How did haciendas affect rural workers and Indigenous communities in Mexico before 1910?

Before 1910, the hacienda system profoundly marginalized rural workers and Indigenous peoples in Mexico by concentrating land ownership in the hands of a wealthy elite, or hacendados.12

The system functioned through the following mechanisms:

• Debt Peonage: While workers were theoretically free, they were reduced to virtual serfdom through debt peonage. Landowners provided credit for basic necessities, binding workers to the land to pay off debts that never diminished.123
• Economic Exploitation: By the end of the Porfirio Díaz regime in 1911, land concentration was extreme. Despite rising costs for staples like maize and beans, agricultural wages had remained stagnant for over a century.1
• Loss of Autonomy: Many haciendas illegally absorbed the lands of communal Indigenous villages. The hacendados acted as local authorities, often maintaining their own jails and meting out punishments, which stripped rural communities of their legal and economic independence.13

This systemic inequality and the loss of ancestral lands were primary catalysts for the Mexican Revolution, which eventually sought to restore land to these communities through the creation of ejidos.23