Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810-1920

5. Survival of the Fittest: Modernity and the Mexican Atavist

5. Survival of the Fittest Modernity and the Mexican Atavist Numerous bands have sprung up . . . animated solely by a spirit of banditry which has begun to develop afresh and is spreading . . . terror. —Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico, April 1, 1911 Those who amassed fortunes on the backs of the poor; They dared call him a bandit, depraved and a traitor. —“Corrido de Pancho Villa” At the turn of the century, Mexican elites looked upon their country with satisfaction commingled with trepidation. Gone were the decades of turmoil and upheaval, of unrestrained banditry and revolution , when the country seemed ready to consume itself in chaos and disorder. Porfirio Díaz had governed Mexico since 1876, save for the interregnum of Manuel González in 1880–84, and during these years he perfected an authoritarian liberal state that preserved stability with a skilled combination of repression and co-option of dissidents. Under his regime Mexico experienced a transformation that seemed, to many, nothing short of miraculous. Railroads and telegraph lines transected the country in every direction, industrialization had begun, and mining had revived, driven by the same hydroelectric sources that lit Mexico City streets and powered its streetcars. Production was climbing, and profits were high. The Mexican state was balancing its budgets for the first time since independence, and a surplus was showing in its ledgers. Even the governments of the United States and Europe, which had once denigrated Mexico as hopelessly backward, now praised Díaz and his nation’s progress and continued to export Survival of the Fittest 170 surplus capital at record-breaking levels. In 1900, as Mexico prepared to enter a new millennium, the elites were poised expectantly on the doorstep of modernity and civilization. Yet even as they celebrated their prosperity and good fortune, many of Mexico’s elites kept one cautious eye on the past, watching for any signs of slippage that might presage a return to disorder and turmoil. Self-identified as the gente decente (decent class), the elites mainly worried about lower-class mestizos and indigenous people and their alleged propensity for criminal behavior and rebellion. The occasional rural bandit still caused anxiety now and then, but banditry no longer commanded their attention the way it once had. Almost everyone agreed that bandits were a vanishing and mostly irrelevant breed. Of greater concern were high rates of urban crime and the violence that often characterized protests by peasants and workers. Mexico’s economic miracle had been accomplished on the backs of Mexican workers and peasants, but they were hardly the beneficiaries of Porfirian progress. By 1910 only 10 percent of indigenous communities still held land, while the vast majority of mestizo peasants had been expropriated to make way for commercial agriculture. The rural poor ended up laboring on haciendas or as unskilled workers in mining or light industry. Whether toiling as peons or as industrial proletarians , the rural and urban poor worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, for daily wages that averaged thirty-five centavos. Their misery generated protests by agrarian rebels and striking workers, but these were crushed with violence by the military and the rurales. Meanwhile, country people displaced by modernization migrated into urban centers in such large numbers that Mexico City grew by 90 percent between 1876 and 1910. Miserably low wages, unemployment, and mass illiteracy aggravated their poverty and drove up rates of theft and violent crime.1 Mexico City, with nearly five hundred thousand residents, had by far the highest volume of léperos and other marginalized plebeians. They numbered in the tens of thousands, and their constant presence in the streets of the capital reinforced a dominant elite prejudice that the majority of Mexicans were still backward and uncivilized. Survival of the Fittest 171 In measuring Mexican progress, the gente decente relied on a handful of instruments. Perhaps the most important were economic indicators that showed a steady rise in investment, production, and profit. But also of consequence were statistics on crime, which allowed the elites to compare Mexican stability and law enforcement to those of other nations. However, this numbers game had its hazards; the figures often alarmed the elites, as happened when authorities discovered in 1897 that Mexico City had a higher homicide rate than Calcutta.2 Three years later, the government learned from the report of the Procurador de Justicia that homicide rates...