Hacendado Elite and Mexican Revolution
The initial direction of the Revolution, however, came from a specific sector of the hacendado elite, owners of modern capitalist haciendas, who tended to be concentrated in northern Mexico. If land had not ceased to be a badge of social prestige for this sector, it still was regarded as a business enterprise and investment. Francisco Madero came from a hacendado family from the northern cotton-producing region of La Laguna; similarly, the Sonoran dynasty that controlled the post-Revolutionary state between 1920 and 1934 through the presidents Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Eláas Calles also owned large agroindustrial holdings in the state of Sonora.

The first phase of the Mexican Revolution, then, was an alliance between capitalist hacendados and campesinos against the Porfirian oligarchy. The democratically inclined and upwardly mobile middle class that had emerged during the Pax Porfiriana also made common cause against the Porfirian regime. This phase was short-lived: the treaty of Ciudad Juárez and the resignation of Porfirio Díaz in May 1911 closed the cycle of power of the landholding oligarchy in Mexico much earlier than in any other Latin American country.

Scarcely had the question of land tenure come into the open, however, when conflict broke out among the various Revolutionary factions. The first agrarian rebellion was led by Emiliano Zapata in November 1911. His Plan de Ayala demanded the restitution of lands to villages and called on campesinos to take back their lands by force of arms, going well beyond the call for legal restitution in Madero's Plan de San Luis Potosí. If during the Porfirian regime the burden of proof had been on the villages, under the Plan de Ayala the burden of proof was on the hacendados, who could contest restitution only after villagers already had taken back their lands. Between 1912 and 1918 the Zapatista forces gained control of the state of Morelos just south of Mexico City, as well as parts of the states of Tlaxcala, Guerrero, and Puebla. The Zapatista government dictated far-reaching legislation on land, water rights, government, education, and municipal administration.

The fall of Madero and his assassination in February 1913 at the hands of the Federal army under Victoriano Huerta unleashed the second phase of the Mexican Revolution, the Constitutionalist revolt led by the hacendado and former governor of Coahuila Venustiano Carranza. Although Carranza's Plan de Guadalupe failed to mention the agrarian question, the agrarian Revolutionaries of the south made common cause with the Constitutionalists of the north against the Huerta dictatorship. Moreover, an important faction within the Constitutionalist ranks was concerned fundamentally with land distribution—the Division of the North headed by the peasant caudillo Pancho Villa. Villa's forces proved militarily decisive, breaking the Federal forces in the Battle of Zacatecas in June 1914. Soon after the Constitutionalist victory, however, the Villistas clashed with the Carrancista leadership over their differing conceptions of the agrarian question.