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Developing the Mexican Countryside: The Department of Fomento's Social Project of Modernization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2016

Casey Marina Lurtz
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Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, governments across Latin America founded departments of fomento, or development, to promote economic growth and modernization. This article looks at the evolution of this department in Mexico and the ways in which it integrated infrastructure, migration, land policy, science, and education into a rural economic and social project. For Department of Fomento leaders, agriculture became the connective tissue linking peace to prosperity. Though many failed, initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of Mexico's rural production illustrate a concerted effort to avoid top-heavy monoculture and use scientific planning to stabilize and unify the nation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 90 , Special Issue 3: A Special Issue on Food and Agriculture , Autumn 2016 , pp. 431 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2016 

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References

1 The ministry, which grew out of the Office of Colonization and Industry, was renamed and reorganized multiple times as its imperatives shifted and, eventually, as commerce spun off into its own department. Founded as a ministry, it later became a department. Its reports were always directed to the Department of State or directly to the Mexican president or emperor, as was the case during the French-sponsored takeover in the mid-1860s. Mexico, Dirección de Colonización e Industria, Memoria 1852 (Mexico City, 1852); Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1867 (Mexico City, 1868), 6–7.

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6 Many accounts of government promotion of agriculture in this era and the years that followed argue that technological improvement in cooperation with existing elites, focused on already dominant commodities, was the central concern of ministries like Fomento. Teresa Cribelli's work has begun to explore how, at least in Brazil, innovation and integration were also at times part of these projects. See also McCook, Stuart, “Promoting the ‘Practical’: Science and Agricultural Modernization in Puerto Rico and Colombia, 1920–1940,” Agricultural History 75, no. 1 (2001): 52–82 Google Scholar; Bowman, Andrew, “Ecology to Technocracy: Scientists, Surveys and Power to the Agricultural Development of Late-Colonial Zambia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 135–53Google Scholar; Dean, Warren, “The Green Wave of Coffee: Beginnings of Tropical Agricultural Research in Brazil (1885–1900),” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (1989): 91–115 Google Scholar; Troconis, Germán Pacheco, “Ciencias agrícolas, modernización e inmigración en Venezuela, 1908–1948,” Revista agroalimentaria 12, no. 23 (2006): 85–100 Google Scholar; and Cribelli, Teresa, “‘These Industrial Forests’: Economic Nationalism and the Search for Agro-Industrial Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 45, no. 3 (2013): 545–79Google Scholar.

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15 Mexico, Dirección de Colonización e Industria, Memoria 1852.

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17 The conclusion to Secretary Manuel Siliceo's first report to Congress reiterated that despite the lack of funds allocated, Fomento had taken major steps toward saving the country from its reputation as “unhappy Mexico.” Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857 (Mexico City, 1857), 128–29Google Scholar.

18 García Vázquez, “La configuración de la Escuela Nacional de Agricultura,” 5.

19 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 5.

20 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896 (Mexico City, 1897).

21 See, for example, Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1865 (Mexico City, 1866).

22 Mexico, Legislación de terrenos baldios (Mexico City, 1885), 3–9.

23 The first concessions for railroads were granted under Santa Anna and upheld by those who overthrew him, but no ties were laid until the 1860s. Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico, 302; Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 19–25; Coatsworth, Growth against Development; Kuntz Ficker, “Los ferrocarriles y la formación del espacio económico”; Priscilla Connolly, “Introducción a obras públicas,” in Kuntz Ficker and Connolly, Ferrocarriles y obras públicas, 141–64.

24 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 114–18; Craib, Cartographic Mexico; Hernández, Hugo Pichardo and Maya, José Omar Moncada, “La labor geográfica de Antonio García Cubas en el Ministerio de Hacienda, 1868–1876,” Estudios de historia moderna y contemporánea de México 31 (2006): 83–107 Google Scholar.

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26 Most histories of Fomento begin in the 1880s, but the ministry was an important component of Díaz's plans from the moment he took power, appointing one of his key rivals—Riva Palacio—as its head. For more on the liberalism of the era, see Hale, Charles A., The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, N.J., 1989)Google Scholar; and Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1876 (Mexico City, 1877), 252, 487, 529.

27 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1876, 529–30.

28 As one official wrote in the Diario Oficial, “[W]e cannot and must not speak of things other than those intimately connected with the public works and material improvements of Mexico.” Quoted in Coerver, “Perils of Progress,” 44.

29 See, for example, the writing about roads, railroads, and colonization in 1873. The report of this same year included a detailed account of the potential of a region in southern Chiapas called the Soconusco, listing all its current products and lamenting that the lack of communications kept them from external consumers. Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1873 (Mexico City, 1873), 3–6, 62, 129, 1014–61.

