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Alan Knight
Porfirian Mexico Chapter 1 of "The Mexican Revolution" by Alan Knight
Porfirian Mexico
Chapter 1 of "The Mexican Revolution"


Porfirian Mexico
Histories of the Mexican Revolution traditionally begin with the Centennial celebrations of 19IO, the great bonanza laid on to commemorate Mexico's initial rebellion against Spanish rule, an event which happily coincided with Porfirio Díaz's seventh re-election to the presidency. So far, then, this is traditional history. But the Centennial was, above all, a Mexico City affair: the parades and processions, the banquets, the unveiling of monuments and mental asylums were designed to impress Mexico City high society, the press, the diplomatic corps and, perhaps, the fickle Mexico City populace-'this capital', as an army general put it, 'always full of amusement . . . this people born to amuse itself'. And, by all accounts, they were impressed.
In all this, provincialism had no part, even if the provinces made their gastronomic contribution (a hundred sea-turtles from the Guaymas fisheries, a thousand Rio Lerma trout, which formed part of one of the master-chef Sylvain's lavish banquets). Overt provincialism, however, was frowned upon at such cosmopolitan occasions, and strenuous efforts were made to ensure that Indians in their baggy white shirts and drawers were kept off the streets of the capital. Outside Mexico City, it is true, there were attempts to make this, the hundredth anniversary of the Grito de Dolores, something special, and there by to foster the tender plant of patriotism: the Indian children of Morelos were got up in clean white blouses and had patriotic recitations drummed into them; in Chihuahua and Durango the authorities did their best to combine patriotic enthusiasm and public order during three days of torrential rain. But, probably more typical of most Mexicans' experience in the summer of 1910 was that of San José de Gracia (Mich.), where the Centennial was ignored, and where two years of drought and the appearance of Halley's comet attracted more concern and attention.
Yet the real Mexico, and in particular the Mexico of the Revolution, was provincial Mexico. In same histories the story begins and the metropolitan angle is fixed with the Centennial; from this angle we focus on the comings and goings of revolutionary leaders - boorish, provincial interlopers - in Mexico City, and on the intermittent paranoia of the diplomatic corps, fearful of a repeat of the Peking siege. But the Revolution cannot be comprehended in these terms; unlike the Russian counterpart, it arose in the provinces, established itself in the countryside, and finally conquered an alien and sullen capital. And, unlike its Chinese counterpart, it failed to produce either a vanguard party of a coherent ideology. Rather, in it's provincial origins, the Revolution displayed kaleidoscopic variations; often it seem less a Revolution than a multitude of disparate revolts, some endowed with national aspirations, many purely provincial, but all reflecting local conditions and concerns. The forces thrown up by these revolts concluded regional deals, adopted national political labels, and entered grand, ephemeral coalitions; but, beneath these spreading ramifications, it was the local roots which gave the Revolution its sustenance. And, even as revolt gave way to reconstruction in the years after 1915, the chief problem of the revolutionary victors- newly but precariously installed in Mexico City - was that of imposing their authority on the recalcitrant provinces, whether by conquest or diplomacy. It was a problem which had exercised Porfirio Diaz throughout his long regime.
Thus, to understand the Revolution, it is necessary to look beyond the capital and beneath the major, national leaders; to comprehend something of the diversity of the provinces (the Mexico City saying 'fuera de México, todo es Cuautitlán'- 'outside Mexico City, it's all Cuatitlán'- says more about the capitalino mentality than the sameness of the despised provinces). For the Mexico of 1910 was, borrowing Lesley Simpson's phrase, 'many Mexicos', less a nation than a geographical expression, a mosaic of regions and communities, introverted and jealous, ethnically and physically fragmented, and lacking common national sentiments; these sentiments came after the Revolution and were (notwithstanding some theories to the contrary) its offspring rather than its parents. The Porfiriato, it is true, saw trends working towards a more centralized state and national economy (and these trends, though halted in 1910, reasserted themselves after 1915); nevertheless, Mexico on the eve of the Revolution still retained much of its nineteenth-century character as 'a semi-fictitious political entity', a character which the Revolution revealed to an alarming extent. The initial task, therefore, is to depict, in broad strokes the 'many Mexicos' of 1910, the Mexico beyond Cuautitlán, the human and physical backdrop for the great upheaval which began in that year.
PEOPLE
'Many Mexicos' implied many allegiances. Mexicans, it may be suggested displayed five kinds of primary allegiance which, taken together, in various combinations, and with no single allegiance necessarily prevailing over all others (even in the last analysis'), determined their political conduct during the years of revolution. These were: ethnic, regional, ideological, class and clientelist. Ideological allegiance will figure prominently in chapter two, class in chapter three; the importance of clientelist will become apparent at many points. The first chapter concerns itself with two allegiances which were the most visually obvious, if not necessarily the most important; those of ethnicity and region.
Following the conquest, the Spaniards imposed a colonial and clerical hierarchy on the sedentary Indian population, whose members continued to plant corn and beans under new masters, and whose old gods were subsumed into a hybrid Catholicism. Miscegenation between lndian and Spaniard created a spectrum of racial types which the regime sought to classify with bureaucratic precision, creating a colonial 'pigmentocracy'. Though, after Independence, these distinctions became juridically irrelevant, they remained of great social consequence throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. As of 1910, at least a third of the Mexican population was reckoned to be Indian, and a little over a half mestizo. But, not only are Mexican statistics for this period notoriously unreliable; in this case the constituencies they seek to measure are fluid and uncertain. As in the rest of Indo-America, ethnic categories of this sort were socio-cultural, rather than biological; they related to perceived characteristics - language, dress, income, food, literacy and domicile. Such characteristics, and the ethnic status they implied, were subjective and mutable. Pedro Martinez passed for an Indian in Yautepec, but was called a ladino (mestizo) in his native Azteca: the uncertainty stemmed partly from perspective, partly from the individual's transitional status. "
Individuals could-through the murky process of 'acculturation' - shed Indian attributes and acquire mestizo status; some made great strides down the available - albeit narrow - paths of advancement offered by the army, the Church, and the law. Some, remaining in or returning to their native villages, performed important roles as organizers and propagandists; they became the 'village lawyers', the 'pen-pushers' (tinterillos) who acted as intellectual captains of popular revolt. Others broke away from the patria chica and rose high in state and national politics: Próspero Cahuantzi, the fat, somnolent Governor of Tlaxcala, seemed a 'delightful Aztec gentleman'; Manuel Alarcón, four times Governor of Morelos, was an Indian 'of plain beginnings'; Policarpo Valenzuela, 'an Indian who was at one time a timber hewer' in the forests of Tabasco, rose not only to govern but also to own a large slice of the same state.
Indian ancestry was no bar to the presidency. Juárez, the liberal hero of the Reform, was a Zapotec (a group known for their enterprising traders and teachers); while Porfirio Diaz, the son of a Mixtec mother, could remember from his childhood the chill fogs which blanketed the mountain villages of the Mixteca Alta, on the summit of the continental divide in Oaxaca. But progress to the presidency wrought necessary changes; with acculturaion Indian characteristics were, where possible, removed and, where the characteristics were physical, politely ignored the Indian was whitened' As an American of twenty-four residence in Mexico put it, Porfirio Diaz gave Mexico the strong white man's government' which, as an Indian country, it required, therefore -- he rationalized - Diaz 'of supposed only one-eighth [sic] Indian' was in fact 'probably all white'.
Yet more important than this process of individual acculturation was the collective, corporate form: the transition - made, for example, by Huatusco (Ver.) in the nineteenth century - from Indian to mestizo status. Acculturation was gradual, it was not unilinear, it was capable of halts and reverses. Yet some consideration of the degree of acculturation experienced by Indian communities is essential in explaining the character - even the very fact - of revolutionary commitment. Some commentators, on hearing the word 'acculturation' reach for their revolvers - the same they have used to pepper old, dualistic scenarios in which 'civilization', radiating from dynamic, modern, poles, penetrates and 'modernizes' the inert, traditional countryside. We may be well rid of such scenarios, but it mast be recognized (as even some fervent 'monists' recognize, sub rosa) that there were variant forms and degrees of Indian acculturation, which had important historical consequences.
Some communities, while retaining Indian language and mores, were firmly integrated into colonial - later national - society as labourers, taxpayers and subjects; indeed, there may be no contradiction here, for the maintenance of the Indian community was in many cases functional to the survival and prosperity of the hacienda - the two lived in a stable though 'unequal symbiosis'. The villages of Morelos, for example, had co-existed with the sugar plantations since the sixteenth century; travelers, used to the suspicious and taciturn Indians they encountered elsewhere in Mexico, found the people of Morelos more forthcoming, 'distinguished by their obliging manners'. Towns like Tepoztlán - outside the immediate sugar zone, but 'in the heart of Zapatista country'- were key points in the state's network of trade and administration-and played an important role-;in local politics. The Zapotecs of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, though similarly integrated into the mestizo state and economy, had a record of resistance stretching back through colonial times; they were also reckoned to be free, prouder, more enterprising and vivacious' than other Indian groups.
Elsewhere in Oaxaca the case was different. Few villages had escaped the impact of colonial authority and colonial market relations. But, after the collapse of the cochineal trade in the late eighteenth century, Oaxaca lapsed into subsistence farming and barter trade, and even the opening of the Mexican Southern Railway in 1892 provided only a slow, tortuous and costly means of access from the north. While the regime of the hacienda was established in a few fertile valleys - Cuicatlán, Zaachila, Oaxaca itself - the bulk of the Indian population enjoyed an economic and political independence in proportion to the inaccessibility of their villages and the undesirability of their lands. Many, in fatc, possessed abundant land, and agrarian conflicts pitted village against village rather than village against hacienda; groups like the Mije remained ´rabid isolationists´ well into the twentieth century.21
In such regions political authority was wielded by local caciques whose rule was tolerated and sometimes utilized by a distant central government. The finqueros of Chiapas assumed the role of paternalist protectors of Indian lands and communities - thus perpetuating the 'colonial' symbiosis well into the twentieth century; mestizo caciques ruled in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca; the old Indian cacique Juan Francisco Lucas traveled by sedan chair through the Puebla sierra around Teziutlán, where he held sway throughout the Porfiriato and where, a member of the Chamber of Deputies pointed out, the Indians had managed to retain a form of vigorous self-government 22 If such fiefs lay within the interstices of the mestizo state, enjoying a conditional, partial independence, there were other Indian groups who retained a fuller, quasitribal freedom fending off the embrace of the state and the commercial economy. They stood at one end - and a diminishing end - of the spectrum of acculturation, and they had usually parted company with at least a section of the 'tribe' which had succumbed to the embrace. The Chamulas and Lacandones of Chiapas, though being drawn into the Soconusco coffee economy, lived in their scattered highland settlements, where mestizo control was of en tenuous and census officials nceded an Indian escort if they were to avoid attack.23 The Huicholes maintained a similar independence, entertaining 'a profound hatred for the mestizos' in the wild country of Tepic; nearby, the Cora Indians of the mountains contrasted with their more 'acculturated' cousins of the lowlands; the Tarahumara of western Chihuahua were similarly divided.24
But the best example of this pattern of development was the Yaqui tribe of Sonora, whose resistance to the incursions of whites and mestizos (collectively the yen in the Yaqui tongue) gave rise to the protracted Yaqui wars of the Porfiriato. Part of the Yaqui 'nation', dispossessed of its fertile valley lands became hacienda laborers or urban workers (the American consul at Hermosillo had a Yaqui washerwoman); these were the manse (pacified) Yaqui, who had taken the first reluctant steps towards 'acculturation' and mestizaje. 25 Another part of the tribe, however, labeled broncos or [ravel, maintained a fierce resistance in the mountains. Both groups played a major part in revolutionary events after 1910, displaying an evident degree of ethnic cohesion, and continuing their ancient struggle under new, political labels whether in shaky alliance with mestizo forces, or in outright opposition to the yen in general.
