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Working Women
Into the Border Lands
By Sonia Hernández Texas A&M University
Copyright © 2014 Sonia Hernández
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-139-0
CHAPTER 1
Selling the Norteño Borderlands
Capital, Land, and Labor
I was in Monterrey on the 23rd ... expecting the pleasure of meeting you in person; but having a party of capitalists with me, I could not await your arrival. In my opinion the Monterrey and Gulf RR. will open up a garden spot in your country, and I expect to locate along its line some solid enterprising capital, in mining and other enterprises.
A. W. GIFFORD TO GOV. ALEJANDRO PRIETO, 1889
THE MODERNIZATION AGENDA carried out by state elites, politicians, and a pro-foreign investment climate fostered by the Díaz regime helped bring to fruition A. W. Gifford's prediction of a "garden spot" in Tamaulipas. Gifford's Imogene Mining Company, as well as scores of other foreign enterprises, found a welcoming environment and pro-business climate in Tamaulipas and in neighboring Nuevo León during the Porfiriato. Gifford, the president of Imogene Mining, envisioned the creation of a zone between Monterrey and Tampico that would produce piloncillo, ixtle, and other products for a global market. Like many investors, Gifford built a solid relationship with regional and state elites and politicians to exploit the natural resources of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León by relying on the relatively inexpensive labor of resident norteños and transient migrants. Regional elites, state representatives, and foreign investors venturing in Mexico led the effort to develop the Northeast through the linking of towns and ports via railroads, infrastructure development, a capitalized banking system, the exploitation of old mines, and the commercialization of agriculture.
The last decades of the nineteenth century marked the onset of the modern Mexican nation-state. The process of modern nation building and border making in the far northeastern reaches of Mexico was rooted in the privatization and commercialization of land, the decline of communal forms of subsistence, an increase in free wage labor, and a more permanent labor force. The borderland region did not, as Juan Mora-Torres rightly explains, develop when the geopolitical border was established in 1848. Regional elites and midsize rancheros, as well as foreign investors—primarily American—would reap the benefits of norteño free wage labor. The concentration of arable land in the hands of few individuals and corporations had begun during the Benito Juárez period. This process and the eventual commercialization of land gradually tore at the communal foundation of the municipio libre (autonomous village/ pueblo), poblados, and rancherías that made up the majority of the settlements. During the colonial period, land in the northern fringes of Mexico had been allotted and divided up either as large grants (porciones), rancherías, or military colonies, or it was under the purview of missionaries—Jesuits and Franciscans who had been granted lands by the king of Spain for missionary purposes and settlement. Gradually, the more sedentary indigenous populations such as the Indios Olivos were integrated into missions, and ethnic groups from other parts of the republic headed to the North and assisted in the pacification of more rebellious groups. Mestizos and other groups received land grants to form military colonies. Some indigenous groups survived the intrusion, especially those who lived in hard-to-reach places such as the Sierra Huasteca, in the present-day states of Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosí, and areas farther south.
In southern Tamaulipas, the Jesuits controlled enormous portions of land that would become some of the first great haciendas in the Northeast. With secularization, government officials confiscated much of the land belonging to the Jesuits. A decade after the newly organized Mexican government implemented the Colonization Law of 1823, intended primarily for the province of Tejas, German immigrants led by the Baron Racknitz set up colonies in Tamaulipas. Further, an expansive tract of land, covering almost two-thirds of southern Tamaulipas, was confiscated from the Jesuits, and by 1842 the land had been sold to a tobacco entrepreneur named Felipe Neri del Barrio. In 1865, José Domingo Rascón, father of José Martín Rascón, purchased the land. Secularization increased the number of landholdings in private hands, and it intensified in the 1850s and 1860s with the Leyes de Reforma, promulgated by Benito Juárez. Although the process of land privatization began during the Juárez period, it was during the Porfiriato that this process accelerated and further reorganized communities.
In the 1860s, as Americans fought against each other in the Civil War, norteño merchants, taking advantage of the strategic location of their region, engaged in extensive trade with the Confederacy. The rupture between the US North and the South and the subsequent blockades of vital southern ports forced the Confederacy to seek alternative ports in order to continue exporting cotton. The new cotton- and weapons-based trade relationship between the Confederacy and merchants from Matamoros and Monterrey further expanded the economy of the Mexican borderlands. With a strong financial base developed during the Civil War, the region witnessed its second economic boom of the nineteenth century. This time, however, the economic resurgence resulted in profound social and economic repercussions for the growing border population. The changes that took place during the 1880s were driven by a strong regional and national desire to keep up with modernized countries.
