After having briefly discussed the Mexican Revolution, it is appropriate to turn to the first actor in the revolutionary drama: the Mexican worker. The process of rapid economic development under Porfirio Diaz, beginning in the 1890s, had created the country's first significant industrial working class. Alicia Hernandez Chavez notes that railroad workers, for example, numbered in the tens of thousands in 1910, whereas they did not exist before the creation and expansion of the industry (MBH 173). The arrival of the streetcar, now present in many major Mexican cities, created another skilled working-class occupation that had not previously existed. In the two decades before the outbreak of the revolution, a modern textile sector also emerged. It reached six hundred and six thousand workers, many of them concentrated in large factories producing fabrics for domestic consumption (MBH 173). Mining, a booming and declining industry dating back to colonial times, recovered and expanded greatly thanks to the railroads. In 1910 there were almost one hundred thousand miners in Mexico (MBH 173). They lived in mining camps and towns that were largely located in northern Mexico. More generally, various mass consumer goods were increasingly moving toward small-scale industrial production, including items such as soap, candles, beer, furniture, soft drinks, cigarettes, meat, and baked goods. However, conditions for workers during the Porfirio era were grim. . Hernandez Chavez argues: “Moreover, working conditions in the period we discuss, universally described as hellish, were subject to legislative control, leaving workers entirely unprotected” (MBH 211). Long workdays were the norm for garment workers and miners. The salary of a textile worker... half the paper... another striking example for contemporaries was taxation. The fact that the rich do not pay enough taxes may also seem like an insignificant observation, common to varying degrees across all capitalist economies. However, in Porfirian Mexico the wealthy, including large landowners and other capitalists, enjoyed tax privileges that would make contemporary Wall Street bankers blush. Political connections and tax avoidance went hand in hand. This meant, of course, that the burden was on everyone else. Vegetable sellers in the city of Guanajuato, for example, were said to pay more taxes than all the landowners in the region. Another case was the state of Chihuahua, where property taxes were officially regressive, working to the distinct disadvantage of those with smaller landholdings. Furthermore, in the two decades before the revolution, taxes had increased eightfold.