'Porfiriate') is a term given to the period when General Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico as president in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, coined by Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas.

Violence broke out, Díaz was forced to resign and go into exile, and Mexico experienced a decade of regional civil war, the Mexican Revolution.

[4] In particular, this means separating the period of "order and progress" after 1884 from the tumultuous decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and post-Revolution developments, but increasingly the Porfiriato is seen as laying the basis for post-revolutionary Mexico.

[5] Under Díaz, Mexico was able to centralize authority, manage political infighting, tamp down banditry, and shift tendencies of economic nationalism to embrace foreign investment.

The benefits of economic growth were unevenly distributed and social ills increased, including debt peonage of the peasantry and child labor in new industrial enterprises.

Díaz replaced a number of independent regional leaders with men loyal to himself, and quelled discontent by coopting political "outs" by making them intermediaries with foreign investors, allowing their personal enrichment.

To further consolidate state power, Díaz appointed jefes políticos ("political bosses") answerable to central government, who commanded local forces.

"[18][19] Mexico at the beginning of the Porfiriato was a predominantly rural nation, with large estate owners controlling agricultural production for the local and regional food market.

The Liberal Reform had sought to eliminate corporate ownership of land, targeting estates owned by the Roman Catholic Church and indigenous communities, forcing them to be broken up into parcels and sold.

Mexico is not endowed with a navigable river system that would have allowed for cheap water transport, and roads were often impassable during the rainy season, so the construction of railway lines overcame a major obstacle for Mexican economic development.

Mining enterprises for copper, lead, iron, and coal in Mexico's north, especially Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Guanajuato and Coahuila, with Monterrey and Aguascalientes becoming especially prominent.

Women also engaged in certain types of manual labor, including factory work in paper mills, cotton textiles, chocolate, shoes, and hats.

Feminism in Mexico emerged during the Liberal Reform and Porfiriato, with adherents critiquing inequality in Mexican society, as happened elsewhere in the hemisphere and Western Europe.

[34] Schools did not just teach literacy and numeracy, but also aimed at creating a workforce guided by principles of punctuality, thrift, valuable work habits, and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco use, and gambling.

In Mexico City, the government invested in a large-scale infrastructure project to drain the central lake system, the desagüe, in an attempt to prevent frequent flooding in the capital.

Planners viewed inadequate drainage, sewage treatment, and lack of access to clean, potable water as solvable problems using scientific methods.

[40][41][42] During the Porfiriato, urban Mexican elites became more cosmopolitan, with their consumer tastes for imported fashion styles and goods being considered an indicator of Mexico's modernity, with France being the embodiment of the sophistication they admired.

The club hired an architect who attended race events in Europe and the U.S. to design and build the track, which was to be opened on Easter Sunday 1882, a distinctly non-religious way to celebrate the holiday.

At the delayed opening, the President of the Republic (1880–82), Manuel González, his cabinet, and the diplomatic corps, along with Mexicans who could afford the entry, watched horses owned by gentlemen compete for purses.

A French company imported bicycles and set up a rental business, but the sport took off when the technology improved in the 1890s with wheels of equal size and pneumatic tires.

Responding to the potential loss of the faithful in Mexico and elsewhere, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, calling on the Church to become involved in social problems.

The Church's success in the new initiatives can be seen as Zapatistas in Morelos carried out no anticlerical actions during the Mexican Revolution,[50] and many fighters wore the Virgin of Guadalupe on their hats.

On 16 September, Diaz with an array of dignitaries attending inaugurated, the Monument to Independence at a major intersection (glorieta) of Paseo de la Reforma.

On 2 September, the pillar of the baptismal font in Hidalgo's church was brought to the capital with great ceremony and placed in the National Museum, with some 25,000 children viewing the event.

The Spanish ambassador, the Marquis of Polavieja returned items of historical importance to Mexico, including the uniform of Father Morelos, a portrait, and other relics of independence in a ceremony at the National Palace, with the diplomatic corps in attendance, as well as Mexican army officers.

The king of Spain conveyed through his special ambassador the honor of the Order of Charles III on Diaz, the highest distinction for sovereigns and heads of state.

As part of the historical commemorations of the centennial, on September 8 there was homage paid to the Niños Héroes, the cadets who died defending Chapultepec Castle from the invading U.S. forces during the Mexican–American War.

While still in Mexico, he issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí in October 1910, which denounced the election as fraudulent and called for a rebellion against what he considered Díaz's illegitimate regime.

Political rivals, General Bernardo Reyes, who had a fiefdom in northern Mexico encompassing Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo León, and Minister of Finance and leader of the Científicos, José Yves Limantour, were shut out of the succession, with Díaz choosing Ramón Corral as his vice president.

[54] The treaty specified that Diaz resign along with vice president Corral, and created an interim regime under Francisco León de la Barra in advance of new elections.