The export economy was beneficial to Mexican landowners; it's only later, when US capital began to take over large sections of the Mexican economy, that some members of the elite began to feel that there was an issue of national integrity at stake in terms of economic domination, but as I've said, I don't think this was a key issue in terms of explaining the revolution, i
e. I don't think it should be seen as some kind of nationalist' revolution. .
diaz had been a liberal general, and in some ways he continued the trend set up by liberalism, particularly in the countryside. Before I say something about the relationship between agrarian structures and the Revolution, I want to mention some other, crucially important things. First of all, there's the question of Church-State relations. diaz differed from his liberal predecessors, and the caudillos who ran the post-revolutionary state, particularly in the 1920s, by abandoning a strongly anti-clerical stance. It is extremely important to stress that the Church remained an independent corporate power in Mexican society after the Reform. In France, Napoleon also reached a concordat with the Church to calm conservative opinion, very like diaz: but in France the Church lost most of its property, and the state took over the job of paying its priests. In Mexico, in contrast, the Church's wealth had remained largely untouched by the reform - it was simply more disguised. The Church no longer owned haciendas - it simply financed other people's. Members of landed families entered Holy Orders and the clergy acted as administrators and financiers to the landed and commercial sectors. In fact, the Church's relationship to the landlord class became an even more organic one under the Porfiriato. As the tendencies towards class polarization and rural proletarianization which we've already discussed increased, the clergy played an increasingly important role in the ideological control of the masses and the campaign against the agrarian reform movement which gathered momentum through the period of the Wars of the Reform and the diaz dictatorship.