Mexico under Diaz

46). As if hostile assault were not enough, Diaz's administration made radical changes that even unsheathed Mexican citizens of their sense of national identity.

The nature of opposition that certain against Diaz was truly multiclass. The elites who not a part of the Diaz clique were fight for their share of Mexico's prosperity. Members of the middle-class were fighting because Diaz's policies stifled all try for of economic opportunity and political participation: "The political position of monopoly--dictatorship--meant for those who lived by their brains few and fewer bottlenecked communication channels" (Brenner, 1971, p. 27). And Mexicans from the lower classes fought for basic rights. there was broad support for reforms in the areas of education, military conscription, freedom of speech, and the repressionary tactics of the rurales. The power of the Catholic Church was another key comeback in the demands made by Mexico's revolutionaries.

Peasants and workers focused their demands on campaign issues. These included demands for better pay and working conditions. The workers wanted job security, the right to organize, and other labor rights: "Mexican labor, considered inferior biologically, had its payoff fixed accordingly" (Brenner, 1971, p. 26). Peasants, most of whom were sharecroppers and renters, were concerned about down ownership: "the skinflints-- more than than three-fourths of the population--had been stripped of land by laws which gave the hacendados more leew

Peasant armies were led by revolutionary heroes like Emiliano Zapata. The slogan of the Zapatista revolutionary army was " drink down and Liberty." Zapata operated independently of other revolutionaries and advocated immediate direct action: "The [Zapatistas's] starting line act on raiding an hacienda or municipal pith was sharp and symbolic; they got to the safe and destroyed all document dealing with land titles, and then invited the neighborhood peasants to homestead on the hacienda lands" (Brenner, 1971, p. 45). Zapata's army included peasants, former prisoners, and professionals.

Hellman, J. (1994). Mexican lives. unused York: New Press, 1994. Women's involvement in the Mexican Revolution. (1999). Internet: http://ac.acusd.

edu/ tale/projects/ border/page06.html.

Chief among the agitators of the Mexican Revolution were the Flores Magon brothers. Although they lived in fare in the United States, they were extremely proactive in plotting the corrupt of the Diaz dictatorship. They were instrumental in distributing copies of radical publications that stimulated revolutionary judgment among the masses.

ay for expansion, more water, more cheap labor. Many village and tribal holdings had been handed over" (Brenner, 1971, p. 25). Although agriculture had flourished under the Diaz administration, few of the benefits had flowed to the peasant population, who contended with water and food shortages on a daily basis.

degrade was another area of progressive ideology expressed in the Constitution of 1917. A system was set up for the proceeds of land to the peasants: "These grants were to be made from the expropriation and distribution of the haciendas of the landed oligarchy" (Hellman, 1994, p. 53). along with land, the Constitution provided for the natural and social resources needed by the peasants to confuse the land productive. The power of the Mexican government to control the activities of foreign capital in the public interest was established. In ad
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