Anarchisms & The Mexican Working Class, 1860

During the second half of the nineteenth century, when Mexico began a slow drawn-out process of industrialization and urbanization, the seemingly quiet countryside experienced agrarian unrest of proportions unprecedented since the independence revolution of 1810. Trapped between increasing population on diminished ejidal and pueblo landholdings and ever-growing estates and demands of large property owners, campesinos throughout Mexico sought relief by an extraordinary mixture of tactics ranging from legal petitions and agrarian plans to insurrection. The agrarian disturbances which occurred periodically throughout the nineteenth century resulted from a long process of historical development and served as a prelude to similar and more famous occurrences during the fateful epoch 1910–1917. Their causes, nature, and significance are essential for understanding an important aspect of Mexican history and the Mexican Revolution.¹

Intense peasant uprisings comprised an important part of the Spanish colonial experience in Mexico. Throughout the colonial epoch the campesinaje demonstrated a willingness to revolt that alarmed the authorities and caused them to take considerable security measures, including the creation of various rural constabularies.² But the agrarian population never successfully asserted itself prior to 1810. Its manifestations of unrest were always isolated by geographical conditions and poor communications. The uprisings were all defeated, for the rural population suffered not only from inferior weaponry but also from internal divisions. The rural working class rarely if ever confronted the great landowners as a unity. Municipio leadership often cooperated with the Spanish imperial order and opposed rebellious elements from the lower social strata of the village. Sometimes racial differences between mestizo and indigenous elements rendered deep, even violent, divisions within the villages. Communities contended with each other over land, water rights, and political jurisdictions. Rivalry existed between villages and the sometimes more fortunate hacienda laborers, who in parts of the Valley of Mexico received higher incomes than the free village inhabitants in addition to relief from the head tax which was paid by their hacendado patrones.³

Despite the uprisings, social banditry and Catholic millenarianism constituted the most frequent forms of Mexican agrarianism. Like the preindustrial, preideological urban crowd, preideological agrarian protest challenged not the state but rather abuses in administration, land seizures, and deplorable conditions encountered in the locality. Out of this social protest, plus the presence of some radical priest missionaries, the first agrarian ideology, Catholic millenarianism, emerged among the campesinaje. Some peasants believed that everything would be changed and the long-sought ideal of social justice would spread over the land. The effect of millenarianism in the Mexican countryside has not yet been treated adequately, but testimony to its presence is found in the religiosity of the Zapatista army of the revolution and in the spontaneous land redistributions carried out behind the advancing peasant armies led by the revolutionary priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos. The argument for spontaneity in these actions is enhanced by the lesser commitment of those two leaders to agrarian reform than that demonstrated by their “followers,” who seized haciendas, killed their owners, and occupied the terrain.

During the nineteenth century the development of export-oriented agriculture in the traditional countryside intensified the growth of haciendas and threatened the village landholdings, municipio political independence, and indigenous precapitalist cultural values. The growth of the hacienda did not mean greater wealth in the hinterlands; rather it meant an increased flow of productivity and wealth to the cities, where the empresarios of the new export-oriented country estates lived, traded, and speculated. The cultural impact of the new countryside capitalism devastated the precapitalist indigenous farmers’ former value system. The traditional campesino worked and lived off the produce of the land. Its productivity satisfied his needs until the intrusion of the outside world created new desires and concerns. He lost confidence in his former way of life, he sought the advantages of modern nineteenth-century technology, and yet he resisted his loss of personal freedom and the polarization of landownership. The prepolitical poor believe in the rights of the common man based upon natural justice, law, and custom. They resist infringement by outsiders or the rich. The more serious campesino uprisings in central Mexico (excluding Sonora, Chihuahua, and Yucatán) occurred in 1832–1834,1842–1844, 1847–1849,1855–1856,1868–1869,1878–1884,1896, and 1906. The campesinaje resistance deepened as the century progressed.⁵

After the mid-nineteenth century, free-contract and open-market sales replaced the long-standing protection of Church and indigenous municipio landholdings. The volume of land transfers increased until it peaked during the Porfiriato. These changes catastrophically altered the peasants’ way of life. At the same time the contemporary agrarian ideology of anarchism and other radical forms of thought reached the Mexican countryside. Predictably, areas that previously produced social banditry—Chalco-Río Frío, eastern Morelos, and northwestern Puebla—now produced heavily ideological agrarian revolutionaries.

