The roots of the revolution lie in the global dislocations wrought by industrialization and modernization, combined with the local factors of social inequality and the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz in the last six years of his rule. During the Porfiriato, an expanding Atlantic economy targeted Mexican raw materials for export to the industrializing economies in the United States and Europe. The resultant foreign investments into infrastructure, banking, mining, and agriculture brought impressive material improvements, including the construction of almost fifteen thousand miles of railroad track and the revitalization of the mining industry. But these investments also brought an unprecedented degree of vulnerability to global markets. …show more content…
The first opposition group was the anarcho-syndicalist Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party) under the leadership of the brothers Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón. Particularly strong in the mining centers of the north, the PLM protested miserable working conditions and capitalist exploitation. The movement found especially fertile ground among the workers of the Cananea copper mine in northeastern Sonora. In 1906, the Cananea workers organized the first large-scale strike of the Porfirian era, a strike brutally repressed by authorities. Campesinos stood in opposition for different reasons. For example, Emiliano Zapata, an indigenous leader from the southern state of Morelos, led an effort to reclaim the communal lands lost to large sugar-producing estates. In the northern states of Chihuahua and Durango, poor rural dwellers such as Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa had different grievances, seeking autonomy from a central government that had established its iron-fisted rule by means of the railroad, which brought with it rapid modernization of agriculture and mining. Intellectuals and artists began to oppose the Díaz regime as well: José Guadalupe Posada’s calaveras remain popular representations of the corrupt upper class until this