The Silver of the Sierra Madre: John Robinson, Boss Shepard, and the People of the Canyons (review)

Hart examines the intrusion of United States entrepreneurs into the mining district of Batopilas in the southwestern part of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, beginning in 1861 and enduring for more than a half-century. He argues that two United States mining investment groups, first gradually, then more rapidly, revolutionized local society as they transformed mining in the district. John Robinson initiated the process that tied the district’s people—the local town elite, mestizo workers, and Tarahumara Indians—to both the United States and Chinese economies. Then, a second group, dominated by Alexander Shepard, expanded the enterprise after 1879. The latter’s oppressive nature, Hart contends—through its regimentation of mine labor, forced labor for some, unequal pay and racial segregation, suppression of unions and disappearance of labor organizers, and the political dictatorship of a company town backed by the judicial and military force of the Porfirian regime nationally and the Terrazas clique at the state level—more generally reflected the dynamic at work around the Caribbean Basin. More specifically, that industrial capitalist regime changed the consciousness of many batopilenses, motivating them to participate in the 1910 Revolution.

Hart’s work is at once an analytical case study, local narrative, geographic journal, and ethnographic profile. The structure is both chronological and biographical—two periods, two entrepreneurs—weaving together these four stylistic strands in varying lengths through the two time periods. This makes the book attractive to a wide range of readers, in both literary genre and disciplinary focus. Hart employs a travel journal approach to introduce and ground the reader in the life and people of Chihuahua’s portion of the Sierra Madre, tracing Robinson’s long journey from the east and Shepard’s from the Pacific coast. Interspersed along the way are topographical and settlement descriptions, ethnographic portraits of the Tarahumaras, and biographical vignettes. Hart’s analysis focuses on the geopolitical and economic connections between local, state, national, international interests, and the process by which the industrialization of mining transformed the district.

Hart uses a very extensive body of manuscript and archival collections at the state and national levels, and on both sides of the border, as well the Batopilas Mining Company’s records, especially its letter books. There is a strong reliance on a local history written by José Sánchez Pareja in 1883. Secondary sources include regional monographs in book, dissertation, and journal article form, along with ethnographic studies of indigenous tribes in the region, some general works on Mexican history, and a variety of popular travel-like accounts written over the last century. Hart’s skill is in taking the growing body of work on northwest Mexico and focusing its numerous dimensions on a single locality, and doing so in entertaining fashion.

However, Hart seems to have overlooked a significant historiographical finding in his concluding chapter. He contends that Batopilas is, above all, an example of the larger late nineteenth-early twentieth century pattern of United States industrial capitalism coming to localities across the Caribbean Basin. In the more general sense it is. But probing more deeply, perhaps, one uncovers a dual structure within that general pattern. The well-established contrast of Robinson and Shepard reveals two stages of North American capitalism’s intrusion into Latin America: one, between 1850 and 1880, in which more individual, entrepreneurial capitalists introduced modernizing instruments and practices to extractive and infrastructure ventures, but compromised with, as much as changed the local societies they encountered; and a second, beginning in the 1880s, that brought the full weight of industrial, corporate capitalism to bear on those localities, radically altering them. It is the contrast of Henry Meiggs in Peru with the Cananea and Guggenheim Mining Companies in northern Mexico, the transportation ventures of Cornelius Vanderbilt with the United Fruit Company in Central America.