Eric J. Hobsbawn has outlined the anarchist agrarian village movement in Spain as comprised of three groups—the periodically active mass of the village population, the local militants, and the outside agitators.⁶ Among the Mexican peasants, as in Spain, the third group made an important contribution to the other two because it brought agrarian revolutionary ideologies into a countryside already in periodic revolt.

The serious agrarian unrest of nineteenth-century Mexico indeed dates back to the independence struggles led by Hidalgo and Morelos and the massive Oaxaca, Guererro, and Michoacán uprising of 1842–1844, but the first ideological, coordinated, and well led and organized agrarian uprising did not take place until 1849, when one thousand poorly armed campesinos raided haciendas and seized Río Verde, a town near Querétaro. The notorious rapine and savagery of this episode set a pattern for the struggles that followed. Most significantly, the leader of these campesinos, Eleuterio Quiroz, set a precedent and established a formative agrarian ideology by demanding, in writing, the redistribution to the peones of the more populous lands of the hacendados. The campesinos, however, sustained their campaign for only a few months and they offered no ideological-historical critique of society as a basis for justifying their grievances or making their demands for change.⁷ Agrarian tumult intensified and swept most of central Mexico in 1856 as a result of the Ley Lerdo. The struggle finally merged with the incipient Wars of the Reforma (1858–1860). In the late 1860’s, after the French intervention and the liberals’ return to power, agrarian disorders sharply increased and took on an entirely new dimension as a result of the appearance of a revolutionary doctrine. The important turning point toward the modern agrarian movement of the 1910 revolutionary era occurred with the ideological contribution of the Chávez López uprising of 1868–1869.⁸

During the years that followed the demise of Chávez López, agrarian adherents began an active campaign on behalf of the campesinos through the medium of the Mexico City working-class press.⁹ Radicals, many of them anarchists, continued to develop the agrarian ideology by speaking of cooperative agrarian colonies independent of governmental interference and reinforcing their members’ sense of local patriotism. José María González stands out as the leading spokesman for what might be called Mexican anarchoagrarianism during the 1870’s.

Despite his importance, González’ background remains largely unknown. However, the record of his public activities and the numerous newspaper editorials and articles he wrote during the second half of the 1870’s have left behind a historical-ideological legacy and a limited amount of biographical information. He emerges as one of the most provocative and controversial figures of his time. González’ descriptions of the more important agrarian confrontations of the epoch are the best expressions of a system of agrarian ideas then gaining widespread acceptance.

González became prominent in the mid-1870’s bitterly denouncing and blaming the government, with his essays in El Hijo del Trabajo, for the hardships of the campesinos, artisans, and urban workers. He cited the omnipresent poverty, the chronic economic instability, and the continual political chaos as evidence of a corrupt and worse than useless Mexican government. Through these denunciations and his proposals for the betterment of society and the uplifting of the lower classes, he expressed in clear terms his anarchist ideology :

