Urban Growth and Development

The country's instability, owing to a lack of leadership and goals, to foreign invasions and conspiracies, to epidemics, and most of all, to the lack of national control by the central government, kept urban growth and development at a minimum. Any progress found in the Mexican urban setting during the period from 1821 to 1876—such as in Guadalajara—can be attributed to local officials and elites who were able to manage economic and social issues so that their cities were able to sustain some growth despite the national situation.

Scholar Alejandra Moreno Toscano described the powerful regionalism found in Mexico throughout the nineteenth century in Tres ejemplos de relación entre ciudades y regiones en Nueva España finales del siglo XVIII. She distinguished Mexican cities before the advent of Independence based on their economic activities, development of internal methods of communication, and commercial relations that survived well after 1821, which assured their continuity throughout the nineteenth century. In some cases small cities, such as Cholula, almost disappeared when their importance was corroded by competing confrontations with stronger neighbors. Other cities, such as Orizaba and Córdoba, developed in unison with nearby cities owing to a shared regional concern, such as industrial and agricultural warehousing to surrounding lands. The cities of the Bajío region of north-central Mexico , an important agricultural region, established ranking and connecting links that allowed their common development. Most of these colonial cities were thus able to enter the new era after Independence. However, they did not attain "national" status as their loyalty was given to the political elements in the capital only as long as they supported the local or regional interests. Thus, the relationship between the center and the rest of the country remained very volatile until the late nineteenth century because the cities' primary concerns were local and not national.

Mexican cities and regions began to be integrated into one nation with Porfirio Díaz's revolution in 1876. He took power as the nation's president and except for the years 1880 to 1884 did not relinquish his control until 1911. His dictatorship, organized with the cooperation of military, commercial, and regional urban leaders, enforced a national unity not achieved previously by any other president. His general idea of national development was enforced through a number of officials who identified with the positivist motto "order and progress," so popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Díaz placed loyal followers in all the state and city governments of the country and rallied merchants' and businessmen's support by retaining them as members of those local or regional institutions and accommodating their interests. An example can be seen in Tampico, where loyal Porfiristas were members of the city government between 1872 and 1914. The presidents who followed Díaz—Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, and Plutarco Elías Calles— consistently applied the same centralization activities as those of the Porfiriato.