Before the Mexican Revolution of 1910, most of the land in Mexico was concentrated in the hands of a small elite of wealthy Mexican landowners and foreign investors, while peasants and Indigenous communities held very little productive land.

Quick Scoop: Who owned the land?

  • Huge estates called haciendas dominated the countryside and were controlled by rich Mexican families (the landowning oligarchy).
  • Foreign companies and investors (especially from the United States and Europe) owned large tracts of land, particularly in resource‑rich or commercially valuable areas.
  • Indigenous communities and small farmers technically still held some land, but most of it was either low-quality or had been taken over, pressured into sale, or surrounded by haciendas, leaving them dependent and often in debt peonage.
  • Under Porfirio DĂ­az (the long‑time dictator before the revolution), liberal laws allowed “unused” or “vacant” land to be surveyed and transferred to private owners or companies, which accelerated land concentration into a few hands.

Why this mattered for the “second revolution” idea

Many historians describe the 1910 Mexican Revolution itself as the great agrarian uprising, and later land reforms (like the massive redistribution under President Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s) as a kind of “second” or continuing revolution in the countryside. The core grievance in both waves was the same: a tiny minority of large landowners and foreign interests controlled most of Mexico’s land, while the majority who worked it owned almost nothing.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.