Mexican Immigration to the United States

Until the late-nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican peasants (or campesinos) were locked in debt peonage and isolated in rural areas that lacked the railroads or other transportation systems that facilitate mass migration. But the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), a period popularly known as el Porfiriato, changed the history of Mexican immobility. Díaz pursued a program of modernizing Mexico in the image of nations such as Argentina and the United States. During this campaign for “Order and Progress,” Diaz dramatically expanded Mexico's railroad system, promoted land privatization, and encouraged a switch from peonage to wage labor. As an estimated five million Mexican campesinos lost access to communal land holdings during el Porfiriato, their search for work began a century of mass labor migration between Mexico and the United States (1). This essay provides a compact history of Mexican immigration to the United States. There are many ways to tell this history, but the basic framework of what follows is a story of uneven capitalist economic development and U.S. foreign policy in the making of international labor migration.