In decades of change pressed from below without visible leaders or ideologies, women took new roles in communities claiming autonomies of production and culture on the land. That shift broke the power of established landed oligarchs, leading women to displace men they saw as failing to preserve essential property, wealth, and eminence. Meanwhile, when a turn to industrial manufacturing aimed to preserve the Bajío’s historic textile industries, women long central to household cloth production found new work laboring in growing mills. And when a new silver-industrial capitalism rose to peak in the 1840s and 1850s, women kept key roles in family cultivation, took wages in new mills—while the mines of Guanajuato revived to generate unprecedented streams of silver, ruled by an entrepreneurial woman, doña Francisca de Paula Pérez Gálvez.
Regime-backed propertied power had fueled centuries of silver capitalism sustained by patriarchal integrations that became predatory after 1780. When popular insurgents broke capitalist production and the regime that sustained it, men fought to gain power in an imagined new nation—while women negotiated to claim new roles in production, families, communities, and cultures. Decades too often seen as times of unmitigated collapse, are emerging as times of conflictive reconstruction that favored popular producers and women in a more socially distributive revival of capitalism. The new society held strong past mid-century, until U.S. power and Mexican liberal programs merged to corrode the power of silver, limit industrialization, and promote new concentrations of production on the land—all reinforcing patriarchy.