With the aid of foreign money and
expertise, railroad and telegraph lines
were built; mining, textile, and other
industries boomed; ports were improved;
hydroelectric plants rose; and foreign
trade mushroomed. Most of Mexico’s
industries were foreign owned and staffed
at the highest levels by foreigners, partic-
ularly Americans who enjoyed privileges
not granted to Mexicans. But Díaz
repressed any critics bold enough to com-
plain about the country’s growing domi-
nation by foreigners.
With “order and progress” as his
guiding lights, Díaz brought about an
era of prosperity that benefited Mexico’s
middle and upper classes. However, the
poor, the vast majority of Mexicans, were
left out. Through various legal and illegal
means, the country’s Native Americans
were deprived of their ancient communal
lands, the ejidos. Land ownership became
more concentrated; by 1910 only 2 per-
cent of the country’s population held title
to land. Wealthy landowners devoted
their acreage to cash crops such as sisal
(hemp), coffee, and rubber, harvested by
debt peons living in hunger, illiteracy,
and squalor. Little land was left available
for the growing of subsistence crops by
the poor. As a result, food prices rose
while wages stayed the same.
After 1900, the mass social discon-
tent of the poor began to merge with
other rumblings against the Porfiriato, as
the regime was called. In 1905, Ricardo
Flores Magón (1873–1922), a Mexican
exile living in the United States, founded
the Mexican Liberal Party, a reformist,
anti-Díaz party. An economic depression
in 1907–1908 affected even the middle
and upper classes, reducing their support
for Díaz’s order and progress. Nationalist
sentiment began to grow, as Mexicans
everywhere felt that the country had been
taken over by American and other foreign
businessmen. In 1906 a strike by copper
miners against an American company at
Cananea, a Mexican city near the border,
was brutally suppressed by 275 Arizona
Rangers imported for that purpose by the
company. Many Mexicans considered the
incident an insult to national sovereignty.
In 1910 Díaz, as usual, won reelec-
tion to the presidency. But the end was
near. His imprisoned opponent in the
election, Francisco Madero (1873–1913),
fled to San Antonio, Texas. There he
rejected the election results, declaredhimself provisional president of Mexico,
and called for the Mexican people to rise
up against Díaz, beginning on November- The uprising that resulted surprised
even Madero.
The Mexican Revolution
Beginning on November 20, 1910, local-
ly based guerrilla forces throughout
Mexico responded to Madero’s call to
arms. The movement’s members and sup-
porters included people from all social
classes who had had enough of Díaz. In
response to this opposition, Díaz tried his
best to crush them militarily, but despite
his efforts, powerful revolutionary forces
grew, particularly the peasant armies
under Pancho Villa (1878–1923) in the
north and Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919)
in the south.
In 1911 Madero returned to Mexico
as the political head of the revolution.
Ciudad Juárez fell to the rebels on May 8,
followed by other cities. Accepting the
inevitability of his ouster, Díaz resigned
on May 25, 1911, and then fled to Paris,
where he died in exile four years later.
Madero was elected provisional presi-
dent (1911–1913) in November.
Though Madero himself had called
for revolution, he failed to understand the134 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
Emiliano Zapata(MPI Archives)THE FLORES
MAGÓN
BROTHERS
Among the most influential figures
in the Mexican Revolution were
Ricardo (1873–1922) and Enrique
Flores Magón (1877–1954). In 1905, a
year after moving to the United States
as an exile from his home country,
Ricardo founded the Mexican Liberal
Party, a reform party that would lead
unsuccessful revolts against Díaz in
1906 and 1908. Living in exile in St.
Louis, Missouri, the Flores Magóns
published denunciations against Díaz
in their newspaper Regeneración
(Regeneration). After meeting the
anarchist writer Emma Goldman in
1911, Ricardo shifted from his reform-
minded liberal philosophy to espouse
radical anarchism. In 1911, a year into
the Mexican Revolution, the Flores
Magón brothers waged a military
campaign known as the Magonista
Revolt. During the Magonista Revolt,
Liberal Party rebels operated from
revolutionary communes in Baja
California organized by Magón.