Railroads and Foreign Capital Modernize the Porfiriato, and Inequality Deepens

What happened

Under Diaz, Mexico's rail network grew to 10,000 miles of track by 1910, connecting Mexico City to major ports and opening the interior to commercial agriculture and foreign investment in mines and factories. International capital financed haciendas that restructured agricultural land for export markets, and cities grew as new industry drew rural workers off the land, while a quarter of Mexicans became literate even though Diaz opened few new public schools. But the benefits concentrated among elites and foreign investors, and the arrival of large haciendas and corporations pushed many mestizo and Indigenous farmers into wage labor or debt peonage on land their communities had worked for generations, while the government's Rurales police force and federal troops enforced order in the countryside.

How we know

Railroad mileage and industrial figures are documented in Library of Congress exhibition materials drawing on period government and business records; the connection between hacienda expansion and rural dispossession is corroborated by the biographies of revolutionary leaders like Zapata who organized specifically around land seizures during this period.

Sources

• The Mexican Revolution and the United States exhibit, Library of Congress. Railroads in Mexico (1884-1885) / The Consequences of Progress · Primary sourceloc.gov · The domain "loc.gov" is on our Primary source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
• Library of Congress Country Studies. Mexico - The Porfiriato, 1876-1910 · General sourcecountrystudies.us · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).