Shangyu (silverhats)

Although some farmers in the United States and Mexico took up pens or rifles to contest their marginalization, most judged open resistance too risky and quietly abandoned their land. Indeed, the technopolitical transformation of agriculture in the postwar decades resulted in a rural enclosure movement of unprecedented scale and scope. Hundreds of thousands of displaced campesinos from central and southern Mexico migrated to the new agricultural hubs of Sinaloa and Baja California, arriving hat in hand as wageworkers. Millions more fled failing ejidos for growing metropolises.