30 See, for a Cuban example, Prieto, Leida Fernández, Espacio de poder: ciencia y agricultura en Cuba: el Círculo de Hacendados, 1878–1917 (Madrid, 2008)Google Scholar. On U.S. parallels, see Scott, Roy Vernon, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana, Ill., 1970)Google Scholar.

31 Sociedad Agrícola Mexicana, Estatutos de la Sociedad Agrícola Mexicana aprobados por la junta general el 26 de setiembre de 1879 (Mexico City, 1879)Google Scholar.

32 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1876, 451.

33 The school was founded in 1853, the same year as Fomento and with similar aims, but only began receiving real support from the government when moved under the auspices of Fomento during the 1880s. Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 71–76; García Vázquez, “La configuración de la Escuela Nacional de Agricultura,” 2–3.

34 Periódico quincenal de la Sociedad de Artes y Oficios, Jan. 1, 1879, 107, quoted in Tortolero Villaseñor, De la coa a la máquina de vapor, 60.

35 Carmagnani, Marcello, Estado y mercado: la economía pública del liberalismo mexicano, 1850–1911 (Mexico City, 1994)Google Scholar; Salvucci, Politics, Markets, and Mexico's “London Debt.”

36 Tortolero Villaseñor, De la coa a la máquina de vapor, 48; García Vázquez, “La configuración de la Escuela Nacional de Agricultura,” 9–10.

37 Urbán Martínez and Saldaña, “La enseñanza agrícola,” 29.

38 From its earliest days, the shadow of the loss of Texas to government-sanctioned North American colonists loomed over Fomento's work, a vivid example of the dangers of introducing too many foreign actors onto the scene. Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 38–42.

39 Coerver, “Perils of Progress,” 61–62; Zuleta, “La Secretaría de Fomento,” 3–12.

40 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1883–1885, vol. 1, (Mexico City, 1887), vi–xii.

41 Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands, 9.

42 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 37–51.

43 For a prime example, see the experience of Minister of Finance Matías Romero in southern Mexico as described in Casey Lurtz, “Exporting from Eden: Coffee, Migration, and the Development of the Soconusco, 1867–1920” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), chap. 1.

44 This had been a complaint for decades, with the earliest ministers promoting a national property registry to establish, by default, what still belonged to the nation. Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 59; Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands, 11.

45 For examples of Pacheco's negotiation of the 1863 law, see Mexico, Legislación de terrenos baldios.

46 Holden also points out that the contracting of private companies freed the government from the “politically explosive” work of verifying landholders' rights. Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands, 15.

47 Holden, Robert H., “Priorities of the State in the Survey of the Public Land in Mexico, 1876–1911,” Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 4 (1990): 607–608 Google Scholar.

48 See, in particular, Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands; Justus Fenner, “Los deslindes de terrenos baldíos en Chiapas, México, en el contexto internacional y nacional, 1881–1917” (PhD diss., Colegio de Michoacán, 2009).

49 Holden, “Priorities of the State,” 596–99.

50 Holden's research supports this claim. Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1883–1885, vol. 1, 3; Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands, 56.

51 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896, 3.

52 Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands, 67–70; Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900 (Mexico City, 1908), 8, 12–13.

53 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896, 9. For more on the process of village privatization, see Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Matthew Butler, introduction to Mexico in Transition: New Perspectives on Mexican Agrarian History, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Mexico City, 2013).

54 Holden, “Priorities of the State,” 607.

55 While histories of Mexico have long pointed to the concentration of landholding as a key motivation behind the Mexican Revolution, no good data exists on the matter. In certain regions, like Chiapas, small and mid-sized holdings remained the norm, while in others, like the far north, massive haciendas dominated. For contrasting experiences of market-led agricultural development, see the cases of vanilla in Papantla and sugar in Morelos. Kourí, Emilio H., A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Womack, John, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

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57 Molina had begun his career as a merchant and grown wealthy through collaboration with International Harvester; he became governor of the Yucatán before investing in land and cultivation. During his tenure as governor he sponsored the building of numerous new schools, roads, hospitals, and other public projects through reformed and strengthened tax collection on the booming fiber market. Wells, Allen, Yucatán's Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860–1915 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1985), 74–75 Google Scholar; Joseph, Gilbert M. and Wells, Allen, “Summer of Discontent: Economic Rivalry among Elite Factions during the Late Porfiriato in Yucatán,” Journal of Latin American Studies 18, no. 2 (1986): 63–65 Google Scholar.

58 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1909–1910 (Mexico City, 1910), v.

59 Hernández, Mexican American Colonization, 56.

60 Reséndez, Andrés, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, U.K., 2005)Google Scholar; Hernández, Mexican American Colonization, chapters 2 and 3.

