Introduction

This book analyzes production and modernity in pre-revolutionary Mexico, focusing specifically on the relationship between labour, race, and the state in Chiapas during the Porfiriato. The thirty-five-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) was a key period in the history of modern Mexico. Following upon fifty years of political turmoil and economic stagnation after independence, the regime oversaw an unprecedented period of growth and political modernization, which ended in the ‘first social revolution of the twentieth century’ (1910–20). In order to understand the twin processes of state formation and market development that took place in Mexico during these years, the book examines changing political, economic, and social relations in the southern state of Chiapas between Díaz's seizure of national power in the Tuxtepec rebellion of 1876 and the arrival of revolutionary troops in the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, in 1914. In this period Chiapas was subject to the same processes and tendencies that took place throughout the Mexican republic, which centred on rapid export-led development and growing political centralization. However, the state's distinct regional characteristics — notably its majority Mayan Indian population, polarized ethnic relations, strong historical and administrative links to Central America, and poor communications with the rest of Mexico — also contributed to the particular quality of modernization and modernity in Chiapas.

‘Disguised slavery’: debt peonage in Chiapas, 1876–1914

This chapter analyzes the institution of debt peonage in Chiapas during the Porfiriato. The first section examines Porfirian debates regarding the relationship between debt peonage, slavery, and market development in Chiapas. The second section addresses the economics and economic rationality of debt peonage. The third section focuses on the legal foundations of rural peonage and domestic servitude in the state. The fourth section tackles the issue of coercion and consent and the ‘popular legitimacy’ of debt peonage. The final section looks at the issue of debt peonage in Chiapas after the resignation of President Díaz, comparing the legislative proposals of local politicians with those of the Constitutionalists who descended on the state in 1914, and underlining the significance of the institution during the years of Mexico's armed Revolution (1910–20).

Modernization, race and the state

This chapter analyzes the different ways in which race was understood by national politicians, foreign investors, and local elites in Chiapas, and explores the relationship between interpretations of race, political factionalism, and economic and social policies. It concludes with an overview of three important areas of state activity — taxation, education, and public works — and highlights how racialized practices of state rule were modernized during the last twenty years of the Porfirian regime in Chiapas.

Post-independence politics and land: from the community to agrarian servitude

When Mexico declared independence in September 1821, Chiapas, along with the rest of Central America, joined the new nation. Then, in 1823, precipitated by the collapse of Iturbide's Mexican Empire, the other former Central American provinces broke away to form the Central American Union. Chiapas, though, chose permanent annexation to the Mexican republic the following year. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the historiography of other regions of Mexico and Central America during these years in order better to understand the way that history and geography may have influenced political and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the half-century after independence. The second section looks at politics and state-building in Chiapas between 1824 and 1855, focusing on the relationship between regional elites in the central valley and the central highlands, national governments, and Indian communities. The third section provides an overview of commercial agriculture, population, and labour, and analyzes the agrarian laws which were passed in the state in the post-independence period. The fourth section examines the process of land privatization in different regions of Chiapas and the relationship between the alienation of public and communal lands and the spread of agrarian servitude — both labour tenancy (known as baldiaje) and debt peonage. The fifth section addresses the question of why, despite the growing dispossession of communal land, no peasant rebellion emerged in Chiapas during these years, while the next section examines the Labour Tenancy Law of 1849, a short-lived attempt to regulate baldiaje and limit the role of servile labour in commercial agriculture. Finally, the last section looks at the impact in Chiapas of the laws of the Reform and civil conflict between liberals and conservatives in the period 1855–67, and highlights the way in which local political factionalism contributed to Chiapas's Caste War of 1869–70.

Debt peonage and regional export development: Pichucalco, Chilón, Palenque and Soconusco, 1876–1914

This chapter examines the relationship between debt peonage and regional export development between 1876 and 1914 in four departments of Chiapas: Pichucalco, Chilón, and Palenque in the north of the state and Soconusco on the Pacific coast. All of these departments underwent considerable commercial development during the Porfiriato based on the production of tropical agricultural commodities such as coffee, cacao, rubber, and hard woods, and Soconusco, Palenque, and Chilón were recipients of significant foreign capital. However, the impact of market development on labour relations was not uniform: whereas in Soconusco plantation agriculture tended to undermine labour coercion, in the other departments these years saw the intensification and spread of servile peonage. The chapter shows that such changes were principally the product of regional market conditions and the capacity of the state to intervene in the process of labour contracting.

