Mural by Fernando Castro Pacheco.
Four Episodes of Debt in Mexican History
II/III
1908: Journey into Barbarous Mexico
John K. Turner, an American journalist, travelled to Mexico in late 1908 to see with his own eyes whether conditions for the toiling masses were as oppressive as he had been told by Mexican political exiles residing in Los Angeles. They told him that people in Mexico were “bought and sold like mules — just like mules — and like mules they belong to their masters. They are slaves.” He had a hard time conceiving that slavery could still exist in the Americas in this time and age. It was difficult to believe considering the status of Porfirio Díaz. He was regarded as one of the world’s great statesmen, the savior of Mexico who had pulled Mexicans out of the darkness of the past. Portrayed as a modern day Moses by the American press, Díaz, according to his cultivated narrative, was guiding his people into the light of progress and civilization. If it was true that slavery existed in Mexico, Turner wrote, “I’m going to see it.”
Turner’s investigative journey to Mexico was shrouded in secrecy because Mexican authorities knew that he worked closely with the leadership of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), a revolutionary grouping working for the overthrow of the Díaz regime. Driven into exile, the Mexican government employed spies, the Furlong and Pinkerton detective agencies, to harass, follow, and make life difficult for the PLM’s leadership. The main leaders, such as Ricardo Flores Magón, had already been arrested and jailed in the U.S. for their anti-Díaz political activities (in his case, he spent half of his life in the U.S. in prison). Aware of the surveillance on political exiles, Turner and Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, a leader of the PLM, left Los Angeles disguised as “tramps.” Just like millions before and after them, they “rode the rod,” the freight train. In their case, they “rode the rod” to El Paso.
Before crossing the border and boarding a passenger train headed for Mexico City, they disguised themselves into respectable personas. Turner was to play the role of a wealthy American businessman and Gutiérrez de Lara as his assistant and translator. They avoided northern Mexico for reasons of precaution, focusing their first-hand investigation on southern Mexico. Gutiérrez de Lara was well known in northern Mexico for his political activities, including participating in the Cananea miners strike of 1906. He was a wanted man in Mexico.
Turner’s education on social conditions in Mexico began on the train when he befriended a poor jornalero family on their way to the cotton fields of La Laguna. The patriarch of the family informed Turner that they had suffered many abuses in the haciendas of Chihuahua and were going south to Torreón because they had heard that each member of the family could earn one peso a day picking cotton. One peso was among the highest wage for common workers in low-wage Porfirian Mexico. For that reason thousands of migrant cotton pickers arrived every year for seasonal work in the plantations of La Laguna, many of them families; the larger the family, the more money in the form of wages.
This family constituted the “free workers” of Mexico, workers who were not permanently tied to employers by way of debts. They were free to move and change employers. However, economic insecurity, like a shadow, followed them everywhere — the constant struggles to make ends meet in order to feed, house, and clothe their families. As Turner and Gutiírrez de Lara headed further south the labor market worsened for working people where wages dropped to as low as 25 centavos per day, among the lowest wage in the world. These wages could not sustain a family, forcing laborers into different arrangement with employers, including debt-bondage.
El henequén by Fernando Castro Pacheco.
Slavery and Debt: “It is necessary to whip them”
Turner’s impersonation of a wealthy American seeking to invest in Mexico worked to perfection. The doors to the powerful opened for him in southern Mexico. He met and interviewed hacendados, foreign investors, and government officials and visited cities and large estates. He saw with his own eyes the living and working conditions of laborers. Turner, more than any journalist of that era, including Mexicans, wrote the best chronicles on one of the main results of what he called the “Díaz system” — the brutalization of workers, peasants, and Indians after three decades of economic modernization in Mexico.
For the most part, Mexican journalists had been silent on reporting the dark side of the Porfiriato, the conditions of the laboring masses. Not because they were blind to the brutal conditions that dominated their lives, but due to regime’s censuring of the independent press. One of Díaz’ rules was “a dog with a bone does not bite or barks.” In short, the government bought the loyalty of much of the Mexican press. Honest journalists went to jail or exile, as in the case of the journalists of Regeneración, the newspaper of the PLM. In this journalistic vacuum, Turner was privileged in that the doors to Mexico opened for him, thanks to his disguise.
