Building the King's Highway: Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico's Caminos Reales, 1757-1804 (review)

This slim volume integrates employment and expense records and several late eighteenth century censuses to explore the social history of road construction in central Mexico. Bruce A. Castleman complements that data with administrative correspondence from Mexican and Spanish archives. Flushing out the challenges and goals of local, regional, and imperial elites who wanted paved roads, the author discusses their competing interests. The core of this though, remains the ordinary people who worked on road projects. The author intersperses brief vignettes about the lives of workers throughout this study, shedding new light on the social history of work during the latter decades of the eighteenth century in Mexico.

Following a brief introduction, the author structured his analysis in four subsequent chapters. The second chapter introduces us to the major road projects: the Veracruz-Mexico City roads through Orizaba to the south and Xalapa to the north, designed planned to link up in Puebla; and the western Toluca-Mexico City road for internal commerce. Castleman stresses the importance of local and regional markets as the impetus for the successful construction of the roads between Toluca and Mexico City and between Mexico City and Puebla. He also discusses the topographical obstacles that hindered the completion of paved roads between Veracruz and both Orizaba and Xalapa. He perhaps understates those challenges and might have included a section on the state of civil engineering knowledge at the time.

The following chapter focuses on the road and bridge projects around Xalapa and analyzes the change from draft labor to free labor between 1757 and 1767. Imperial officials insisted on that change. Just why they did that remains to be more fully explored. Nevertheless, administrative documents and pay lists clearly indicate that that the labor system shifted from drafting villagers, administered by village leaders who received compensation for each man-day of work, to weekly employment of free labor. Those records also indicate the pay differentials for unskilled workers at 1-3 reales a day and skilled labor at 4 to 6 reales a day and the continuity of skilled labor on the job, as opposed to a high turnover rate for unskilled workers. The chapter concludes with a wide ranging discussion of road building labor regimes in ancient and early modern empires.

The next chapter assesses the wages paid to workers in the Orizaba region and on the Toluca road project during the 1790s. Castleman argued that wages had increased over the decades, but then decreased between 1791 and 1794. Weekly pay records indicated high turnover rates; fewer than six percent of the unskilled laborers worked for more than one week. Demographic growth, though, contributed to a demand for work; and workers continued to show up each week. Again, as in the Xalapa region decades earlier, higher paid skilled labor showed higher rates of persistency on the job than did unskilled labor. Because some of the data on reductions in weekly pay came from late summer months in the Toluca region, the author might have considered that lower pay might have been caused by heavy seasonal rains inhibiting work rather than reductions in daily pay rates.

The final chapter analyzes two Orizaba censuses, a 1777 Church administered census and a 1791 government census, to explore the social lives of the unskilled, skilled, and elite of Orizaba. The censuses indicate a significant change in Orizaba's socio-racial profile with Iberian and American born Spaniards increasing from eighteen percent to over fifty percent of the population and the mestizo component decreasing from sixty-two percent to thirty percent. By record linking 1,012 persons on the two censuses, though, Castleman showed that socio-racial drifting rather than significant change explained the changing profile as individuals classified as mestizos, castizos, and pardos on the 1777 census became listed as Spaniards...