Why has development in Latin America and North America been so different?
• Greater Latin American dependence on
Europe in colonial period (complementarity)
• Low domestic purchasing power in Latin
America (highly stratified societies)
• Lack of adequate capital (e.g., banks) and unwillingness of Catholic Church to invest in industry (Church a major landed interest)
• Strength of Latin American plantation interests (Liberal parties)
• US military intervention (support of exporters)
• 1821: Independence
• 1845: Secession/annexation of Texas
• 1846-48: US invasion
• 1853: Gadsden purchase
• 1854-67: Civil wars; French occupation
• 1855-1880: Liberal reforms
• 1876-1911: Porfiriato
• 1910-20: Mexican “revolution”
• 1930s: Land reform, oil expropriated
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• Rise of Mexico’s “peripheries”
• Liberal reformers
– Provincial elites
– Lawyers and professionals
– Mestizo rancheros
• 1856 law (Ley Lerdo)
– Forced sale of Church lands
– Privatized peasant community lands
“Upon decreeing freedom of trade, industry, and other franchises, great concessions are made to foreigners, scarcely reflecting upon the impossibility of our industry and crafts competing with the foreigners, given three centuries of delay, monopoly, and servitude that have weighed upon the
Mexican people.”
• Early political stability; dictatorship
• Rapid growth and industrialization
• Increased role for foreign investors
• Increased social polarization
• Development of railroads, links to U.S.
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• Increased tenancy/sharecropping in central highlands (e.g., Morelos)
• Increased insecurity for small rancheros and increased tenancy/sharecropping in northern borderlands (e.g., Chihuahua)
• Places where rebellion didn’t occur
– Yucatan: food security of estate workers
– Oaxaca: peasant communities relatively less affected by industrial development
• Three contending factions
– Zapata’s agrarian rebels
– Villa’s agrarian rebels and rancheros
– Carranza’s Constitutionalists
• Failure of Zapata’s and Villa’s factions
– 1915: US recognizes Carranza, cuts off assistance to Zapata and Villa
– 1916: Pershing’s forces chase Villa
– 1919: Zapata assassinated
• Liberal restoration?
• 1934: Land reform
• 1938: Expropriation of oil fields
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• J. Womack,
Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution (1970)
• L. Stavrianos,
Global Rift (1981)
• N. Hamilton, Limits of State Autonomy
(1982)
• J. Tutino,
From Insurrection to
Revolution in Mexico (1986)
• J. D. Cockroft,
Mexico (1990)
• A. Gilly,
The Mexican Revolution (2005)
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