CHAPTER II

NATURE AND THE MEXICAN MARKET[2]

Every land upon this globe owes to nature that predetermination of its products and its needs which are the vital factors of its commerce and its industries. Even the nature of its races, which has so much to do with the standards of living which affect the quality and volume of business, is determined to a certain extent by climate and geography. It is therefore a fundamental need of all who have a deep interest in Mexican business to grasp something of the location, the formation, and the climate of that country. For few nations in the world have a more wonderful location, and few have a more disastrous climate.

The vast cornucopia-like triangle of land which comprises the territory of Mexico lies south of nearly three-quarters of the southern boundary of the United States. Its western tip touches Southern California at the Pacific and its most easterly point is 500 miles south of the Pensacola, at the western end of Florida. For 1,833 miles Mexico’s northern border is contiguous to the United States, 693 miles eastward along arbitrarily marked lines from the Pacific Ocean to El Paso, Texas, and the remainder southeastward along the sinuous course of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. Its jagged southern border is hardly 400 miles long, touching Guatemala and British Honduras (Belize).

This cornucopia, grasping the Gulf of Mexico on the east like a great hand, swings southeastward from the Pacific contact with the United States until the most westerly point of the Guatemalan border is 500 miles _east_ of Mexico’s easternmost contact with the United States on the north.

Set apart, as Mexico is by her boundaries, she seems in form much like a great peninsula, but she has, herself, two important peninsulas as part of her territorial extent and configuration. One is the Peninsula of Yucatan, which forms the eastern end of the cornucopia, the thumb of the curving hand which grasps the Gulf of Mexico, an area of about 50,000 square miles. The other is the long, narrow peninsula of Lower California, with 58,343 square miles, extending directly south of the American state of California and connected with the Mexican mainland by only a narrow strip.

That mainland comprises, with the two peninsulas, 765,762 square miles, and the 1,561 square miles of coastal islands under Mexican sovereignty bring the total area of the country up to 767,323 square miles. The greatest width of the mainland is 750 miles, and the greatest length is 1,942 miles, from the northwestern tip of Lower California, where it joins the United States, to the southernmost point in the jagged Guatemalan border in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The narrowest point in Mexico is 120 miles, at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, once discussed as the possible site of an interoceanic canal, and in the time of Diaz the route of a great transshipping railway between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic (Gulf of Mexico) coastline of Mexico is 1,727 miles long, that of the Pacific (including the long border of Lower California) 4,574 miles.

Lying between 32° 30′ and 14° 30′ North Latitude and 86° 30′ to 117° Longitude west from Greenwich, the triangular form of the Mexican territory places it about equally in the temperate and torrid zones. This is a primary factor in Mexican climate, but far more significant is the contour of the country itself.

This is largely mountainous, for if we include the high but fertile table-lands, nearly two-thirds of the country is covered with mountain ranges. The Rocky Mountains of the United States, the great backbone of the Western Hemisphere, cross the Mexican border into Sonora, in a low, narrow range. Almost immediately south of the international line they begin spreading eastward. A long, slowly rising valley a hundred miles wide continues southward from El Paso, narrowing rapidly, while to the eastward of this valley rises an apparently new range of mountains, obviously a part of the great Rocky Mountain range, but unconnected with it in the United States and south, indeed, of the broad flat plains of Texas. This is the _Sierra Madre Oriental_, or Eastern Mother Range, the continuation of the Rockies in Sonora and Durango being called the _Sierra Madre Occidental_, or Western Mother Range. Further south, these two join together, and spread to virtually the whole width of Mexico, excepting for the Gulf coastal plain, some 300 miles wide, to the east. All of Central Mexico is mountainous, flattened only by vast plateaus which, according to the accepted geological theory, were created by alluvial deposits and lava dust from the mountains which rise still above them. At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Sierra Madre flattens out till, save for the relatively easy grades which climb from the Gulf and from the Pacific to the summit of the low divide (less than 300 feet above sea level) the mountains might be all but gone. The narrow plane of the Isthmus passed, the mountains rise again until the center of the state of Chiapas is once more a vast plateau accented with towering peaks, a formation which continues southward through Central America, lowers again at Panama, but joins directly, at last, with the South American Andes.

In this sweep of mountainous territory are hundreds of deep cañons or _barrancas_, great fertile plateaus, and many wonderful mountains. Of these last those about the Valley of Anahuac, the site of Mexico City and for ages the center of Mexican government and population, are the most famous. Here are Popocatepetl (17,520 feet) and Ixtaccihuatl (16,960 feet) the snow-peaked volcanoes, and to the eastward the still more beautiful cone of Orizaba (18,250 feet). Virtually at the same latitude, but far to the west, is Colima, (12,991 feet), a still active volcano. Toluca (14,950 feet), close to the Valley of Mexico, Malinche (14,636 feet) in the state Tlaxcala, the Cofre de Perote (13,400 feet) in the state of Vera Cruz, and Tancitaro (12,664 feet) are those of greatest height. Only the already great altitude of the plateaus of Mexico from which most of the striking mountains spring keeps hundreds of others from filling the eye of the traveler. The scenery which results from the mountainous formations of Mexico is literally unsurpassed, for Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl can give the climber all the thrills of the Alps, and the crater lakes to be found in one or two sections of Mexico rival in splendor the more famous resorts in Europe.

The deep and wide _barrancas_ which mark the mountainous formation all through Mexico are magnificent to contemplate, but the day’s journey down and up the sides of such a geological spectacle as the Barranca of Beltran brings home to even the unscientific observer the terrific handicaps which these vast cuts put upon the industrial development of the country. Much of the conquering of these handicaps was achieved under the broad railway policy of President Diaz, and the work done still remains, but many years must now pass before the final conquest is achieved. Such a work as the building of the Colima branch of the Mexican Central, completing the only direct line for the first time from the Capital to the Pacific, will hardly be repeated when revolution threatens, for here, in less than 100 miles, twenty great bridges had to be built, most of them crossing _barrancas_ and cuts of mere geological formation, with virtually no streams filling them even in the rainy season. The Southern Pacific line from the northern border in Sonora lacks but sixty miles of linking up with the Guadalajara branch of the National Railways, but thirty of those sixty miles are through a mountainous territory cut with deep _barrancas_ which will cost close to a million dollars a mile to build.

Such _barrancas_ and valleys do not, of themselves, indicate either great natural water power or navigable streams. There are wonderful water power possibilities in Mexico, to be sure, which come from two factors, the sheer drops which give ideal power sites with tremendous heads of water, and the heavy torrential rainy season. But the streams themselves do not carry sufficient water the year round to justify any plant, and tremendous reservoir development is vital to any power plant design. Such reservoirs have been built in various parts of Mexico, but at appalling expense, such as only great financial interests can swing--only foreign capital or the government has been able to handle them. There is an added and unexpected element of difficulty--the porousness of much of the soil of Mexico. The mountains, indeed, are of igneous rocks, but underneath the valleys is often soft limestone, and more often still, under those places where a great impounding of water might be made with a relatively low and inexpensive dam, is the soft, porous alluvial and volcanic-ash land with which the valleys have been filled up.

This porous soil and limestone are factors bearing on the absence of navigable streams. Even in the lowlands the streams run underground in Mexico, and while they can be tapped by shallow wells, they deprive Mexico almost entirely of the advantages of river transportation. Even the Rio Grande, on the northern border, is useless for navigation most of the year. The Panuco, at whose mouth is located the great oil center of Tampico, is navigable only a short distance above that port. The broad, rich coastal plain along the Gulf of Mexico is watered by tiny streams, all of which, excepting the partially navigable Papaloapam, are useless for steamers and even for launches most of the year. Not until we reach the Isthmus of Tehuantepec do we find a river worth considering for transportation. The Coatzacoalcos, at whose mouth on the Gulf of Mexico is Puerto Mexico (the eastern terminus of the Tehuantepec National Railway), furnishes a highway which made possible the relatively great development of American tropical plantations during the years of peace under Diaz. Its mouth was then the port of loading for great ships, but only by continual dredging was it kept open, and to-day the port is abandoned except for light-draft coasting ships. Further south, emptying into the Gulf at Frontera, is the magnificent system of which the Grijalva and the Usumacinta are the chief streams. Here indeed have plied and in the future will ply great river steamers, for upon the banks of the Usumacinta, at least, are rich oil fields and the fairest farming land in all tropical Mexico. Both the Grijalva and the Usumacinta are magnificent streams, and the latter is comparable, in its majestic volume, to the Mississippi itself. Only the bar at Frontera keeps them from being navigable to ocean steamers. For a brief period under President Madero this bar was dredged so that fruit boats could enter and go to the docks of banana farms, encouraging a promising industry which was killed by heavy taxation and government neglect of the dredging, under the revolutionary presidents of recent years. But this one system of rivers offers virtually all there is of navigation in Mexico.

