The Mexican Problem. Clarence Walker Barron
between the manager and his peon workers was regarded as a proper lark. If the manager got the better of it, the belligerents went peacefully back to work and everybody was happy because the boss had sustained his position.
Mexico is not a difficult proposition when once you understand the Mexican character. He is the same childlike, dependent, trusting fellow whether at work, play, or revolution. He is simply in need of a strong helping hand.
DEBT AND CITIZENSHIP
The Mexican peon is not thirsting for land or rule. There never yet were twenty thousand votes cast in Mexico for a president. The ballot will not redeem the Mexican from the peonage system in which alone he has confidence. Singular as it may appear, his independence and his self-respect he finds in this system. If you try to give him financial independence, he is fearful and rebellious. He is afraid that you are going to discharge him; that he will lose his job without being transferred to another.
In brief a Mexican peon in agriculture, or on a hacienda, is a self-sold slave. He will not accumulate and spend his money. He must borrow of his employer and spend; and when his money is gone he is contented and happy to work under debt. But if you deny him credit or try to get him out from under the debt system, he becomes suspicious, will not work, and loses his own self-respect; you have not trusted him, you have no confidence in him; you are not his real friend, and he would like to be transferred with his "account" to some other hacienda or employer where his credit will be unquestioned.
While the peonage system may be the safely of agricultural Mexico, it can never produce independence, citizenship, and self-government.
The redemption of Mexico must be from the invasion of business, forcing upon the natives—the good people of Mexico—technical training, higher wages, bank accounts, financial independence, and the rights of citizenship and accumulation.
CHAPTER II AMERICAN INTERESTS NO BASE OF DISORDER
The Mexican problem can be studied better at Tampico than elsewhere in Mexico. Here the civilization and business forces of Europe and America have opened the jungle and the prairie, tapped the greatest oil basin in the world, harnessed it, piped it to the Gulf coast, and here light and enlightenment, work and wages, invite human development. Here is the American boom town of Mexico, grown to fifty thousand population, with asphalt-paved streets, business blocks, markets, and parks.
Here in turn the warring factions of Mexico fight for the privilege of protecting and taxing the developing properties about Tampico. Here the new order meets the old. The native Mexican, more than two-thirds the population of the country, gladly accepts the extended helping hand. The Anglo-Saxon, the European and the American, are welcome throughout Mexico. "Gringo" is only a border term.
What, then, is the Mexican problem? It is the problem of one civilization and one order, one rule and procedure, in contact with another civilization, another order, procedure and morality.
A WORLD PROBLEM
This is the problem belting the world. It is the problem of China, it is the problem in Egypt, it is the whole of the southern-eastern question. It is the issue that blazes in northern Europe.
Here the issue is complicated because the oncoming order finds not only one but two civilizations already in the field and more or less in conflict for four hundred years.
Governments in Europe are breaking up. Governments in Mexico are one after another breaking down; but the breakdown in Mexico has no more relation in its causes to the United States than has the European war, as the facts when ultimately presented before the American people must clearly demonstrate.
But it was not with any purpose to theorize on the Mexican problem that the writer took a trip across the country and the Gulf to Tampico and studied the resources of Mexico in the Tampico-Tuxpan oil field to get the facts of the existing situation and note the factors springing therefrom related to American investments.
Tampico has a broader meaning in the American investment field than is yet generally realized. The development of the gold fields of South Africa has been important, not because of the South African war costing England $1,200,000,000, but because the output of South African gold affected the civilization and the economic and social order of the world.
Vera Cruz, Mexico City, and the west coast of Mexico are to-day as Mexican as ever—both in order and disorder. But Tampico and Tuxpan are international and are basic in the economic and social progress of both Europe and America, and possibly of Asia.
Here is the British naval oil base. Here, before the war, were the German experts studying the future relations of German commerce to the oil supply of the world, which later may center in Mexico.
THE AMERICAN PIONEER
American pioneers, however, were first in the field and American business talent and American capital have maintained leadership without government invitation, support or even recognition. It is a popular misconception in the United States that the people of Mexico have been, are, or are about to be exploited in the interest of the Standard Oil refineries, the Guggenheim smelters, or the Hearst ranches. Nothing could be further from the facts as related to the present situation, although both in Texas and Mexico, Standard Oil interests attempted years ago to arrest the oil development.
The wealth of the world is planetary wealth until it is lifted by human discovery, human forces, and human hands into human uses. The agricultural wealth of the world giving food to man is from the sun through the soil by labor. The mineral and oil wealth of the world is by human discovery, engineering, machinery, finance, and complex forms of human labor. Almost universally have the nations of the earth recognized right by discovery in underground wealth, and thus invited its discovery and development.
Under the administration of President Diaz Mexico was opened to the outside world, which was invited to pour in its talent, money, and skill to lift to the surface the undeveloped resources of the country, teach the unskilled labor of the land, and put Mexico, its people and its resources, in the way of modern development and civilization.
What are now the oil fields of Mexico were formerly the "bad lands" of the jungle and the plain. The black asphalt oozes softened the soil and enmeshed and swallowed up cattle, horses, and wild animals. They were in 1900, as they had been for nineteen hundred years, worse than valueless.
Edward L. Doheny, American engineer-prospector, miner, and pioneer developer in the oil fields of Los Angeles, California, was more than millionaire, and so also was his partner Canfield, when they entered Mexico in 1900 to prospect for petroleum. They were not freebooters, seeking conquest or the exploitation of people, laws, or government. They were looking to do in Mexico what they had done in California and with their own fortunes lift values of this old planet to the surface, under Mexican laws, treaties, and customs and with the aid of Mexican labor. Diaz and Mexico had invited outside talent and money; Boston money had built the railroad from Arizona to the port of Guaymas on the Gulf of California and from El Paso to the City of Mexico, with a branch to Tampico.
Into the jungle from Tampico to Tuxpan went Doheny and Canfield by foot and on horseback. They located the oil seepages. They sought out the owners of the lands. First they bought 450,000 acres thirty-five miles west of Tampico and later 170,000 acres in various tracts south toward Tuxpan. They paid from sixty cents per acre upward and astonished the Mexican people by the prices paid for such unproductive lands. They were advised against such large prices by the Mexican lawyers, landowners, and statesmen
But the Americans retorted that the price was immaterial if they found what they were after; they would not hesitate or haggle. The Mexicans named their own terms, took the cash and delivered title deeds running back through generations, some titles making a heavy volume.
The Americans cleared the jungle