The Policy of Privatization
The policy of privatization provoked widespread resistance among villagers in diverse regions, including many who had been the Liberals' allies in the recent national conflict. And in many communities, resistance to privatization was stiffened by opposition to Liberal attempts to prohibit public expression of community religious cultures. Again, the nature of the resistance varied. Many villagers simply ignored the Liberal edicts, maintaining community lands and staging very public religious festivals. With their allies in the Sierra de Puebla, the Liberals were pressed to negotiate limited privatizations that left most community lands intact. Elsewhere, in regions ranging from Chalco, to the Mezquital and the Puebla Basin in the central highlands, to more distant regions from Chiapas to Tepic and Sonora, the late 1860s brought renewed regional insurrections that challenged the Liberal vision for rural Mexico. Once again, the rebellions eventually were contained. But the broad range of resistance in the late 1860s slowed the implementation of the Liberal program in many regions and made clear the high price Liberals would pay for any rapid assertion of radical reform.

The mid- 1870s brought the last nineteenth-century contest over national power, as Porfirio Díaz challenged Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada for control of the Liberal movement and the national state. Simultaneously, the last nineteenth-century era of agrarian insurrections challenged the Liberal vision of the Mexican nation. In part, the uprisings of the 1870s were one more instance of rural poor people taking advantage of elite conflicts to press their demands. Yet Porfirio Díaz also played to rural discontent in his move to claim national power. Earlier he had been active in mobilizing agrarian support for the war against the French in the Sierra de Puebla. He was more sensitive to agrarian grievances than the more urban, ideological Liberals who looked to Lerdo for leadership—and, of course, Lerdo shared the name of the law (named for his late brother) that demanded the privatization of village lands. Díaz never campaigned for village tradition; he never publicly opposed Liberal agrarian policies. However, he did not promote them although he emphasized his support of local and municipal autonomy: an open position that might attract rancheros as well as many villagers. Thus, Díaz's campaign for the presidency both responded to and promoted rural resistance to Lerdo and the ideological Liberals. Díaz's regime, established in 1876, came to power having raised expectations of a new approach to agrarian justice.

With the consolidation of Díaz's rule, rural resistance took new directions. The massive, enduring regional insurrections that seemed to define agrarian Mexico from the 1840s through the 1870s receded. Conflict did not disappear, but became more local, more negotiated, and less threatening to the national state and regime. What had changed? The consolidation of the state inhibited insurrectionary violence. The reduction of political conflict, the acceleration of economic development, and the integration of the nation via railroads and telegraphs all consolidated state power and limited the space for overt rebellion.