Yucatan, the peninsula which separates the Caribbean sea from the Gulf of Mexico, is virtually without rivers, the water from the abundant rainfall of its interior finding its way to underground streams in the porous underlying coral limestone.

On the west coast there are a few rivers. The most important is the Lerma, which waters a large territory on the Pacific side of the continental divide, and allows some local transportation. The Balsas, in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, reaches far inland, but rapids and shallows make its use for navigation expensive and all but impossible. In Sonora is the Yaqui river, navigable for small boats and of some value for transportation. The Fuerte is also in this class.

Another phase of the geography of Mexico which affects transportation is the complete absence of good natural harbors well located. The chief port of Mexico, Vera Cruz, has a harbor which was built artificially around a partially protected bay. Tampico is a port solely because of the jetties which narrow the mouth of the Panuco and, with the help of dredges, keep the channel clear. Puerto Mexico has a similar problem, but the smaller river makes dredging absolutely vital. Frontera is solely a dredging proposition, as the Usumacinta and the Grijalva, emptying together into the Gulf, have formed a vast delta in the lowlands which can probably never be narrowed to take advantage of the great volume of water which they pour out. Yucatan has literally no semblance of a harbor, and its great crops of sisal hemp are loaded from lighters at appalling expense.

On the Pacific coast, Acapulco has one of the ideal harbors of the world, completely landlocked, and open for medium-draft ships. But it is relatively small, and moreover as yet almost inaccessible to any railway survey, although it was used by the galleons from Manila as a port for trans-shipment of the treasures of the Orient across Mexico to the galleons from Cadiz which came to Vera Cruz. Salina Cruz, the Pacific terminus of the Tehuantepec National Railway, was built from an open roadstead with two lines of jetties and seawalls, a work which inattention has now all but ruined. Manzanillo, the terminus of the only direct railway line from Mexico City to the Pacific, was also built with seawalls and opened by dredges. Mazatlan, further up the coast, and the chief port of the Southern Pacific Railway of Mexico, is an open roadstead. Guaymas, the port of the state of Sonora, is accessible only to light-draft ships.

These are all great natural handicaps, and have affected the life of Mexico probably more than it will be possible to estimate. The mighty and costly work of the Diaz régime in building harbors is a monument to that “materialistic” era which will last through many years and has already played a tremendous part in furnishing the sinews of revolution to succeeding governments, for without that work Mexico would be far from capable of sustaining herself in the period of her agony to-day.

But beyond all these factors of mountains and rivers and sea looms a yet greater problem, and still more far-reaching--the problem of climate. As noted, Mexico lies in about equal parts in the temperate and torrid zones. But the geological zones are far more important, for climate is affected not alone by latitude but by altitude as well. These geological zones are three, the hot country or _tierra caliente_, the temperate country or _tierra templada_ and the (relatively) cold country or _tierra fria_. The hot country is the lowland section along the coasts from sea level to 3,000 feet altitude, where the mean annual temperature varies from 76° to 88° Fahrenheit. The Mexican terminology includes not only the lowlands of the torrid zone, but the whole coastal plain up to the northern border. The _tierra templada_ lies along the mountain slopes and in the lower plateaus, between 3,000 and 6,500 feet altitude, where the temperature is between 65° and 76°. This zone takes in the higher northern sections which are within the temperate zone proper. The _tierra fria_ takes in the high plateaus and the mountains, between 6,500 and 12,500 feet, the yearly average temperatures varying from 30° to 60°, although the important sections record 50° or more. The three geological zones each include about equal portions of the country, but half of the inhabitants live in the cold zone, and only a quarter each in the temperate and hot sections. The mean temperatures of the cold zone are approximately those recognized as the most favorable for physical exertion, but in the hot country the body struggles against a handicap of almost 20° F. more than the 65° at which it normally functions best. More significant still are the temperatures of all the zones in their relation to mental activity. The human mind is at its best under the stimulus of a mean temperature of about 40° F., but even at Mexico City, 7,600 feet above sea level, the mean temperature of winter is as high as 53°. In the temperate and hot countries the handicaps under which the brain functions run to 20° and up to 45° above the 40° at which the human mind works at highest efficiency. No stimulating winters, no clarifying cool spells, even, in the midst of the endlessly beautiful summers of Mexico!

