One loyal, liberal, National Guard community was Xochiapulco, a municipality of
Nahua peasants in the southern Puebla Sierra. Granted municipal status in 1861 for its participation in the Reform Wars, and nationally recognized for the heroic contribution made by its guardsmen to the Republican victory over the French expeditionary force at Puebla on May 5, 1867, Xochiapulco became an exemplary center for the new liberal creed. The community's leaders were no longer village elders and the Catholic priest, as had been the custom in the Puebla Sierra, but younger national guardsmen who doubled as schoolteachers. During the 1870s, village commons and land expropriated by the liberal state government from an unprofitable hacienda were divided among National Guard soldiers and war widows, in accordance with the law of desamortizacidn of 1856. Methodist ministers were invited to establish a mission in the municipality. No church was built for the Roman Catholic community, although the images of saints were housed in an unconsecrated chapel. Throughout the reign of Porfirio Diaz, no incidence of consecutive reelection of a municipal president was recorded in Xochiapulco, contrasting with the perpetuity in office commonly found at the state and national levels.
The period from 1854 to 1876 was the high point of popular liberalism. Central authority remained weak. Elites were divided by acute ideological conflict (before 1867 between liberals and conservatives, and after 1867, between centralizing liberals and the eclectic following of Porfirio Diaz). This
brought unprecedented competition for popular support and created more space for the satisfaction of popular demands. Florencia Mallon shows how prolonged patriotic resistance against the European Intervention reinforced these demands from communities that had sacrificed their meager resources and native sons in Mexico's Second War of Independence. These three decades have been described by the historian Alicia Hernández Chávez as "a period of expanding citizenship when political representation achieved its strongest popular content . . . the strength of the liberal revolution was sustained by this new spirit of collaboration between the people and the elite."
Where Hernández Chávez sees a single, albeit quarrelsome, liberal family, starting to knit together a young nation through common patriotic struggles, a common pantheon of secular heroes, an egalitarian civic vocabulary, and democratic institutions, Mallon observes a fragmented polity consisting of a multiplicity of competing and mutually irreconcilable liberalisms and nationalisms. Whether one sees the conflicts of the Restored Republic as mere family squabbles over spoils or a more profound conflict between a centralizing elite and popular liberal caciques, few would dispute Hernández Chávez's conclusion that the detente between the political elites and the pueblos broke down during the 1880s, as formerly popular leaders such as Porfirio Diaz manipulated the electoral system to ensure their own future power. Dazzled by economic opportunities, elites put aside their differences and distanced themselves from politics, leaving artisans, industrial workers, and villagers without their patrons. Finally, Díazs
successful pacification of the country took away from these groups the lever on power they had exercised through warfare and military service.
