Critical Juncture
All the regional uprisings were eventually contained after the war ended. Their number and extent reveal not only indigenous peoples' discontent with the direction of national developments, they demonstrate that many Mexicans did not then identify with the emerging nation-state. Rather than join that state in its conflict with the United States, peoples of Yucatán, Tehuantepec, and the Sierra Gorda saw the war as an opportunity to challenge those who ruled the struggling Mexican nation. The late 1840s brought Mexico to a critical juncture. Elites had to face both failure in war and failure to forge a national society. The leaders of numerous Mexican states concluded that it was time to legislate a liberal agrarian reform: the privatization of community lands. Expecting resistance, the same states created rural police. Yet most lacked the administrative organization to privatize community lands effectively and the financial resources to create effective police. As a result, the primary outcome of postwar attempts to weaken the power of indigenous communities was to set off waves of rural conflict that began in the late 1840s and recurred in the 1850s, the late 1860s, and again in the 1870s.

Across the central highlands, the conflicts provoked by the agrarian reforms of midcentury took forms that included passive resistance, legal challenges, political support for the Liberals' Conservative opposition, local riots, and regional uprisings that might last several months. These were less massive insurrectionary movements than the uprisings of the war years, yet they proved widespread, enduring, and a real challenge to attempts to implement the Liberal agrarian reform. Such conflicts developed in Mexico State and the Cuernavaca basin in the late 1840s and early 1850s. When Liberals seized national power in the mid-1850s and made the privatization of community lands national policy through the Ley Lerdo of 1856, resistance became widespread. Such resistance ensured that there was little effective privatization before a decade of civil war postponed the issue. From 1858 through 1860, Mexican Conservatives fought Mexican Liberals for control of the national state. Following the Liberal victory, from 1862 to 1867, Mexican Liberals fought French invaders and the French-imposed empire of Maximilian—allied with surviving Conservatives—for national power. Rural Mexicans faced new conflicts and new decisions in rapid succession.

Their responses were complex and varied, but important patterns emerged. Rancheros, whether small proprietors, squatters, or tenants of estates or communities, tended toward the Liberals—promoters of small property in rural Mexico. Peasant villagers faced more difficult decisions. The Liberals aimed to assault their community lands. Yet Conservatives were often the very landlords with whom they had contested local lands and labor relations for decades. Many chose to avoid entanglement in the Liberal-Conservative conflict of 1858 to 1860. The conflicts with the French after 1862, however, brought new considerations. Now the nation was at risk. In that context, some peasant villagers—notably in the Sierra de Puebla—allied with the Liberals, and their assistance proved critical to the eventual defeat of the invaders.