naranja in this period can be read as a testimony to the greed and influence of Spanish outsiders and mestizo collaborators. But it can also be read as a response to North American investment in Mexican railroads. The surveyors arrived in Naranja less than a year after the Mexican government granted a railroad concession to the Mexican National Construction Company for a line through Pátzcuaro to Uruapan.⁸³ The Noriegas acquired title to the swamp in 1883, just after the National’s line reached Acámbaro and work on the branch to Uruapan had begun. The commercial company was formed in 1886 just as the railroad reached Pátzcuaro.⁸⁴ By the time the swamp was drained, a small private railroad linked the Zacapu with Irapuato on the Mexican Central’s main line to the north.⁸⁵ Until much more research is done, it will be impossible to know how many leaderless villages peacefully lost their lands to greedy outsiders seizing properties in anticipation of railroad construction. It is conceivable that Naranja’s experience was repeated in countless local dramas throughout the Porfirian railroad era.

If the results of this study may be extended somewhat, they suggest that foreign enterprise in the form of major railroad construction projects significantly altered the shape and balance of Mexico’s agrarian system in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Porfiriato saw a considerable expansion and consolidation of the hacienda at the expense of competing rural institutions, notably the Indian free village. Until further research brings new evidence to light, the full dimensions of this process are difficult to specify. Regional variations, consistent with variations in natural conditions, local agrarian institutions, and the penetration of new transport and industrial technologies may prove to have been quite complex. It does seem possible to conclude, however, that Mexico’s developing international economic connections will provide a list of variables quite critical to explaining the evolution of agrarian institutions during the Porfiriato.

Some historians and social scientists, including Barrington Moore in a recent work, have stressed the importance of agrarian social change during periods of rapid “commercialization” at the beginning of the industrial era.⁸⁶ Some of the crucial parameters of institutional behavior in the contemporary period, it is argued, have their origins in these earlier agrarian transformations. The Mexican Revolution makes it impossible to draw lines as straight as those Moore seems able to identify through the modern history of several European and Asian nations. Still, the development of modern authoritarian political rule in Mexico may well be linked as much to the socially regressive commercialization of agriculture in the Porfiriato as to the defeat of the agrarian movements of the 1910s and 1920s.

In nineteenth-century Mexico, as perhaps was true in other parts of Latin America, many contemporary social and political institutions and behavior patterns developed at least in part through response to the penetration of foreign enterprise and technology. Nevertheless, billiard ball models of external dependence, in which discrete units of foreign influence bounce into equally self-contained Latin American economic, social and political variables, are not likely to prove useful in the analysis of the impact of modern imperialism. What can be assumed is that when the Mexican official of today greets the visiting North American entrepreneur, or casts him a suspicious glance, he is looking at his own history.

Author notes