Through analysis of local politics, agrarian reform, and popular movements in nineteenth-century Jalisco, this project pursues an understanding of nation building in Mexico and the rural challenges to both liberal and conservative notions of that process. My investigation broadens our understanding of indigenous and peasant cultures by exploring regional conceptualizations of community between 1857 and 1876 and by questioning the liberal values with which they are sometimes associated. Although it is unlikely that villagers were either conservative or liberal in a national political sense of the term, I demonstrate that Lozada's movement was rooted in rural, popular conservatism. This study takes one of the largest rural rebellions of the period, led primarily by a conservative mestizo, Manuel Lozada, as its central subject. For a brief period in 1873, Lozada mobilized nearly 7,000 rural followers in an attempt to overthrow the national government. As one of approximately twenty regional rebellions over the same historical period, his particular uprising also represents a broader sense of rural discontent with the Mexican state. My project explores both the theoretical and practical implications of popular conservatism juxtaposed with local and national politics. The first three substantive chapters scrutinize Lozada's career as a leader, peasant participation in rebellion, and the nature of property disputes in the region. Such an emphasis illustrates motives for peasant rebellion and other forms of engagement with the state in order to meet local needs. These findings also illustrate the ways in which collective violence did not coincide with the liberal ideals of modern revolutions. The final three chapters analyze the political and economic changes in the seventh canton of Jalisco, the area that would become the State of Nayarit in 1917. I examine the evolution of local and national bureaucracies, the role of contraband in economic and political life, and representations of local rebels in media over time. In sum, these chapters illuminate the challenges that became evident as a state with limited coercive capacity extended its modernizing influence into regions that had previously exercised significant political and economic autonomy.