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Until the late-nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican peasants (or campesinos) were locked in debt peonage and isolated in rural areas that lacked the railroads or other transportation systems that facilitate mass migration. But the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), a period popularly known as el Porfriato, changed the history of Mexican immobility. Diaz pursued a program of modernizing Mexico in the image of nations such as Argentina and the United States. During this campaign for "Order and Progress," Diaz dramatically expanded Mexico's railroad system, promoted land privatization, and encouraged a switch from peonage to wage labor. As an estimated five million Mexican campesinos lost access to communal land holdings during el Porfxriato, their search for work began a century of mass labor migration between Mexico and the United States (1). This essay provides a compact history of Mexican immigration to the United States. There are many ways to tell this history, but the basic framework of what follows is a story of uneven capitalist economic development and U.S. foreign policy in the making of international labor migration.
Roots of Migration
Porfirio Diaz's world of "Order and Progress" reduced political instability, increased literacy, and improved public health, but was forged at an overwhelming price of dispossession and poverty for Mexico's rural population. More Mexicans were free wage laborers, but more were also dangerously poor without recourse in rural Mexico. Without land, Mexico's newly mobile wage labor force migrated in search of work and wages. In 1884, the newly completed railroad terminal at El Paso, Texas directly linked Mexican workers in the populous central regions of Mexico to jobs north of the U.S.-Mexico border, where industrial agriculture was beginning to take root in the southwestern United States (2).
Industrial agriculture began a three-decade long expansion in the American west after Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to fund large irrigation projects in the region. As dams, canals, and reservoirs controlled the flow of water through the region, landholders quickly transformed the rich but arid lands into fields of grains, fruits, vegetables, and cotton. By 1920, the Southwest served as an orchard and winter garden to the world. With almost 31 million acres of crops valued at over $1.7 billion in California and Texas alone,...