Mexico's great railroad boom wrought major transformations as the system expanded from 640 kilometers in 1876 to over 19,000 by 1910. Railroads served as catalysts for the changes in land tenure and use which heightened agrarian grievances, contributing t o the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. They engendered rapid economic growth during the Porfiriato (1876-1910) as well as Mexico's long-term underdevelopment. The workers' organizations spawned in the railroad industry helped shape Mexico's labor movem ent and government policies toward industry.

Examination of the railroad's quotidian operations brings to light yet another element of its impact on Mexico. This essay argues that railroads generated contests at the community level over resources and control, which not only produced significant mate rial gains for local residents, but also prompted shifts in certain social meanings upon which Porifirian order was based. These contests resulted from railroad officials' efforts to gain access to locally-controlled resources such as land, water, materia ls, labor, customer-patronage, and political favors while residents in turn maneuvered to maximize their gains from the wages, contracts, passes, surplus materials, and services (including free rides and piped water) controlled by the railroad. Borrowing conceptual tools from Joan Wallach Scott, this essay reclaims the meaning of the railroad as an obra pu'blica-- a public service like the new water, sewer, electric power and others under construction in this same period to which ordinary people claimed e ntitlement as citizens, tax-payers, hard-workers, law-abiders, defenders of the patria, padres de familia numerosa, and sundry other constructs new and old. These contests shed light on such central issues as the railroads' backward linkages in Mexico, th e relations of central elite to rural and provincial social groups during the Porfiriato, and the agency of workers below the level of direct action or nationalist alliance with the state. Ultimately, these sources (rail company and Ayuntamiento records a nd correspondence to Gen. Porfirio Di'az) afford a glimpse into the ways in which small town and rural Mexicans maneuvered to tailor "progress" to their own ends. Their successes merit particular attention given Limantour's clout, the mystique prevailing toward railroads and progress, and the residents' lack of recourse to such organized tactics as strikes, boycotts, armed uprisings, and nationalist alliance with the state which scholars have identified as limiting the railroads' control in Mexico and els ewhere.

The railroad considered here is the Ferrocarril de Co'rdoba a Huatusco, owned by Julio M. Limantour, the younger brother of Di'az's Finance Minister. It was built to serve commercial producers, including such prominent owners of local coffee and sugar can e plantations as the Landa y Escando'n family, Mexico's Minister of Development, and the Limantours themselves. The railroad was part of a general commercial development so promising in this area that Gen. Di'az personally brought a group of governors and Cabinet ministers to tour a local hacienda in order to promote a newly-developed cash crop. Though short (as were 16 of the 34 railroads operating in 1910), the FC Huatusco prided itself for having constructed "the highest bridge in the Republic."

The FC Huatusco transferred resources to sundry members of local communities. Hacendados provided large orders of cross ties. Local and district officials wangled free rail services, cash donations for fiestas, and contracts at plum rates. Small property owners rented rooms to bridge site supervisors and defended their property against the railroad's right of-way claims. Muleteers worked the feeder lines, conveyed traffic the last 12 miles, and ferried freight from plantations to stations. Artisans repaired equipment, adapted ill-fitting imports, and manufactured all rail cars except the first-class passeng er cars. A priest served as labor broker, surveyor's guide and mediator of railroad and local smallholders.

Lacking space to address the social meanings of all sectors, I will focus on the workers. Most relevant for the historiographical debates is the fact that illiterate and itinerant suppliers of locally-available raw materials (sand, charcoal, soil, cut roc k, limestone and firewood) earned sums which exceeded the high wages of even the foreign workers on Mexico's largest railroad. Also, this railroad sustained employment beyond completion of construction (the typical lay-off point) due to high maintenance r equirements. These documents suggest that those high maintenance costs resulted not only from the railroad's structural needs, but also from the workers' efforts (condemned as "negligence" by the chief administrator) to maximize their earnings. Workers al so maneuvered for control over their own labor as well as for material gain. They subordinated work to social practices, defended their dignity, pursued interests outside of work, and demanded perks and privileges-- all of which cost the railroad. Workers ' claims sprang most often from long-established constructs such as customary rights, filial duty, and honor. In certain cases, these contests over control posed challenges to the social hierarchy. The chief administrator demanded no less than that the ba ses of authority be redefined in his favor in the railroad's conflict with Brian Tomblin, a leading citizen of Co'rdoba, a major coffee shipper, and "a powerful man because of his friendship with you [Limantour]." Pagaza insisted that his rational busines s practices should prevail over Tomblin's "word." He forced Limantour to side with him by threatening to resign in favor of someone who "has the good fortune to gain the favor of the grandes Sen~ores."

On the face of it, then, the story of the FC Huatusco bears a theme now familiar in the historiography, of top-down initiatives subverted from below. The longer story of this railroad's fifty years of operation, however, suggests a more provocative possib ility. Perhaps in these residents' claims were the early glimmerings of insistence by some Mexicans that they merited inclusion in the benefits of growth and development without reference to corporatist or clientelist relations.