Economic Disorganization in Mexico
Many rural Mexicans took advantage of economic disorganization and political instability to leave villages and haciendas and to move into long-isolated upland regions. There they often settled apparently untitled lands and created ranchero communities, escaping the power of estates and the state. The first decades after Independence brought political instability and economic disorganization, accompanied by a consolidation of village and ranchero production. That change was caused in part by the institutional collapse, disruption in communications, and loss of a reliable market for agricultural exports. Yet changes favorable to the agrarian majority also resulted from pressures by rural villagers, estate residents, and rancheros working within the context of postIndependence disorganization to promote their own versions of independence. The years from 1821 into the 1840s saw few major insurrections; yet agrarian resistance proved persistent and often successful.

The 1840s brought a return to more violent agrarian conflicts. The national state remained weak and in dispute, but provincial governments began to consolidate their powers and to promote more effectively the interests of landed elites. Local conflicts over lands and labor relations emerged across a large area of southern Mexico from Oaxaca, through Guerrero, to Morelos. Yet violent conflicts remained limited until the outbreak of war against the United States in 1846. With state power locked in international conflict, indigenous peoples in several Mexican regions took the opportunity to challenge programs and policies that assaulted their visions of a just society.

The largest, most violent, most enduring, and best known of the wartime insurrections was the Caste War of Yucatán. Maya villagers, long stoic in their subjection to colonial rule, faced a post-Independence state that promoted land privatization and commercial development, while challenging community control of ancestral lands. Local political conflicts had armed many Mayas and promised them gains, only to leave them victims of elite disputes. When international war provided the opportunity, Maya peasants rose in armed protest over land losses that were challenges to a cosmic order built on community landholding and family maize cultivation. The conflict raged intensely for nearly a decade, and when the state finally gained the upper hand, a remnant of Maya rebels retreated into the back country to maintain an independent society and religious culture through the end of the nineteenth century.

Parallel conflicts occurred during the war at the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec and in the Sierra Gorda, north of the national capital. At Tehuantepec, simmering conflicts over liberal state policies promoting the privatization of valuable salt beds and favoring large estates in land disputes exploded into violent conflict when the Zapotecs of Juchitán and nearby villagers refused to recognize state law during the war years. Governor Benito Juárez responded with force, setting off years of violent conflict. In the rugged highlands of the Sierra Gorda, indigenous peoples had long resisted colonial rule, joined in the Independence-era insurgencies, and in the 1840s again used the context of larger political conflicts to rise against the incursions of large landowners and commercial exploitation.