Only the cold zone has any advantages in temperature, and these advantages are equally important with the fertility of the soil in accounting for the predominance of population there. Yet even where the temperature is favorable to at least physical work, there is the debilitating sameness of the tropics, the assurance that there will always be more difference between day and night than between the seasons. There, on the heights, too, the nervous drain of altitude and of lack of moisture in the air takes the place--with no advantage to the human machine--of the humidity and heat of the hot country. At every turn in Mexico climate takes toll of human energy, even if we ignore the undoubtedly debilitating effect of tropical and sub-tropical light upon the white men and upon their mixed-blood descendants as well.

All these climatic factors, then, have continuous influence on the health of all the Mexican people as well as upon Mexican business. The hot, humid weather of the hot country makes those who live there low in resistance of disease, while the nervous strain of the altitudes and dryness of air in the better portions achieves a not dissimilar result in lowering resistance. It is axiomatic that the Mexicans as a people are seldom well and, as has been recorded in detail elsewhere,[3] this ill-health has been and is to-day one of the determinants of the relatively low state of progress of the country. No people who are continually sick and upon whose energies their climate is a continuous drain can work well or achieve greatly.

The relation of this thoroughly recognized factor of ill-health to Mexican trade and commerce must not be overlooked. It is at the root of much of the apathy which keeps the Mexican people at their low ebb of business enterprise. It determines with peculiar insistence their predilection for the easy road, the “_mañana_ habit,” even for the dominance of outworn traditional methods in agriculture and in business. It has a great deal to do with the ease with which foreigners develop a land which has for centuries lain virtually fallow. But it places vast difficulties in the way of that development, for it keeps the labor problem continually in the foreground and vitiates much of the great advantage which the relative cheapness of that labor seems to offer. It has and will continue to have a powerful effect on trade, for it keeps even the enterprising among Mexican business men at a low standard of efficiency and makes it almost imperative that foreigners, for the present, do most of the jobbing and export and much of the retail trade and export buying of the country. This element is too likely to be lost sight of, because it is not a condition common to other lands. But it explains much that seems at first inexplicable in the difficulties of the American exporter and importer in getting the adequate representation in Mexico which he must have.

Another vitally important effect of Mexican geography is the uncertainty and untoward distribution of rainfall. This has forced upon the Mexicans their diet of corn and with it their use of fiery condiments which are probable causes of the digestive disorders which ravage all classes. Moreover, the rainfall conditions have been vitally important in the determination of the entire agricultural tendency of the country.

The seasons in Mexico are marked, not by winter cold and summer heat so much as by seasons of rain and drought. The winter is the dry season, roughly between October and May, and the summer is the salubrious rainy season, from June to September. The distribution of rain throughout the year and the failure of the rains in the important growing seasons in some of the otherwise fertile sections is due primarily to the geography of the country. Professor Ellsworth Huntington, of Yale, the great American climatologist, finds that Mexico’s summer rains are due to the vertical rays of the sun which cause the rapid rising of the heated air, with sudden expansion and condensation, first over the low-lying hot country and later on the rising uplands of the _tierra templada_, where the function of the mountains in bringing about condensation is amply proven by the well-watered eastern slopes and the dry western sides of the ranges.

