“I would rather die standing than live on my knees!”[1]

General Emiliano Zapata       

Mexico had won its independence from Spain in 1820 and suffered through numerous presidents, the dictatorship of Santa Anna and one faux monarch from Austria for much of the 19^th century before succumbing to the dictatorship of Jose de la Curz Profirio Diaz Mori or Profirio Diaz from 1876 to 1910. Diaz himself was imprisoned for his opposition to the dictatorship of Santa Anna.[2] He had fought against the invading armies of the French as a brigadier general under President Juarez before becoming a prisoner of war. With the French victory in 1864, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph was installed on the Mexican throne as Maximilian I.[3] In 1867, under pressure from the United States; the French removed all military forces, leaving Maximilian to stand on his own. In April of that year, General Diaz marched on Puebla and Mexico City, only to discover Maximilian had been already captured, tried, and executed.[4] General Diaz twice attempted to gain the presidency against his former friend and ally, Benito Juarez, and lost. After the death of Juarez in 1872, presidential powers were transferred to the President of the Supreme Court, Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada. He was re-elected in 1876. During this time, General Diaz had been participating in revolutionary activities and attacks until he forced Don Sebastian’s resignation in November 1876 and declared himself provisional president. The following year, Congress confirmed him as the Constitutional President.[5] President Perfirio Diaz was now leader of a country covering three-quarters of a million square miles, with a population of over nine million citizens, deeply in debt, and lagging behind the rest of the world in modern technologies.[6] The steam locomotive, the most modern transportation technology at the time had just over 2,000 sporadic miles of railroad track in various places around the country and an uneducated predominantly rural population. President Diaz, along with the social elite hatched an auspicious plan to modernize Mexico.[7] The Porfiriato government attempted to transform Mexico into an economic powerhouse through forced modernization, land reforms, and foreign investment. Mexican modernization was a campaign in search of “Order and Progress.”[8] While this vision of the future appealed to the wealthy and elite class of Mexican society, it had a devastating effect on the rural population throughout the countryside. These modernization projects and policies of the Profiriato government not only led to a modernized Mexico, but also led to the rise in peasant migration to the United States, beginning in the early part of the 20^th Century and continuing into the 21^st century.

To begin this modernization process, public lands throughout Mexico would have to be surveyed and transferred to those who would develop the land in pursuit of President Diaz’s vision. These “public lands” were in fact communal lands worked by the indigenous tribes and people. Many of these people were unable to produce a title proving ownership or had no clear concept of private land ownership. The federal government paved the way for privatization of these public lands through the enactment of the 1883 Land Law. Under the provisions of this law, individuals and companies would receive one-third of the land surveyed, while the remaining two-thirds could be purchased at a substantially reduced rate.[9] To promote a net export for Mexico, land was needed for railroad right of ways and large commercial farms, called Haciendas (estates, such as a plantation). From 1880 to 1910, the Profiriato government hired private companies, who employed land agents to survey the land and reap the benefits of the largest single turnover of public lands in the nation’s history. Under the provisions of the new law, “…from 1878 to 1908, about 50 land speculating companies received some 52.4 million acres of public lands, which at the compensation rate of 3 to 1 implied that roughly 157 million acres had been surveyed.”[10] The Constitution of 1857 further exacerbated the plight of the campesinos (rural life or peasantry) by making it illegal for civil corporations to own land communally. While this new twist was primarily aimed at the land owned by the Catholic Church, it also forced the elimination of ejidos (common or communal land).[11] By 1910, almost one third of all Mexico’s “public” lands had been transferred to private land companies, depriving over 5,000,000 campesinos use of ejido land.[12] The implementation of these laws and practices forced approximately one-third of the campesino population to seek employment as migrant workers on the haciendas throughout Mexico and to immigrate to the United States.[13]   An even greater push factor promoting migration and immigration farther and farther away from their ancestral lands was the population explosion of 6 million people between 1875 and 1910. The “Porifian peace” established between revolutions, combined with the advances in public health care directly contributed to this 50 percent rise in the Mexican population.[14] All these dispossessed peasants needed now was transportation to green pastures.

President Porfirio Diaz’s defining moment in the modernization of Mexico was the expansion of the railroads throughout the country. Forty years prior to the implementation of the vision, Mexico produced only 398 miles of track. During this modernization process, a substantial amount of foreign investment, mainly from the United States and Britain, contributed to 11,800 miles of railroad track and 14,300 miles of telegraph line.[15] To achieve these numbers, the acquisition of land was needed for railroad right-of-way and subvention. The tracks of land required for the railroad tracks, usually 230 feet in width, as well as the land needed for the support facilities such as “…stations, water tanks, roundhouses, repair facilities, employee and worker housing, restaurants, and infirmaries fell under the rubric of right-of way.” Subvention land referred to land granted to the railroad companies in lieu of monetary compensation.[16] Teresa Van Hoy contends in her essay, “La Marcha Violenta? Railroads and Land in 19th-century Mexico,” that there was no widespread dispossession of the rural peasantry due to land acquisition for railroad construction. In fact she also states, “Scholars can cite only a single study in support of the argument that railroads displaced peasants.”[17] It is my contention that while the land grab for the railroad tracks and support facilities may not have disposed the indigenous population, I believe the railroad served as an impetus to encourage migration to northern Mexico and immigration to the United States by providing two very important things. First, the railroads provided short term job opportunities, enabling the dispossessed to survive day to day. Second, the railroad provided the transportation not previously available to the local population.

The haciendas and railroads further created a push factor for migration and immigration as these two establishments worked in concert to drastically raise food prices across the board and limit the amount of accessible food to the general population. Reduced transportation cost supplied by the newly constructed railway system meant cash crops not normally planted in Mexico could be grown and exported for a profit. The hacienda owners rushed to modernize their farming techniques and employ new technologies to maximize their profits.[18] Starvation among the peasant population was becoming widespread as the population increase turned the labor force into a commodity, where wages were set by the law of supply and demand.[19] With no land or crops of their own, the campesinos were forced to work for very low wages. In some cases, these peasants were subsiding on local vegetation such as “weeds and wild flowers from the surrounding mountains.”[20] The owners of the hacienda reaped huge profits exporting their crops out of the country, due to land acquired at low prices, farmed by an underpaid workforce, and transported by a cost-efficient railroad. The push was becoming intolerable, and the search of a stable lifestyle continued to grow.

The American Southwest was experiencing a migration of its own as more and more people began to give up the harsh winters of the east coast to enjoy year around good weather in the Southwest. With the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, dams, reservoirs, and irrigation projects quickly transformed the Southwestern states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas into an agricultural paradise. With reliable water supplies, industrial agriculture began to take shape, as over 31 million acres of crops sprouted up between California and Texas in the 1920s. These vast fields of produce would require a large workforce of seasonal workers. Xenophobia during this time placed heavy restrictions on immigration to the United States and severely limited the available workers from abroad. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 with the Japanese government effectively deterred or limited immigration from those countries.[21] Some relief occurred with the acquisition of the Philippines in 1899, however, most in the agriculture business found their labor organizing efforts troublesome and counterproductive. With the labor supply sources limited, the agribusiness turned to those dispossessed by the policies of their own government.[22] With affordable railroad transportation spanning most of the major and minor cites of Mexico, from Veracruz and Manzanillo in the south to Nogales, Juarez, and Laredo in the north,[23] the migrant workforce flocked to the border in a desperate attempt for survival and possibly the promise of a better life. However, the happy days of the 1920s came to an abrupt halt with the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the devastating effects of the Oklahoma dust bowl. Mexican immigration slowed to a trickle as farms were in foreclosure and agricultural jobs disappeared. To add insult to injury, xenophobia raised its ugly head once again and it had in its sights on the Mexican immigrant. With millions of U.S. citizens out of work, the government at the federal, state, and local level attempted to ease the competition for U.S. jobs by deporting an estimated 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. After providing the backbone to a thriving billion dollar Southwest agriculture business, U.S. officials and community leaders were pressured to send them back to Mexico, along with their U.S.-born children. This dismal situation continued throughout the 1930s, and mass immigration from south of the border would not pick up again until the demands of World War II forced U.S. officials to declare an emergency situation and attempted to manage immigration from Mexico through the Bracero Program, while simultaneously meeting wartime demands on workforce shortages. A contract guest worker program, the Bracero Program operated between 1942 and 1964.[24] While hundreds of thousands of contracts were fulfilled annually throughout the western United States, the braceros were also used as strike breakers, to lower wages, and to lower working conditions. Working as a labor activist, Ernesto Galarza critiqued the status of the bracero worker, stating: “Is this indentured alien-almost perfect model of the economic man, an ‘input factor’ stripped of political and social attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally-is this bracero the prototype of the production man of the future?”[25] The campesinos of Mexico were labeled as insignificant and backwards by their own countrymen, only to be betrayed by the country that seemed to welcome them with open arms.   What seemed to be the land of milk and honey transformed into the land they thought they had left behind.