What was the Porfiriato in Mexico under Porfirio Díaz?
The Porfiriato: order, progress and inequality
El Porfiriato
1876–May 1911. General Porfirio Díaz, a hero of the war against the French, took power in 1876 and, apart from one four-year gap, held it until 1911 under the motto 'order…
Draft: not yet checked against its sources.
Where: Mexico
What happened
General Porfirio Díaz, a hero of the war against the French, took power in 1876 and, apart from one four-year gap, held it until 1911 under the motto 'order and progress'. Stability and new laws on customs, railways and land drew capital from the United States, Britain, France and Germany. The cost fell on the countryside. The 1883 law on 'empty lands' broke up village and Indigenous common lands into private estates, so that by 1910 only about 15 per cent of Mexican peasants owned the land they worked; hacienda labourers worked ten to twelve hours for wages paid back to the company store. Wealth concentrated in few hands, strikes were crushed, and the explosion came in 1910.
Say it
Porfirio Díaz gobernó México durante más de treinta años.
Porfirio Díaz governed Mexico for more than thirty years.
Why it matters
The Porfiriato built the modern Mexican state, its railways and its capital's grand avenues, and also the inequality that the Revolution rose against. 'Porfirismo' remains a Mexican word for authoritarian modernisation.
Read about it
Connected
- The Caste War of Yucatán (July 1847–1901)
- Benito Juárez and La Reforma (1855–15 July 1867)
- Benito Juárez and La Reforma (1855–15 July 1867)
- Cinco de Mayo: the Battle of Puebla (5 May 1862)
- The Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885)
- The War of the Pacific (February 1879–April 1884)
- The Mexican Revolution begins (20 November 1910–1920)
- The Mexican Revolution begins (20 November 1910–1920)
Sources
- Crecimiento económico durante el Porfiriato — Nueva Escuela Mexicana Digital (SEP)