Over time, however, such ethnic allegiances tended to give way to others - class, ideological, regional and clientelist. As inexorable external pressures Compelled tighter integration within the nation and national economy, so the Indian mass merged into the ethnically indeterminate campesinado; Mayan Indians became Yucatecan peons; caste identity was supplanted by class identity.26 For this reason ( we might interject at this point) there is little point in attempting analyses of mestizo society, paralleling those of Indian society. For, while the latter has a certain socio-ethnic validity, the former is a chimera. There has been no definable mestizo society- or social personality- only mestizo campesinos, mestizo workers, mestizo priests, politics and businessmen, their shared mestizaje relevant only in that it collectively differentiated them from the indian. Hence, the thumbnail portrait of the mestizo penned by Eric Wolf and taken up by others- the rootless, macho, power hungry mestizo, ´´ relegated to the edges of society … belong(ing) to a social shadow world, prone to drink, fantasy and gambling- is at best a crude national stereotype, of dubious validity. 27 At the same time, the diametrically opposite image of mestizo propagated by Molina Enriquez (the mestizo as the higher racial synthesis, the quintessential Mexican, the carrier of the country's destiny) is of interest as a theme in Porfirian and revolutionary thought, linked to other integrative, nationalist myths, but it has no validity as a concept for historical inquiry.
In 1910 the transition from ethnic to alternative allegiances was very far from complete; hence ethnicity figured as an important factor in the Revolution, sometimes complementing these allegiances, sometimes competing with them; and in doing so, it helped determine revolutionary commitments.
The Zapatista and Yaqui rebellions, for example, obeyed common agrarian causes, yet they assumed different modes of expression - the first steeped in liberal, patriotic tradition, politically articulate, and nationally aware (if not nationally effective),the second, fundamentally atavistic and anti-national. Similar distinctions may be noted among those rebel movements which I shall categorise as serrano. If, later in this book, it is the common causes of such rebellions which are stressed, it is worth noting at the outset the different degrees and modes of acculturation which characterised, say, the Zapatistas and Yaquis, and which in turn determined the manner of their revolutionary commitment.
Indian social organisation displayed certain recurrent features. It exalted the patria chica above the national state which, for most Indian groups, was at best a remote figment, at worst an arbitrary oppressor. Hence Indian movements were fiercely parochial: many - like the Chontal/Mixtec pueblo of San Bartolo (Oax.) - 'seemed to have their municipality on the brain', outsiders found them cerrado (locked up, introverted) and their social organisation 'very clannish'.29 This exclusivism extended to other Indian tribes (there was no Pan-lndianism), even to neighboring communities of common ethnic origin. Hans Gadow arrived at Huilotepec, a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, riding a Huavi ox-cart, accompanied by a Mexicano guide; but 'the Zapotecs did not care for the Huavi, would not even allow them into the house, and . . . the Mexicano hated the Zapotecs'. 30 Hence tribes could be pitted against each other: Pima against Yaqui, Zapotec against Mexicano. 31 Inter-village disputes were endemic: among people of Morelos, the Maya of Yucatan, the highland communities of Oaxaca. Sometimes land was at issue, sometimes (as the conflict between Chan Kom and Ebtun) political authority; some feuds had been going for so long that their original rationale seemed lost in the mists of time, even though the feud still prospered.32 There were also cases of intro-village conflict between rival barrios. When the Revolution came, factional allegiances tended to follow these ancient fault lines.33
Within Indian communities religion - a syncretic blend of Catholic and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices - was pervasive; there was no clear differentiation between sacred and secular. Political authority - when it emerged from within and was not imposed from without - mingled with religious, creating intertwined civil-religious hierarchies which served to integrate the community and to provide, where permitted, a vigorous form of self-government, resistant to external pressures. In addition, while Indian communities were by no means egalitarian, nevertheless internal stratification was kept in check by mechanisms of redistribution, such as feasts and other religious expensm.34 Thus, like the atom, the 'closed corporate community' remained banded together, defying the fissiparous forces which threatened its dissolution from within and without; like the atom, too, when dissolution occurred, it released violent energies.
Not that Indian communities had a monopoly of these defensive and integrative characteristics. They may be discerned, too, in some rural mestizo communities like Tomóchic, in the Chihuahua sierra, or Arandas, in the Altos de Jalisco.35 Nor are they confined to Mexico: 'inward-oriented villages', complete with 'community survival mechanisms', have been noted throughout the world, wherever peasantries exist on the margin of subsistence, facing the combined threats of government, landlord, and the elements.36 The peasant's alleged conservatism, hostility to innovation, and 'sheer unadulterated cussedness and pigheaded stopidity'37 were traits induced by the subordinate and precarious position of peasant communities; they were social responses, to given social conditions, not products of Indian culture per se. It was rather the case that Indian communities - almost by definition - had developed these traits to a greater extent, over a longer period of time, and had maintained them more fully intact in the face of outside pressures.
These supposed characteristics influenced outsiders' opinions of the Indian. Though the Porfiriato saw stirrings of interest in and concern for the plight of the Indian - anticipations of the full-blown indigenismo of the twentieth century - the prevailing view among the political nation, when it went beyond indifference, was at best paternalistic, at worst domineering and racist.38 The well-to-do prized their creole ancestry, 'Quelle horreur!', exclaimed the wife of a Mexican diplomat in Tokyo when it was suggested to her that she shared a common, Asiatic racial heritage with thc Japanese; as the choice of idiom implied, her kind (especially the Catholic creoles of central Mexico) looked to Europe, and particularly to Frane, for their cultural inspiration.39 Pablo Escandon, briefly Governor of Moreos, was 'more at home in Europe than in Mexico'; to a Lieutenant Colonel of the Zouaves he seemed 'le plus Parisien des Mexicains'.40 Landa y Escandon, speaking perfect English as he took tea in Cuernavaca (he had been educated at Stonyhursy), look[ed] like an Englishman and is proud if it'.41
In their eyes, the Indian represented a drag on Mexico's 'progress'(a concept to which constant appeal was made), and white immigration, on Argentine lines, was the preferred - though unattainable - solotion.42 Meanwhile, the stereotypes of the 'lazy native', familiar in colonial contexts, were invoked to justify low wages, land seizures and forced labour. 'The Indian', as the Yucatecan proverb went, 'hears through his backside'; without the discipline of hard work on their henequen "cafes, the planters of the peninsula maintained, the Maya would live on 'sunlight and a patch of beans'; and similar arguments were heard in Morelos.43 Attitudes of this kind were confined neither to conservative Porfirians, nor to members of the landed elite. Revolutionaries - especially those from the progressive, mestizo north - subscribed to the racist and Social Darwinist ideas which passed for scientific thinking in those times; they inveighed against Chinese immigrants, and they saw the Indian population of central and southern Mexico as alcoholic degenerates, ready for a rough redemption.44
Racist practice was, of course, anterior to pseudo-scientific racist thinking (which, for a literate minority, merely rationalised existing attitudes); and it was particularly significant where it underpinned a local, political hierarchy. Indian communities were frequently dominated by a handful of ladino (mestizo) caciques, who monopolised land, commerce and political power. Azteca was controlled by a few such caciques who 'had money and rode fine horses and were always the officials'; at Tepoztlán the caciques lived in the best barrio, owned most ¡of the private land, controlled the communal fields, and enjoyed political contacts in the capital.45 Mestizo caciques were not necessarily despots; or, at least, they could be enlightened despots. Vicente Mendoza of Tepoztlán was one such; so, too, was the cacique of Huixquilucán (Mex.), 'an old mestizo of rather forbidding manners but kindly spirit', under whose regime the village seemed to prosper.46 More typical, perhaps, was Don Guillermo Murcio, blacksmith and cacique of the Triqui pueblo of Chicahuastla (Oax.), where 'he has gained almost unbounded influence among the simple natives. His word is law and the town government trembles before his gaze'; the traveler Lumholtz encountered another blacksmith/liquor dealer/ cacique at Yoquivo, in the Chihuahua sierra.47
Mestizo caciques, like their landlord betters, justified their exercise of power and their commercial sharp practice in terms of the Indians' sloth and fecklessness (even mestizo priests, condemned to the Indian backwoods, were inclined to agree).48 Indian degeneracy invited contempt and exploitation. 'What these people needed', declared a mestizo schoolmaster at Huancito (Mich.), who reportedly 'despises the Indians with his charge' was a second Cortez {for}… they had never been properly conquered.49 For the high-minded, of both 'conservative and 'revolutionary' persuasion, a second conquest was required to eliminate Indian vice, filth, superstition and alcoholism, and to inculcate values of hygiene, hard work and patriotism.50 Some communities were polarised by this socio-ethnic division. At Naranja (Mich.) dispossessed Indian villagers clashed with mestizo hacienda workers; at Acayucán (Ver.), where such conflicts had produced a minor 'caste war', 'the whites and mestizos live in the centre of a large Indian community, but the separation between them . . . is as great as if they lived leagues apart . . . (and) between the two a conflict over land has gone on for centflries'.51 Other 'bi-ethnic' communities of this kind - such as Tantoyuca in the Huasteca, and Jamiltepec on the coast of Oaxaca - figured significantly in the Revolution after I9IO.
But mestizo control could also operate at a distance. Frequently, a mestizo town acted as metropolis for outlying Indian satellites which, though they might retain land, still languished in the grip of mestizo merchants and off~ciaFis.52 Tlacoiltopec (Hgo) was a mestizo pueblo which 'has charge of several Indian villages'; Chilcota, head town of the Once Pueblos in Michoacán, was mestizo, while dependencies like Huancito (home of the maestro of conquistador mentality) were 'primitive and purely Indian'; Izúcar de Matamoros, in Puebla, had fourteen such satellites.53 On a grander scale, the commercial tentacles of the city of Oaxaca embraced the surrounding sierra, while the merchants of Acapulco dominated the hinterland of the Costa Chica. 54 In some cases this dependency involved the direct transfer of resources - land and water rights- from Indian satellites to mestizo metropolis; when this occurred (as it did at Ometepec and Jamiltepec, communities lying athwart the GuerreroOaxaca state line) agrarian rebellion could assume the guise of a localized caste war. Indeed, it is likely that same of the ubiquitous inter-community conflicts of the revolutionary period derived from such unequal political and economic relationships, as yet uninvestigated.
Certainly the landlord and merchant victims saw Indian rebellion in terms of caste war (there had been enough nineteenth-century precedents, and not simply in Yucatán).55 Where the social historian discerns agrarian rebellion, contemporaries often saw something akin to Carleton Beals´ 'feather-shanked aggressions, disorganized seizures of ancient patrimonies'. Zapata's agrarian revolt was soon construed as a 'caste war, in which members of an 'inferior race were captained by a modern Attila; the creole planter Pablo Escandón came to fear the rise of a true Niggerdom' in Mexico - terms which came readily to the lips of same British and American observers too. Agrarian revolt revealed the other side of the lazy Indian: the bloodthirsty, atavistic savage, 'half devil and half child'. Urban readers were titillated by stories, mostly apocryphal, of refined brutalities, while those responsible for combating 'Indian' rebellion not only used similar methods as colonial governors, but also evinced similar attitudes. 'Hunting for Zapatistas', according to the version of the aristocratic Alfonso Rincón Gallardo seems to be the biggest kind of "big-game" shooting'. 58 As for the troublesome Yaquis, the leading Catholic paper El País was prepared to advocate the genocide of a tribe 'unworthy of membership of the great human family'; while revolutionaries justified repression (and the traffic in Yaqui prisoners-of-war) on the grounds of the Indian's 'instinct for pillage and evil-doing'.59 To the gente decente of town and countryside this sudden volte-face of the Indian - from deferential peon to belligerent savage - necessitated tough measures, just as it smacked of treachery and threatened a reversion to barbarism.