61 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1883–1885, vol. 1, 208–25.

62 Ibid., 191–226.

63 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896, 14–18.

64 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1905–1907 (Mexico City, 1909), 14–16.

65 For an articulation of this, see Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900, 12.

66 González, Manuel, Decreto del Ejecutivo sobre colonización y compañías deslindadoras, (Mexico City, 1883)Google Scholar.

67 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1883–1885, vol. 1, ix–x.

68 For a brief summary of this argument, see Hale, Transformation of Liberalism, 237–38; see also the first chapters of Stepan, Nancy Leys, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992)Google Scholar.

69 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1857, 53.

70 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1877–1882 (Mexico City, 1885), 5.

71 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1905–1907, 14–17.

72 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900, 8; see also Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–910 (Madison, Wisc., 1984)Google Scholar.

73 de Sorinne, Guillermo Wodón, La colonización de México, 2nd ed. (Mexico City, 1902), 17Google Scholar.

74 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900, 14.

75 McCook, Stuart George, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940 (Austin, Tex., 2002), 27–28 Google Scholar; Fernández Prieto, “Islands of Knowledge.”

76 For example, see the variety of articles on coffee production and demand from Germany, the United States, and Mexico published in Boletín de la Sociedad Agrícola Mexicana 11, no. 19 (1887) and no. 42 (1887). See also El Agricultor Mexicano, published in Chihuahua beginning in 1896.

77 See ongoing conversations about possibilities for fruit cultivation with consuls in the United States. Ramo Fomento: Agricultura, boxes 11 and 12, 1893–1897, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN).

78 McCook calls this “repatriating foreign knowledge.” McCook, States of Nature, 28.

79 Ramo Fomento: Agricultura, box 7, folder 4, AGN.

80 Coerver, “Perils of Progress,” 45–46.

81 See, for example, the survey results for coffee, apiculture, and general agriculture in Boletín de Agricultura, Minería, e Industrias 2, no. 7 (1893), 60–113.

82 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896, 102.

83 Tortolero Villaseñor, De la coa a la máquina de vapor, 61–62.

84 See, for example, the schools set up in Colonia Porfirio Díaz and the Distrito Federal. Ramo Fomento: Agricultura, box 12bis, folder 14, 1882 and box 13, folder 12, 1886, AGN.

85 Tortolero Villaseñor, De la coa a la máquina de vapor, 66–68.

86 García Vázquez, “La configuración de la Escuela Nacional de Agricultura,” 12–14.

87 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1883–1885, vol. 3, 392–93.

88 Ibid., 394–95; Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1892–1896, 105–107; Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900, 141.

89 Boletín de Agricultura, Minería, e Industrias 1, no. 10 (1892): 3–7.

90 The story of cotton promotion in the northern borderlands follows a somewhat similar trajectory, again with larger producers rather than smallholders as the eventual beneficiaries. Casey Walsh, Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton along the Mexico-Texas Border, Environmental History Series 22 (College Station, Tex., 2008).

91 Experimental stations often faced this challenge, as has been well documented in the United States. Tortolero Villaseñor, De la coa a la máquina de vapor, 69, 77–82; Scott, The Reluctant Farmer.

92 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1905–1907, 76.

93 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1909–1910, xxxiv.

94 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1897–1900, 124.

95 Oñate, Abdiel, Banqueros y hacendados: la quimera de la modernización (Mexico City, 1991), 35–36 Google Scholar.

96 Walsh, Building the Borderlands.

97 Mexico, Secretaría de Fomento, Memoria 1909–1910, xxxviii.

98 The editors of El Agricultor Mexicano were alumni of the ENA and wrote a great deal about the importance of reaching out to producers on all scales. Escobar, Hermanos, “La Escuela de Agricultura,” El Agricultor Mexicano 1, no. 1 (1896): 24–26 Google Scholar.

99 Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley, Calif., 1996)Google Scholar.

100 Coatsworth, John H., “Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978): 82–83 Google Scholar.

101 While this growth is significant, it bears reminding that Mexico's prosperity was less dramatic than that of Cuba and Argentina, where per capita exports exceeded sixty dollars. Ficker, Sandra Kuntz, El comercio exterior de México en la era del capitalismo liberal, 1870–1929 (Mexico City, 2007), 76Google Scholar; Topik, Steven and Wells, Allen, eds., The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930 (Austin, Tex., 1998), 10Google Scholar.

102 Mexico, Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Boletin de estadística fiscal: Jul 1910–Jun 1911, no. 366 (Mexico, 1912).

103 Lurtz, “Exporting from Eden.”

104 Kourí, “Interpreting the Expropriation.”

105 This is starting to be addressed. See, for example, Escobar Ohmstede and Butler, introduction.