While the mainstream press, foreign and domestic, praised Díaz for bringing “order and progress” to Mexico, Turner wrote on what he saw. His first-hand reporting exposed the human cost of the spread of capitalism in Mexico. He reported on the genocide of the Yaqui people who were being evicted from their ancestral lands in Sonora and deported to Yucatan where they were sold as slaves to planters. Many perished in the plantations. He reported on the thousands of enganchados chained to the haciendas of the Valle Nacional (most owned by Spaniards) by unpayable debts, and the mass slavery in the plantations of the Mexico’s southeast.
Turner vividly wrote on the miserable working and living conditions of the henequen, coffee, rubber, sugar, and tobacco plantations in southern Mexico that depended on “debt and contract slavery.” He wrote that slavery “is everywhere the same-service against the will of the laborer, no pay, semi-starvation, and the whip.” In the case of Yucatán, the 50 “henequen kings,” the so-called casta divina, owned the lives of 100,000 to 120,000 Mayas, 8,000 Yaquis, and 3,000 Koreans and Chinese. A spokesperson for the planters told him, “It is necessary to whip them . . . What other means is there of enforcing their discipline . . . If we did not whip them they would do nothing.”
Although the “kings” denied the existence of slavery because the Mexican Constitution prohibited it, Turner noted that they were slave in all definitions of the term except in name. They were purchased and sold like any commodity or animal, worked from hours before sunset to sundown in extreme heat, locked up in galeras (barracks) at night, and fed one meal a day consisting of small portions of tortillas, beans, and spoiled fish. In comparing conditions in Russia and Mexico, Mexican liberals noted that “Siberia is hell frozen over; Yucatan is hell aflame.”
Mexico’s starving wages ensured the reproduction of “debt and contract slavery.” The typical case involved desperate laborers borrowing money from hacendados due to a family emergency, ranging from sickness to simply feeding their families. More often than not, they could not pay back what they owed, forcing them to pay it back with their labor. The low wages in the haciendas meant that they could not pay their debt and feed their family at the same time. In this scenario they had no other option than to get credit at the hacienda store where the prices of basic goods were higher than in regular stores, resulting in debts that increased over the years to the degree that they became unpayable. Not even death pardon their debts — the children inherited them, ensuring the reproduction of “debt and contract slavery.”
In isolated areas where labor shortages prevailed, such as in Oaxaca’s Valle Nacional, employers counted on enganchadores, the unscrupulous labor agents, who specialized in the recruitment of laborers. An American planter told Turner, “when we need a lot of enganchados all we had to do was wire to one of the numerous enganchadores in Mexico saying: we want so many men and women on such and such a day.” The enganchadores “never failed to deliver” the necessary enganchados, the workers who were enticed to sign labor contracts with wage advancements and false promises of higher wages, free housing, and transportation. They had to pay back the wage advancements with their labor, an almost impossible task considering that the low-wages and the credit at hacienda stores ensured that their debts would never be paid. Debt chained enganchados to haciendas which, “kept them as long as they lasted.” Many were overworked to death.
Turner published Barbarous Mexico in 1910. The first part of the book dealt with his first-hand accounts on the hellish working and living conditions of the toiling masses, and also contained over a dozen photographs to illustrate his point. The second part focused on his interpretation of “the Díaz system”: the repressive nature of the dictatorship that had violated the Constitution of 1857 (absence of democracy, ending with the freedoms, persecution of dissent) and the economic beneficiaries of Mexico’s “progress,” such as Wall Street, foreign corporations and investors, and the wealthy of Mexico, especially hacendados. He estimated that American capitalists had invested $900 million dollars in Mexico, such as the Morgans and Guggenheims. He concluded that foreign, especially Americans, and, to a lesser extent, Mexican capitalists owned Mexico, including ownership of people: one million slaves, as in the case of the Yucatán, and five million peons chained to employers by unpayable debts.
In his interpretation of the “big picture,” Turner pointed his finger at the U.S. government for being complicit in sustaining the “Díaz system.” As a government that protected the welfare of big business, the U.S. “is a partner in slavery in Mexico” for it endorsed the Díaz regime which, in turn, maintained a business climate that generated immense profits for American investors and other capitalists. He pointed out that “the slavery and peonage of Mexico, the poverty and illiteracy, the general prostration of the people are due to the financial and political organization that at present rules the country — in a word, to what I call the “system” of General Porfirio Diaz.”
