Mexico and its reconstruction/Chapter 9

Layout 4

 

CHAPTER IX

THE MEXICAN LABORER

The Aztec civilization, which the Spaniards found in Mexico at the time of the conquest, depended primarily upon the labor of the hands of the people. Domestic animals, as in all America, were conspicuous by their absence. Agriculture was of the most primitive sort.

One of the most important changes in the economic life of the country brought by the Spanish conquest, greatly increasing the labor power of the country, was the introduction of European foodstuffs and domestic animals. European cereals and other foods were introduced in the highland regions and the horse, burro, sheep, and swine became common elements in the life of the country. Chicken raising spread rapidly, wool became important as a material for clothing. Later potato culture was extended and rice and coffee were introduced. European methods improved the yield of the mines and minted coins made exchange easier and gave a new impulse to the weak local commerce.^[1]

In spite of the introduction of these favorable elements the life of Mexico did not change as much as might have been expected. Mining drew attention away from other developments, such as agriculture, but most of all the trade policy of the mother land kept the country in a backward condition. It shut out the foreigner who, by his example, might have stimulated the Indian to adopt a civilization in which industry played a greater part than in his own. It restricted the foreign trade that would have opened up the natural resources and that would have created greater necessity for labor and would have increased its reward. When the Spanish restrictions were removed, the influences that formerly hindered development largely vanished, but the country did not advance. Disorder, which discouraged capital investment and robbed the workman of the fruit of his labor, retarded progress. Not until after half a century of intermittent revolutions did Mexico right itself. Under the discipline of a strong government it gradually removed the more important survivals of the antiquated Spanish commercial policy, and the republic for the first time came into real contact with the current of world economic developments.

For these reasons the Mexican laborer—as a laborer—has only recently had a chance to prove his merits and even now his possibilities cannot be definitely stated.^[2]

The estimates of the Mexican workman given by those who have employed him in large numbers vary as greatly as the Mexican himself varies. In some railroad construction work overseers who have had wide experience with all kinds of unskilled labor declare him to be the best material they have ever had to deal with for doing rough work. Others think him "next after the Irish," "fully the equal of the Italian," and "as good as any immigrant labor I ever dealt with." Estimates of less favorable character are quite as numerous, and the Mexican employer appears to have quite as much to say about the shortcomings of the native laborer as does the foreigner. The fact that the estimates of his ability are not regional, that there is no ethnological nor sociological unity among the population, and that some foreign and some Mexican employers have marked success in using native labor in districts where others find it very inefficient makes it hard to arrive at any estimate of the Mexican as a laborer that is fair.

In whatever part of the country that is under discussion the laborer is, as a rule, an Indian laborer. He is the fulcrum of Mexican society. As one of the most thorough of Mexican students says, "Amidst the most terrible sufferings and crushed by all sorts of hardship the indigenous population is sustaining us, socially speaking: it carries on the agricultural labor throughout the Republic, works the mines, and effectuates all hard and heavy toils." "Our subordination to the indigenes is so patent that our actual existence depends exclusively on them."^[3]

The work that the Indian has been called upon to do thus far has been, as a rule, such as to test his physical endurance and industry but has given him little opportunity to show his abilities in skilled trades. The most important exception is found in the textile mills. There ignorance has stood in the way to prevent advance to responsible positions. In the few cases where this has not been the case the better paid places have not infrequently been reserved for foreigners by the management or, if Mexicans were put into places of responsibility, they were given lower wages than were paid to Europeans doing similar work. The success of certain of the native employees in the face of these difficulties shows that some, at least, have aptitude for the skilled trades. There is no doubt that even in the textile mills the abilities of the native population have not been fully tried out in the past.