This mountain contour and the peculiar shape of the Mexican mainland (very wide at the north in proportion to the south) create another important climatological effect--the broad stretches of desert in the northern sections. The so-called continental type of climate which forms the American deserts further north combines with the mountain contour and the distance from the eastern seashore (driving the rain-clouds southward) to make immense sections of Mexico desert, capable of supporting, at best, only wandering herds. These deserts lie between the broad arms of the great “Y” of the Mexican mountain ranges, and combined with the mountainsides themselves render nearly three-fourths of the area of Mexico unfit for cultivation, even if irrigation were general.

The result is that of the 500,000,000 acres of land in Mexico, not more than 25,000,000 acres are arable. Great sections are useless, so that in the state of Chihuahua, 90,000 square miles in extent, only about 125,000 acres, or less than two-tenths of one per cent can be cultivated--and most of that arable portion is irrigated.

The most fertile sections of Mexico are rich indeed, and in the plateau valleys, where alluvial deposits and lava dust have been poured in together to form the soil, great crops can be raised--when there is rain. Only in a relatively limited section, however, is rain sure to come at the times needed by the crops. Often when it does come, it is in torrential downpours which are likely to wash cultivated fields away in a single night. It is this condition which makes the so-called _tierra templada_, on the slopes of the mountains, in many ways the least desirable of all the farming land of Mexico.

Uncertainty of rainfall is, then, one of the outstanding results of the Mexican climate as influenced by Mexican geography. This uncertainty works forever upon the mind of the Mexican farmer, making him a hopeless fatalist, making it less than worth his while to attempt scientific cultivation. If there is rain, his crops are good anyway, and if there is not rain, the cost of labor and fertilizer and good seed are lost. The Mexican farmer is the worst of gamblers, and his fondest hope is that his average crop over a period of years will be twenty-five per cent of normal!

Famine has ravaged Mexico periodically for thousands of years. It is most interesting, in looking at the present stage (when the largest items of import are foodstuffs), to realize that it has probably been only the much-abused hacienda system which has saved Mexico from severe ravages of recent famine. The hacienda system, which is the operation of huge estates under an elaborate overseership, approaches as nearly as the living conditions of the country permit to a businesslike administration of the farming of the land. It was the stable factor in Mexican food production in the time of the Spaniards and in the later era of Diaz.

The small farmer of Mexico has worked, since the beginning of Indian history, without a thought of supplying the market and thus feeding the industrial workers of the towns. He has lived from hand to mouth, and only when he chances to have a surplus does he transport it or sell it on the ground for the needs of the city market. So true is this that in the period of mining and industrial expansion under Diaz, the draining of the labor from the haciendas to the mines and to the few factories had an immediate effect on the food production, and the imports of foreign corn and wheat grew almost in exact proportion to the diversion of this labor to industry. The small farmers, the Indians and peons, who had places of their own or worked in the village commons, did not go to the mines, but continued their relatively easy existence on their own little _fincas_. They learned only slowly the possibilities of the increased market for their product, and only to an infinitesimal degree did they rise to meet that market.

To-day, with the shutting down of hundreds of the haciendas, and the return of the country to its primeval agriculture, the situation has become extremely serious, and the food importations have grown out of all proportion to the industrial growth of the country; in fact, almost in inverse ratio to the industrial depression of the country.

This presents a serious problem, but it also presents a promise of new opportunity when peace comes to Mexico. For then there must come a revival of large-scale farming, the growth of a new farming system, and with it a tremendously increased market for modern farm implements. There has been much talk, on the part of the revolutionary governments, of the needs of the new small farmers for agricultural machinery, but this is almost entirely talk, for the new small farmers are only falling back to the way of their ancestors, and are not in any sense taking the place of the ruined haciendas in food production for the cities and industrial sections. That development will probably come in the form of an entirely new system of agriculture, in which foreign machinery and of necessity foreign capital must have a vital part.