PLACES
The ethnic face of Mexico corresponded to its physical face: the Indian population was to be found - along with pine-trees, pulque and pneumonia the high country; and Mexico's ubiquitous mountains, slicing the country into distinct regions and discrete valleys, shaped not only patterns of settlement but also modes of government, of economic development, and, after 1910, of revolutionary conflict. The mountains march south in two mighty parallel chains: the Western Sierra Madre continuing the line of the Rockies, the Eastern Sierra Madre rising among the hills of Nuevo León in the north east and sidling towards the Gulf coast in its progress south. These, which with the lesser sierras cover a quarter of the country's area, harbored a distinctive, serrano population: Indians, hardy pioneers, independent villagers, remote mining and lumber camps, bandit leirs.60 In the north, between the arms of the mountains, lies a broad expanse of high plain, at its broadest and most inhospitable in the deserts, dunes, and trapped rivers of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest state. Chihuahua, which has the strongest claim to the disputed title of 'cradle of the Revolution', was a land of sprawling cattle ranges, dotted with isolated haciendas, settlements, cities and mining camps, populated by few men but thousands of cattle, dependent on the rivers flowing eastwards out of the mountains into landlocked lakes, or via the Conchos down to the Río Grande.61 These northern plains were the theatre of the keenest fighting in 1911 and again in 1913-14, but many of the revolutionary protagonists were men of the sierra who had ridden down from the mountains to oppose first Diaz, then Huerta. In Chihuahua, as elsewhere, the Revolution rook on the character of a conflict between highland and lowland, marching the conflicts between villager and landlord, Indian and rnestizo, 'sandal and shoe'.
Water, nor land, was the scarce resource in the north. Men jostled for access to the irrigated valleys of the north west, specially that of the Yaqui River. Further east, on the Durango/Coahuila borderlands, the River Nazas wound its way down to the cotton country of the Laguna which, thanks to its seasonal waters, appeared in summer 'toute blanche…sous sa neige de coton'.62 The Laguna was a region of dynamic growth: Torreón, the main town, 'misbegotten on an arid site for no better reason than that of an intersection of the railway lines', became a bone of biter contention.63 After 191O the Laguna (like the Yaqui valley) was a hotbed of revolt; and Torreón, with its strategic railway junction, was the site of the bloodiest siege of the Revolution.
This northern region had been patchily settled in the colonial period, chiefly in response to the silver boom; the Indians of the Gran Chichimeca were wild, nomadic and less numerous than those under Aztec dominion to the south and, since they could supply neither tribute nor a docile labor force, they were annihilated or pushed into the mountains (a process that was long, bloody, and barely complete in the 19005)- Northern society, mestizo rather than Indian, was shaped by the operations of mine and hacienda, both of which prospered and expanded with the advent of the railway in the 1880s. This was a pattern of development dependent on local initiative and self-sufficiency - virtues displayed in the struggle against Apache and Yaqui, which was waged with only limited help from Mexico City.64 With its scant population, shifting internal frontier, and dynamic economy, the north was the land of the self-made man where, compared with central Mexico, achievement counted for more than ascription, where the rich (both Mexican and foreign) could "pact bonanzas, and where even the poor enjoyed same mobility and opportunity.65 In Monterrey, it was noted, the sons of the wealthy did not waste their substance, but studied business (often in the US) and went into the family firm.66 Here, if anywhere, the Porfiriato saw the birth of a vigorous 'national bourgeoisie'. Hence, major commercial and industrial cities - like Monterrey, Chihuahua, Torreón - prospered, seeming to ape the ways of North America; the Church kept a low profile (Torreón was practically churchless); and the authority of the central government was grudgingly tolerated, sometimes sourly resented. Traditionally, the north had stood for federalism, liberalism and anti-clericalism, often in opposition to Mexico City. Under Diaz, these commitments were strengthened and with them the potential opposition of the north to the centre.67
Further south, as Mexico narrows towards the Isthmus, the two Sierra Madre ranges merge in a knot of convoluted peaks and valleys, crossed and further complicated by an east-west volcanic seam which had thrown up some of Mexico s greatest and (in the case of Paricutín) most recent mountains. Here, the Mesa Central had formed the heartland of the Aztec empire, of the colony of New Spain, and of independent Mexico. And, despite the growth of the north, the central plateau still contained the bulk of the population in the days od Diaz. In seven central states, together with the Federal District, one-third of the population inhabited one-fifteenth of the country's area.68 Here, the pattern of settlement and society reflected the broken nature of the landscape. The Spainards had built their ordered, gridiron cities, centered around church and plaza, in the temperate valleys, often following pre-Columbian precedent: Mexico City usurped the place of Tenochtitlán, Puebla inherited the religiosity of neighboring Cholula, becoming a city noted for its churches, its Catholicism, and its conservatism. Most of the state capitals of the central states were, like these, old colonial cities, steeped in history: Guanajuato and Querétaro to the north of the capital, Toluca and Morelia to the west, Oaxaca to the south and Jalapa to the east. Some (which Lejeune labeled 'Catholic', compared with the 'American' cities of the north) failed to take up the economic challenges of the Porfiriato and remained administrative, ecclesiastical and cultural centers with sluggish economies, often declining artisan industries, and sometimes dwindling populations; others (the 'European' cities) embraced change and achieved new levels of prosperity.
Outside the cities, three centuries of Spanish rule saw the hacienda emerge as the dominant, though by no means the sole form of rural tenure, as it amassed the better valley lands, dispossessing Indian villages, converting villagers into peons, and pushing the major areas of independent Indian settlement into the sierras. In the valleys, the hacienda raised crops to feed the cities, the mining camps, and later foreign markets: wheat and barley in the high Toluca valley, sugar in Morelos, maguey on the plains of Apam in Hidalgo, coffee on the temperate slopes around Jalapa. In addition, a vigorous class of middling landowners - rancheros - developed, particularly on the plains of the Bajio, watered by the River Lerma. Here, though the silver mines of Guanajuato were in decline, and with them the ancillary artisan industries of Celaya, León and San Miguel, ranchero agriculture nevertheless prospered, creating a distinctive pattern of agrarian tenure and social organisation.70 In the, Bajio, too, the economic influences of the Mexico City and Guadalajara markets met, their contrary tugging paralleled by a certain regional, cultural and political rivalry. The people of Guadalajara (some 120,000 to Mexico City's 471,000 in 1910) were almost ostentatiously well-off, notably devout and seemed distinctly Spanish in appearance. Travelers noted few Indians (Indian settlements had always been rare in the Bajio) but a good many attractive blondes; altogether, the people seemed 'a great deal more refined than their compatriots in Mexico City', whose authority - like the norteños - they did not suffer gladly.
South and east of the populous central plateau the land falls away to the broken country of the southern Sierra Madre which, less imposing but no less inhospitable than the northern ranges cuts a broad swathe of rugged, under-populated land almost from coast to coast. To the east of the capital - and despite its relative proximity - the state of Guerrero enjoyed a long tradition of political autonomy, facilitated by geography, and later revived by the Revolution. It also contained within its borders (as did all such mountain states) 'outlying districts [which] are never visited by either the 134 jefes of the Governor… really independent communities which, if left alone, behave according to their own notions'. - Similarly, in Oaxaca, the arid, cactus-strewn sierras were the home of some of the largest Indian populations, while the valleys were the preserve of white and mestizo, merchant and hacendado. Government also emanated from the valleys, where the administrative centers lay - like the city of Oaxaca, ringed by mountains and hostile serranos, 'the ancient enemies of the town people'.
Internally divided, Oaxaca was nevertheless jealous of its independence and suspicious of the claims of Mexico City - less so, perhaps, when a Oaxaqueño like Porfirio Diaz ruled in the National Palace, more so when northern interlopers appeared, as they did in 1914, and when the mountain barriers and the deficient communications facilitated a regional resistance in which different social and ethnic groups collaborated. The same was true of Chiapas, also a highland, Indian state, closely tied to Guatemala, and only recently and imperfectly linked to the Mexican heartland by the Panamerican Railway; and of Yucatán, too, cut off by the swamps and jungles of the Isthmus, oriented by trade towards the Caribbean and the US, and possessed of a vigorous regionalist, even separatist tradition which the Revolution served to revive.
The mountains dominate the Mexican heartland. But from their highest points around Mexico City they fall away gradually towards the south, precipitately to east and West. Travelers riding the double-headed locomotives which, in the days of Diaz, zig-zagged down from Esperanza, on the Puebla/Veracruz border, to Orizaba, Atoyac and the port of Veracruz, descended from cool peaks to temperate slopes to torrid lowlands in a matter of hours; on the 260 mile trip from the capital to Veracruz the altitude drops by 8,000 feet, and the temperature rises by some 25007 Fahrenheit.75 But the descent from the mountains to the coastal or isthmian lowlands, from the tierra fría to the tierra caliente, brought more than a change of climate; it meant also a change in ethnicity and population, in flora and fauna, in drink and disease.
The hot lowlands, especially the broad flood plain alongside the Gulf, had been sparsely populated during colonial times, attracting neither Indian nor Spaniard. But in the late nineteenth century growing demand for tropical products lured men into the lowlands, just as the mines had lured them to the inhospitable north centuries before. In southern Veracruz, Tabasco and Campeche plantations were set up to produce rubber, cotton, and tropical fruits; companies began to exploit the resources of the forest; and Yucatán, with its unique limestone formation, came to base its entire cash economy on the cultivation of henequen (sisal) to supply the farmers of the American Mid-West with binding twine.76 With the development of these new crops, huge plantations wore carved our of near-virgin tropical country, watered by broad, tirgid, fool-prone rivers like the Grijalva, the Papaloapam, and the Usumacinta. Alone in Mexico, this region had more water then it needed, but the water had not yet been harnessed, and its very abundance only encouraged disease and the enroachment of the rain forest. Engineers working on Lord sleepers with petrol to stop them sprouting, and a quarter of those who built the railway terminus at Salina Cruz, on the Pacific coast, died within two years. 77 Here, foreigners came as managers and planters, but Porfirian hopes of white settlement were disappointed.78
Mexicans from the plateau, too, inured to the respiratory and gastric diseases prevalent there, rapidly succumbed to the malaria and yellow fever (the vómito) of the tropical lowlands. In Guerrero, it was noted, 'nearly all the inhabitants of the inland plateau have an exaggerated dread of the coastlands' a dread that was not, perhaps, so exaggerated for under-nourished peons, who, unlike European travelers, were at the mercy of the lowlands quinine racket, and who too readily switched from the nutritious pulque of the highlands to the firewater of the tropics.79 Yet in the same state - as the Revolution was to reveal once again - 'the people of the coast find it very difficult to campaign outside their own region', that is, when they ventured into the mountains.80 Granted those territorial imperatives- and the absence, outside Yucatán, of a settled, Indian population in the lowlands - the new plantations had difficulty securing labor. Some Indians could be coaxed down out of the mountains, as the German coffee planters of Chiapas found; and for same poor communities the opportunity of seasonal work in the tierra caliente however hard and unhealthy, offered an economic lifeline. Hence an annual flow of labor from highland to lowland became a feature of the Porfirian rural economy.81But since the free flow of labor proved inadequate, the plantations also relied on more coercive methods: forms of forced labor, penal servitude, and the ensnarement of nominally 'free' contract labor by the system of debt peonage, which reached its harshest in southern plantations like those of the celebrated Valle Nacional.82
Porfirian Mexico was thus ethnically and physically diverse; and the analysis of its diversity could be pushed further- to go beyond region and state, to encompass village, valley and barrio, each of which was capable of eliciting powerful loyalties. Tannenbaum gives the example of eleven neighboring pueblos in Hidalgo, characterized by different economies, different reputations, and different politics.83 Since, after 1910, the Revolution was fundamentally linked to local factors, a great variety of responses was possible; and the problems which this implies for the national historian of the Revolution, in his work of analysis, are analogous to those faced by Diaz - and by his revolutionary successors - in their work of government. During a generation of dictatorship Diaz strove to create a strong, centralized government whose writ would run the length and breadth of the country. He succeeded, at a price. For, in turn, he created an opposition which, no longer confined to a town or state, sought to emulate the national standing of the regime, and to create a national opposition transcending local particularism. The Porfirian regime - and its enemies - whose mortal struggle is now to be recounted were, in a paradoxical sense, mutual allies against the recalcitrant localism of Mexico and of the Mexican people.
