This project will examine the formation of non-professional policing forces that kept order in postcolonial Mexico, the local processes of army recruitment that sent large numbers of men into effective social banishment, and the economic and cultural foundations for so sudden and stark a division between lower-class Mexicans. Presenting evidence from three research locations - the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca and the states of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, where mestizo and indigenous peasant villages were interspersed with large agricultural estates (haciendas) - the dissertation will argue that in postindependence Mexico, policing and army recruitment crystallized fluid and diffuse social divisions into a political order that premised participation in the new liberal regime of rights on gendered performances of honest work and familial responsibility. Radical new notions about the dignity of labor that characterized the global 'age of revolutions' in Mexico were thus at the heart of simultaneous revolutions in political participation and social marginalization.