Openly challenging the very principle of government itself, González, a tailor, is a constant reminder of the negative reaction by many artisans to the economic and social impact of the evolving factory system of commodity production.¹¹ On a few occasions he acknowledged those persons who played an important role in the development of his political consciousness. Santiago Villanueva, whom he encountered during the early years of the Gran Círculo when González first became involved in the urban labor movement, probably wielded the greatest influence upon him. Later González remembered him as “my old friend, an artisan, the founder of the Mexican fraternal societies.”¹² The founder and first editor of El Hijo del Trabajo, José Muñuzuri not only exerted powerful influence upon González but also serves as an example of the Spanish anarchist impact upon the Mexicans. González began his journalistic career under the tutelage of the well-grounded and erudite Muñuzuri.¹³ The only other person who had an acknowledged role in the development of González’ anarchist creed was an anonymous figure known as Santibañez (a name assumed on occasion by Rhodakanaty), whom González credited with having contributed greatly to his understanding of Proudhon. It is illustrative of the organizing techniques used by Mexico’s nineteenth-century socialists that they met as a study group in the Santibañez home where they read and discussed What Is Property? and other works.¹⁴

González’ frequent discussion of agrarian conditions and of his anarchist ideas in El Hijo del Trabajo always received featured status and sometimes occupied the entire front page and more. An illustration of his creative thinking, González’ variation of the cooperativist theme represents a part of his contribution to nineteenth-century Mexican agrarianism. Like some agrarian advocates, he sought escape from the social exigencies of a harsh industrial society, from an unprecedented rate of urbanization, and from what seemed to be an increasingly corrupt government into a Utopian countryside modeled upon the socialism of Proudhon and Bakunin. González, in his approach, integrated Mexico’s traditional agrarian sense of identity with the locality, or patria chica, and the artisan guilds’ self-help heritage with European anarchist ideological conceptions. González recommended that a mass movement away from the capitalist economy be started by forming independent, self-sufficient equalitarian associations at the village level :

Describing goals based upon ideology proved to be easier, however, than successfully formulating a realistic plan to bring them about. Gonzalez proposed a program in which groups of associates would amass sufficient capital in order to purchase land and equipment to begin the system of agrarian collectives. He concluded with a premature appeal for thousands of agrarians and workers to join the project, which he predicted would “amaze” people:

In order to prove that what we propose is not a mere Utopian scheme, we are going to set up an example. One hundred associates are able to create a capital amount of ten thousand pesos in two years if each of them saves one hundred pesos. This can be undertaken by fixed monthly payments, i.e., each member would have to give approximately four pesos and sixteen centavos monthly. In the first month four hundred and sixteen pesos would be collected and the funds would be placed into a savings account immediately. Calculated at 3% interest, the savings would provide a gain of twelve pesos and forty-eight centavos, an increase that would continue to grow from month to month. These figures are very small, almost miserable, because we do not wish to deceive but to convince. If this was done with complete enthusiasm and on a greater scale, i.e., with such a number of participants that in the first collection one thousand pesos were gathered, then one would see with amazement the immensity of the project.

What! Are there not ten thousand intelligent workers in the capital that understand their interests and will unite in order to achieve that high ideal of their emancipation, of their betterment? We believe that there are! … and very quickly all of the workers’ societies in the republic will follow their example…. A moment of calm reflection will be enough for the regeneration of the workers. To those men of heart, to those who love Mexico, to those who have children and want to see them happy, to those who suffer from consumption caused by the fatigue of working hours that are too long, to those who eat bread soaked with the sweat that drips from their brows, to them we put this question :

Will you passively submit to your unhappy present and not think of the future?¹⁶

Two prolonged agrarian struggles that resulted in the expulsion of campesino families from disputed land almost obsessed the Mexico City advocates of agrarian reform during the 1870’s. Contrary to the emerging agrarian ideology, the great estate owners, or hacendados, involved in these cases expanded their territories at the expense of two campesino pueblos. The agrarian essayists in the Mexico City working-class press became nearly hysterical in their denunuciations, while whipping up the emotions of their supporters and calling their rivals thieves and robbers.¹⁷ But they failed to stop the land seizures and, during the struggles that ensued, the agrarians became desperate. The public dissemination of their ideas and the push to peacefully develop agrarian collectives seemed to get them nowhere. Some came to believe that they had not gone far enough, questioned the adequacy of their program, and placed their faith in violence as the necessary remedy.

