Organized Amerindians were deeply involved in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Their sphere of influence were the thousands of Indian communities or mestizo communities that still preserved an Amerindian outlook which had endured for centuries before and after the Spanish conquest. These free or semi-autonomous Amerindian and mestizo communities had survived relatively intact until the Porfiriato, culturally and politically. In many cases their autonomy dated from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica by paying tribute to the powerful city-states: the Aztecs, Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, Mayan city-states and others. They continued their autonomy during both the colonial period and republican Mexico. They mostly shunned new agricultural technology and European models of land ownership.
Rural nineteenth century Mexico was the scene of constant tension and struggle, occasionally violent, between the hacendado class which attempted to further encroach on Amerindian landholdings, and the Amerindian communities that struggled to survive and maintain their communal way of life. The pressure points were between the hacienda administrators and their enforcers, and the free Indian communities, their town fathers and appointed political and military leaders.
The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the liberals in Mexico and elsewhere in the Hispanic world including Spain itself. The Mexican liberals were violently anti-clerical, promised constitutional democracy, and had a cultural and economic policy that called for the creation of a rural middle class of prosperous private farmers. While they also promised to end ethnic and other forms of discrimination against Indians, their policies, with some exceptions that reflected local circumstances, was not particularly attractive to the free Indian communities. The liberals wanted to abolish all forms of communal land tenure and make Indians private proprietors like other citizens. Many poor Indians accurately realized that the implementation of those policies would lead to their being totally dispossessed and impoverished, by removing their last legal protection against encroachment by haciendas and the exploitation of poor members of Indian communities by the richer ones. Indian communities therefore frequently supported conservative factions in the civil wars of 19th century Mexico (as they also did in Guatemala), although there are cases, such as that of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, where they supported the liberals, putting on their own interpretation of the liberal land laws. Such alliances tended not to be particularly advantageous to the Indians in the longer term, since Liberals secure in power tended to turn on their erstwhile indigenous allies.

In general terms, the liberals were not motivated to protect the prevailing culture of peasant farmers: they regarded the peasant subsistence plot as an anachronism and a barrier to economic progress. They didn’t worry overly about hacendados taking over peasant land, or propose any sort of radical agrarian reforms, beyond assuming that the breakup of Church property would enable a rural middle class to emerge. The conservatives’ problem was that the liberal policies were actually quite attractive to the landlord class. So in the long term the balance of forces in Mexican society favored the triumph of liberalism. Only the Church and poor Indians remained steadfastly opposed to the so-called ‘reformers’, and the Church rapidly ceased to be an opposition element under the Porfiriato. This underlying tension dating from the rise of 19th century liberalism helps explain both 1910 Zapatismo and the contemporary struggle between, on the one hand, the self-denominated revolutionary ruling party of post-1910, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and on the other, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) which is actually commanded by and made up of Amerindians.

The Amerindians usually made common cause with rural mestizos, this reflecting the vast mixing of bloodlines and cultures by 1910. Typically the rebellion was sparked in the municipal head-town. In the case of Anenecuilco, this was an Amerindian establishment that still retained its Amerindian outlook. Zapata, a Nahuatl-speaking mestizo, was appointed its war-time leader.


The case of the Guaracha hacienda was a case on the mestizo side of the spectrum. The nearby town, Villamar was originally an Indian town (pueblo), that had lost all its land during the Porfirian period. The hacienda drew on seasonal labor supplies from the villages when it needed them, and rented land to villagers working as share-croppers, but relied on a core of permanent workers called peones acasillados, who were waged and had a written contract. Guaracha had modernized its production technology, and was an entirely commercial enterprise: everything it sowed was shipped out by train and sold to the urban market. All this reflected the new situation created by the Porfiriato’s investments in transport infrastructure, irrigation and land reclamation, and its support for land concentration by haciendas. When the same process seemed certain to take place at Naranja, some fifty miles from Guaracha, the town revolted. Guaracha’s peones acasillados were not revolutionary, and the local agrarian movement began, instead, in the municipal head-town which was mestizo in ethnic nature. While the village community was an essential ingredient in agrarian revolt in Mexico, it was not the case, however, that those communities were always indigenous pueblos since many were completely mestizoised by the 19th century, and some revolutionary villages might never have had any Indian ethnic affiliation, even in theory.