Stated another way, Díaz had sacrificed the welfare of a generation in the name of “civilization,” a euphemism for Mexico’s economic modernization that was geared at rewarding the wealthy and powerful. The sacrifice of millions for the benefit of the few had “wrecked Mexico as a national entity.”
Un día de vida by Leopoldo Méndez.
“Mexico: Mother of Foreigners and Stepmother of Mexicans”
“Mexico: mother of foreigners and stepmother of Mexicans” was a popular saying in the era of the Porfiriato. This expression captures one of the key developments of the Porfiriato: Mexico became heaven for foreign capitalists and the inferno for most Mexicans. More than any other work of that time, Barbarous Mexico confirmed the validity of that common sense view. As a journalist Turner reported on the working and living conditions of the laboring population and offered an interpretation of the “Díaz system” on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. He was not a historian who ventured into the history of how Mexico became the “mother of foreigners and stepmother of Mexicans.” Such a history needed to take into account what Walter Benjamin wrote, “there is no document on civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
The early 1880s serves as a good starting point for this account. During these years Díaz opened Mexico up to foreign investments, firmly believing that the fastest route to Mexican development was tying the Mexican economy to the U.S. He followed the aphorism that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” concluding that Mexico did not have the capital nor the people with the capacities to construct a modern country. With that in mind, his regime paved the first steps of the road to modernization with the creation of a good business climate for foreign investments. He imposed political order at any cost, including violating the Constitution, and established the legal framework for the rule of property rights, such as selling millions of hectares of public lands to individuals. Foreign investments poured into Mexico as a result, transforming the country beyond recognition.
The rule of private property led to one of the most striking developments of the Diaz dictatorship — the accumulation of land in few hands. Mexican landlords and foreigners not only bought public lands at low prices, but also acquired great quantities of lands belonging to the pueblos (peasant communities), a trend that began in the colonial era, increased after Independence, and reached its climax during the Porfiriato. Peasant communities, such as the Yaqui and the pueblos of Morelos, not only lost their ancestral lands that provided them with their economic security but also their political authority over local affairs.
The dispossession of the peasants’ lands led to Mexico’s greatest demographic dislocations since the first century after the Conquest of Mexico. Without any land for their subsistence, the displacement of millions of erstwhile peasants forced them to make a tough choice, either migrate to cities in search of their livelihood, with a growing number migrating to the U.S., or enter unfavorable labor arrangements with hacendados, mainly as jornaleros (wage-earners), sharecroppers, and tenants. These choices had their repercussions as Turner reported when he befriended the migrant family heading for the cotton fields of La Laguna.
The patriarch of the family told him, “Work! Work! Work! That’s all there is for us — and nothing in return for the work! We do not drink; we are not lazy; every day we pray to God. Yet the debt is always following us, begging to be taken in.” He wanted to borrow money to make ends meet but his wife insisted that it is,” better die than to owe, for owing once means owing forever-and slavery.” “But sometimes,” continues the patriarch, “I think it might be better to owe, better to fall into debt, better to give up our liberty than to go on like this to the end. True, I am getting old and I would love to die free, but it is hard — too hard.” In their case, they preferred their personal freedom but this came at the cost of economic insecurity. For others who ended up in debt, they had some economic security, living at the level of subsistence (credit at hacienda stores, for instance), but it came at the expense of their freedom.
The construction of the “Díaz system” also involved a racial dimension as a way of legitimizing the necessity for a dictatorship and as an important component behind the logic of the rule of property. Under a heavy dose of Social Darwinism and Positivism, the Porfirian ruling elite, mainly the Científicos, condemned most Mexicans, especially the indigenous people, as racially inferior people. In a nutshell, they shared the opinion that “successful nations,” such as the U.S. and Germany, were products of Caucasians — Mexico’s burden was that it had too few of them. In contrast, it had too many Indians, among the lowest of people in the global hierarchy of race. Regarding most Mexicans more of a burden than an asset in Mexican development, the elite used racial inferiority to justify the dispossession of their lands, keep them in labor bondage, pay them low wages due to their “low labor productivity,” and deny them education and basic human rights. Indians were treated as sub-humans, people only fit for brute labor. A common saying in Yucatán was “los indios no oyen sino por las nalgas.”
