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Race, ethnicity, and gender played an important role in the complex relationship between export agriculture, labour, and state power in Chiapas during the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1914). This case study of tropical plantation development and major regional study of modern Mexico analyzes the politics of state-building and the history of land tenure and rural labour in the state of Chiapas in the period leading up to the outbreak of Revolution in 1910. The book also contributes to the growing history of indigenous peoples in Latin America, examining the changing relationship between Indian groups and non-Indian governments and economic interests in Chiapas during the nineteenth century. In so doing, it addresses questions of tradition, modernity, national state-building, globalization, and the development of capitalism in Latin America. The book argues that colonial caste identities and relations were no impediments to modernization. Instead, they were modified by liberalism, reinterpreted through the lenses of positivism and scientific racism, and managed through an increasingly centralized state apparatus. Indian communities emerge, then, not solely as oppressed and marginalized, but as an integral part of increasingly centralized state power and as institutions through which growing demands for labour and taxes could be made. Debt peonage, too, was upheld by the liberal state, sanctioned by the law as a natural everyday relationship, and buttressed by traditional patriarchy and gender relationships. Thus, in Chiapas the Porfirian regime recycled and redeployed pre-existing social and political relations, reinventing tradition to serve the purposes of modernization and progress.

From the Grounds Up is a study of how peripheral places grappled with globalization at the end of the nineteenth century. Through extensive use of local archives in the Soconusco district of Chiapas, Mexico, the book redefines the body of actors who integrated Latin America’s countryside into international markets for agricultural goods. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little explored web of indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians quickly adopted and adapted to the production of coffee for export. Following their efforts to overcome violence, isolation, and the absence of reliable institutions, the book illustrates the reshaping of rural economic and political life in the context of integrating global markets. By taking up new export crops like coffee and making use of liberal reforms around private property and contract law, smallholders and laborers defended their interests and secured spaces for their own ongoing participation in rural production. Vast swaths of Latin America’s population were sending the fruits of their labor abroad by the turn of the century. Only by taking into account all those who produced for market can we understand rural Latin America’s transformation in this era.