The government has done little to furnish education which would develop the latent industrial ability of the people. "By the change of régime in the present century the indigenes have made no advance, they have only changed their tutors and tutor Congress, to tell the truth, has done less for them than the tutor Viceroy."^[4]

Under these conditions it is evidently unfair to judge what the Mexican laborer can do from what he has done. He has never had a chance to prove his worth and his cause has been an unpopular one even in his own country. The ruling class have consistently alleged his great possibilities and especially in late years not a few, when comparing themselves to foreigners, have developed a sort of Indian cult and have professed themselves of Indian blood and declared themselves proud of their inheritance. Nevertheless, in domestic politics, the Indian has been a subject of general neglect. Mexico has recognized that her greatest problem is at bottom a race problem, but she has made only the feeblest of efforts for its solution.

The criticisms of the Indian laborer by his employers are those frequently alleged against the colored races, especially those living under tropical or semitropical conditions. The Indian laborer is alleged to be lazy, of few wants, preferring a low standard of life with little exertion, physical or mental, to hard work and the satisfaction of new desires. He is stolid, taciturn, melancholy, fatalistic, deceitful, and unambitious. He is declared childlike, quick to anger, devoted, and revengeful. With other peoples at a similar stage of development he shares a fondness for strong drink. "He never becomes an initiator, that is to say, an agent of civilization. . . the native people is a static people."^[5] Unlike some of the native population of the United States he is said to be usually docile, easy to handle if his prejudices are not offended, and, as a rule, not a lover of fighting for its own sake. Custom plays a large part in his life and he yields to new influences but slowly. Though there are those whose experience seems to prove the contrary, it is the general testimony that the native lacks powers of sustained attention and industry. He is easily diverted from the task in hand. He shows, in short, in the work that he undertakes, an immaturity of character comparable to that of a child. These characteristics are emphasized in the hot regions.^[6]

Other ethnic elements besides the Indian play an unimportant part in the manual labor supply of Mexico. The mestizo population, a growing proportion of the whole, has not turned to agricultural or industrial pursuits. What education it has received has turned its attention to the "polite professions" rather than the more fundamental occupations. That such is the case is one of the most unfortunate features of Mexican life. There is no economic bridge between the laboring classes and those who, from a false perspective, believe that working with their hands is beneath them. The education which the state has provided is literary, the envied careers are those in the law courts and diplomatic circles. Even those who receive training in engineering, agriculture, and like careers too frequently consider themselves qualified thereby for government positions or for the responsibilities of directors whose work is sharply cut off from actualities.

From these conditions results one of the most striking contradictions in Mexican life. The mestizos have developed as the owners of the greater number of small properties in the republic, they have monopolized many lines of small trade, they are the middlemen. They hold the great majority of public offices. But they have no unity of interest and feeling with the laboring classes. Mexico, it is true, has no hard and fast race line such as is found in the United States. It has a line of economic and social demarkation which is no less unfortunate. "Ever since the independence the Mexican mestizos and the Creoles. . . divided into two parties, both of them distanced from the nature of things because of their ignorance of the actual world; not knowing the true needs of Mexican society" have "continued to agitate it" but have not established Mexico upon a sound economic, social, and political foundation.^[7]

Foreigners, as an element in the labor supply and in office holding, can be disregarded. They have devoted themselves to trade, banking, and the development of the natural resources of the country, the latter almost exclusively through the use of the local labor. They represent a part of Mexican wealth disproportionate to their number and their enterprises have an important influence on the economic position of the country and its inhabitants, but they do not form an important part of the labor supply.

If the average Mexican laborer of the present day or of a generation ago is compared to the American laborer, he makes no favorable showing. For the dollar of wage received he does not yield more than the highly paid worker in the United States. The chief causes advanced in explanation of this fact are that he is poorly fed, poorly educated, less ambitious, and in large areas of Mexico less able to work because of climatic conditions. The plateaus are so high that the rarefied air makes sustained effort difficult and the atmosphere of the lowlands is so hot and humid that the laborer cannot endure the continuous physical labor of which men of northern lands are capable.^[8] Some of these are disadvantages that can be overcome. Some are inherent in the conditions under which the Mexican laborer lives.