One of the inevitable developments of Mexican agriculture must be in the direction of irrigation. There is literally not enough good accessible land which will produce without irrigation to feed the country or, what is more important, to make an increase of population possible. This land must be created by irrigation, and irrigation, owing to the geographical formation of the country, must of necessity be carried out by great capital. Many of the village communes have irrigation systems, of a crude sort. Water is brought from distant streams, where it flows after the rainy season, and in some places it is brought up from the underground streams by means of crude water-wheels operated by man-power. But the total area watered by such irrigation is relatively insignificant, and as dams can be built in Mexico only at large cost, the true development of Mexican irrigation waits on peace, on foreign capital and government investment and encouragement.

Something of this sort had been begun before the present era of revolutions. In the closing years of the Diaz régime (before 1911) many franchises were granted to large private companies which planned irrigation projects, and the sum of 90,000,000 pesos was ordered expended on government irrigation over a period of years. A few of the private companies had put their plans into execution, and many others, on the way to accomplishment, were nipped and destroyed by the subsequent revolutions. For the past ten years, nothing has been done toward solving the problems of irrigating the fertile but unwatered lands of Mexico, and it seems hardly likely that anything will be done under the threats of confiscation which now hang over all great enterprise there.

Rainfall conditions have had much to do with the overemphasis on the land problem and indeed with the failure of succeeding governments to solve that problem. As in all arid countries, water rights were originally more important to the natives than were land rights. In hundreds of the Indian communes which still persist, the communal rights of the Indians are distributed, not on the basis of land assigned, but of the water allowed; each Indian receives a proportion of the water brought by the communal irrigation ditches, and may take three or four times the amount of land which his water will irrigate--for crop rotation, forage, etc. This inevitable emphasis on water has perhaps had its part in directing the attention of the Indians in their demands for land distribution, toward the cultivated haciendas where water is available. But it also gives promise for a future which will make possible the rehabilitation of the country through great irrigation projects creating thousands of rich small tracts available for distribution to industrious natives--and foreign small farmers as well. In the government franchises given under Diaz to private irrigation projects, provision was made that about one-third of the land brought into cultivation should be turned over to the government for distribution to small native farmers.

Aside from the indirect effect of these rainfall conditions, they have determined, with imperative insistence, the type of agriculture which is followed in Mexico, and so have affected her trade in foods and raw materials. They have made corn (maize) the staple food of the country, as wheat is the staple of the lands where there is winter snow and regular rainfall throughout the year. They have allowed the development of only the tropical products like coffee, sugar and rubber in the rich districts of Vera Cruz and Oaxaca which were partially opened by foreign stock companies under Diaz. They have, more than all, enthroned, as the only important agricultural export of Mexico, the sisal hemp of Yucatan. This desert product, which requires slow growth for the maturing of the long stout fibers which make rope and binder twine, is the greatest export of Mexico which is the product of Nature’s bounty and human enterprise. Coffee and some rubber and tobacco and a little sugar were raised for export in happier days, but only sisal hemp, the product of the desert _henequen_ plant, has become a wealth-producer in any great quantity. Mexico has long been an importer of foodstuffs, for, as I have noted, before the days of modern commerce, famine came with terrible regularity. Under Diaz, food was imported in increasing quantities, and since his fall, Mexico has been utterly dependent on the outside world for a large portion of the nutriment of her people.

It is impossible now to predict when and how Mexico will become an agricultural country in fact as well as in potentialities. Irrigation must come, for only when it does will agriculture and the prosperity of agriculture fill the land. In one section where irrigation has been carried out on a large scale--the Laguna district near Torreon, Coah.--cotton is grown in quantity. This product feeds into the native industry of cotton weaving which flourishes near Orizaba and in other sections where local, direct water-power is available.

It seems inevitable that the increase in irrigated lands will add to the acreage of cotton and also to the number and importance of agricultural products of the class of raw materials. The country which irrigation will water in Mexico is of vast extent, and is safely comparable, even at its worst, with what the lands of Utah and California and the Imperial Valley were before water was brought to them. Again, however, we wait on peace and on the great works of modern scientific irrigation. And, however enthusiastic we may be as tradesmen, our capital will not be rushing to seek Mexican investments of this sort until civilized government again rules, with a promise of relative permanency.

