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

Within the context of Spain's rise to power fueled by its colonial silver trade, Bruce A. Castleman, in this slender volume, spins an engaging narrative sprinkled with relevant anecdotes on the Mexican road systems created to facilitate Spain's goals. In Chapters 1 and 2, he explains the policy conflicts between the Bourbon colonial state, local interests, and the powerful merchants guilds, or consulados. Here, the author successfully underscores the significance of local and regional markets. These interesting larger issues serve more as a background for the central themes of this work concerning labor, society, and family.

In the chapters that follow, Castleman makes excellent use of almost non-extant weekly employment and pay records for workers participating in road and bridge construction in Xalapa, Orizaba, and Toluca. In addition, he collected data from census documents pertaining to the same and earlier labor groups. Together, these records provide a trove of cross references which richly reinforce a number of important arguments—the author's as well as those posited by scholars looking to other temporal, spatial and occupational constructs. Drawing from these collective sources, Castleman provides informed, compelling comparisons and suggestions, some of which reach far beyond the parameters of colonial Mexico.

This goal is most notably achieved in Chapters 3 and 4 where Castleman's data well serve the discussion on the evolving structure of labor systems in relation to the ongoing construction projects discussed above. Here, he analyzes local draft labor and its significance within the context of tribute demands and village welfare. He notes, for example, how the Totonac leadership brokered deals for their villagers' tribute relief by providing additional labor to meet road construction demands. The author's weekly payroll data also support a marked transition from draft to free wage labor on the road projects within a ten-year span. Of more significance perhaps, is that this transition was not accompanied by any meaningful increase in earning power, nor did it reverse the preponderance of high job turnover. Further, the unskilled road crews remained primarily indigenous. Castleman expresses reasonable concern that his documents yield no indication of women's participation in the construction projects. In other regions, we know women early on were drafted along with the mobile male work crews to serve as cooks, corn grinders, and the like. He concludes his analysis of wage labor with a historiographical assessment of labor systems elsewhere to find draft, or corvée labor, a universal model regardless of time or place. He postulates that a relationship between an expanded cash economy fostered by the industrial revolution and reinforced by population growth usually lessened the need for draft labor.

Nevertheless, Castleman suggests that systems of coercion could still be applied, including a reversal to draft labor, as argued in Chapter 4, aptly titled "Times Get Tougher." Here, elaborating on an earlier theme, he argues that although workers benefited somewhat by free wage labor and possible flexibility in job options, such benefits were notably offset by inflation and wage cuts, and the unskilled, subsistence farmer-cum-day laborer fared even worse than skilled labor. Finally, in this reader's opinion, Castleman's last chapter, "Patterns of People's Lives," is the book's most interesting as well as somewhat frustrating. He provides challenging hypotheses regarding the startling "shortage" of area men, due possibly to out-migration for jobs, tribute evasion, and avoidance of conscription. He then moves on to assess the issues of race, ethnicity, and the resulting intermixture of both, basing his arguments on the official designations of these categories as embodied in the sistema de castas. Here, Castleman provides additional insight to occupational structures as well as to the ongoing discussion of the "whitening" process. While he does distinguish between creole and peninsular-born Spaniards, Castleman unfortunately lumps all African descent populations into the...