THE REGIME
The Porfirian regime gave Mexico a generation of unprecedented peace and stability The Pax Porfiriana was, of course, a flawed peace, based on recurrent repression as well as popular consensus; nevertheless, the continuity of government, local and national, and the absence of serious civil war, contrasted with the endemic political conflict of the fifty years after Independence. Diaz knew the old days: he had fought against the conservatives and their French allies in the 1860s, against his fellow-liberals, Juárez and Lerdo in the I870s, finally battling his way to the presidency. Liberal by affiliation, Díaz displayed more appetite for power than adherence to principle and, once president, he resolved to curb factionalism, to blur the liberal-conservative battle-lines, and to create a strong, centralized regime around his own person.84 For Mexico, it was the end of ideology. Old Liberals died offer were harassed into silence or grew fat on the spoils of office; the Church was conciliated and allowed, tacitly, to recover some of its old importance, political, social and economic. The slogan of the Porfiriato summed it up: 'mucha administración y poca politica' - 'plenty of administration and not too much politics'.
In the early days Diaz had a deft touch. He played off rival provincial factions, perpetuating divisions where it suited him, throwing the weight of the 'center' behind a favored party, thereby creating a loyal client.85 The caciques and generals who had riveted their control on to particular states - AIvarez in Guerrero, Méndez in the Puebla sierra, the Cravioto clan in Hidalgo - were patiently prised from power or cajoled into alliances, or, when they were allowed to die in peace, succeeded by Porfirian appointees. Some, like the Craviotos, who never crossed the President, survived for decades. Others, one-time enemies of Diaz, saw the advantage of detente. In Chihuahua, Luis Terrazas (one of the north's self-made men, he was the son of a butcher) had Opposed Diaz during the liberal infighting of the 1870s and the president accordingly maintained anti-Terracista administrations in the state through the 1880s and 1890s. Meanwhile, by judicious investment and marriage, Terrazas built up an empire of cattle ranches, flour and textile mills, banks and factories worth over 27m. pesos. Old rancours faded: Terrazas became state governor again in 1903 and was succeeded by his son-in-law Enrique Creel in 1907. Political hegemony now complemented economic power, as the Creel-Terrazas oligarchy came to dominate state politics, local government and the courts.86
At the other end of Mexico, in Yucatán, Olegario Molina - 'a man who has made not only himself but all his family, down to the nephews and sons-in-law of cousins´ - created a similar politico-economic empire, based on henequen. Though a member of the 'Divine caste' of richest planters, Molina could not compare with Terrazas for sheer landholdings; but he and his son-in-law, Avelino Montes, served as Mexican agents for the International Harvester Co., the monopolistic buyer of Yucatan's henequen. 87 In addition to his economic muscle, Molina became state governor in 1902; one of his brothers was jefe politico of Mérida, another President of the United Railways of Yucatán; lower in the clan, the son of a cousin served as Inspector of Mayan Ruins - in which capacity, he told two English travelers, 'he had never been to Chichén Itzá but . . . he had satisfactory photographs'. The Creel-Terrazas and Molina-Montas oligarchies were - sheer wealth apart - only exceptional in that they finally added national to local preferment: Creel served as Foreign Minister Molina as Minister of Fomento (Development) in the penultimate Diaz cabinet.
Most local elites remained staunchly local. Over the years, however, as the political mobility of the civil wars gave way to the immobilisme of the late Porfiriato, so they grew older, tighter, and more exclusive. In San Luis Potosi, the Diez Gutiérrez brothers alternated in the statehouse for twenty years Sonora was dominated by General Luis Torres, who served five terms as governor, with a Torresista front-man filling in between each term.89 The Rabasas ran Chiapas: Ramón governed, one son was boss of San Cristóbal another of Tapachula (where he had a monopoly of the slaughter-houses to add to his tram concession in Soconusco), a nephew served as a state deputy, as jefe of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and as commander of the state rurales; a brother-in-law was mayor of Tuxtla and a sister ran the Escuela Normal.90 Brother Emilio, the intellectual of the family, figured prominently in the Cientifico elite of Mexico City. In Puebla, an old companion-in-arms of Diaz, Mucio Martínez, held the governorship for eighteen years (this was no record: Cahuantzi, in Tlaxcala, served twenty-six and others over twenty), enriching himself by operating illegal saloons, brothels, and the state pulque monopoly. He and his official accomplices - notably his Chief of Police, Miguel Cabrera - were bywords for corrupt and arbitrary government, even by Porfirian standards with governors like Mucio Martínez', declared an opposition spokesman revolution is a duty'.91
But Díaz made it clear that the perpetuation of these great satrapies depended on his goodwill In the early days he weeded out governors of doubtful loyalty; thereafter, re-elections and replacements only went ahead after Díaz had weighed local reports and petitions, exercising the ultimate veto of the 'center'. Where necessary, he created counterweights to incumbent caciques: the young, ambitious and loyal General Bernardo Reyes was sent as chief of operations in the north east in order to offset the influence of Generals Treviño and Naranjo, and to bind these distant states to the central government; Treviño and Naranjo turned from public life to private business and their many clients were prised from power. But there was a revealing postscript. Elected governor of Nuevo León, Reyes enjoyed two decades of uninterrupted power - a model ruler and a prop of the Porfirian establishment. But when men began to talk of Reyes as presidential timber, Díaz was swift to act, and among the decisive measures he took in 1909, in order to eradicate Reyes as a political threat, was the appointment of the aged General Gerónimo Treviño as military commander in the north east. The wheel had come full circle; in the end, as in the beginning, the divide-and-role principle kept all the strings in Díaz's hands and these hands had only to twitch, at the apprehension of an over-mighty subject, for the threat to be removed.
If, in the last analysis, the 'centre' prevailed over these local oligarchies, Diaz certainly took care not to antagonize too many provincial caudillos at one time; he buttressed their authority so long as they remained loyal, and he was not too bothered when state governors - who on their visits to the capital strove to convey an impression of culture and civilization - drank, domineered, grafted, and abducted. Loyalty, rather than civic responsibility, was the chief desideratum. Hence, a large proportion of Porfirian governors - maybe 70% - were presidential favourites, imported into alien states, where their prime allegiance was to their president and maker, rather than to their provincial subjects: Antonio Mercenario of Guerrero, for example, knew the state merely as overseer of the Huitzuco mines, owned by Diaz's wife; his successor, Agustin Mora, was another outsider, from Puebla. Local opinion might be outraged, but governors tended to be loyal, even servile. As a result, when the Revolution came, it was not, like so many Latin American revolutions, the work of ambitious state governors (Urquiza riding out of Entre Ríos to topple Rosas, Varges seizing power from Rio Grande do Sul in 1930), rather, it was an upswelling of popular feeling directed not only against Diaz but also - even more so - against the creatures he had installed in the state palaces of the Federation.
The army, the other great source of Latin American revolutions, offers a comparable case. At the outset, the Porfirian regime had a military complexion three-quarters of the state governors of 1885 were generals, even if only two or three were career soldiers. By 1903, however, the complement of military governors had fallen from eighteen to eight and those who survived and prospered politically were those, like Reyes, who displayed administrative talents as well as military skills. Meanwhile, the military establishment itself was cut back: the number of generals by a careful quarter, the total strength by a third, from thirty to twenty thousand. Even this was paper strength, for when, in 1910, the army was called upon to face its biggest test, only 14,000 or so men could be put into the field. '' Auxiliary forces, too, like the state militias had been savagely pruned (in the interests of centralization) and, as peace reigned and municipal government decayed, the once vigorous local defense forces had fallen into disuse. This run-town of the bloated armed forces of the 1870s made political and budgetary sense, eliminating the gang of power- and peso-hungry generals which had battened on the treasury since Independence. And it worked militarily: thanks to the new railway network, Díaz could dispatch troops into areas of disaffection and stifle revolts with unprecedented speed and efficiency. But this low-cost strategy involved risks, which were dramatically revealed in 1910- 11, when revolts proliferated, and the army, confined to the major towns and the vulnerable railway lines proved inadequate to maintain the regime.
Díaz's was not a military regime. True, the army played an important part in maintaining the Pax Porfiriana: it had fought no foreign opponent since the French quit Mexico in I867, and officers like Reyes and Victoriano Huerta won their laurels and secured presidential favour by 'pacifying actions' and punitive expeditions, in which rebellious Indians or political dissidents were the victims. But the regime enjoyed other - civilian, caciquista - institutional bases and the army was in no sense an autonomous political actor: it took its orders from Díaz and carried them out loyally; rarely did officers, like Heriberto Frías, denounce in public the repressive actions they had to perform in practice. Indeed, the army underwent gradual professionalism (in the 1900s, along Prussian lines) and it became less a bastion of conservative privilege, more a carrère ouverte aux talents, especially middle-class talents. At the top, Diaz's generals grew old (by 1910 all the divisional generals were in their seventies, veterans, like Díaz himself, of the mid-century civil wars) they had acquired European spiked helmets and waxed moustaches to match chair European munitions and European military manuals; under their leadership the army served as a loyal arm of the dictatorship, devoid of political pretensions. The Revolution changed all that.
What the Revolution failed to change - if we compare the 1900s and the 1920s - was the position of the rank -and- file, who were for the most part reluctant conscripts, rounded up by the authorities to meet required quotas, or even dragged from the gaols. Since most were Indian or mestizo, foreign military opinion disdained them as quasi-colonial levies (an estimation which was not altogether wide of the mark). Not surprisingly, they were unreliable. When a picket of press-ganged troops was set to guard a prison work gang, an additional police detachment had to keep an eye on the troops; when soldiers wore sent to Salina Cruz to protect a gang of West lndian labourers, whose presence the local workers resented, 'the first request of the officer in charge was to have strong blockhouses built, as the only means of preventing his soldiers from running away and marauding in the neighborhood. For the common people, forced service in the army was among the most feared punishment, and one that a good many rebel leaders (such as Zapata and Calixto Contreras) had suffered. A few significant individuals thereby gained some familiarity, not which the arts of war, but with the internal working in the army, and the army acquired a mass of sullen conscripts, many on the look-out for the first opportunity to desert.
In the old days, when Díaz was young, the power of the military had been rivaled by that of the Catholic Church. But the liberal victory in the civil wars of the 1850s and 1860s had broken the economic power of the Church, stripping it of its huge landed wealth, and laws now curtailed the Church's ability either to educate outside church schools, or to pray, process and preach outside church buildings. The defeat of the conservatives left the Church in political limbo, shunned by the liberal rulers of Mexico and compelled, by its adherence to Pins IX and the Syllabus, to abjure them. But as a moral force, capable of influencing the hearts and minds of men (and even more of women), the Church remained powerful and Díaz, keen to maintain a somnolent political climate, had no intention of going the way of doctrinaire, priestbaiting Liberals. On the contrary, his regime witnessed a gradual, though never total, detente between Church and state. The laws and the landed status quo remained (too many Liberals had a stake in that for any change to be contemplated) but the rules were gently bent, or overlooked, especially in states where devout Porfiristas ruled, and clerical garb reappeared on the streets, church bells were rung, religious lessons were tacked on at the end of the day in secular schools. Diaz sanctioned detente in Mexico, just as Pope Leo Xlll did globally: the Archbishop of Mexico, exiled by the liberals, returned to officiate at Diaz's wedding; when the old prelate died in 1891, Diaz attended his funeral. Some die-hard Liberals denounced this backsliding, just as some more radical Catholics began to question the social abuses of the Porfiriato; in the course of the 1900s, as the following chapter shows, both became more vociferous. Till then, the Church-State conflict remained mated, to the advantage of the regime, and Diaz, if he had not won a fervent ally in the Church, had at least disarmed a potential opponent.
The regime's neglect of constitutional requirements, evident in the case of the Church, was even clearer in the operations of Mexico's supposedly representative democracy. Díaz's Mexico was thus a leading member of that great tribe of 'artificial democracies', states in which political practice diverged radically from imposed, liberal theory.107 Mexican politics were shot through with fraud, graft and nepotism; vices in the eyes of the regime's critics, but sources of strength to Porfirian rulers, complementing brute force, and so deeply entrenched that they easily survived the overthrow of the Porfirian System. It was expected that men in power, nationally and locally, would protect and advance their families and compadres, that political and judicial decisions would be influenced by considerations of personal gain, that concessions and contracts would be awarded according to criteria other the purely economic. The mordida- the 'bite', or bribe- was an integral part of business and politics: Lord Cowardray, the Brittish oil magnate, probably never 'bribed any of the Mexicans', commented an ingenuous (and mistaken) diplomat, '[but] he sometimes gave valuable presents and he appointed prominent Mexicans to positions which did not involve much work in his businesses'. But, in indulging in such methods - greasing palms, trading favours and recruiting clients-foreigners merely followed the local rules. The bonds of blood, compadrazgo and clientelism (the most ubiquitous of the allegiances mentioned earlier) stretched across Mexican society: 'each employee represents a whole hierarchy of protectors'. Out in the sticks, for example, muleteers needed the favourable recommendation of the local political boss to secure trade; state governors, as we have seen, advanced their friends and relatives wholesale; officers in the rural police - in defiance of regulations - commanded over and promoted their own sons and nephews.
