Porfiriato Diaz Regime

Paper Summary:

This article discusses that despite the substantial economic growth that occurred within Mexico during the reign of the government of Porfiriato Diaz from 1877-1910, the legacy of this period remains a dark one in the Mexican imagination and historical memory. The writer notes that despite Diaz's expressed intentions to modernize the nation he led, his policies instead sewed the seeds for social stratification and the Mexican Revolution, which followed shortly after his government's dissolution. Further, the writer discusses that during the Diaz years, the economic expansion of the Mexican elite was fueled by the systematic and often bloody suppression of the nation's growing ranks of urban laborers, such as textile workers and miners, in a fashion that created an inequitable and unstable base for a modern, capitalist system in Mexico.

From the Paper:

"The mania for modernization also created an intellectual justification within the Diaz regime for the continued oppression of Mexican agricultural workers, whose labor was deemed to be less necessary for the expanding Mexican industries favored by the regime. The period was also marked by the unjust possession by the government of the land of the nation's traditional peasantry, again a casualty of urbanization and modernization. These orchestrated inequities reinforced the Mexican class system within the developing Mexican industrial and agricultural economy in a fashion that swiftly created a land that had evolved into what almost seemed like a parody of the traditional Marxist view of history. In other words, there was an extreme imbalance between the working classes and the classes who owned the nation's means of production and institutions of government."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Meyer, Michael C & William l. Sherman, Susan M. Deeds. The Course of Mexican History. Seventh Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Gilbert, Joseph & Timothy J. Henderson. The Mexico Reader Duke University Press, 2003.

More papers on Porfiriato Diaz Regime:

• Essay # 137922 : "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq: A Book Review"
• Book Review # 114444 : "Junot Diaz's "Ysrael"
• Book Review # 99537 : "Junot Diaz's "Aguantado"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: