The
Color of Money: Race, Ideology, and Foreign Enterprise
in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
James Henson
Department of History and Government
University of Louisiana at Monroe
Subjects insinuate their cognition of race in the structures within which histories are formed; those structures, in turn, bear ideological elements of race and inculcate them in subjects. These mutually constitutive effects are vital elements of articulations of race in social and historical contexts.(1) Some of these articulations between subjects and structures have been analyzed in recent years by examining the relationship between elements of identity such as race and sexuality, and institutions centered around the state, particularly (though not exclusively) in colonial and postcolonial states(2). This essay focuses primarily on discourses produced by U.S. businessmen active in Mexico in the two decades or so after the revolutionary civil wars of 1910-1920, and examines the articulation of race and national identity with understandings of economic behavior. The analysis reveals mutually constitutive relationships between the strategies of "rational actors" pursuing nominally economic objectives and the cultural formations that condensed racial meanings and that shaped the substance and pursuit of "material" interests(3). This reading of discourses surrounding U.S. enterprise in Mexico suggests that ideological elements present in racialized thinking -- understandings of race and of nationalism, notions of capitalist competence, constructions of threats to stability and to capitalism -- were constituent parts of "rational action" in the pursuit of material gain.
Just as recent theorization of the state-society linkage undermines solid demarcations between these spheres(4), the mutual implication of culture and profit-seeking in the transnational development of both Mexico and the U.S. similarly undermines frameworks based on the conceptual distinction between mutually exclusive spheres of economic reasoning and culture or ideology. Focus upon the articulation of race with the pursuit of material interests in economic fields thus extends recent turns in theoretical analysis of the trajectories of state and society in Mexico. Interpretations of the development of state and economy in Mexico have turned increasingly to the fluctuating, complex interrelationships among social dimensions heretofore seen as more or less discrete. Such work invites not just a reassessment of the weights given to particular elements (i.e. "the state," "economic interests," "culture," etc.), but a more thorough renovation of the concepts themselves(5).
Ways in which racialized discourses and practices working in and around state structures worked to constitute colonialism and its aftereffects have preoccupied much of this work. These themes provide a point of departure for analysis of the social relations that constituted transnational interactions between the United States and Mexico in the economic sphere. Construing social relations as constitutive of "the economic sphere" requires attention to other kinds of elements articulated in the social relations that constitute economic strategies and discourses. This essay suggests that linkages between understandings of race, national identity, and the capacity to engage competently in capitalist action were central to these strategies and discourses in the articulation of relations between Mexicans and actors from the U.S.
In the period upon which this essay focuses, national identities remained potent ideological sites of racial formation -- that is, of "the social and historical processes by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, or destroyed" (Omi and Winant, 1994, p. 55). The period, however, was one of great ideological flux in the fields of racial discourse and practice. Theories and understandings of race in the very early twentieth century, as Richard Graham and others have pointed out, were still strongly determined by "scientific" hierarchies that ranked "humankind into superior and inferior races."(6) This relatively straightforward characterization, summarizing the impact of late nineteenth and early twentieth century applications of biology, medicine, and pseudo-scientific quackery to race, rings accurate enough. But it only hints at the density of the confrontation of residual, dominant, and emergent elements of race colliding in the space of North and South America during this period.(7) Residual elements of early- or pre-modern apprehensions of natural racial hierarchies still lingered, receiving international resuscitation via a dose of the new scientific approaches associated with Comte, Spencer, and a burgeoning body of scientific research positing the existence of hierarchical racial types(8). In the United States, such theories found fertile ground among waves of nativism, racially tinted red scares, and the vigorous maintenance of Jim Crow in the southern states. In Mexico, the mix of thinking of racial identical included the discourses of science, national identity, and institutionalized revolutionary progress. In both places and in the spaces in which they intersected, the characteristics of the experience of modernity in North America converged in processes of racial formation that were transnational as well as national. Modes of racialized thinking met, melded, created new combinations (to invoke some of the bioimagery common to the period).
This essay dwells on the period roughly between the world wars, which represents a critical watershed in the deepening of the conditions associated with modernity. In a discussion relating struggles to apprehend identity in the black diaspora to modernity, Gilroy (1993) writes of the hallmarks of modernity as "the fatal intermediation of capitalism, industrialization, and a new conception of political democracy" (p. 30). Of course, Mexico's experience of the vortex of modernity did not begin with its entanglement in the development of U.S. hegemony in the first decades of the twentieth century; the impact of Europe predated and even preempted U.S. influence into the early years of the twentieth century, especially among Mexican elites, to say nothing of Mexico's colonial experience. But the 1920's were a period that for Mexico and the United States echoed García's more general description of the "renovation" he associates with modernity -- a period characterized "by the dynamism with which the cultural fields are adapting to technological and social innovations."(9) Important among such social shifts of modernity was the deepening of the integration of Mexico and the United States as the cultures and political economies of the two countries, always enmeshed, became more intertwined as U.S. economic activity in the region increased in volume and importance(10). Thus my interest in the economy an important (certainly not the only) sit of the deployment, contestation, creation and recreation of racial meanings.
