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The Hidalgo revolt of 1810 marked the commencement of conflicts that brought independence to Mexico in 1821 and then led to a series of revolutionary changes that endured for decades into the national era. As colonial rule ended the contested processes of nation-building began. Mexicans faced new links to the Atlantic economy: silver mining collapsed and struggled to recuperate; textile production foundered in the face of industrial imports, then began to revive with early industrialization in Mexico. A colonial state that was oriented to mediate conflicts gave way to a national polity in which diverse Mexicans saw the state as an agent of their interests in conflict. Elites and popular groups struggled, and at times fought, to determine who would control the state and participate in national, regional, and local politics. Many villagers saw the postindependence era of conflict as a time to renegotiate production and labor relations. And beginning with insurgency in i8Io, rural families forced radical transformations in agrarian production and social relations in the region that had been the engine of commercial development in late colonial Mexico: the Bajio, a fertile basin that lay north and west of Mexico City and the central highlands.
The interpretation just given challenges an entrenched vision of Mexican history: that for all their popular participation, the conflicts that began in Io and led to independence constituted a social revolution that failed, while the conflicts that began in Io, with greater mobilization of the populace and radicalization of the elites, became a transforming national revolution. In accord with this vision, only in the twentieth century did landed elites face expropriation, while peasant communities found new life with massive redistribution of land through agrarian reform. Only after io did a self-proclaimed revolutionary state take power, with peasant villagers an essential political base. If Mexico's revolutionary tradition began in 1810, it was a tradition that was defeated and denied until the great mobilizations of 1910(1)
This essay argues for a different interpretation. At least in the Bajio, it was the insurgency that began with the Hidalgo revolt that initiated an enduring agrarian and social transformation. During a decade of revolt, insurgents challenged property rights and the organization of production and forced a shift from large-scale commercial production to family-based...