A major crisis developed when González charged that José Ives Limantour, the proprietor of Hacienda La Tenería in the state of México, forcibly seized the farming lands of the pueblo San Simonito Tlacomulco in 1869 without legal sanction. In 1876 the campesinos, hopeful that the new president, Díaz, would help them, petitioned him for return of the land. But by 1877 Limantour, who had supported former President Lerdo, had proven his ability to survive political upheaval by leading a campaign to collect private loans to the Díaz regime in order for it to pay the government’s debt to the United States. Limantour gained the support of the Díaz regime in the settlement of the dispute and kept the property—this time with the sanction of the courts. González reacted by printing the pathetic petition sent to Díaz by the pueblo and then summarized his feelings:

For nearly two years the agrarian advocates in Mexico City campaigned for the return of lands lost by a campesino community to Hacienda de las Bocas in San Luis Potosí. In fact, the series of incidents on Hacienda de las Bocas led to some of the most fierce agrarian attacks against the Díaz government. González led the critics, referring to the regime as a group of “oppressors and gangsters” who used the rurales to support the hacendados.¹⁹ According to the working-class press accounts (the other newspapers ignored the land disputes), these land acquisitions assumed almost classical patterns. They claimed that in 1864 the hacendados obtained a series of court decisions based upon the Ley Lerdo that adjudicated the land to them. With the courts’ decisions, or perhaps before the courts’ decisions, they obtained the support of the local, state, and national authorities. The hacendados involved, the “wealthy and powerful” Farias family, caused the campesinos, who had originally occupied the land early in the previous century, to be legally declared squatters.²⁰ This new settlement, a common phenomenon as the rural population continued to increase during the century, had received recognition in 1792 as the pueblo of Ahualulco; and the town archives indicated construction of the village church in that year. During the court proceedings, none of the town’s citizens could provide testimony regarding the legal rights under which the town had been established, and they possessed no documentary proof. Officials of the Maximilian government then expelled them from the property.²¹

Later, during the tripartite civil war between Díaz, Lerdo, and Iglesias, agrarians believed that Díaz had at least partially adopted their ideology because they thought he had promised land reform to the poverty-striken peones of the Mexican countryside. González, for example, referred to this commitment when he wrote : “[T]he plan of Tuxtepec promised us the independence of the municipality, but it was just a promise to lure us.”²² The former citizens of Ahualulco acted upon the assumption that the land would be returned to them, and they reoccupied it.²³ Unfortunately for them, by 1878 the Díaz government and the local and state authorities decided against them. The campesinos were once again forcibly removed, their buildings razed, and their belongings lost.²⁴

La Internacional’s correspondent read the contents of a telegraphic message sent from the rural official on the scene; the reporter then forwarded the report from the town of Moctezuma to his paper, and it appeared in the next day’s edition: “Commandant F. Rodríguez: Yesterday the removal of morenos began from Rancho de San Vicente, upon the orders from the owners of Hacienda de las Bocas; today the expulsion of all the families was completed. Joaquín Flores.”²⁵ The message caused a furor among Mexico City’s agrarians. Outraged, La Internacional’s editors commented :

Six hundred families have been thrown off this land in Rancho de San Vicente, upon the orders of the usurpers from Hacienda de las Bocas.

This horrible act is nothing more than a repetition of what previously occurred in 1869 when this vile hacendado threw out others, including old men, women, and children…. The rich, with but few and honorable exceptions, lead lives filled with vice and crime … at the price of onerous sacrifices on the part of the workers. But when the workers realize this, they will then be able to emancipate themselves from the rule of private capital by joining associations and creating cooperative societies…. ¡ Ay de los vampiros de Oro! ¡Pueblo, justicia para el Proletario!²⁶

The growing animosity of agrarians toward the Díaz regime reached the boiling point. By 1877 González and others called for a mass uprising, La Revolución Social, in their articles that treated the disputes between campesinos and hacendados.²⁷ But the most important result of the agrarian disputes during the 1870’s was the emergence of a more sophisticated agrarian ideology.

