Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor

5. Colonialism’s Thumb

83 FIVE Colonialism’s Thumb i The golden age of capitalism, when the tree of the Industrial Revolution bore ripe fruit, was no time for the peripheral world to free itself from colonialism’s thumb. Known as the Gilded Age in the United States, Mexico’s new trading partner, it saw the triumph of the world economy of industrial capitalism, when Western Europe, and then the United States, embarked on imperial adventures, acquiring colonies by trade and investments and, if that failed, by rifle and cannon. By 1914, these colonies of the rich and powerful covered nearly 85 percent of the globe’s surface. As international commerce expanded, so too did Western capitalists’ investments in the peripheral world. Steamships, railroads, the telegraph, and bank loans opened the door for the sale of factory goods in faraway corners of the globe. Western factories now had markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America for their expanding productive capacity. 84 c o l o n i a l i s m’s t h u m b The Gilded Age was a time of splendid Western hypocrisy, when deeds and spoken words rarely coincided. Englishmen dressed fastidiously in somber clothes, led the vanguard of this globalization, and saw themselves as the bearers of respectability and Victorian virtue, while caste societies and even slavery prevailed in their colonies. It was a time when dual standards dictated the behavior of upper-class men, usually bearded and sporting drooping mustaches, who gawked at women with breasts, hips, and buttocks swelled huge by perverse and punitive Victorian corsets, demanded chastity from their wives and daughters, but made women of the lower classes fair game for their sexual escapades.1 These Englishmen and their cohorts in the West bore in their souls the seeds of a virulent racism.2 Herbert Spencer and his silly doctrine of social Darwinism made deep inroads in liberal thought, the prevailing dogma of the Gilded Age.3 A horror of miscegenation spread like wildfire through Western Europe and the United States, prompted by a belief that half-breeds inherited the worst of their parents’ races. A horde of Mexicans wishing to deny their mestizo roots, especially the middle class, which was always uncertain of its place on the social ladder, fervently embraced Spencer’s nonsense to distant themselves from the Indian and the swarthy poor. As Federico Gamboa had a Spaniard say in his novel Santa, the “vices of Mexico sport aboriginal roots, nasty after-tastes of savages and characteristic of pre-Hispanic Indians.”4 With Spencer as their bible, Europeans, capitalists, and liberals one and all, and soon their cousins in the United States, would dictate events in Mexico and the rest of Spanish America, cementing in place, by trade, finance, and steel, the colonial structure of underdevelopment under the mantel of free trade. As in colonial times, Mexico kept on strumming the same old guitar, relying on an export economy choreographed by hacendados, powerful merchants, foreign mine owners, and a servile burguesía. In its relations with the advanced capitalist countries, Mexico served as an adjunct, supplying them with raw materials , industrial metals, cheap labor, fertile soil for investment, and a market for goods. c o l o n i a l i s m’s t h u m b 85 i i After the restoration of the Republic, another day dawned, calling forth decades of peace and order, all under the Liberal Party banner, an era now remembered as the Porfiriato. At the helm of the ship of state was an elite embracing the Western capitalist values of money, personal success, schooling, and science. Urban growth, a signpost of rising middle -class importance, was a hallmark of the times; the populations of Mexico City, Guadalajara, and León, three of the booming cities, multiplied rapidly. With the Western European hunt for raw materials for industry and markets, investment capital slowly started to come, primarily to Mexico’s metropolises and the mining districts of the northern border states. Little of the money found its way into factories, partly because the investors did not want competitors. Despite the flow of capital into Mexico, the poor went from want to want. Dirt farmers and artisans alike swelled the ranks of job seekers, while campesinos who held on to their parcels of land had little money to spend. Designed to supply the needs of the industrial nations, the...