Díaz and Mexican Economy
Díaz reoriented the Liberal project for agrarian Mexico. He continued to favor the privatization of community lands, but he left implementation to local initiative. Local elites often promoted privatization, while poorer villagers opposed it. When conflicts developed Díaz tried to mediate negotiated solutions rather than impose ideological programs. Privatization finally was implemented on a broad scale across Mexico in the 1880s, provoking many local conflicts. Few escalated into challenges to the national regime.

While promoting privatization in carefully limited ways, Díaz backed away from the more ideological Liberals' program of cultural secularization. Having reached an accommodation with the Catholic Church on the national level, he understood the risks of forcing rural communities to limit their annual religious festivities. Thus, when communities faced privatization during the Díaz era, conflicts over land were less often linked to challenges to local religious cultures. The result was a tendency for agrarian conflicts to become localized and less threatening to the national state and the Liberal development project.

If the consolidation of the Díaz regime and its moderation of the Liberal agrarian program successfully ended the post-Independence era of agrarian insurrections, Díaz's development project simultaneously brought new pressures to rural Mexico and new patterns of agrarian conflict and resistance. The rapid incorporation of Mexico into the expanding Atlantic economy, and with it the sudden explosion of export development, brought new demands for land and labor across agrarian Mexico. Entrepreneurs seeking profit—with regime backing—often coveted land and water resources customarily used by villagers and rancheros. Such lands might have been obtained through privatization, the surveying of untitled lands, purchase, or a variety of less legal pressures. Porfirian development thus set off a spate of local land and labor disputes, leading to varied negotiations, court challenges, local demonstrations, stealthy violence, and periodic riots. They rarely led to enduring insurrections, except in peripheral regions— Papantla, Veracruz, the Yaqui Valley of Sonora, and Tomochic, Chihuahua—where long-isolated regions faced sudden incursions of state power and economic developments that challenged both the economic welfare and the cultural independence of local peoples. There, the Díaz regime faced major uprisings in the 1890s.

For most rural Mexicans, the Díaz era brought agrarian compression. Among the agrarian majority, population growth intersected with land loss, declining wages, and insecure tenancies to produce widespread economic deterioration. Yet regime stability, coupled with limited mediation of disputes, inhibited insurrectionary resistance. Conflict was generally contained within communities, there to re-emerge as crime and family violence. Yet pressures mounted and conditions worsened. In 1910, when unresolved issues of political succession broke the Díaz regime, beginning a decade of political conflict, the compressed and contained agrarian grievances generated during the decades of Porfirian peace exploded to fuel agrarian forces within a social revolution that would eventually reconfigure state and society in twentiethcentury Mexico.