MANUFACTURING

Production in colonial Mexico combined indigenous and European practices. A few innovations in the artisan sector, such as the Indians’ adoption of the Spanish loom, enabled them to weave wider cloth and to weave more rapidly. Generally, though, handicraft production retained traditional technology—and its low productivity. Early in the colonial period, Indian women produced cotton textiles to pay tribute. Throughout the colonial period, the Indian majority continued to produce most of the textiles it required. As late as 1817, the Veracruz merchant guild lamented, “The Indians spend nothing on cloth save what they make for themselves, and they produce their own raw materials.” Artisan weavers consumed much of their production within their own household. However, some home production involved putting-out arrangements. In such cases, credit and raw materials would be supplied to a home weaver by a merchant or cloth producer.84

Butchers, bakers, weavers, hatters, pottery-makers, silversmiths, carpenters, tanners, and blacksmiths and producers of such items as saddles, candles, confections, shoes, and silk cloth each had their own guilds. Masters in each guild hired apprentices who would later become masters themselves. Guilds established detailed regulations concerning the type of product, production techniques, prices, and marketing. The bakers guild set the maximum number of bread shops in Mexico City at thirty-six and in Veracruz at fourteen. The needlemakers guild limited each master to only one store and rigorously fixed the price for each type of needle. To enhance their image and eliminate competition, some guilds prohibited the admission of mestizos, Indians, mulattos, or even the descendants of Jewish or Moorish converts. On occasion guild members such as painters engaged in public relations campaigns to puff up their image. Those who violated guild rules could be punished with fines, jail, whipping, destruction of tools and product, or even suspension from the profession.85

Mexico City, which had a population of 113,324 in 1790, illustrates the importance of the guild. In 1788, the city’s workers belonged to fifty-five guilds with a total membership of 18,624. High-status guilds, such as those for silversmiths, architects, and coach makers, existed alongside more mundane ones, such as those for water drawers and pipe layers. Masons, who numbered 2,015, formed the largest guild.86

For most of the colonial period guilds enjoyed a legal monopoly on urban production and marketing. However, in the late colonial period, guild members had to compete with an increasing number of artisans, including women, who produced and marketed their products illegally. At the same time, policy makers, influenced by the Enlightenment, increasingly questioned the guilds’ economic efficiency. Others felt the guilds’ employment restrictions violated individuals’ natural freedom to work in any job they desired. As a result of such doubts, an 1813 decree abolished the legal monopoly enjoyed by guilds, although it did not eliminate the guilds themselves. After that date, individuals could produce items regardless of their guild membership.87

Weavers’ shops known as obrajes produced textiles for the domestic market. Obraje production resembled artisan production in that some obrajes had as few as three workers and employed technology similar to that of artisans. Their products were, however, more widely marketed than those of artisans. Obrajes resembled factories in their division of labor and larger scale of production. By putting several phases of production under one roof, the costs of supervision and transportation were reduced and control over the labor force could be increased.88

Obrajes differed from the factories that appeared with the industrial revolution in Europe in that they failed to introduce new technology. The lack of new technology limited profitability, making them unable to pay wages that would attract sufficient voluntary workers. Given their limited ability to hire voluntary workers, owners also employed slaves, convicts, vagrants, orphans, and indentured apprentices. The jail-like conditions of most obrajes also made it difficult to attract free laborers.89 Humboldt described an obraje he visited:

Free men, Indians, and people of colour, are confounded with the criminals distributed by justice among the manufactories, in order to be compelled to work. All appear half naked, covered with rags, meagre, and deformed. Every workshop resembles a dark prison. The doors which are double remain constantly shut, and the workmen are not permitted to quit the house. Those who are married are only allowed to see their families on sundays. All are unmercifully flogged if they commit the smallest trespass, on the order established in the manufactory.90

Because of the poor working conditions, in 1601 King Felipe III forbade all Indian labor, forced or voluntary, in obrajes. Rather than improving working conditions, this restriction and others simply provided officials an opportunity to collect bribes for ignoring protective legislation. The same officials also profited from diverting convict and repartimiento labor to obrajes. As historian Richard Salvucci observed, “Some owners got labor, some officials got rich, and some workers got protection, but in distinctly different proportions.”91

Even though the obrajes lacked the latest European technology, they did enjoy advantages over artisan production. In addition to being able to use political connections to obtain involuntary labor, they had sufficient capital to build up their wool inventory at shearing time, which allowed year-round production. Labor discipline and the division of work among such specialists as carders and washers increased productivity. The workforce at an individual obraje usually numbered between fifty and 150, although some obrajes employed as many as 700. The buildings housing obrajes ranged in size up to 39,000 square feet. Since artisans supplied most textile needs, the number of obrajes operating at one time in New Spain never exceeded thirty.92

