Landlords & Haciendas in Modernizing Mexico

Book excerpt: The Mexican Revolution has been generally depicted and analyzed as a popular agrarian revolt against the oppressive hacienda. As a corollary it has also been characterised as the crucible of a new agrarian bourgeoisie which emerged to take the Mexican countryside out of the dark feudal ages bequeathed by Spain. In all such accounts the hacienda appears as an archaic institution responsible for both social repression and economic stagnation. This book turns such theses upside down and makes the argument that the Porfirian hacienda in central Mexico was a progressive adaptation to adverse circumstances that had accomplished much of the transition to agrarian capitalism by 1910.