Hence, when the bastard son of the jefe político of Tulancingo (Hgo) was threatened with arrest by the jefe of neighbouring Tenango del Doria, the response was typical: 'son,' his father said, 'I am the jefe politico of Tulancingo and the Governor of the state is Pedro Rodriguez; I am his intimate friend and we shall succeed in ousting that jefe in Tenango . . . who has ordered your arrest'. The outcome is unknown; the story - told by a 'garrulous, simple-minded individual'- may even be apocryphal; but it is in keeping with the mores of Porfirian Mexico. Politics was less a high-minded, Gladstonian striving in the public interest, than a source of power, security and patronage, in a society where opportunities for advancement were often limited. A growing number of Mexicans, however, deplored this state of affairs and sought to close the chasm between constitutional precept and political practice; for, as long as constitutions remain, however neglected and abused, authoritarian regimes (be they artificial liberal democracies or pseudo-workers' states) can hardly expect their subjects to maintain indefinitely a 'willing suspension of disbelief regarding matters political and constitutional. Eventually, as Diaz found, the constitutional chickens come home to roost.
For a generation, however, it worked. Within the central government, the executive, with Diaz at its head, was all-powerful. The Supreme Court, commented a critic, was more 'courtesan' than court; in this it reflected the position of the judiciary as a whole. Opposition groups in Congress - still vocal in the 1880s - were gradually silenced, as their members were harassed and as rigged elections guaranteed an increasingly loyal legislature. Relatives and cronies of the president packed the Chamber, and fellow-Oaxaqueños rose high in government and administration. Local factions who sought to field a candidate for state governor, and who therefore needed Diaz's support, could do worse chan pick a native of Oaxaca - 'that favoured spot . . . so productive of statesmen' - even if the governorship was that of San Luis. At both state and national level, therefore, the legislature was effectively appointed by the executive and its members were cyphers, 'I doubt', remarked an English men in Durango, 'if 1% of the inhabitants could tell their names '.The irrelevance of Congress became a byword. When one Federal deputy had failed either to the Chamber or - more surprising - to collect his salary for two months 'they sent an urgent messenger and ascertained that he had died eight months he was ever elected'; another apocryphal story, perhaps, but one that is revealing.
Political power, during the Porfiriato, was concentrated in a small coterie, surrounding the dictator - a national oligarchy paralleling the state oligarchies mentioned. First elected to the presidency in 1876, after a revolt against Laredo and the evils of re-election, Diaz secured his own re-election on occasions; following the presidential term of his old compadre Manuel Gonzales (1880-4) he ruled for twenty-seven consecutive years. Early presidential rivals, González, Dublán, Pacheco, Romero Rubio, were beaten off and by 1890's Diaz's personal dictatorship was not only established but was clearly seen to be established. Now, as the president entered his sixties, a new political generation, familiar with and molded by the years of peace, came to the fore, replacing the old generals and caciques. They paused to wonder what would happen (what, in particular, would happen to them) when the lynchpin system was removed; in 1897 their fears were stimulated by an unsuccessful attempt on Diaz's life and Finance Minister Limantour, on a trip abroad, learned that foreign bankers were also worried about the political succession.
The 1890s thus saw the first attempts to place the regime on a surer institutional footing. In 1892 a group of Díaz supporters formed the Liberal Union, advocated the president's third re-election in return for certain concessions which, they argued, would strengthen the regime, ensure continuity of government and avert the 'terrible crisis' of succession which they foresaw when Diaz was removed from the scene. Even some critics of the regime regarded their proposals as 'noble and pure'. A third re-election, the Liberal Union conceded, meant a sacrifice of democratic hopes, but this was warranted by the situation; peace, now established, had to be preserved, and Mexico could not implement the fall democracy of the 1857 Constitution without risking anarchy. Future reforms depended on continued peace and material progress. Hence, though the Liberal Union made moderate political proposals, advocating immovability of the judiciary and the creation of a vice-presidency, its chief concern was for continued economic development: more railways, a rationalized fiscal system, the suppression of internal customs barriers, European immigration, and further cuts in the military budget. This insistence on the primacy of material progress and on the need to match political reforms to the level of economic development revealed the positivist influence at work among the Porfiristas of the Liberal Union. Hence, claiming a Comtian and 'scientific' view of society, they acquired their nickname: the Cientificos.
But this move towards a party organization (which some hoped would be seconded by conservative, Catholic interests, creating an embryonic two-party system) was soon thwarted and the mild reforms were ignored or compromised away. Perhaps the last, best chance of gradual change, guided from above, was thereby lost and personal rule, lacking institutional supports, persisted. Even when Diaz conceded the vice-presidency in 1904, he made sure that its incumbent was (as he admitted himself) an unpopular adicto, who posed no threat to the president: Vice-President Corral began unpopular, remained unpopular, and Diaz took pains to keep him uninformed and uninfluential. Fearful of rivals and jealous of his untrammelled power, Diaz thus perpetuated a variety of personal rule which, after the manner of the Virgin Queen, kept the succession an open and potentially explosive question.
But this was not the end of the Científicos. Though their proposals of 1892 foundered, they were clearly the coming men, a new generation (most of them were born in the 1850s) who now stepped into the shoes of the moribund liberal veterans of Díaz's own generation. They were also a new type: urbane, cosmopolitan, articulate and well read. Led (unofficially, for they constituted no formal political party) first by Díaz's father-in-law, Romero Rubio, and then by Finance Minister Limantour, they acquired a comprehensive range of political, administrative and business posts, amassing huge wealth and, supposedly, huge influence. Over time, their positivist emphasis on economic development squeezed out their moderate political reformism and they emerged as the foremost advocates, apologists, and beneficiaries of Mexican capitalism. The Científicos have often been portrayed as corrupt vendepatrias, representatives of a comprador bourgeoisie which - unlike the national bourgeoisie of the Revolution - delivered the Mexican economy into foreign hands.120 Certainly the Científicos favoured foreign investment, which grew some thirty-fold during the Porfiriato, with the US supplying the greatest share.121 Of total direct foreign investment, about one-third went into railways, a quarter into mining, the remainder into banks, utility companies, property ventures, textile factories and oil. The Científicos involved themselves directly in these operations, handling concessions and contracts and serving on company boards: Pablo Macedo, for example, President of the Federal Congress, was director of two banks, of the Aguila Oil Co., the Panamerican Railway, the Buen Tono cigarette firm, the Mexican Light and Power Co., and the Light and Power Co. of Pachuca; Fernando Pimentel y Fagoaga, Mayor of Mexico City in 1910, served on the board of four banks, of the Chapala Hydro-Electric Co., the San Rafael Paper Co., the Industrial Co. of Atlixco, the Sierra Lumber Co., and the Monterrey Smelting Co.122
But the Cientificos were nor simply profiteers masquerading as positivists. They had a genuine vision of a dynamic, developing Mexico. They saw foreign investment as a crucial factor in this development, but they looked to Europe to offset American influence and they anticipated the day when - as Limantour and Pablo Macedo argued - domestic capital, already dominant in some sectors, would assume a greater determining role within the economy.123 By the 1900s, indeed, a new economic nationalism emerged in Porfirian-Cientifico circles: prottective tariffs were raised, the bulk of the railways were merged and taken under government control, and the debates over the new Mining Code indicated that the Cientificos' design to nationalise the process of economic development was real and not just rhetorical. Furthermore, both Científico thinking and government policy recognised that development also depended on factors which were 'non-economic'. Crime, alcoholism, illiteracy, squalor and disease were subjects of lively debate and study: Justo Sierra championed educational reform (and the Porfiriato witnessed a modest but significant improvement in educational provision); preventive medicine and urban sanitation were overhauled. Achievements in these fields were variable and limited, in particular, the Científico strategy of development encountered major, 'structural' barriers which it showed no desire or capacity to dismantle. Their demolition was not to come until after the Revolution. But it cannot be denied that the Científicos had a programme of development which - however unjust or misconceived - went beyond personal peculation and collective entreguismo. It was a programme, furthermore, which later revolutionaries plagiarized at will and it was certainly not a formula for standpat conservatism. Politically inflexible and authoritarian, the Científicos were economically progressive, dedicated to the principle of 'progress' and capable, it seems, of imparting a similar dedication among their minions. Indeed, it was as much their fervent commitment to social and economic change as their resistance to political reform, which brought about their eventual downfall.
For by 1910 the position of the Científicos proved to be precarious. Over the long term their economic strategy appeared to be vindicated: during the Porfiriato, as population grew at 1.4% per annum, economic production increased at a rate of 2. 7%, exports at 6. 1 %. Mexico experienced a phase of export-led growth not unusual in Latin America during these years and this enabled Limantour, Finance Minister since 1893, to convert a situation of chronic governmental bankruptcy into one of unprecedented fiscal and budgetary stability. In the course of the 1890s Limantour balanced the budget, reformed the treasury, abolished internal tariffs and overhauled the Country's banking institutions. In 1905, he placed Mexico on the gold standard, eliminating the fluctuations in value of the peso, hitherto based on silver. By 1910 the Mexican government had reserves in excess of 60m. pesos and could borrow at 5%; indeed, when the Revolution broke out, Limantour was in Europe, negotiating a reconversion of the national debt at 4%.129 Limantour's success depended to a large extent on global trends which - as the recession of 1907 displayed - were beyond his control. But even then Diaz retained his faith in Cientifico theory and practice. Sound credit and a healthy budget were essential ingredients of the Pax Porfiriana, which preceding regimes had lacked. to their cost. In the financial world, therefore, where Díaz's own abilities were limited, the president readily deferred to his team of loyal and efficient technocrats.130
Politically however, the Científicos were weak; and, by 1910, bitterly unpopular, the very term 'Cientifico' having become a general term of abuse, indicating a Porfirista, reactionary, or almost any political opponent associated with the old regime. Unpopular village officials were 'Científicos', often misspelt. Apart from their greed and graft, the Científicos were supposed to have ensnared Díaz, making him their pliant puppet. Down in Oaxaca, where Díaz's friends, high and low, were still numerous, Limantour was 'universally considered a dangerous man, a sinister factor . . . dictating the policy of the President; Limantour was forced to complain to Diaz himself of the 'daily attacks whose instigators (whom you and I know well) try . . . to portray you before the whole world as a puppet manipulated by the "cientificos". Some historians have taken these polemics at face value. Yet it is clear that the Cientificos, for all their wealth and contacts, enjoyed limited political power, and their position was always conditional on the favour of Diaz himself. They were rooted in Mexico City, where they held their cabinet or congressional posts and managed their legal and business affairs; with the exception of Creel and Molina (and maybe Rabasa) they exercised no power in the provinces, though their unpopularity knew no such bounds. The loathed Cientificos remained an intellectual, technocratic elite, confined to the metropolis, their influence 'deriving from the only authentic source of power, which was Porfirio Díaz'. This dependence, indeed, was heightened in the closing years of the regime. While politics remained the prerogative of narrow camarillas, national and local, the Científicos prospered, but as the issue of the succession began to agitate the political nation and as new political movements got under way, they faltered. They lacked popularity, they lacked support among Porfiristas in the provinces, they lacked the charisma and common touch which, in the novel situation of political mobilisation, counted for more than seats on the board or a well-stocked law library. Open - even half open - politics did not suit them. Limantour, passed over for vice-president in 1904, when he had fallen victim to a hostile press campaign, was no more popular in 1910. There was no question of the Científicos surviving the fall of their master: all that remained of them after 1910 was the opprobrious label and the developmentalist ideology, soon to be taken up by others.
