The Commodification of Nature, 1880–1910

When General Porfirio Díaz seized the presidency from his weakened and unpopular predecessor in 1876, it seemed as if Mexico might fall back into the cycle of instability that had characterized its first decades as an independent nation. Instead, Díaz remained in power for thirty-five years (punctuated by only one hiatus, from 1880 to 1884), until revolutionaries forced him from office, in 1911. His autocratic regime brought fractious regional leaders to heel and cracked down on bandits who thrived on political turmoil. Hacienda owners enjoyed strengthening markets and a political atmosphere that encouraged the expansion of their domains, while foreign investors attracted by unprecedented stability and business-friendly policies rushed to build railroads, mines, oil fields, and other industries great and small. By 1900, American and Canadian companies started to turn their attention to timber as well. The economic development and intellectual ferment of the Díaz years, which are known as the Porfiriato, brought some parts of the nation more closely in step with the developed world in the span of a single generation. Yet the wrenching advent of Porfirian order and progress had ominous implications for a rural society that still retained many of its colonial traits. Laws ostensibly intended to modernize the market in rural property forced most indigenous communities (including acculturated ones) to privatize their collectively owned lands, or at least to incorporate themselves into holding companies. In either case, most communal property slipped into the hands of outsiders or wealthy villagers, leaving increasing numbers of rural people destitute. Some joined the ranks wage labor. At the same time, the land, water, and forests owned by the federal government or formerly held as village commons were fashioned into commodities that could be bought by investors or savvy residents who understood how to manipulate the expanding state bureaucracy.

The Porfirian order adhered to a peculiarly nineteenth-century variant of political liberalism, whose core tenets included secularism, equal rights for all, the capability of trade to grow the wealth of nations, and the virtues of individual choice. Liberalism had at least nominally become the law of the land ever since the so-called reform era of 1855–1857. When Díaz came to power two decades later, his inner circle of advisors known as científicos (scientists) hoped that a reinvigorated liberal agenda would finally allow the nation to overcome a colonial heritage marked by caste privileges, weak markets, and clerical prerogatives. They intended to lead Mexico down the same economic path as Europe and the United States yet despaired of their countrymen's fitness for the journey. The Church continued to wield immense authority and had little use for secularism and the sort of modernization the científicos envisioned. Geography made it difficult for one region to trade with another, and bandits roamed the land. Indigenous communities posed a particularly thorny problem, because many still owned common lands granted by the crown during the colonial era, but few native people could read, and they appeared hopelessly backward to the upper classes. By the time Díaz became president, liberal politicians had all but given up on the liberal touchstones of political equality and individual choice; instead, they turned their attention to stimulating trade on a national and international scale. State and federal governments attracted foreign investment by granting concessions—that is, contracts that provided tax exemptions, access to public lands, and other perks—to corporations willing to invest in railroads and extractive industries. Most concessions went to foreign interests that had the requisite expertise, capital, and political connections to undertake such projects, though Mexican businesses received a modest number as well.

The científicos hoped to expand domestic commerce, and the market for rural property in particular. Liberal leaders during Benito Juárez's era (1858–1872) had forced the Church to sell off most of its properties, but their Porfirian heirs worried that too much land still languished beyond the reach of markets in village commons that could not be bought or sold. The administration dusted off the 1856 Lerdo Law, which obliged the owners of communally owned property (comuneros) to divide it among themselves and title it as individuals—a process known as "disentailment." The partition of village commons facilitated a massive transfer of property from rural communities to hacienda owners, wealthy villagers, and in some instances a rising class of independent family farmers known as rancheros. Many peasant communities had lost track (or simply been robbed) of the colonial documents that constituted the most direct means to establish a clear title to the commons. The absence of these "primordial titles" opened the way for unscrupulous landowners or village elites to encroach on communal property. Landowners were known to redraw their boundary lines (sometimes by moving the ubiquitous stone markers known as mojoneras) or to take a more direct route and fraudulently title village lands with the collusion of local officials. Even if villagers successfully managed to avoid dispossession, divide the commons, and title it with the authorities, they still faced threats to their property. Some sold it for a pittance to some local profiteer. Others fell into arrears on their tax bills, either because they lacked the money to pay, or more likely because they failed to negotiate the opaque and sometimes hostile process of making a payment at the tax assessor's office. Tax sales became a commonplace in central Mexico during the late nineteenth century and helped create a mass of land-poor villagers, whom haciendas used as a reserve labor pool during planting and harvest seasons.

Another problem was that village lands got swept up in the tidal wave of public land sales during the 1880s. The officials who made public lands available to investors needed a clear picture of the extent and location of national landholdings; however, few such maps existed. A law passed in 1883 remedied this problem by promising survey companies a third of any unoccupied public land (known as terrenos baldíos) they mapped. This enticing offer was meant both to compensate surveyors for their work and to encourage them not to leave any corner of the nation uncharted. According to the best available estimate, the survey companies received 21.2 million...