From Ranching to Mass Industrial Agriculture
Most of what today is known as the Rio Grande Valley Delta was land to nomadic native tribes, before it became ranchland then mass commercial agriculture. In her book, Building the Borderlands, Casey Walsh, explains how water management transformed the river delta region into a center for agriculture commerce based on irrigation and the shifting of land.
Cotton weighing near Brownsville, Texas, photographer Dorothea Lange, 1936 Aug.
In 1904, wealthy landowners worked to bring a railroad line to South Texas. This was thought to raise land values, which would create more profit from land sales and farming as the railroad could transport produce further north. (8, Peons and Progressives). On the opposite side, the Mexicanos suffered, as they could not afford the rising taxes caused by the increase in valuations on their property. This created a significant shift in the RGV’s economy from ranching and grazing to mass industrial agriculture.
(The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company) Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, TX.
Cotton is a crop linked to a deeply violent history. Enslaved black people produced most of the cotton in the cotton belt of the United States between 1715-1865. During the U.S Civil War between 1861-1865, the southern confederate states called for secession in order to maintain the institution of slavery in the South. The union blockade prevented the confederate states from trading any of their goods. Northern Mexico then became a cotton producing region with cotton being a very profitable commercial crop. Merchant capitalists from Monterrey profited highly from cotton during the US civil war and looked to make investments in textile industries in the early twentieth century. (4, Building the Borderlands)
Monterrey, Mexico became a center of textile industry, which created more fiber demand and made the Laguna region of Coahuila and Durango into a center of commercial cotton agriculture. This led to plans to create irrigated cotton zones in other regions of northern Mexico, including on the border in Matamoros. The textile industry (4, Building the Borderlands) required outside investments, and the open door policy of the Porfiriato to U.S investments helped create the mass industrial agriculture in northern mexico.
Cotton was profitable because of exploitation of labor. Cotton production demanded a large amount of labor for specific moments in the production process, one being during harvest, la pizca. (4, Building the Borderlands) This created a temporary worker exploitative system. Eventuales stayed in the area and looked for other part time work in other industries, such as mine or railroads. Large numbers of underemployed migrant workers and cheap labor demands led to large mobilization of agricultural workers. (4, Building the borderlands) The labor demands of cotton production helped the rise of the Mexican Revolution in the borderlands.
References:
4, Building the Borderlands
8, Peons and Progressives
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