Principal economic activities consisted of livestock ranching, agriculture, maritime trade (in the ports of Matamoros and Tampico), and mining in the Sierra de San Carlos, as well as in the central-western region of neighboring Nuevo León. The region frequently supplied raw materials to markets in the United States, England, and Cuba. A manufacturing sector emerged in central Nuevo León but remained small until the 1890s. Local manufacturing was limited in scope, so norteños regularly obtained finished goods from the United States.
The nineteenth century would prove especially harsh for a variety of indigenous groups whose homes were situated throughout the borderlands. As Gen. Gerónimo Treviño, military commander of the Linéa del Bravo and regional elite, eloquently put it to his American audience in a reunion along the border in 1877, "the lipanes are a constant threat to our security and safety with their depravations on the left banks of the Bravo.... I ordered Coronel Nuncio to apprehend them and keep them jailed." He continued, "In my opinion[,] once apprehended, they should be taken to the interior, [and] placed in talleres and casas de beneficiencia where they will be educated and taught how to work based on their age and sex." Such state-sponsored views of Indian peoples as disposable, uneducated ociosos (lazy/idle persons), shared also by recruited mestizo nonnative colonos and local mestizo vecinos, lent credibility to the idea of Indians as obstacles to progress, as impediments to the process of clearing land to make it productive and eventually attract foreign investment. Bold investors such as the oil giant Edward Doheny noted how "there was no greater menace, except as far as Indians were concerned, from 1875 to 1910," and in this way he justified how "we went with impunity wherever we desired to go in Mexico."
After Díaz launched his revolution from the Río Bravo region and took power in 1876 he implemented a program to eliminate or transplant uncooperative Indians and to recruit able-bodied colonists to populate the region. Like the Mexican officials who had planned to entice settlers to Tejas in the 1820s, in the 1870s and 1880s Díaz offered land to prospective colonists who were Mormon, Russian, Anglo American, Chinese, and African American. In some cases, the Mexican government profited from these land offers; one hundred miles southwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, in 1903, Hacienda del Chamal was organized via the Blalock Mexico Colony, which attracted American settlers from Texas, Oklahoma, and midwestern states. The Banco Mercantil Hipotecario de México recorded the sixty-six-thousand-peso transaction. In late 1893 Governor Prieto authorized a Mr. McKastle, an American colonization agent in Monterrey, to establish an agricultural colony in Tamaulipas. By 1910 foreigners controlled more than 70 percent of the coastal frontiers and borders. The number of foreign-owned tracts of land (often comprising more than one hundred thousand acres) was significant, and the fact that Americans owned "the largest and best conditioned bearing orchard[s]" further revealed the growing socioeconomic chasm between norteño laborers and Americans in the Northeast.
Acquiring land from the government was fairly easy, particularly after the passage of the Ley sobre Terrenos Baldíos in 1883 under Pres. Manuel González, who essentially followed Díaz's orders. Companías agrícolas and companías colonizadoras (commercial agriculture corporations and land settlement companies) came to facilitate the transformation of norteño land—owned by military colonos, rancherías, and poblados en común or tierras comunales (communal villages) since the colonial period and now claimed as "vacant lands" under the "terrenos baldíos" designation for "unoccupied" land. This uncultivated land, labeled as "unproductive" by government surveyors, was thus, in their view, in need of "transformation." Land and labor served as strategic incentives for regional elites and caudillos to acquiesce to Díaz's centralizing efforts. In this manner, President González acquired the Hacienda El Cojo, extending from Tampico to Victoria and including the following haciendas within its borders: La Palma, El Carrizal, El Barco, Chocoy, Opichan, El Rosario, Las Flores, Tancasneque, Alamitos, Montaña de Galul, Santa Juana, Tierras Blancas, Rayón, Timas, Cuestecistas, Acuña, La Panocha, and El Pretil, among others. This process of privatizing land took aim at the very foundation of pueblo and village life, even among scattered communities and sparsely populated villages. This transformation forever altered the lives of residents and would serve as the basis for claiming community autonomy and workers' rights and for fosteringcooperativismo and, eventually, uprisings. In towns and villages across the Northeast, norteños demanded an end to the "maltratamiento por parte de mayordomos y hacendados" (abuse from supervisors and landowners).
