The Fourth and Fifth Mexican Lands Systems
All of these systems of land tenure were founded on the idea that land belonged to those who cultivate it. They also formed the basis of village autonomy and local campesino democracy. However, each also corresponded to different traditions, histories, and worldviews that would help determine different strategies during the Revolution.

A fourth system of land tenure was that of the old haciendas. Here the rent of land and the labor of the campesino was a source of profit for the landowner, but the ownership of land also was a source of prestige and power. The old hacienda system might best be termed a symbiosis of traditional seigniory typical of the ancien régime and the new spirit of capitalist enterprise. Porfirian haciendas combined these two elements in varying degrees, just as they found innumerable ways to combine servile labor and salaried work.

A fifth group, that of rancheros and rich campesinos, owned medium-sized individual and family properties (ranchos) that also had emerged alongside the haciendas. The rancheros had taken advantage of the expropriation of village lands, contracted work, and could rent part of their properties to poor campesinos. Members of this rural middle class, whose size is difficult to estimate based on census records, acted as intermediaries between villages and haciendas and, depending on the region, took different sides during the Revolution. Nonetheless, the power of the Porfirian regime linked tightly to the landowning elites in symbiosis with the new "steam lords" of the emerging industrial sector. In the mentality of this landholding aristocracy, social prestige, political and military power, and investment capital were the sole determinants of elite membership. All three campesino groups—communal villages, former military colonists, and indigenous groups of the northeast—fought against this social regime, capturing or destroying haciendas everywhere Revolutionary battles took place.