The desert character of the country in the north was responsible for the establishment of a great cattle-raising industry, for the land was cheap and the ranges were vast. This has to-day been virtually wiped out, and Mexico imports meat from the United States--all the result of revolution, so that when peace comes the cattle industry will surely be revived. But always the cattle of northern Mexico have been of the range, still unfit for profitable slaughter, and sections suitable for their fattening have been badly needed. There was, in other days, much shipment of range cattle into the United States, and to the better watered southern sections of Mexico. But although peace will bring a revival of the ranges, Mexico cannot look forward to becoming a great meat-producing country until the irrigation problem is solved.

There are rich, well-watered sections of Mexico--this must not be overlooked--but these have resulted in a crowding of population on the plateaus and through the rich valleys such as that of the Lerma river in Jalisco state, and have contributed but little toward the broad development of the country. In fact, one of the characteristics of Mexico’s population distribution has been the tendency to gather into groups, so that a great city like the capital or like Guadalajara or Puebla will have a dozen cities and villages of considerable size close about it--and then stretches of sparsely populated country for leagues until another group is found. This is essentially climatic--and geographical.

The mountain contour of the country and this same grouping of the important centers of population have been the chief influences in the location of the railways. Owing to the absence of navigable streams, the mere possibility of Mexico’s industrial and of even her true national development had to wait upon the coming of the railways. The first line was that completed in 1872 by English capital between Vera Cruz, the chief port of the Gulf of Mexico, and the City of Mexico, some 400 miles inland and a mile and a half above the level of the port. This “Mexican Railway” touches the groups of cities along the old Spanish highway, and gave them an industrial primacy which was unchallenged until the very last years of the Diaz peace.

After the building of this first line railway construction turned to follow the great natural avenues laid out by the mountain valleys. There were, as we have seen, two main valleys, that between the Eastern and Western Mother ranges, and that to the east of the Eastern chain. Looking at a map of Mexico, the most casual observer is struck by the fact mentioned more than once by Mexican revolutionists, that both these valleys lead directly to the heart of the United States. The railroads which were built there might indeed be taken to have been built to drain Mexico’s resources into the United States. But it was only because these roadbeds had been laid out by Nature herself that the lines came to be built there, with the inevitable result of increasing immeasurably the importance of the United States to Mexican development. One early Mexican president (Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, 1872-76), in fact, refused to allow these obvious roads to be built, explaining, in a much-quoted phrase: “Between the weak and the strong, let the desert remain.”

The roads were both built by American companies under President Diaz, the Mexican National on the east, the Mexican Central on the west. They had a mighty part to play in the modernizing of Mexico, and in her development through the trade in the minerals and in the building of such industries as followed them. Throughout their history to the present, they have been of far greater importance to Mexico than to her allegedly covetous northern neighbor.

After these lines were built, others came, to follow the mountain valleys. One went from Mexico City westward to Guadalajara, tapping the rich Valley of the Lerma, the granary of Mexico. Narrow gauge lines twisted through the rich states of Mexico and Michoacan, lines which when modernized and extended in some future time will open agricultural and mining territory comparable to anything yet known to commerce and Mexican industry. Another line found its way to Oaxaca, deep in the mountains to the east and south of Mexico City. Others followed the seacoast to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and crossed that narrow, shallow neck of land to the Pacific.

Along the western slope of the Sierra Madre other lines were built through Sonora, and then the Southern Pacific of Mexico, an American company, pushed these roads still further southward, opening new territory, not to the commerce of Central Mexico, but to that of the United States. And last of all, the line to Guadalajara left its easy grades and smooth roadbed to leap the _barrancas_ and climb down the mountains to achieve the contact with the Pacific at Manzanillo. A mighty hand, indeed, has nature had in the locating of Mexico’s railway lines, and with their connection to the United States and our trade.

The mountainous character of the Mexican territory has upturned vast mineral resources, whose effect on the development of the country has been greater perhaps than any other single fact. These minerals gave the wealth of the Aztecs which tempted the Spaniards to take and to develop the country so thoroughly. They were drained for the three centuries that Spain ruled, and their exploitation shaped all the policy of the colonial régime. They were the greatest of the attractions to foreign capital at the beginning of the Diaz rule, and they paid most of the revenue of taxes upon which the material civilization of the Mexico of that day was built. It seems safe to promise that when there is lengthened peace again in Mexico, mining will take its place with the greatest industries of the country--although oil may still retain its present primacy when it, too, can spread out and develop itself.

