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Mexican villagers endured three decades of dispossession during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1880, 1884-1911). The transfer of most lands held by communities known as pueblos led many rural people to join the Mexican revolution of 1910-1917, and it helped to structure the postrevolutionary politics. Using E. P. Thompson's concept of 'community,' this article suggests that villagers' sense of solidarity formed by their shared lives within the pueblos, and leavened by collective experiences during the Díaz dictatorship and revolution, helped them to forge a new identity as campesinos with an inherent right to land reform during the postrevolutionary era. A core component of campesino identity was opposition to hacienda owners. This opposition set up a struggle over land during the 1920s and 1930s that led some landowners to 'weaponize nature' by destroying natural resources such as forests rather than turning it over to villagers through the land reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]