In the particular times and places examined here, the articulation of U.S. business interests in Mexico were both constitutive and symptomatic of the ongoing manifestation of modernity both in Mexico as well as in the U.S and in the hybridized areas in which Mexicans and U.S. citizens interacted. Nestor García Canclini argues that this renovation and especially the explosive economic expansion associated with modernity have been articulated in a "contradictory and unequal manner." The articulation of a sphere of U.S.-Mexican relations in the post-revolutionary decades was replete with the contradictions García's understanding suggests. The deepening of modernity evident in economic interactions between U.S. citizens and Mexicans during the inter-war years was manifested in concrete social relations and practices that produced a dense network of transnational relationships. The basic outlines of the interactions that make up the stories of U.S.-Mexican relations during this period are relatively familiar: as a new constellation of political and economic institutions solidified after the revolution, the growing U.S. predominance in Mexico's external economic relations continued, albeit in concert and conflict with the new structures that emerged from the revolutionary period. But a closer look reveals these trajectories to be more complicated than the common emphases on Mexican institutional growth and the tales of U.S. hegemony might suggest. Relationships among U.S. and Mexican social actors were constituted by elements typically opposed as either "cultural" or "rational." Transnational capitalism as a social and cultural practice -- that is, "doing business" in Mexico -- infused profit-seeking with ideological formations, many of which colored transnational business as a racialized matter. These formations and their discourses emanated from multiple sources that combined in a variety of ways, including forms of scientific racism, nativism, and counter-subversive preoccupations prevalent in both the U.S. and in Mexico.(11)
The discussion of empirical material below is an initial exploration of how ideological formations of racial and cultural competence and identity were articulated within particular social relationships -- those between U.S. nationals and other bearers of U.S. capital and various actors who lived primarily in the Mexican political economy. The discourses marking the articulation with capitalism, modernity, and the emergence of the U.S.-Mexico relationship in these contexts were characteristically polyvalent. That is, the equivalences and linkages between race, national identity, and capitalist competence charged each other but were not over-determining. National identity and race were linked in discursive formation to suggest capitalist virtues or shortcomings, but in varying degrees of explicitness and with varying charges. In one moment, racialized national identities were used to ground judgements about the shortcomings of Mexican economic actors; the next, they were used express begrudging admiration of some "exception to the rule."(12)
This essay begins an accumulation of the traces of these
relationships. Within a transnational yet relatively specifically
network, a discourse operated that marked Mexico as a discrete
nation while incorporating that nation into a racialized network
of meanings linked to the United States. These meanings operated
in and around sets of social relationships. These relationships
constituted and structured the terms of power and contestation in
the field of economic relations.
Race and capitalist competence
Businessmen in the United States, not unlike their counterparts in other countries, circulated in a discursive world in which cultural difference was racialized using theories legitimized by the stamp of European and U.S. "science."(13) These theories produced "scientific" notions of racial hierarchy that provided U.S. businessmen operating in Mexico with the ideological components used to attribute economic competence to characteristics determined by mutually constituting race and culture.
At the commanding heights of the international economic relations, key actors in the business of international finance in the U.S. were at the crucial intersection of economic relations involving actors in both the Mexican state and the private sector. In the aftermath of the revolutionary civil wars in Mexico, U.S. bankers strove to impart to officials in the Mexican government a sense of the bankers' priorities -- which placed high value on the resumption of debt repayment, conservative fiscal management, and reestablishing stability in the Mexican economy.(14) Thomas Lamont, senior partner at J. P. Morgan and Company, was a central figure in attempts to renegotiate the terms of the repayment of the Mexican debt, which had gone unpaid as a result of the revolutionary civil wars. As the chairman of the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico (ICBM), Lamont conducted a string of negotiations with the Mexican government and Mexican private sector actors between 1918 and 1932. In mid-1922, Lamont was in the midst of attempting to induce the Mexican finance minister Adolfo de la Huerta to meet with American officials and to take a more pronounced stand in internal Mexican politics in favor of renewing debt repayment. As he tried to set the stage for such a meeting between De la Huerta and U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Lamont wrote to Hughes that, "These Mexican people ought not to proud and peculiar, but they are, and we can't change them overnight into Anglo-Saxons."(15)
The Anglophile Lamont's comparison is revealing. Economic competence here is portrayed as a cultural characteristic in a context in which culture and nation still bore a racial connotation. Mexicans could be brought along and nurtured in their attempts to organize their own economy, but they required stewardship, and above all, Lamont suggests, patience with their culturally-based deficiency. Mexicans are distinguished from the North American bankers by their lack of Anglo-Saxon identity and the attributes that come with it. And yet, in a time-hallowed stereotype, they remain, curiously, proud.