By 1878, with years of debate and hundreds of revolutionary proposals behind them, the agrarians boasted a program that seemed elaborate in contrast to the ideological simplicity of Chávez López. Zalacosta, the editor of La Internacional and an agrarian who favored direct and violent action, endorsed and printed a plan allegedly proposed by La Social. The anarchist-Bakuninist organizing groups then claimed sixty-two branch sections scattered throughout Mexico.²⁸ La Social’s agrarian program called for dissolution of the national government; autonomous municipalities; an agrarian law to provide for the measuring and demarcation of deamortized lands; liquidation of urban capital and interests in the countryside; gradual leveling and equalization of property ownership; ultimate abolition of the wage system and, meanwhile, procurement of higher agricultural wages by means of strikes; formation of territorial banks to secure the sale of agricultural products; and Falansterio Societario communal groups as the basic mode of organization for both urban and agricultural laborers.²⁹

In the meantime, intense agrarian unrest built up in the central and northern areas of the country. Between 1878 and 1884 the most widespread campesino rebellions to that point in Mexican history broke out in the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Durango, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Hidalgo, México, Puebla, and Morelos. The revolts resulted from widespread land seizures by speculators in conjunction with the development of national railroad lines and the government’s wholesale application of Ley Lerdo land-claims procedures.³⁰

The desperate plight of the villages and no expectation that his agrarian plan could be legally implemented caused Zalacosta and other agrarista radicals to form a Gran Comité Conmunero. Its task was to promote revolution in the countryside, and its delegates attended village congresses in the states of México, Guanajuato, and Hidalgo. Emissaries established communications with rebellious agrarians as far away as Michoacán and Chihuahua. Then, armed with the program of La Social-La Internacional and the manifesto of Chávez López, Zalacosta went to Chalco, where he managed to stir up a campesino rebellion in late 1878. During the next eighteen months he and a few hundred of his followers fought a running battle with the federal army and rurales through northeastern Morelos, eastern México, Querétaro, and Hidalgo. The rebels sacked numerous haciendas and redistributed their lands among the campesinos. Non-campesino towns were attacked and burned. Government forces finally apprehended Zalacosta near Querétaro, where he was detained and eventually executed.³¹ The wave of unrest rose and fell until 1884, when the government once again gained military control of the situation.³²

In the midst of the agrarian turmoil that gripped most of central Mexico, Colonel Alberto Santa Fe penned the most complex and sophisticated agrarian document yet seen. It marked the apex in the development of nineteenth-century agrarian revolutionary ideology. The proposal, known as the Ley del Pueblo, received wide publication in the working-class press.³³ Although one historian describes Santa Fe as “half Bakuninist-half Marxist,” his Marxist experience was probably minimal.³⁴ Marx was hardly mentioned in the working-class press during the 1870’s and the first translation of his work did not appear until El Socialista broke the silence in 1883.³⁵ Bakunin’s philosophy, however, received frequent coverage in the pages of the Mexico City working-class press with which Santa Fe maintained a close relationship.³⁶ Porfirio Díaz called Santa Fe a “communist”;³⁷ the reason for this reaction is not hard to find, since the preamble of the Ley del Pueblo stated that the ley was based upon the concept of human social and spiritual equality. Its program called for the distribution of parcels of land to the extent of 276 rods in length by 184 in width per minor son to each campesino family in Mexico as long as the family’s total capital and property did not exceed three thousand pesos. The municipios would determine which lands would be seized from the haciendas. To obtain compensation, the ley required the hacendado to present a receipt for his lands to the nearest office of a Banco Agrícola y Industrial, which in open and public hearings determined the property’s value. The bank, which would be required to have at least one branch in every state of the Mexican union, would keep a record of how much territory the pueblo claimed in order to determine when, according to its population, sufficient acreage had been acquired. The ayuntamiento municipal, or village council, was charged with the responsibility of individual or communal plot distribution in accordance with local tradition. The recipient was required to repay the agreed-upon value of the land to the agricultural bank at a rate of 10 percent per year plus 6 percent interest on the unpaid principal for ten years. The land title could not be transferred to another individual until the terms of the agreement had been met. Further, the agricultural bank was charged with the responsibility of providing low-interest loans to the campesinos through the municipal councils for the purchase of agricultural equipment, seeds, and other necessary farming implements. Consistent with contemporary libertarian socialist ideology and cooperativism, the base of political power was to be the local municipio.³⁸