Making all due allowances for the disadvantages under which it works, it is clear that the laboring population of Indian blood is one that reacts but slowly to new surroundings and one the abilities of which are still to be determined. The mestizo class, which is gaining in numbers as compared to the pure Indian, will sooner or later be forced to take a larger part in the labor of the community. The Mexican Indian as an Indian seems destined to disappear by absorption. Even though under the stimulus of foreign example and economic compulsion he should take on European habits of life, rapidly develop new wants, and become a greater factor in the national life, there is little chance of his surviving as an Indian. The chance would be less perhaps than if he continued his present mode of life, for his blending with the rest of the population would probably be hastened by unity of economic interest.

Mexico is now predominantly a mixed blood state and it seems probable will become more so. The Mexican laborer of the future, it appears, will be a mestizo and not an Indian, a condition that will be hastened by the absence of the social cleavage on racial lines, which is found elsewhere. The aboriginal races, which formed so important a factor in the early history of the United States, have disappeared as an important factor in the national life by a process of elimination, those of Mexico, which have been, until now, the foundation on which the state has been built, will disappear by intermarriage.

What effect this development will have upon Mexican economic and political life it is, of course, impossible to say. Whether through faulty education or other causes, the mixed bloods, up to the present, have not shown themselves an industrially able population. In politics they have been wonderfully facile and disappointingly unstable. Whatever the changes that the revolution brings in the labor conditions of Mexico may be—whether the Indian for the time being comes to play a more or a less important part in the national life and whether or not the mestizo rises to his opportunity—it is clear that Mexican labor problems will be in the future, as they have in the past, to a large extent, race problems. They must depend for the success of their solution upon the degree to which the Indian, and for the future the mestizo, population show themselves adaptable to the demands of industry.

It is not fair, however, to assume, as is often done, that given the chance to develop wants the Indian and mestizo populations have shown no tendency to do so. In fact, the Indian has been brought into contact with the habits of civilized life so casually, if at all, that his adaptive impulses, which appear naturally slow, have been but feebly aroused. The mestizo has taken on a surface culture but has missed the lesson that civilization means work and responsibility for those who do not labor with their hands as well as for those who do. He has developed new wants but they have not sunk deeply enough into his nature to make him, in fact as well as in appearance, a person of Western European civilization.

Along the railroads and at the seaports, wherever the currents of commerce have penetrated, demands for the simpler and cheaper manufactured articles have developed, and if education and economic changes, which would open greater possibilities of economic independence, were to reach the people, they would doubtless progress faster toward a European standard of wants.^[9] Until those elements that a modern state considers it essential to furnish its citizens are introduced in Mexico, it will be too soon to judge what the capabilities of the local population are and the degree to which they will be able to keep their country their own—both in an economic and a political sense.

1. A good description of the changes in the life of the people introduced by the Spanish conquest is found in Karl von Sapper, Wirtschaftsgeographie von Mexico, 1908.
2. See Wallace Thompson, The People of Mexico, New York, 1921, pp. 315-348.
3. Justus Sierra, editor, Mexico, Its Social Evolution, vol. 1, p. 50.
4. Ibid., p. 31. See also Alberto Robles Gil, Memoria de la secretaría de fomento presentada al congreso de la union, Mexico, 1913, p. 500.
5. Justus Sierra quoted in Luis Pombo, México, 1876-1892, Mexico, 1893, p. 7.
6. See on this point Alberto Robles Gil, op. cit., p. 94. The "vigorous" element in the hot zone are one-twentieth of the population. In the temperate regions they are one-tenth.
7. Agustin Aragón in Justus Sierra, op. cit., p. 31.
8. M. Romero, "Wages in Mexico," in Commercial Information Concerning the American Republics and Colonies, 1891, Bulletin No. 41, Washington, 1892.
9. A good description of the position of the Indian in Mexican life is found in Luis Pombo, op. cit., p. 7 et seq.