Chapter 07 Summary

CHAPTER 7

The benefits of the age of modernization were not shared equally or universally and did not come without costs. In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, the benefits went disproportionately to elites who owned land or capital, to foreign investors, and to men and women in the emerging middle class. The urban and rural poor, indigenous communities, immigrant workers, and people of African descent were often left behind and suffered new forms of exploitation, exclusion, and dispossession.

Booming cities were transformed by immigration (from Europe or the countryside) and by technologies like streetcars and gas and electric lighting. Positivist urban planners built new public spaces like boulevards, plazas, and parks, and made efforts to provide modern sanitation and public health. The working classes, however, were often bypassed or excluded from these improvements, relegated to slums, and subject to the attentions of professional police forces and intrusive medical officials.     

Rural indigenous communities, meanwhile, saw their lands encroached upon by expanding haciendas or plantations. Through legal or extra-legal means, rural people resisted the loss of their lands and communities, but they often had no choice but to work as wage laborers on these commercial estates or seek new lives in the cities.

Some in the growing middle class – especially students and professional authors – criticized the positivist elites. While middle-class folk were generally free to voice their opinions, forces of the state ruthlessly suppressed strikes and demonstrations by urban workers and uprisings or land occupations by the rural poor. But divisions among the elite – such as those over Porfirio Díaz's attempt at re-election in Mexico in 1910 – could create space for the poor and provincial to demand reforms and restitution. The result in Mexico was a revolution that would profoundly impact that country and the region in the decades to come.