Empire at Atencingo

At the war’s end, Jenkins began to fulfill his pledge to his wife of a return to the United States, commissioning a Los Angeles mansion and selling his mill, but one of the rural properties he had acquired gave him the chance to fulfil his boyhood dreams of farming and to develop a third fortune, in sugar. After the Revolution, fragile provincial governments like that of Puebla relied on capitalists to generate tax revenue and make them loans; they were therefore willing to apply the Revolution’s promise of property redistribution quite selectively, to protect men like Jenkins from rural radicals, and to permit them create private militia. These dispositions not only safeguarded Jenkins’s Atencingo plantation but enabled him to prey further on elite landowners, often widows. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jenkins thereby seized eight further sugar plantations, annexing them to Atencingo, to create the largest landholding in the state’s history.