Santa Fe’s persistent advocacy of his ley, his association with the fugitive Zalacosta, and the use of his plan by the revolutionary General Miguel Negrete in the states of Puebla and Morelos led to his arrest in Puebla.³⁹ Further incentive to make the arrest stemmed from his open communications with agrarian revolutionaries in Guanajuato and Michoacán who had already faced the federal army in the field.⁴⁰ Accused of being a “communist,” he was placed in the prison of Santiago Tlatelolco in Mexico City on June 8, 1879.⁴¹ After his release he lived in the north of Mexico in “exile.” Chastized, years later he won election to the Congress as a pro-Díaz deputy from Durango.⁴² He proved to be a repentant sinner who never again muddied the water.

In 1879 the Ley del Pueblo inspired a serious rebellion led by General Miguel Negrete in Puebla, the Chalco area, Morelos, and Guerrero.⁴³ Negrete explained :

Between 1868 and 1890 Negrete was a potent force in the vast mountainous area extending across the states of Puebla, Morelos, and Guerrero.⁴⁵ He supported revolutionary sociopolitical programs and consistently sided with the urban labor and agrarian movements in their relations with the governments of Juárez, Lerdo, and Díaz.⁴⁶ He plotted the overthrow of Juárez in 1866 because he and his confederate, General García de la Cadena, both leading generals in the liberal resistance against the French, considered Juárez too conservative.⁴⁷ Negrete took this action despite his position as the chief field commander of the Juárez army;⁴⁸ the plot fell through because of the opposition voiced by Generals Francisco Naranjo and Juan N. Saenz.⁴⁹ It is clear from the record that Negrete did not fit the pattern of an ordinary provincial caudillo. He alienated himself from the mainstream of post-Reforma liberalism, the compromisers and “practical men,” with his consistent espousal of agrarian and urban labor reform.

In 1868 and 1869 Negrete provided logistical support for the Chávez López uprising in Chalco and conducted a campaign against government troops in the Puebla-Morelos area immediately to the south of Chalco.⁵⁰ He then supported the insurrectionists at Chalco who rallied to Zalacosta in 1879.⁵¹ Consistent with his record, Negrete supported the Ley del Pueblo in 1879–1880. He barely managed to escape arrest in Puebla when federal troops surprised him and some of Santa Fe’s supporters. The Mexico City newspaper EI Hijo del Trabajo commented, “God save Don Miguel from the claw.”⁵² In 1880 Negrete helped to spread the anarchistlike ideology of the agrarian movement when he issued his own revolutionary agrarian program, which called for the emergence of the autonomous and sovereign municipio libre to distribute land and determine the outcome of the long-standing agrarian dispute.⁵³ He continued to hold out against Díaz until the early 1890’s when advanced age forced him to abandon the struggle.⁵⁴