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, production of woolens centered on Puebla due to the availability of wool and water power and due to the market provided by nearby Mexico City and Puebla itself. Since mine labor required warm clothing produced from wool, the Crown sent Spanish artisans and sheep to Mexico and offered financial incentives for textile production. Later most production of woolens moved north to cities such as Queretaro, since obrajes there were closer to wool produced on the great sheep ranches of Coahuila and to the market provided by northern mines.93

Puebla remained as an important cotton weaving center, stimulating cultivation along the Gulf Coast. As late as 1808, the production of cottons supported some 20,000 people in the province of Puebla. Weaving in Mexico flourished, since prior to the end of the eighteenth century, imported textiles were beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.94

At the very end of the colonial period, Mexican cotton textile production declined as English textile imports, a product of the industrial revolution, appeared in Mexico. Mexican textile producers had been reluctant to invest in mechanization due to Mexico’s low wage levels and their ability to coerce labor. In the late eighteenth century, a striking 84 percent of goods shipped from Spain to Mexico were textiles.95

In 1764, to increase revenue, the Crown established a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of tobacco products. To facilitate control, it limited tobacco cultivation to the region of Orizaba and Cordoba in the modern state of Veracruz. Monopolizing production increased royal income, as well as the income of a few privileged growers. The processed tobacco—cigars and cigarettes— could only be sold in government-licensed shops.

The monopoly reduced the income of those who had formerly grown the plant and those who had produced tobacco products. Before the Crown monopoly, many small growers and artisans had dominated tobacco growing and processing. This group lacked an effective lobby to defend their right to continue producing tobacco.96

The efficiency with which cigarettes and cigars were produced demonstrated Bourbon organizational ability. Factories were located in Guadalajara, Puebla, Oaxaca, Orizaba, Queretaro, and Mexico City. The largest, in Mexico City, employed almost 9,000 workers at its peak, an extraordinary size for a factory anywhere in the eighteenth century. By the 1790s, the tobacco monopoly employed almost 20,000, making it one of the largest organized industries in the colony, along with silver mining and textile production.97

Throughout the eighteenth century, the tobacco monopoly remained very lucrative. At its peak, it accounted for almost a fifth of government revenue, a figure surpassed only by silver mining.98

Management at the tobacco factories attempted to instill modern industrial labor values in workers, such as on-time arrival, not stealing materials, and abstaining from drunken or other “scandalous” behavior. It punished infractions of the rules by a stint in the factory stocks, suspension from the job, or permanent prohibition from employment.99

Women were encouraged to work in the tobacco factories, since one of the goals of the monopoly was providing desirable employment for poor urban women. Managers often preferred them as employees, since they felt men should be working in mines and fields. Women readily accepted such employment since many had worked in the tobacco industry before monopolization and because work there paid substantially more than the most common female occupation of the time—domestic service.100

In order to stimulate Spanish industry, Mexican producers were forced to rely on cigarette paper supplied by Spanish factories. As Spain’s frequent wars interrupted the supply of paper, production declined or even halted, leaving workers jobless and the state without revenues. Despite the inescapable logic of building a paper mill in Mexico, this was never done, because it would compete with producers in Spain.101

Negotiation and compromise served as the basis of labor-management relations in the tobacco factories. This resulted from: 1) there being few alternatives for semi-skilled and unskilled male workers and fewer still for women; 2) the provision of an in-house dispute resolution mechanism; 3) management’s desire for labor stability; and 4) the division of the labor force along the lines of gender, status, and ethnicity. Management also benefited from a general approval of the colonial regime. This became evident after management prohibited taking rolling papers home to meet their quota. Managers soon reversed the decision, leading workers to indicate their loyalty to the regime by sending the following message to the king: “... only with silence can we thank you. There is no other language more meaningful for a prince as perfect as your excellency.”102

The elevated price of tobacco to the consumer reflected monopoly profit. This and the illegality of growing tobacco anywhere except in a small area inevitably led to widespread illegal dealing in contraband tobacco. Officials in some cases even justified illegal production by Indians on the grounds that it enabled them to earn money to fulfill tribute obligations.

Further north, away from the tobacco factories, authorities and citizens alike simply ignored the monopoly. Residents of New Mexico, Coahuila, and Texas cultivated tobacco extensively and bartered with it in the frontier economy.103