Traditional and Marxist scholars alike have argued for years that prerevolutionary rural Mexico suffered from two ills: an overconcentration of land in the hands of a few large landowners and a rural population that was more than 90 percent landless. This two-class rural structure changed only slightly with the Bevolution of 1910 as a new urban bourgeoisie arose and replaced the old landed upper class, leaving the economic and political status of the peasant essentially unchanged. Schryer challenges these basic assumptions by brilliantly analyzing the neglected role of the rancheros, or peasant bourgeoisie, as a key social group in Mexican revolutionary politics, and he presents an authoritative new approach to the evolution of the Mexican rural class structure.
The first part of his case study of the municipio of Pisaflores in the Sierra Alta of Hidalgo traces the economic and social characteristics of a ranchero economy from the Porfiriato to the present. Relying heavily on municipio censuses and fiscal data, he pieces together an exceptionally accurate history of land-tenure patterns and the emerging social structure. The ranchero class arose during the Porfiriato and transformed a subsistence agricultural economy into a commercially oriented one based on wage labor. As the chief beneficiary of the Revolution, this peasant bourgeoisie increased from 12 to 21 percent of the population. In addition, a new middle peasant class of small tenant farmers emerged with the commercialization of coffee in the 1920s. Schryer contends quite convincingly that the ranchero or rich peasant should not be confused with either a poor family farmer or an individual smallholder who relies primarily on his own labor. In the state of Hidalgo he is not part of a homogeneous class, for he may be a genuine family-sized plotholder or a land leaser more actively engaged in commerce. In Pisaflores socially he lives and dresses like a peasant, but politically he constitutes the local upper class.
The second part of this study traces the political behavior of the peasant bourgeoisie as it comes to power in the municipio and then gradually loses its economic position to outside interests after the 1930s. Two of his conclusions seem most significant for the study of agrarian politics. The rancheros did not react politically as a class to outside economic changes, but rather as rival factions competing for power and economic rewards. Second, their approach to agrarian politics was characterized more by factionalism based on patron-client relationships than by class conflict.
What is the significance of Schryer’s findings in Pisaflores for understanding land-tenure patterns and the agrarian revolution in central Mexico? Although research has been conducted on the ranchero in the Bajío, Guerrero, and Jalisco, Schryer, unlike most anthropologists, has attempted to apply his conclusions to all of Mexico. He contends that at least one-third of the rural population of Mexico was under the control of the peasant bourgeoisie at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910 and, therefore, could have been heavily influenced by it. Thus, the main concern of the official revolutionary party became control of rural politics through manipulation and cooptation of rival factions of the peasant bourgeoisie rather than through simple manipulation of the poor peasantry, that is, the ejidatario and minifundista. This is indeed an intriguing and refreshing new approach to rural-urban linkages in the revolutionary era. What is now needed is additional research on the ranchero economy outside central Mexico, where the rich peasant did not figure so prominently, to test the applicability of Schryer’s conclusions on the pervasiveness of ranchero clientage systems.
