Revolutionary Mobilization and Mexican Exonomy
Revolutionary mobilization was regionally intense in the central highlands. Where booming estates pressed hardest on villagers yet offered only limited seasonal employment (often because mechanization allowed production increases without parallel labor demands), insurrection demanding the return to peasant production and village autonomy became intense, particularly in Morelos (Emiliano Zapata's homeland) and in adjacent regions of the states of Mexico, Puebla, and Guerrero. In other regions, highland Oaxaca, for example, limited estate development and limited pressures on villagers and peasant families led to fewer, more sporadic local uprisings.

Rancheros also faced Revolution and responded in diverse ways. Many in the north, having profited from economic boom while being pressured by large estates operated by politically linked oligarchs, became adamant Revolutionaries. In the Bajío, rancheros had profited from Porfirian development without competing with large estates and rarely joined the Revolution. Others in the uplands where Michoacán joins Jalisco had remained isolated from Porfirian developments and ignored the revolution. Rancheros in Hidalgo and Guerrero led Revolutionary movements that challenged landed elites and claimed local political power. The complex transformations of land and labor regimes during the nineteenth century left diverse legacies to Revolutionary Mexico.

The creation of the Mexican nation was a long and contested process. Elite visions of a national state and society were challenged in diverse ways by popular alternatives. Elites sought a national state that would serve such elite interests as economic development and national power. The agrarian majority often had alternative priorities, including subsistence production and family and community autonomy. After 1821, growing numbers of influential leaders promoted liberal ideals: they aimed to turn community lands into private property, they worked to limit the role of the Catholic Church and religion in public affairs, and they demanded the education of the Mexican majority to transform peasant villagers into liberal citizens. Many among the agrarian majority, however, preferred communal landholding, held religion as essential to community culture, and resisted any transformation about which they were not consulted. The result was a long era of post-Independence negotiation and conflict, punctuated between 1840 and 1880 by a series of major regional insurrections.

Resistance, of course, takes diverse forms. It may range from ignoring the edicts of the powerful, to hard negotiations over work, to legal challenges, to brief riots, to massive and violent insurrections. All developed in Mexico during the century after Independence, although the historical record privileges the more public and violent challenges to the emerging nation-state and the developing liberal project.