Railroads, Landholding, and Agrarian Protest in the Early Porfiriato
U NDER CONDITIONS of rigid social and political hierarchy, and especially where rural cultivators form a distinct and subordinate ethnic group, marked improvement in the profitability of agricultural enterprise tends to be associated with regressive movements in the distribution of property (land, livestock, implements, and the like) as well as direct assaults on the political liberties and other rights of peasants. While there has been some recognition that such a process accompanied the large scale penetration of foreign capital and technology into much of IndoLatin America in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the process has not received the attention it deserves.' Perhaps the most visible and costly byproduct of nineteenth-century foreign intrusion were the railroads. Hundreds, even thousands, of miles of railroads often were built even before substantial direct investments were made in other kinds of enterprise. In fact railroads accounted for more than half of all British and United States investments in Latin America until well after the turn of the century.2 The close relationship between transport innovation and export sector development has been very evident to historians.3 However, much less is known of the impact of railroads on agrarian conditions except where the new transport system formed part of the agricultural export system. Yet railroads often induced profound transformations