In implementing the new land law, government surveyors, assisted by land developers and regional elites, declared desirable lands to be "terrenos baldíos" and began to employ large numbers of workers from nearby villages and from the interior of the country to clear the tracts. By 1876 the government had made the surveying of these "vacant" areas mandatory and thus provided economic opportunities for land surveying companies, which were allowed to retain one-third of the surveyed lands as compensation. Thus began the rise of powerful land surveying companies orcompañías deslindadoras. Land surveying companies such as Gen. Gerónimo Treviño's Compañía Deslindadora de Terrenos Baldíos allowed regional elites to acquire sizable tracts of land. Treviño's La Babia property comprised more than a million acres and had increasing numbers of cattle. Treviño, as explained later, would come to represent a type of transnational cultural broker who persuaded American capitalists to invest in Mexico. As lands were cleared, the Díaz government extended tax and land concessions to railroad companies to link urban centers with remote villages and rancherías, which solidified a burgeoning transnational market. The original goal of the law was to populate the "enormes extensiones del territorio" to fend off any foreign threats. However, the government, with little faith in its own people, advocated populating the land with "practical and hardworking agriculturalists from Europe" to avoid another War of 1846. Yet, the Europeans did not come—at least in the numbers that the government expected. Instead, land became privatized and concentrated in the hands of a few whose estates orlatifundios were among the largest in the country, thanks in great part to the surveying companies. As the historian Raul Rangel Frías writes, "the compañías deslindadoras produced great latifundios that ended up in the hands of prominent men such as ... Treviño ... or foreigners who rented lands or became owners of property that became public due to the surveys and that should have remained under ownership of states' treasury or [the] federal government." The expansion of existing estates and the creation of new ones altered the geographic landscape of the Mexican Northeast. "Following the American tradition," such estates began to use barbed wire to enclose haciendas and ranches. These estates would focus on the production of a variety of goods that not only addressed the needs of the local border population but were among the main exports, destined for international markets.
In many cases, making land "productive" coincided with curbing any threats or quashing any local rebellions that jeopardized the centralizing mission of Díaz. In certain instances, the same regional elites who collaborated with Díaz and his efforts to bring the northern periphery into closer scrutiny assisted with curbing such threats. Díaz also offered tracts of land to those who had extended support to him during the Revolution of Tuxtepec, which had secured him control of the region and eventually the entire country. Treviño, for example, served as Díaz's point person in negotiations with Americans such as Brig. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord in "combating bandolerismo along the border" when Díaz launched the border revolt that paved his way to the presidency. It was Treviño who collaborated with General Ord to rid the border of the rancher and revolutionary Juan Cortina. As Jerry Thompson has argued, Ord believed that "peace could never be restored to the region as long as Cortina remained on the border." Mexican regional elites in support of Díaz would come to help the "Mexican government remove Cortina." As rebellions such as Cortina's and others were quelled, the process of land privatization could resume.
As in other places in Latin America, a small landowning class came to control expansive tracts of arable land, thus displacing communities that had for centuries worked the lands en común (as a collective). As sharecroppers and temporary or transient laborers, these workers moved in search of better wages and available work and formed the bulk of the norteño labor force during the transitional effort to modernize the borderlands.
Porfirio Díaz and his cohort of científicos shaped the future of Mexico through a series of transportation, communication, trade, and land concessions to foreigners. Government agents promoting investments in banking, railroad, telegraph, tourist, and agricultural industries assured investors that the "progressive" climate of Mexico "protected" them and their properties. Mexican boosters wrote that the "climate and soil are rich" and "offer tremendous opportunities for growers," and "Mexico's new regime, for the first time, [is] able to offer small tracts of land to purchasers." Moreover, foreigners were "guaranteed safety" and could travel to Mexico "with the utmost degree of confidence and hope."
Financiers and entrepreneurs from various countries embarked on a journey into Mexico driven by descriptions of "a rapidly developing country, [with] mining regions, the richest in the globe, and cheap labor." Supporters of the Díaz agenda argued that foreign investments would create job opportunities for thousands of Mexicans, and thus modernization would benefit everyone. Foreign investors "traveled the entire country in search of mines, raw materials, and shortly thereafter petroleum."
The social differentiation rooted in the long and turbulent history of conflict over land rights in Mexico was exacerbated with the carte blanche offered to foreigners to virtually control the country economically. By the eve of the Mexican Revolution, more than nine million Mexicans out of a population of fifteen million had no land, and half of the country "belonged to less than three thousand families." Many of the foreign investors who would come to own extensive tracts of land were considered absentee landowners who placed fellow Americans in supervisory positions to oversee their commercial operations.
Pamphlets produced by American boosters promoting business ventures in Mexico made it clear that what Mexico "offered to the [foreign] settler" [land, specifically] did not belong to anyone. The relative ease with which investors could set up shop was further facilitated by the availability of cheap labor. As one such brochure published in Chicago put it, "in Mexico there are good things that are yet to be obtained. In more developed countries the good things have already been taken up by people who intend to keep them." The publication stated further that "a very important factor to take into account is the price of labor. Here in Mexico labor costs only about one-half of what is paid for in the United States. The foreign settler or investor finds his capital at once multiplied by two."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Working Women by Sonia Hernández. Copyright © 2014 Sonia Hernández. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University.
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