Mining camps and groups of mining camps dot the country, and whole distinct territories are devoted to the mining, here of silver, there of gold, there of copper, lead, etc. Indeed, the geography of Mexico has had a tremendous effect in the creation there of a country primarily rich in minerals as she is poor in agriculture. Oil is to-day the greatest single wealth of Mexico, but the other minerals have had and will again have their important bearing on her development.

The mineral wealth (oil as well as metals) has as I have noted been the chief attraction which has brought foreign capital to Mexico. The Spaniards and to a lesser extent the Indians before them, mined the mountains of Mexico, but it remained to foreign enterprise in the time of Diaz to open up the great bonanza sections to scientific development. In the train of this development, came more foreign capital of every sort, for agriculture, for industry, for oil, and for public service investment. This foreign capital, developing Mexico’s latent wealth, opened her to the world, and brought forth her great promise of the future, even though it also gave to the revolutionists who overthrew Diaz a handy battle cry of anti-foreignism.

It seems unlikely that without the geographical and geological conditions which offered the wealth of minerals to the development of capital, Mexico would or could have entered upon the modern stage of her development. In that was the hope of the past and in it, too, is the hope of the future regeneration of Mexico. The tempting possibilities of such development are the only bait which will bring back to Mexico the stream of foreign capital to which alone she can look for her prompt salvation, when peace comes at last.

The geography and climate have had their hand, too, in the industrial situation in Mexico. Mining, in the time of Diaz, drained the available labor away from the farms and away from the small factories which then existed. The oil fields have more recently taken a large proportion of the available workers. The supply of labor in Mexico is astonishingly small--the development of the latent labor supplies in the Indian communes waits on peace and education. Temperamentally (and in this we find the hand of climate) the Mexican is not a good factory worker. The raw products which the land produces, sisal hemp, cotton, rubber, etc., all demand for their profitable manufacture large and intricate plants, such as Mexico has not built and for whose operation she has never trained her people. Therefore, save for the cotton factories (which produce only the coarser staples) there is to-day in Mexico almost no industrial development. The lists of industries of which such a manufacturing town as Monterey boasts, include, for instance, candle and match factories employing thirty or forty people, brass bed “factories,” where the products of American foundries are put together, soda water factories--the industries which no city in any other land would find worth mentioning. Mexican industry, indeed, waits surely upon the development of the crops of raw materials, upon the education of her laboring classes, and upon the solution of the problems of irrigation and water power.

Geography and climate have been cruel to Mexico,--of this we need not seek to deceive ourselves. But throughout the list of unhappy conditions which has been set down here there runs a promise of advancement and of better things--when peace comes and when foreign enterprise shall again be welcomed. All of the advance which Mexico has made in her long fight against an unkind Nature has been made with the help of foreign energy. First was Spain, and the 300 years in which she built up the colony to a semblance of a modern state, creating great cities and peace and prosperity. Then, after fifty years of destructive revolution, Diaz, and his wise invitation to and use of foreign enterprises and foreign money. Only in these two periods has Mexico been prosperous.

The greatest advance was under Diaz, when in thirty years Mexico rose from the ashes of her revolutions and flew toward the heights of commercial advancement. In that time her railways were almost all of them built, all the water power which she now has developed, the one great and productive irrigation section--the Laguna cotton district--reclaimed from the desert, the sisal hemp industry created, the factories, such as they are, built and set in operation. Virtually all of these advances were made with foreign capital and under the control of foreign engineers and managers. Success rewarded the faith and the efforts of all who devoted themselves to these developments and it was their conquering of the great natural handicaps of Mexico which made possible the glowing tales of her “treasure-house.” When such times as those come again, and only when they come, will the battle against Nature be resumed, and in its resumption, the signs of man’s great conquest reappear.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] This chapter is based upon the author’s article on Mexican Geography contributed to the important _Mexican Year Book for 1920-21_, published in Los Angeles, Calif., concurrently with this volume.

[3] _The People of Mexico_, Book I, Chap. V.