The Cientificos' crucial weakness was their neglect of the provincial grassroots. Diaz knew better: his regime depended, at root, on the tight control exercised over the municipalities of the country by political bosses, the jefes politicos, appointed by the executive. It was through these three hundred or so key officials, 'who, at the moment of action, were indispensable political agents' that the Porfirian regime exercised its social control and it was in reaction to these many petty 'Díazpotisms' that local opposition and; revolutionary movements often developed.
Mexico s municipalities had longstanding democratic traditions, tracing back to the self-governing Spanish towns and Indian villages of the colony, and later enshrined in the liberal constitutions of the nineteenth century. But, particularly since the days of Bourbon centralism, power-hungry administrations had cut back the authority of municipal government, of mayor and town council. By the 1900s, outright executive appointees had replaced elected of officials in certain states, such as Chihuahua. 136 Elsewhere, elected of officials only secured election through the good offices of the executive, that is, of the jefe politico. As a result, local elections became a sham, conducted amidst apathy and indifference, and municipal authorities became the supine servants of the executive, irremovable, unresponsive to local opinion, and starved of funds. The strings of local power were gathered in the hands of the jefe politico and only in regions where centralisation had made less headway - in the sierras and the remote south - did municipalities retain same of their old freedom and autonomy.
The character of the jefe varied from place to place. Like many Porfirian officials, jefe often owed their position to family connections: Luis Demetrio Molina, of Mérida, had uncle Olegario to thank; Silvano Martínez of Urnapán (Mich.) had married the daughter of state governor Mercado. Such family relationships penetrated deep into the fabric of local government. Some municipalities - like Guachóchic, in the Chihuahua sierra- were nests of nepotism, in which a couple of related families monopolised political, fiscal and judicial offices: Urique, in the same region, represented 'el colmo de compadrazgo', where a single family ran the beef trade and held all federal, state and municipal posts. Increasingly, as the power of national and state governments grew, these local hierarchies depended on - often were created by - forces external to the municipio itself. Standing at the apex of the local hierarchy, the jcfc politico sought to reconcile its interests (usually the interests of the well-to-do) with the growing demands of the 'centre'. Where such a reconciliation could not be effected, the regime faced the opposition of entire Communities, from top to bottom. More often, the jefe, governed to the satisfaction of the well-to-do and to the disgust of the pelados.
Most jefes were imposed from outside, by the 'centre'. Some were military men, like Colonel Celso Vega, the middle-aged army regular who ran Baja California Norte, or the disastrous Brigadier-General Higinio Aguilar, an old veteran of the French Intervention, who lasted two and a half months as jefe politico at Cuernavaca (Mor.), antagonising the population, until a fraud charge removed him from office. There were also suave jefes, who impressed foreign travelers with their culture: the antiquarian Andrés Ruiz of Tlacolula (Oax. ) whom, it was said, the local people 'trusted and liked', or the 'well-read Cicerone, Enrique Dabbadie of Cuautla (Mor.), who proved no literary slouch when facing political opposition in his district in 1909, he ordered the mounted police to break-up demonstrations and arrested a crowd of merchants, clerks and peons…. some without charges being filed, most simply because of their reputations. Curbing the opposition in this way was one of the main tasks of the jefe politico, particularly in the last years of the Porfiriato when political passions were rising. Puebla, seat of the corrupt and arbitrary Martinista administration, became a centre of political dissidence, which the Martinista jefe, Joaquín Pita, sought to contain. When the governor s car was stoned in the streets of the city, Pita (dismissing the political signficance of the affair) had thirty alleged culprits consigned to the army. At election rime he personally closed down polling booths which might deliver an anti-government vote and had their rash supervisors arrested. The jefe of the Chihuahuan mining town of Batopilas similarly disfranchised the opposition, denying them booths and sending a list of miners thought to be sympathetic to the opposition to the American manager, in the hope that he would apply suitable pressure. Though there were precedents for such action, the manager declined: foreign businessmen were wary of direct involvement in the flux of Porfirian politics.
Foreign businessmen did, however, take steps to cultivate the local jefe, and they valued his co-operation in the maintenance of order: the jefe, it might be said, stood in the front line of the Porfirian 'collaborating élite', performing a function no less vital than that of the Cientificos. Some jefes-like an earlier incumbent at Batopilas - defused strike agitation by diplomacy and exhortation; Carlos Herrera at Orizaba, and even Joaquin Pita at Puebla, showed an awareness of the problems of the textile workers and a clear desire to combine repression with sympathy. In this respect - and particularly where the textile workers were concerned - they reflected a more general change taking place in Porfirian official attitudes towards labour. But elsewhere, most notably, it would seem; in the wild and remote-mining camps of the north, jefes preferred the stick to the carrot and 'mine managers openly boasted of these methods to timíd investors'. The jefe politico of Mapimi, for example, broke a strike at the Peñoles mine by riding into town with the police, dragging the strikers from their homes, and beating up the furnacemen who refused to work at the old rate: a case of trop de zele, it would seem, for the company were prepared to concede a pay rise, after a suitable delay.
In addition to political surveillance and peace-keeping, the jefe could fulfil a number of informal functions: "he was the local authority of the central government, the boss of the town and often its moneylender, pawnbroker, house agent, merchant and marriage broker at the same time, and all greatly to his own profit". Some resisted the gross temptations of office and exercised a benevolent despotism over their districts. Demetrio Santibáñez, despite an earlier record of political repression in southern Veracruz, 'ruled the district (of Tehuantepec) with firmness and tact" settling complex conjugal disputes with threats and blandishments, rattling off official letters on his typewriter, while stocking his private menagerie with parrots, monkeys and geckos. Santibañez governed with the support of Tehuana cacica, thereby, it seems guaranteeing his popularity: a few years later when the Revolution gave the chance, his son was made jefe politico by popular acclamation. There were other jefes - like Juan Francisco Villar of Uruapán, who had 'practised Democracy in the full flood of Dictatorship'- who were the objects of popular esteem and recall. Equally, there were cases where the jefe was exonerated of abuses committed by other officials: the corrupt judicial authorities of Parral, the police chief who was a 'real tyrant' at Jiménez (Chih.).
As these examples suggest, there was considerable scope for individual variation, which in turn might be translated into a varied pattern of revolutionary response after 1910. Given the opportunity, many communities were discriminating in offloading some officials, retaining, even recalling others. Yet, even here, it seems, the system contained a quantum of oppression which it was hard to avoid: if the jefe politico escaped censure, then the police chief, juez de paz, or tax-collector incurred opprobrium; the licence to oppress was not eliminated, simply shared around. It was particularly evident, too, in certain recognizable and recurrent cases, where the imperatives of social and political circumstances defied individual tact or reputation. In regions of acute agrarian tension, for example, the jefe, as appointee of the centre and upholder of law and order, was easily converted into an ally of expansionist landlords. Similarly, where a small commercial elite held a community and its rural hinterland in an economic vice, the jefe partnered mercantile exploiters - at Acapulco for example. But the jefe was most acutely and specifically resented in regions where he acted as the arm of an entrenched state oligarchy, enforcing a new and rigid centralism in defiance of municipal interests and independence: in Chihuahua, where Governor Creel replaced elected with appointed jefes municipales, creating a tribe of "veritable sultans"; or in Sonora, where the Torres administration likewise dismantled elected local government in a state where political literacy and expectations were on the increase.
In circumstances like these, the jefe politico appeared as a tyrant subverting local liberties. Hence communities preferred that a local man should occupy this crucial office, for a local man might display some degree of social responsibility, and, after 1911, demands to this effect came thick and fast, coupled sometimes with declarations that 'this pueblo refuses to be abandoned into the hands of a stranger who comes from outside'. During the Porfiriato, however, outsiders predominated, and the chief criterion for appointment was loyalty to the executive - to the state governor, and to Diaz himself, who took; a close interest in the selection of jefes politicos. The Porfirian regime, bent on centralisation, knew no other way of operating. As for its Opponents some sought the end of centralization and the consequent
.lhtJlirion (~l'tilt- /{'/iián?~~. t~r!"'r~ W()tilti rC't.lin bllt tiLmoCratist' tilC system
~nili'~mg ir answtr.lhlt o' irs suh~ta-rs. Mearltirne, rhc regime jutiigetl a jef¿ accorciling to his StltCCSS ;ir nl.nl;`L:hig clections, mainraining order, silencing political opposition anci labour unrest. If he failed in these respects - as Dabbadie appreciared at Cuaurl;l - his remunerative employment was at an end; s~milarly, municipal otficials who went against their governor's wishes were soon our of a job. 159
Loyalty to Diaz rather than responsibility to subjects was the hallmark of the system: for jefes politicos 'the sole desire is to keep the Centre happy, and the Centre is happy so long as there is no revolution and not too many bandits in the countryside. The rest is neither here nor there'. i60 If keeping the Centre happy allowed, even encouraged, more ealightened rule, as it apparently did with Herrera ar Orizaba or Santibáñez at Tehuantepec, that, for the locals, ~vas a fortunate bonus. More often, as in Durango, the jcfa were 'men who, tO say the least, could never be elected', while same, like RaSael Cervantes (San JU¿" Guadalupe, Dgo),.Jesús González Garza (Velardeña, Dgo), Cipriano Espinosa (San Felipe, Gto), Ignacio Hernández (San Miguel Allende, Gto), were kno~vn tyrants, spurs to l"al rebellion. 16[
The position of the jcfc lent itself to corruption. In Oaxaca, a prospective appointee, aware that the of ficial salary of r 50 pesos a month was inadequate, had to tout himself around the local planters and businessmen, seeking retainers in return for services to be rendered. 162 Others supplemented their income with fines, some of which were diverted into the jefc's pocket. Compla~a,inst petty, arbitrary fines were legion: in the prosperous towns of Sonora and~ the booming oil purr of Tampico; in Guanajuato, where Indians were fined for coming into town wearing their baggy drawers; in ChihuaLua where drunks were mulcted twenty-five pesos, and a¿~aw were fined for watering their burros at public springs. 163 Joaquín Pita, it wes said, made so much money fining the people of Puebla that he paid his boss, Governor Martfnez,~ for the~privilege; rather3 tháh r"eiving a satary, whiile the 1cfc of Soconusco wes reckoned to have accumulated a personal fortune of a quarter of a million pesos in three years, dispossessing people of their land and extorting excessive fines. 164 Early in s9~ ~, his fortune made, he quit the region for Mexico City, fearing assassination.
Apart from such quasi-judicial peculation, rhe jcie enjoyed other means of makmg money. Dabbadie, in Cuautla, embezzled political funds (the Revolation brought to light many similar malpractices); increasecti, often arbitrary taxes were a constant complaint in Chihuahua and elsewhere; Aguilar lost his lob at Cuernavaca for 'defrauding rhe feeble-minded heir to a Cuernavaca tortune' ~GS Even if some of rhese allegations were untrue, or exaggerated rheyindicatedsomethingotthepublicimageofthejefeandofhisstewardship Cerrainly jtJes followetl guhernarorial cxample and prevailing political mores m bltlrrlng rheir otfici;ll allt' priv.llc unctions. In Yucatán, the jefe politico of
Ceh man;lgt'ci .t MOIitlil pliIIltittit)Il, Whilt .~norller r.n~ a htl~ci~cr s -~~~~~1, ~,vhich local peoplc wiere ohligcti to patrollisc, m tilC tiCtrililCnt ot tOIlipCtitOrS and customers aliikc.'" In Chihuahua, tOO, local officials, appoinrc~l h~ GOvernor Crcel. worc on the payroll of Crecl's privarc companics. ,t'7 SOllOrall ofhcials - jeles, judges, police chieh - ran liquor stores and gambling houses. [68 The jep's control of prison work gangs also proved lucrative: one jeJ; used forced labour to pave a road through his brother's hacienda; another had prisoners build him a private house; jefes in Guerrero reaped profits supplying work gangs for the Chilpancingo-Acapulco highway.'69 Perhaps most lucrative, certaialy most infamous, was the trade in cnçanrLados, 'hocked' labourers who were consigned, by force or frand, to the semi-slave plantations of the south. Ten per cent of the labourers in the notorious Valle National were reckoned to have been sent there by Rodollo Pardo, jek polisico of nearby Tuxtepec, who by the illegal sale of lands and people has amassed a large fortune'.~70 The jcfc of Pochotla, which lay 'ankle-deep in dust under the blaring sun' of the Pacific, ran a similar trade, while further afield at Pachuca - a large, ran-down mining town on the central plateau, where the miners' acquaintance with liquor and unemployment helped business - the jefc annually sent soo labourers south for plantation work.
