Peasant nationalism and social unrest in the Mexican Huasteca, 1848-1884

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, a wave of peasant unrest swept the Huastecan mountains in the northeastern Mexico. The Huastecan rebellion represents the greatest level of agrarian unrest in 19th-century Mexico and served as a precursor to the revolutionary upheaval that erupted in 1910.; The social origins of the Huastecan revolution lay in two causes; material and ideological. The material process of the revolution originated in the conquest of the 16th-century. During the 1870s, in an attempt to modernize the economy of San Luis Potosi the state elites eagerly built roads, railroads, and telegraphs throughout the state reaching into the Huasteca. The construction of roads and railroads from San Luis Potosi to the port of Tampico, and hence the international economy allowed local landowners to increase the size of their holdings at the expense of the peasant's pueblos.; The ideological process of the revolution rested in the formation of a radical national consciousness among the peasantry. During the 19th-century, the peasants of central Mexico gained a heightened sense of national citizenship and political participation by virtue of their service in the guerrilla resistance to the American and French occupation forces. That struggle gave the Mexican rural working class participants a new sense of empowerment in dealing with their political problems at home after the wars ended. The role of religious ideology also radicalized the Huastecan consciousness as anarchist parish priests succeeded in raising the political consciousness of the peasantry.; This dissertation offers a new interpretation on the origins of Mexican nationalism, one that incorporates rather than separates the peasantry into the national historical process. Based on previously untapped sources, I hope to present a new social and cultural history of the Mexican countryside in the 19th-century.