CHAPTER 7 MESOAMERICANS IN THE NEOCOLONIAL ERA 263whelming majority of the population. In contrast, the newly arrived científicos(“sci-
entists,” “technicians”) did extremely well. In some cases, their success eclipsed the
privileges of the old creole elite. It was not uncommon at the end of the nineteenth
century to have railroad and telegraph facilities wholly in the hands of North Amer-
ican and English companies.
Guatemala’s enormous expansion of coffee production included vast tracts that
were owned by newly arrived German immigrants. North American corporations
and individuals controlled much of Mexico’s rail infrastructure and a majority of the
henequen plantations in Yucatán. Even Costa Rica permitted Minor Keith—a North
American engineer who built the railroad that linked the highlands to the Atlantic
port city of Limón—to acquire almost full economic control of it. Whose party was
it? Certainly not the sharecroppers and plantation workers down the road.
The ideologies of liberalism and positivism, operating in the name of social
progress and economic growth, displaced millions of the region’s rural poor, both
mestizo and Indian. Their traditional land base eroded, facilitated by government
policies that encouraged privatization of communal property and easy alienation of
it for cash. The frenzy for development of export production also led to government
policies that facilitated encroachment on and outright appropriation of small land-
holdings of Indian and mestizo peasants. Land that had hitherto been deemed mar-
ginal suddenly became prime land for coffee, henequen, banana, and beef
production for the export market to the United States. Once the rural poor saw
themselves without a source of subsistence, millions of them became attached to
large cattle ranches and commercial agriculture operations in what was essentially a
return to colonial forms of debt peonage. Their wages were never sufficient to pay
their debts for housing, food, and emergency cash needs. The company store be-
came an agent of bondage.
It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, that the truncated and impoverished
Indian communities that managed to survive these predations retrenched and re-
treated from other than obligatory contact with national institutions. In particular,
in both Guatemala and Mexico, renewed emphasis was placed upon the highly local,
ethnically segregated civil and religious community organizations that developed
during the Colonial period in accordance with Crown dictates. It is worth noting the
irony that the very institutional formulas that were intended to integrateIndian com-
munities into colonial society became defense mechanisms that facilitated their ex-
clusion from participation in national life in the neocolonial postindependence
period.
Nevertheless, scholars have pointed out that the so-called “closed corporate” In-
dian community was a form of social organization that was never fully closed during
the Colonial period and that it was becoming even less closed during the turbulent
years of the nineteenth century. If it ever existed, the option for the Indians of iso-
lation within closed communities, shielded from the dramatic political and economic
changes being promoted by liberal dictators like Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, was rapidly
disappearing.
For those displaced rural people who were already outside the confines of Indian
communities, the main option was migration to the cities, either directly from their