Mexico became a capitalist utopia under Díaz. One of his ministers pointed out that foreign investors doubled their capital in Mexico, a high rate of profits that was due, to a large part, to “cheap and docile labor.” In an age of labor militancy throughout the industrial world, the Porfirian dictatorship oppressed organized labor, banning unions and strikes. This policy of labor repression ensured the “cheapness” of Mexican workers. Indeed, “cheap labor” was one of the associations foreigners made with regards to Mexico. It was one of the “competitive advantages” that Mexico had over other countries. One of the calls from employers in the American Southwest was “we need to have Mexican cheap labor.” Considering that the lowest wages in the U.S. were two to eight times higher than in Mexico, many Mexicans responded to that call during the Porfiriato and throughout the 20th century.
Zapatistas, 1931, by José Clemente Orozco.
1910: México Bárbaro
Turner travelled to Mexico to see if slavery really existed. “Slavery in Mexico!,” he wrote, “Yes, I found it.” He published his findings in a series of articles that appeared in American Magazine. His discovery was not a revelation in Mexico in spite of the denial from government authorities and hacendados. Many Mexicans experienced it first hand for indentured servitude nourished it, the product of wages so low that laborers had no other option than to borrow just to stay alive. While his writings had no real overall impact in Mexico, it did in the U.S. In spite of being a work that legitimized the reasons for Mexican Revolution, Barbarous Mexico was not translated into Spanish until 1955. It had a second wind of mass readership in Mexico.
Aimed for an English-speaking audience, Turner’s discovery of slavery shocked people in the U.S. and other parts of the industrial world. They believed that Díaz was a great modernizer, just like Turner did before his journey to Mexico. This revelation reflected the success of the English language mainstream press in cultivating the image of Díaz as the savior of Mexico. His articles, and others that were not published, were compiled into a book, Barbarous Mexico, published in late 1910, just around the time Mexico erupted in Revolution. Hundreds of thousands read his articles and Barbarous Mexico in the U.S. and Great Britain, becoming the most read book on Mexico up to that point.
More than any other work Barbarous Mexico blackened the international portrayal of Diaz, depicting him as a brutal dictator who managed a “system” that guaranteed immense profits for foreign and Mexican capitalists. This wealth came at the expense of the impoverished laboring masses. One of the aims of book was to inform North Americans on how their government was complicit in maintaining the “Díaz system.” He wrote that the “system” could no longer be sustained, making two predictions. First, that Mexico was on the verge of a revolution for democracy. That revolution began when the Madero rebellion removed Díaz from power in 1911. Second, that the U.S. government would intervene in Mexico to support a regime that did not threatened American investments. The desire of Mexicans for democracy would inevitably lead to a clash with U.S. imperialist ambitions. One of Turner’s goals was to educate the American public at what was at stake in Mexico.
It should be noted that although Turner wrote Barbarous Mexico, he was influenced by the leadership of the PLM. A good part of Turner’s interpretation on Mexico is to be found in 1906 Program of the PLM and its newspaper, Regeneración. The PLM called for the overthrow of the dictatorship and the creation of a nation free of all types of oppression. Two of the goals of the PLM were the abolishment of the debts of the laboring masses and the distribution of land to the tillers. Part of the PLM’s program was partially fulfilled by the Mexican Revolution. For all its failures and betrayals, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) ended with “slavery,” indentured labor, and distributed land to many tillers. Indeed these were great achievements of the Revolution.
Four Episodes of Debt in Mexican History (Part I)
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Juan Mora-Torres Associate Professor of Latin American History at DePaul University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Wayne State University (Detroit). His research and writings focus on the history of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, Mexican migration, popular culture, working class formations, and Mexicans in Chicago. He is the author of The Making of the Mexican Border (University of Texas Press, 2001). The Making of the Mexican Border won the Jim Parish Book Award. He’s currently working on Me voy pa’l norte: The First Great Mexican Migration, 1890-1940. Mora-Torres is the Board President of El BeiSMan.
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