Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

Chapter 6: Production, Patriarchy, and Polarization in the Cities: Guanajuato, San Miguel, and Querétaro, 1770–1810

ChapTer 6 Production, Patriarchy, and Polarization in the Cities Guanajuato, San Miguel, and Querétaro, 1770–1810 mosT oF The silver that drove the economy of New Spain came from Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and regions north. Silver accelerated urbanization, stimulating markets for cloth and commercial crops. Powerful men in Mexico City along with mining , textile, and agricultural entrepreneurs in the Bajío ruled a booming economy after 1770. Still, the late-century boom developed in a changing global context. The premium prices paid by China for silver , stimulating the cycle of 1550 to 1640 and the resurgence of mining after 1700, were gone by 1750. Silver remained vitally important as money and a commodity.1 Its price declined just as Mexican mines again faced rising costs for tunneling, drainage, and labor. The regime answered with policies that promoted mining by lowering costs for taxes, mercury, and labor; it also worked to draw more silver toward Spain and Europe. The Bourbons promoted mining, prejudiced colonial textile production , and sought power and revenues while aiming to limit disruptive resistance. Entrepreneurs and officials worked together toward policies of social control that would concentrate the fruits of boom in the hands of the few; the men, women, and rising number of boys who produced silver, cloth, and crops faced declining returns and unprecedented insecurities. Patriarchy remained strong in elite families; produCTion, paTriarChy, and polarizaTion 301 mounting pressures and uncertainties challenged men, women, and children in working households. Linked histories of boom and dislocation, of entrepreneurs and producers , the few seeking wealth and power and the many working to survive, played out in cities, towns, and rural communities of the Bajío. The region sustained an integrated regional economy; its silver drove burgeoning trades. But it divided internally into zones with different legacies of settlement, ways of production, social organization , and cultural visions. The southern and eastern Bajío focused on the commercial and textile city of Querétaro, still with an Otomí majority in the late eighteenth century. The northern and western Bajío focused on the mining city of Guanajuato; it remained a Hispanic society with a mulatto-indio majority. Prosperity and polarization were everywhere; so were differences that made every community distinct. Patriarchy remained a dominant ideal, at least among patriarchs. It organized entrepreneurship, in the Bajío as in Mexico City. It orchestrated production in cities and across the countryside. Men were presumed the heads of producing households, working to sustain families ; wives and children should serve and assist, in production and in household affairs. The patriarchal ideal did not presume that only men worked. Rather, men would lead working households that incorporated the labors of women and children. Entrepreneurial patriarchs and their managers presumed to deal with producing patriarchs—the heads of working households. Working patriarchs aimed to produce cloth and other goods in the cities and crops in the countryside; wives and children were expected to work, serve, and obey. Thus the key to production and social stability under patriarchy was the link between unequal patriarchs. If entrepreneurial patriarchs allowed working patriarchs the means to provide for and thus rule their families, subordinate men would work loyally for the few who profited. Patriarchy was essential to social stability in the eighteenth-century Bajío. But what if workingmen could not “provide”—could not gain the work or resources to allow families the necessities of sustenance? If the “failing” was personal, family conflict resulted.2 Since the beginning , labor at the mines of Guanajuato was so dangerous and insecure that uncertainty about working patriarchs’ ability to “provide” was built into the social order grounded in dominant trends in the organization of production. After 1770 deepening structural challenges to working men’s patriarchy spread to textile cities and rural communities . The result was an era of polarization and insecurity. Many struggled to sustain patriarchy. Others looked for new ways of work and family life. The Bajío boom after 1770 brought profits to the few and declining earnings to the majority. It also brought new challenges 302 Forging aTlanTiC CapiTalism to the patriarchy that orchestrated stability in a deeply unequal regional society. While the boom lasted, elite patriarchs found ways to profit and the majority grappled with unprecedented uncertainties. Guanajuato: Patriarchs and Producers in the Silver City Silver mined and refined at Guanajuato soared to new heights after 1770, driving the economy of the Bajío and...