ABSTRACT
During the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the southern Mexican state of Chiapas became a commodity frontier from which coffee, cacao, rubber, and tropical hardwoods were shipped for consumption in Europe and the United States. Export-led modernisation had profound and long-lasting impacts on the region’s largely indigenous Maya peasantry, whose land and labour were appropriated by non-indigenous elites and foreign investors for global capitalist expansion. This process had begun after Mexican independence, when Chiapas’s political economy shifted from tribute and peasant subsistence to landed production on private estates using servile and non-wage labour. After 1870, rising global demand for tropical commodities and the agrarian reforms implemented by the government of Porfirio Díaz intensified the expropriation of the peasantry and the spread of coercive labour relations. In Chiapas, capitalist development did not imply free wage labour or free markets in land and capital. This chapter looks specifically at agrarian legislation and land tenure to show how the modernisation of property rights contributed to the spread of non-wage and coercive labour by an authoritarian regime that would fall to agrarian revolution in 1911.
