Page:Margaret Shipman - Mexico's Struggle Towards Democracy (1927).pdf/30

 American investors acquired rich mining concessions and huge grants of land for cattle ranches, fake colonizing schemes, and other speculative purposes. With the building of railroads, there developed also smaller land holdings, and business enterprises. Sonora, most western of the northern tier of states, is more rugged, with mountains rich in copper, rivers, and fertile valleys. This is the ancestral home of the Yaqui Indians. Fierce, courageous, industrious, they were never subdued to peonage, but up to 1880 practiced their communal system of agriculture. Diaz granted their best river lands to foreign speculators and in retaliation for the Yaquis' determined and continued resistance, thousands of them were sold as slaves at $65 per head to the planters of Yucatan. By 1910 the tribe had been reduced to a small fraction of its former size. From this northern section of Mexico came the leaders of the revolution who represented middle-class interests.

In the state of Vera Cruz, extending in a narrow strip along the Gulf of Mexico, are located most of the great oil fields, the two largest ports, Vera Cruz and Tampico, and also in this state and those adjoining it on the west are situated most of the largest factories in Mexico. This section became the chief center of organized labor.

The basic causes of the revolution were (1st) rapid growth of capitalism, controlled by foreign investors, which caused increasing concentration of land, monopolistic business development and rising price of food; (2nd) a rising Mexican middle class: