Producing Modernity in Mexico

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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 a major regional study of modern Mexico analyses 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, globalisation and the development of capitalism in Latin America. The book argues that colonial caste identities and relations were no impediments to modernisation. Instead, they were modified by liberalism, reinterpreted through the lenses of positivism and scientific racism, and managed through an increasingly centralised state apparatus. Indian communities emerge, then, not solely as oppressed and marginalis

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