Land privatization and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the Porfiriato

This chapter considers the agrarian question in Chiapas during the Porfiriato. First, it examines the geographical and financial restrictions faced by rural producers in the state. Second, it analyses quantitative data regarding demography, rural property, investment, output, and labour. Third, it scrutinizes the impact of land legislation and land privatization on rural social relations and agrarian structure. Finally, it addresses historiographical questions regarding the social impact of Porfirian agrarian policy in Chiapas and its role in the Revolution of 1910–20.

Building the Porfirian state: administrative centralization, Indian communities and the ‘reinvention of tradition’

This chapter aims to improve our understanding of political modernization and state formation in Porfirian Chiapas ‘from below’, explaining specifically how the regime consolidated power within the Indian communities in order to carry out policies aimed at strengthening the national state and developing the export economy. The first section looks at the role of schoolteachers in secular state-building and the development of commercial agriculture from around 1855 until 1910. The second section examines the relationship between the jefaturas políticas, caciquismo, and forced labour, particularly in the export sector. The final section analyzes the impact of centralization and the role of coercion and consent in political and economic relationships in central and northern Chiapas. It argues that the Porfirian state achieved considerable hegemony by penetrating and manipulating ‘traditional’ structures of power in the countryside in order to consolidate the regime and modernize the economy.

On the border: Chiapas, between empire and republic

This chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social relations in Chiapas during the colonial era in order to better understand the nature and impact of the modernizing reforms enacted by liberal regimes after independence. The first section presents an overview of the conquest of the region from 1528 to around 1550. The second section examines the institutions of state rule and how they changed over time, emphasizing the break between Habsburg and Bourbon rule after 1750. The third section analyzes the history and structure of the Indian community or república de indios and underscores its important political, economic, and ideological role in colonial society. The next two sections look at controlled markets in commerce and labour (repartimientos), which constituted important means by which surplus labour and produce were extracted from the Indian population. The next section considers the history of the Church in Chiapas, which like the Spanish Crown extracted taxes, fees, and labour from the communities. The Church also structured religious celebration and public ritual in the communities around the corporate institutions of the parish and cofradía, thereby contributing to the consolidation of both colonial rule and Indian ethnic identity and solidarity. Chiapas's hacienda sector, which is examined in the final section, was also dominated by the Church, although production was limited in the province before Bourbon policies fomented the expansion of commercial agriculture in the late eighteenth century.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the author. Upon close examination, the Porfirian ‘modernity’ in Chiapas turns out to be, if not a total fiction, a blurred and virtual entity — essentially political and hardly technocratic, personalist more than bureaucratic, authoritarian rather than liberal in the broad sense, underpinned by ‘pre-modern’ ethnic divisions and political institutions, conservative instead of progressive, and, one could say, very ‘traditional’ — an ambiguity which derives not only from the peculiarities and contradictions of Porfirian ideas and practices of modernity, but also, undoubtedly, from the unclear nature of the concept itself and its intimate yet ambivalent relationship to its supposed antithesis, ‘tradition’.

The politics of Porfirian Chiapas, 1870–1914

This chapter traces the political developments in Chiapas from 1870 to 1914. Until 1891 central state authority remained weak in Chiapas and the state was divided into a number of powerful cacicazgos dominated by military leaders from the Reform, who owed their position to adherence to Porfirio Díaz's Plan of Tuxtepec of 1876. After Díaz's re-election in 1884 there was a gradual alteration in the management of politics away from a strategy of loyalty to the camarilla (political clique) associated with Tuxtepec and towards one of playing competing factions off against one another in order to increase central authority and the power of the national patriarch, namely Díaz. In Chiapas, the first governor charged with implementing the centralizing measures that would undermine the influence of local caudillos was the comiteco Manuel Carrascosa, who took office in 1888. In 1891, Díaz had decided to replace Carrascosa with young Chiapanecan lawyer and científico Emilio Rabasa in the governorship of Chiapas. In 1895 the Oaxacan Colonel Francisco León was chosen by the president to continue Emilio Rabasa's programme of modernization in Chiapas. The most controversial task that he faced during his term in office was labour reform, specifically the issue of debt servitude, which came to be seen by some politicians and investors as contributing to labour shortages in the export sector.