There wes one final prerogative of the jcfc which, if less profitable, was no less gratifying to the official or galling to the people .in his charge: the jcfc's droit de seigneur. 'To possess by force or deceit', it has been said, is the essence of machismo, and the jcfc politico, along with other members of Porfirian officialdom, had ample opportunity to play the macho, again blurring public and private activities. 172 The caciques of Azteca (Mor.), for example, 'took advantage of poor girls. If they liked a girl, they got her - they always enjoyed fine women just because of the power they had. One of the caciques died at eighty in the arms of a fifteen-year-old girl'.l73 A jCk at Mariscal (Chis.) celebrated his birthday by 'inviting' a young woman ro his house, while his mén ran her novio out of town; his counterpart at the Yincateco port of Progreso, Colonel José María Ceballos, aroused a 'very keen hatred' among the local people, not least because of his 'questionable attitude towards the young girls of Progreso', and his propensity to arrest their fathers in order to further his suit. 174 Similar kinds of sexual exploitation had impelled rebels - like Pancho Villa - on their early outlaw carcers. In the case of Ceballos it was his libidinous pursuits, rather than the forced conscription, exorbitant taxation, heavy fines and 'arbitrary and dictatorial behaviour in general', of all of which he wes guilty, which finally brought his downEall. For in ~ 9 ~ 4 the daughter of a Progreso butcher, Lino Muñoz, spurned the jefc's advances: the father rebelled rather than hce reprisals and, recruiting fifty men, he captured the port, paraded Ceballos in the square, and had him shot. The Revolution thus came to Progreso after the manner of a Corsican vendetta.
In the main, Porfirian officialdom's sins of commission weighed most
heavily on thL pL.i`~ti/!.U ilit' ~~,nl~u~,n peoplc, who sui'7erctl arLirr;lry ¡U1LS, arrests, hlll~ressincnr. .icl.~,rrar~o~u cven - in notorious cases like lepames ((:ol.) - murder. l ?-i 1'ilCy conce~vcti a bitter harred of the regime, h1 irs 1`x:al manifesrarion, and rhe Revolurion was therefore characterised both by sudUen, violent, popular uprisings againsr such officials and also by a more general popular hostility to the Porfirian sysrem, and to would-be restorers of that system, whose legitimacy had been irretrievably squandered. This popular reaction must be seen wirhin rLe general context of Porfirian economic and agrarian policy (the subject of chapter three). The gentc derentc on the other hand, the respectable, literate, propertied people, resented Porfirian officialdom somewhat differenrly. Some, ir is true, suffered arrest and imprisonment for their political views. Antonio Sedano, a 'respected merchant' of Cuernavaca, who dabbled in opposition politics, was arrested 'for not having washed down the street' in front of his store; Ponciano Medina, arreseed by the j~6c
0li't~ro of Tuxtepec (Rodolio Pardo again) for participating in an opposition demonstration, chose to pay a fifty peso fine rather than to go to gaol, 'since his social and financial position would not allow his dignity as an honourable businessman to be outraged'. i76 He was gaoled just the same. In genera,~, however, the gentc derentc escaped the more extreme aLuses. Their chief complaint was likely to be the unfeir, sometimes capricious incidence of taxation, which could weigh heavily on small businessmen and artisans. 177 It was perhaps for this reason that 'Commerce' was linked to 'the People in general' as the joint victims of the corrupt city goveroment of Puebla, or that the jefc of San Miguel Allende was said to have 'all the middle and lower class subjugated'. [78
The gente derente complained more of Porfirian sins of omission, of official derelictions of duty. The businessmen of Enseñada, for example, were sick of the extravagance and ineptitude of jefe Celso Vega, a military mediocrity, who was held responsibJe for a smallpox outbre: ak in the region. 17.9 In Chihuahua, the authorities at=Ciudad Camargo tole;rated drunkenness and abduction; the jefc of the Benito Juárez district of the state could never be found in his of fice; the mflncipal boss at Carichic failed in his duty to support the local schools; at Cusihuaráchic, a fast-growing mining town, the jcfc was a wastrel who kept only two policemen on the payroll, and they slouched about in sandals and sloppy shirts. ChihuaLuan jefes in general, critics complained, feiled to supervise their districts, preferring to sit immobile in the ra6crcra (the head town), save when they left 'to come to the capital for seme banquet'. '~° What the respectable, literate people of Chihuahua wanted wes not less goverament, but more, better, responsible government. What such people also wanted wes a governmenr which nor only honoured its constitutional obligarions (an obvious but central point). buir also lived up to irs progressive, 'developmentalist' rhemric. (:ientifico adv`~;lc! oit hard work, hygiene, sobriety and'progress' - values tO whit-h respetrahle critics wore also stroogly attached - was
dailY betit~i nt rht iatEs olt tit~ Ul small rowns, lil;e Poram (8ra), whert rht drunk polite ~ h~ct t-oUitI be ifoun~l wirh his cronies - rhe judge, posrmilsrer an~i 5choolreacher. rllt i~li'tluenrial "governing class' of rhe communiry - drinking, playing billi;trUs. fixing deals, while outside rhe streets remained flnswepr, rhc strcetlighrS wore inadequate, and the only centre of recreation was the saloon. In such towns, inefficiency and dishonesty were the order of the day', while, despite the regimets philosophy, 'all evolution was a sin, and every effort to break with custom a crime'.'~' Científicos like Sierra would have shared the sense of outrage. For critics of this kind, it was not that Cientifico social philosophy fundamentally erred (Cientifico political authoritarianism was, of course, a different matter), ir was rather that the regime had hiled to implement the philosopLy, that it appeared to tolerate in practice the ingrained vices it condemned in principle.
It was additionally vexing for the gentc deccntc that they had no say in the election of locaFi officiaFis, hence no control over their conduct. Sustained pressure, if it came from the right sources and was articulated in the right way, might dislodge an intolerable locaFi boss. Dia2 wes prepared to cast the occasionaFi jefe, like the occasional state governor, to the wolves, in order to assuage public opinion - and po~r cnco~rager Ics antres. P"ulation and oppression had to be nicely judged, as Higinio Aguilar learned to his cost at Cuernavaca. 1iS2 The people of Villa Aldama (Chih.) showed how to set about removing a hated political boss. They mounted an impressive, decorous demonstration, bringing over ~so protesters to the state capital and handing ~n a petition to the governor; on retflroing to Villa Aldama their train was met by 'a group of ladies and señoritas of our botter society, with palms and fFiowers'. Clearly, this was no rabble and since, in the words of the governor, the people of Villa Aldama 'had always given proof of a model peacefulness and notable submissiveness and obedience to the constituted authorities', he agreed to accede to their petition and remove the offending of ficiaFi. '~3
But the gov¿mment did not like doing this too often. Many more p-etrtions and complaints were ignored; some egregiously offending officials (in part~cular, one suspects, those who chicfly offended against matepelad~s) survived and prospered.'~4 And from the point of view of the protesters - even successful protesters - this wes a clumsy, expensive and uncertein method of eff"ting changes in local government. When the proposed re-election of unpopular city officials at Tampico produced vocal complaints in December ~9to, the ticket was withdrawn and new candidates were substituted. These were elected 'in the usual form'. Not surprisingly, the townspeople remained d'5satisfied, since they claim that they had no voice in the selection of the new men on this new ticket'. lá5 What thinking, respectable citizens wanted was not thi5 vague and uncertain right of veto (a right rhat could only be exercised °Ccasionally and discreetly), but regular consultation through rhe polls, as rhe C°nStitution provided. Hence arose rhe original slogan of the ~g~o ~revo
lflrion. .\'/`Jr``,vio F:tertil~c .\!/J ll`-`l~r~nn, arlLI rhe reiterate¿i cry fi>r Atun~ritio Li~re, trce local government
In mainraining. in defiance ot rhe Constiturion, a closed, caciquista form of polirics, rhe Porfirian regime had consranr resort to repression, perpetrated by the army or rhe police, particularly the mounted police, the rurales. In some towns, such as Parral, rhe police chief called the tune and incurred popular hostility. ~R6 Elsewhere, at Potam, for example, or Puebla, he acted as ally and crony of the jcfc. The death of Miguel Cabrera, Puebla's chief of police, provoked scurrilous verses in i 9 1 o:
Cabrera arrived in hell, in his bowler har and frockcoac, And a witch said to him: 'Why haven't you brought Pita?'i87
Porfirian police methods were crude: suspects had been known to die in custody (Cabrera had been involved in one famous case) and there were allegations of torture, though in this respect Diaz, and his regime, were mild in comparison with Latin American dictatorships of then and now. Iaa
If ehe regime wes even less a police state than it wes a militarist state, nevertheless it maintained a degree of covert political surveillance, particntarly in the later years, as opposition grew and the president, perLaps, became more suspiciously dictatorial. Plein-clothes policemen watched opposition demonstrations, like those of the Anti-Re-electionist students in I892; in the provinces, governors, jcfes politicos, and military commanders monitored local subversion, reporting to Diaz members of opposition groups and subscribers to opposition newspapers. 189 Governor Martínez of Puebla wes particularly zealous in the collection of political intelligence: he employed a retired ¡policeman, turned newsagent, to furnish the names of those who read the wrong papers; he supplied Díaz with a complete run of the oppositionist Rcgeneración; he sent his hired thugs to pay nocturnal visits on suspect citizens. As ~ new opposition parties - developed in the I900S, they were prompely infiltrated, as were some Masonic lodges. Jcia sent delegates to opposition party conventions (when they were permitted), while the military commander at Juárez hired a 'seductive lady' to worm her way into the Liberal Party and monitor their plans in the US. Political exiles such as these were closely watched (as were their families in Mexico) and there were even attempts at assassination on foreign soil. ~9r'
Within Mexico, the growth of political activity in the ~goos was matched by a parallel growth of secret police activi ry, of which people werc well aware. In Yucatán, the rise of the 'universally detested secret police' added a new dimension to the old caciqu~smo: it was reckoned that Governor Molina had recruited 7oo agents in a city of so,ooo (Mérida), where they 'were used for political and worse purposes by the Governor'. '9~ Creel had his secret police in Chihuahua, too, said to be better known than the uniformed variety, and 'recognisable from miics away' '"2 Nevertheless, Porfirian rulers wore toler
ablY suc~csstul .`r smItmg out ~lisatitction an<l ~luasllh~g rev~,lts. Iil;c ri~~,sc ~`t tgo6 ancl ~ ~)o`~. `>rg¡luisc~i hy thc Liberals 'I'hc first tiicker ot rl~c ~ L) ~ o reVolution was easily doflscci as well. Porfirian polirical intelligence was rllus adeCinate tar pinptlinting known oppositionists. It failed, however, ro convcy an accurate, general picture of political conditions and unresr and it failecl because the kind of reports which governors, jefes and police chiefs liked both to file and to receive were ones in which the strength of the opposirion was deprecated and derided, that of the regime taken for granted. A generation of peace had instilled a fatal political hubris and the regime, insulated from the reality of its own unpopularity, wes encouraged to disregard mounting political and social flarest. Hence the t9 tO revolution came as a surprise.
