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CHAPTER 2: COTTON AND CAPITALISM IN THE BORDERLANDS, 1820–1920
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CHAPTER 2 COTTON AND CAPITALISM IN THE BORDERLANDS, 1820–1920 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mestizo and indigenous peasants from Mesoamerica settled near water sources throughout northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, learning to live with aridity and battling nomadic groups of indigenous people.1 This long history of peasant communities in northern Mexico notwithstanding, what came to define the region in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the growth of railroads, mining, and commercial agricultural enterprises, and social formations characterized by a regional bourgeoisie and a large, migratory class of “semi-industrial, semi-agricultural” workers.2 In an oft-cited essay about the “peculiarities” of northern Mexico, Barry Carr argued that many of the men who led the armies of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and rose to national power as a result of the fighting came from this northern bourgeoisie . Their liberalism, entrepreneurialism, racism, and anticlericalism were forged in those conditions “peculiar” to northern Mexico, and the northern character of these men guided the formation of the state, society, and economy after the Revolution.3 In this chapter I discuss the emergence of this new borderlands society by tracing the history of cotton in the region. Cotton, cultivated by an army of migratory workers, was central to the constitution of systems of production and social classes in Mexicali and the Imperial Valley, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the Comarca Lagunera in Durango and Coahuila, the area around Corpus Christi, the Salt River Valley in Arizona, the San Joaquin Valley in California, the Yaqui and Mayo river valleys in Sonora, the Río Conchos in Chihuahua, and the Matamoros and Brownsville region where the Río Bravo empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Cotton production in the borderlands was characterized by large plantations and migrant labor, by industrial production techniques and mechanization, by massive irrigation systems and the rationalization of space, by a struggle to control the waters of the international rivers, and by huge demands for capital met by both private and state investment . I highlight three dimensions of this history. The first is the regional, national, and international political economy of cotton. The social dimensions of irrigated cotton agriculture—labor, its settlement, and migration—will also be discussed. The third dimension is the creation of irrigation zones, and the struggle to control 22 chapter 2 the waters of the international rivers shared by the United States and Mexico. By following cotton we move beyond the limits of the locality to confront the “regional particularities” of a larger domain—the borderlands.4 At the same time, the story of cotton in the borderlands forces us to avoid reproducing the boundedness of community studies on the scale of region. Instead, to understand cotton production in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands we must take into consideration global systems of textile production involving cotton agricultural zones, cotton markets, industrial centers , capital, and imperial states that extend their web-like connections across the planet. I follow the fiber around the globe in order to discuss the social relations of the people organized within global networks of cotton production, exchange, and consumption. Although cotton is native to the borderlands, it was not its status as an indigenous plant that placed it at the center of the evolution of capitalism in the region, but rather the integration of the borderlands into global systems of industrial textile production. The emergence in Mexico of a textile industry during the nineteenth century, promoted by federal and state governments, in turn generated demand for fiber, which, despite serious efforts to establish commercial cotton agriculture, was met by imports from the southern United States. The Union blockade of Confederate exports during the Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) caused a severe shortage of cotton fiber in the textile centers of the northern United States and Europe, as well as Mexico. In this context, the dramatic intensification of overland cotton commerce between the U.S. South and northern Mexico led to the accumulation of capital in the city of Monterrey. When trade fell off after the war, merchant capitalists reinvested in local textile industries and cotton agriculture. Along with important land reforms, this capital investment laid the basis for the growth, after 1885, of the Laguna region as the first major irrigated cotton zone in the MexicoU .S. borderlands. The lasting effect of the cotton famine was to demonstrate to textile industrialists and their government allies their dependence on U.S. cotton sources. Insecurity about...