In 1880 Rhodakanaty returned to Chalco with the intention of reopening his escuela, only to find the task rendered hopeless by the combined hostility of the government, the local hacendados, and Tiburcio Montiel, who founded a large campesino organization, the Liga Agraria de la República Mexicana.⁵⁵ The Liga, which held regular meetings and sponsored legal action against the territorial encroachments of hacendados, had members in the states of Hidalgo, México, Morelos, and Puebla.⁵⁶ Active in the agrarian movement since the early 1870’s, Montiel assisted Zalacosta in the formation of the Gran Comité Conmunero in 1876.⁵⁷ In 1878 he wrote a particularly aggressive article in El Socialista which condemned agrarian injustice and cited specific attacks, land seizures, and even instances of cattle rustling commited by haciendas against pueblos. He concluded with the assertion that, if his resistance to hacendados’ aggressions was “communismo,” then so be it.⁵⁸ He obviously regarded Rhodakanaty as a rival when the latter returned to Chalco. Discouraged, Rhodakanaty returned to Mexico City; he finally gave up and returned to Europe in 1886.⁵⁹ Unfortunately for Montiel, his dispute with Rhodakanaty attracted too much attention to him; the government identified him as a cohort of Santa Fe and Zalacosta and arrested him in August 1881. After a short-lived jail release, during which he joined Rhodakanaty and others as a temporary editor of El Socialista, the government again arrested Montiel and sent him into exile at La Paz, Baja California. In the meantime, the ever troublesome campesinos at Chalco, who supported him by resorting to the seizure of contested lands, were violently suppressed by the federal army.⁶⁰

Agrarian clashes continued throughout Mexico from Yucatán to Sonora until 1910, although the historical record does not reveal any major attempts made by the campesinos or pueblos of Chalco or the nearby areas of Morelos and Puebla to redress their grievances outside legal channels. The last major agrarian uprising of the nineteenth century in central Mexico occurred at Papantla in Veracruz, where, despite overwhelming government strength, about one thousand campesinos demanding “return of their land” rebelled in 1896. Following defeat in an open battle with the federal army, the indigenous rebels resorted to a vicious guerrilla war that continued until 1906.⁶¹ Resurgent agrarian unrest in other parts of Veracruz erupted in 1906 along with uprisings in northern Mexico under anarchist-oriented Flores Magonista-Partido Liberal Mexicano leadership. The Veracruz fighting continued on into the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Díaz regime reigned supreme; yet, the agrarians, pushed by a relentless population growth and ever expanding hacienda system, had already developed that collection of ideas and attitudes known as agrarian ideology.⁶² Don Porfirio and his científicos, with all the power they possessed, never succeeded in undoing the revolution that had occurred in the minds of the campesino population.

Despite claims that the Zapatista Plan de Ayala and Agrarian Law were “original,” it is clear that the agrarian ideology developed in the nineteenth century, especially in Zapata’s own area of operations, foreshadowed most of the concepts that appeared during the agrarian struggle of 1910.⁶³ The Zapatista program included features of the precursor’s proposals, such as redistribution of land, conditions of compensation, municipio political autonomy, municipio authority over actual land seizures and the awarding of communal or individual plots according to local tradition, the formation of a regional agricultural bank, and the guaranteed provision of such basic farming implements as seed, plows, and oxen.⁶⁴ The Plan de Ayala, as a revolutionary document, was more elaborate than its nineteenth-century predecessors; but, after all, it was the end product of an agrarian movement with a long history. As Professor John Womack states : “The plan [de Ayala] was not an instant creation. As a statement of attitudes it had been evolving for at least fifty years, through the public lessons Juárez had given in the supreme importance of ‘principles,’ ‘law,’ and ‘justice,’ through the formation of national pride in the resistance against the French, through the exasperation with personal promises and political abuses during Don Porfirio’s long reign, and lately through the abortion of hopes in the virtuous Madero.”⁶⁵ There existed, however, other important elements in this evolutionary process. Leaders expressing varying degrees of libertarian socialist ideology, such as Chávez López, Rhodakanaty, Zalacosta, González, Santa Fe, Montiel, and Negrete, in their own indefatigable way, made significant contributions to agrarian ideology in their struggles during the darkest days of the nineteenth century. Their efforts were an important part in the development of Mexican agrarianism prior to the coming of the Mexican Revolution.