When it came, the regime proved equal to the challenge in the cities, where most known oppositionists wore gathered and where they could easily be apprehended. But in the coflntqside, soon to be the locus of rebellion, the situation was different. Opposition here was more anonymous, inarticulate, and often unforeseen. Its supposed antidote was the rural police, the rurales, the showpiece of the Pax Porfiriana. The rurales, established in the I8605 as the Juárez government's answer to endemic banditry, had by the ~goos become a symbol of the Porfirian regime's machismo and efficiency. Foreigners, especially foreign ladies, were susceptible to the rurala' fine mounts and dashing rtarro outfits - tight trousers, brief leather jackets, wide sombreros, bandannas, cummerbunds and assorted wesponry. Parading through Mexico City, with sparks flying from their horses' hooves, they cut a fine figure and the romantic u~ra (cultivated by the official press) wes only heightened by the prevalent belief that many rurala were themselves ex-bandits, now given 'the congenial occupation . . . of hunting down other robbers and malcontents'. 193
The truth was more prosaic. The early rurales had included some exguerrilleros, though few bandits. By the ~8gos the majority of recruits were campcsinos and artisans (t,be latter disproportionately represented), many coming from the declining towns of the Bajío.'94 Their activities were less glamorous too: in ~908, for example, the First, Second, and Seventh Rural Corps were engaged escorting railway and factory paymasters, keeping order during Holy Week fiestas or on hacienda paydays, policing local elections, quelling revolts against unpopular authorities, conveying prisoners across Country (chicfly to the penal colonies on the Tres Marias islands off the Tepic Coast) and chasing rustlers and criminal fugitives. The occasional petty train-robber was the closest to the bandit quarry of the good old days. 195 Some r~rales, it is true, lived up to the image. Corporal, later Major, Francisco Cardenas peers impassively from the pages of Casasola, ruggedly handsome in embroidered charro jacket and waistcoat and a broad-brimmed sombrero In ~9~o he hunred down rhe elusive bandir-rebel Sanrañón and killed him on the banks oí rhc Huasunrán River; three years later he collected an even more Prestigious rrophy "" Yer cven Cárdenas' heroics were perhaps, like his
I.lCiiCt. till.ll. ..:.l n .lilti .:~.,; v.111 i)~ llo ttotib' Ih.lr tht rI`rilie.l ot rhc lare
Portlriilrn \VCrt ll] gCnCri~l t,!titr. ~árRt'r, iUlti less dashing thar1 thcir hnage suggesteti. I htv werc ntn ;Ivtrsc ro briltillg helpless peons (somt useCi thilt tavouritc l aru1 Anlericiu1 i;"\J~~~~~~/u, rhe bull's penis), nor to liquidating prisoners by mc.lns of thc ler /~ ga, rhe 'shot while trying to escape' formula which saved rhe aflthoritics rhe embarrassment of a trial. 197 But Paul Vanderwood has ably documentetii their many failings, evident in the Gobernación archive, it not in the pages of Mrs Moats and Mrs Tweedie: their predominanr illiteracy and one-in-three desertion rate, their combination of adolescence and senility, their drunkenness, delinquency, ill discipline and incompetence. ")~
The deportment of the Firsr Rural Corps, on the eve of the Revolution, did not differ much from the average. '99 Its commander had ealisted in t869, one of his corporals was a veteran of the War of the Reform (1857 60). But, an inspector concluded, the demands placed on the officers were not extreme: 'posts in the Rural Police . . . as they are carried out at the moment are reafi sinecures, since the commanders of the detachments, once they establish themselves in the places allocared for residence, apart from procuring a smafil fortune in the shortest possible time, and at any cost, delegate all the duties of the service to subordinates'. The Corps' tasiks - patrolling the railways, haciendas and textile factories of the Puebla-Mexico region - were poorly perGormed. Trains went unescorted (the r~raks preferred to louage in the stations) and managers believed their factories were menaced by labour agitation. The factory workers despised the rn~ralc', while the peons of the C\axaqueña plantation resented their well-paid-employment as field managers and foremen. It was in this (strictly illegal) capaciq that the only energetic detachment of the Corps exhausted their horses patrolling the plantation perimeter and bent their sabres belabouring the field hands. Discipline in the Corps wes lax, or of a crude, pecking-order variety; nepotism was rife; and officers, ~generally illiterate, behaved like petty tyrants.- Ignorant- of the rule-book, they beat their men, reviewed them in shirt-sleeves, neglected their horses, drank, gambled, artended cockfights and ran up bills at the local bars - that is, if they did not, like Corporal Francisco Alvarez, at Atotonilco, run a cantina of their own. The men wore 'peasant garb' (no tight trousers and cummerbunds out in the sticks) and lived in squalid barracks, often with their families. Here, one corporal had -been laid up with rheumatism for six months
While Corporal Alvarez ran his bar and Corporal Gutiérrez policed the plantation, Corporal Pacheco, woo had been stationed at Necaxa for no less than eight years, had built up SO many connections that the town was polarised into Pachequista anci anti-Paclltquista factions. Indeed, relations between the rural polict anci rhe civit aflChoriries wore nor always cordial, and were frequently corrt~l~r: Alvartz. rtt-civing rhe inspector in bed, bousreci of having the ¡udici¡lr~ `,t Aromrlilco h~ his pociitr.''''l
:: !( ~ l",

Clear|y. rtlc '-~~,,~it., wcrL tI'll~rtllilrttl ft~r rtiesililrc~lic l~sl ~'l l`)l~~. I tit ll l~li ~vas to policc rht- countrysidt; rhty were, supposetily. rFe fleer, romorstltss pursuers ot hilnciits an~i rebels; they were the reghnc's hrst line tit tictenct agajnst subversion in the countryside, where political intelligence was p~nJr and which the Federal army, with its troop trains and artillery, couki not casily penetrare That they failed in 1910 was partly because of their unpopularity at the grassrootS (an admirer, with unconscious irony, likened them to 'the Irish constabulary or . that splendid corps, the Guardias Civiles in Spain').2"' But failure can also be attributed to their acquisition, over the years, of new, peace-time habits; to their accumulation, in particular localities, of sinecures, contacts, retainers, kickbacks; to their growing preference for the quiet life in La Simpática Michoacana (Corporal Alvarez's rantina) over that of the huagry, saddle-sore bandit hunter.
The r~ra~, as Vanderwood remarks, were a typical Porfirian institution, a blend of self-interest and oppression tempered by inefficienq, sloth and complacency, displaying an overriding loyalq to the dictator. They may serve as a more general allegory of the regime. By 19IO Mexico's rulers had grown flabby, overweening, unpopular and often unaware of their unpopularity, for too long the monopolists of power and privilege. It was a goverament of old men: Cahuantzi, governing Tlaxcala, wes eighty, Bandala in Tabasco was seventy-eight, Mercado, of Michoacán, was r"koned to be too senile to sign his name on state papers.202 Old and sick men filled the cabinet, where four senior ministers had enjoyed an average of twenq years apiece in of fice. 203 As for Díaz himself, now seventy-nine, he had once enjoyed undeniable populariq - as the hero of the French Intervention and the creator of peace and progress; in C)axaca, and probably elsewhere too, he still enjoyed support.204 But by the ~goos this popularity - and with it the legitimacy of the regime - had waned, not least because of the social stresses consequent on rapid economic change. These stresses, to be considered in the next two chapters, could~ neither be mediated nor repressed. The Diaz regime was not a military dictatorship' nor a police state: it depended on some lingering legitimacy, as well as on coercion, and the coercion was selective and limited, not indiscriminate Hence the financially successful rundown of the army, and the recognition, even by opponents of the goverament, that 'General Díaz has used absolute power with great moderation', that he 'is not a tyrant - a bir rigid, but not a- tyrant'.205 Indeed, a fully-fledged police or militarist state might have coped with the challenge of Ig~o better than Diaz's ramshackle civilian/rariq¿,ista regime could.
But tLis was a failure of political mediation, as well as of military repression "~, P`arrington Moore has identified a species oftstrong conservative governmenr ~ committed to srate-buitcling and economic clevelopment, but bent on rrying ro solve a prot>lem rhat was inherently hlsolable, to mc~ernise withour Ch ulgulg . . sac iat strutrures'. !"7 The Yorfirian regimc, entert.limng
similar objectives, went even further in conserving both social scructures an. political m"hanisms. If the Ciencificos represented one face of the regime
"onomically progressive, developmentalist, forward-looking - the corrup rmala and arbitrary j"fiu displs;yed another, which wes politically haggard with rheumy eyes fu~i on the past. Yet the social consequences of develop men~ hs;d to bc medis;tet through the political system; protests of incrcasin, vigour had to be either accommodated or repressed. As it was, the Porfiria: regime refused to siccommodete aspiring, articubite groups (its sins c; omission), while, in the bst resort, it feiled tO repress aggrieved, d"linin, groups, the chief victim of the regime's sins of commission. Like some seflria' monster, the regime bcked ~ political br~in commensunte with iu swolle' economic muscle; hcncc its actinction.
But mestizo control could also operate at a distance. Frequently, a mestizo town acted as metropolis for outlying Indian satellites which, though they might retain land., still languished in the grip of mestizo merchants and officials. Tlacuiltepec (Hgo) was a mestizo pueblo which 'has charge of several Indian villages'; Chilcota, head town of the Once Pueblos in Michoacán, was mestizo, while dependencies like Huancito (home of the maestro of conquistados mentality) were 'primitive and purely Indian'; Izúcar de Matamoros, in Puebla, had fourteen such satellites. On a grander scale, the commercian tentacles of the city of Oaxaca embraced the surrounding sierra, while the merchants of Acapulco dominated the hinterland of the Costa chica. In some cases this dependency involved the direct transfer of resources -land and water rights- from Indian satellites to mestizo metropolis; when this occurred (as it did at Ometepec and Jamiltepec, communities lying athwart the Guerrero-Oaxaca state line) agrarian rebellion could assume the guise of a localized caste war. Indeed, it is likely that some of the ubiquitous inter-community conflicts of the revolutionary period derived from such unequal political and economic relationships, as yet uninvestigated.
Certainly the landlord and merchant victims saw Indian rebellion in terms of caste war (there had been enough nineteenth-century precedents, and not simply in Yucatan). Where the social historian discerns agrarian rebellion., contemporaries often saw something akin to Cartelon Beals's feather-shanked aggressions, disorganized seizures of ancient patrimonies. Zapata's agrarian revolt was soon constructed as a 'caste war', in chich members of an 'inferior race0 were captained by a 'true Niggerdom' in Mexico- terms which came radily revealed the other side of the lazy Indian: the bloodthirsty, atavistic savage, 'half devil and half child'. Urban readers were titillated by stories, mostly apocryphal, of refined brutalities, while those responsible for combating 'Indian' rebellion not only used similar methods as colonial governors, but also evinced similar attitudes. 'Hunting for Zapatistas', according to the version of the aristocratic Alfonso Rincón Gallardo, 'seems to be the biggest king of "bug time" shooting'. As for the troublesome Yaquis, the leading Catholic paper El País was prepared to advocate the genocide of a tribe 'unworthy of membership of the great human family', while revolutionaries justified repression (and the traffic in Yaqui prisoners-of-war) on the grounds of the Indian's 'instinct of pillage and evil-doing'. To the gentle decente of town and countryside this sudden volte-face of the Indian - from deferential peon to belligerent savage - necessitated tough measures, just as it smacked of treachery and threatened a reversion to barbarism.
Places
The ethnic face of Mexico corresponded to its physical face: the indian populations was to be found - along with pine-trees, pulque and pneumonia - in the high country; and Mexico's ubiquitous, slicing not only patterns of settlement but also modes of government, of economic development, and, after 1910, of revolutionary conflict. The mountains march south in two mighty parallel chains; the Wstern Sierra Madre continuing the line of the Rockies, the Eastern Sierra Madre rising among the hills of Nuevo León in the north east and siding towards the Gulf coast in tis progress south. There, which with the lesser sierras cover a quarter of the country's area, harboured a distinctive, serrano population: Indians, hardly pioneers, independent villagers, remote mining and lumber camps, bandit lairs. In the north, between the arms of the mountains, lies a broad expanse of high plain, at its broadest and most inhospitable in the deserts, dunes, and trapped rivers of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest state. Chihuahua, which has the strongest claim to the disputed title of 'cradle of the Revolution', was a land of 'sprawling cattle rangers, dotted with isolated haciendas, settlements, cities and mining camps, populated by few men but thousands of cattle, dependent on the rivers flowing eastwards out of the mountains intolandlocked lakes, or via the Conchos down to the Rio Grande. These northern plains were the theatre of the keenest fighting in 1911 and again in 1913-14, but many of the revolutionary protagonists were men of the sierra who had ridden down from the mountains to oppose first Díaz, then Huerta. In Chihuahua, as elsewhere, the Revolution took on the character of a conflict between highland and lowland, matching the conflicts between villager and landlord, indian and mestizo, 'sandal and shoe'.