Sometimes race remained in the background or invisible, shrouded in the language of progress and "backwardness," competence and incompetence.(16) But the broader context of the inter-war years provided content for these constructions of Mexican economic competence. Mexicans, due the presence of indigenous blood, were widely considered a distinct race, both within and outside the United States.(17) When racialized thinking served the cause of nativism, this construction of Mexicans triggered a by now familiar anxiety over immigration that linked collective characteristics with the construct of a Mexican "race" with characteristics derived from national origin. An editorial recommending stricter immigration quotas in the Chicago Daily Tribune in May 1922 links racial inferiority with illiteracy and an inherent Mexican tendency to political "turmoil":
All that was charged against the Mediterranean and Slavic peoples and against the Japanese is ten times true of the Mexicans. Physically they are inferior; their standard of living is contemptible they are illiterate and they come from a country whose chief political tradition is turmoil.
America finds herself today in the strange position of excluding white Europeans and admitting brown men from Mexico. We cannot ignore the danger on the supposition that the Mexican laborer will not remain in this country. Experience teaches that immigrants of all races come here with the idea of giving America a trial and the great mass of them remain. Unless the bars are put up, every American City, within a few years, will have its Mexican slum.(18)
The editorial, published the same year as Lamont's lament about the proud peculiarity of the Mexican people, differs from the banker's comments in tone, rhetoric, and immediate context. But the racial and cultural coordinates derived from the same elements made more explicit by the reduction of Mexicans to "brown men," which invokes the racially-defining marker of phenotype, and the reference to physical inferiority. Yet these only deepen the key characteristic of Lamont's comment -- the distinction between the Mexican "people" and the Anglo-Saxons -- here generalized to the contrast between the curious exclusion of "white Europeans" but not "brown men from Mexico."
Archival records are scattered with evidence business interests operating in Mexico characterized Mexican nationality as distinct in it's lack of economic competence. One manager with J. P. Morgan and company, for example, asked to write a letter of introduction for a Mexican state functionary named A.L. Negrete now in business for himself, struggles in one piece of correspondence with his view of the "average Mexican":
"I find it a little hard to draft the above [reference letter] without either saying more in Negrete's favor than I personally would care to say or giving the impression that there is something the matter with him. I think he is a good, fair, average Mexican."(19) One might at first blush suggest that this is simply the common travail of a reluctant reference. But Munroe's frustration seems to arise not from his lack of enthusiasm for the average bureaucrat, or the average businessman, or even the average revolutionary state functionary. His lack of enthusiasm is for the competence of the average Mexican, good and fair as Negrete may be described.
A supplement to these constructions of Mexicans as inherently poor at capitalism was a corresponding vision of Anglo-American (or just North American) characteristics and competencies, particularly the willingness and ability to bring economic development to Mexico. This was the result of more than simply access to capital or some other advantage based in material resources. Lamont spoke of foreigners who brought "their energy and their capital to the development of Mexico," and obligation of the Mexican government to avoid "difficulties" with these agents of development by fulfilling the government's "contracts and obligations" with these foreigners.(20) In correspondence attempting to gain financing from a Los Angeles, California bank for agricultural and commercial development of a large tract of land in Baja California, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler conveys a characteristic image of his role as a U.S. entrepreneur in Mexico, and attempts to get his banker to share his ambitions. "Los Angeles financiers, " Chandler wrote, "as a matter of good morals and good business policy, can afford to show a broad gauged and progressive spirit in their dealings with our close neighbors to the south."(21) As explained below, the bank president to whom Chandler wrote did not share his vision, but Chandler's view that U.S. investors were the agents of Mexican development were often made by entrepreneurs promoting their efforts in Mexico. Chandler, who promoted such an image in connection with his role in the economic growth of Los Angeles, relished the role, and presaged the now widely-promoted image of the bicultural, but Americanized, entrepreneur. One of the managers of Chandler's Baja California land operation captured the image Chandler promoted at a Los Angeles luncheon in honor of the Jose I. Lugo, then governor of Baja California. "Harry Chandler says that Baja California presents possibilities for development that Central California had thirty or forty years ago," the manager, H.H. Clark, said, "and that the two regions are neighbors with a close relationship."(22) The essential connection in this close relationship is the heroic entrepreneur of U.S. origin.
Good capitalists and bad capitalists
The tendency to contrast Mexican incompetence with North American industry did not always gel coherently, constituted as it was of an unstable mixture of fact, experience, and ideology. The equivalence of American or Anglo-Saxon superiority became difficult to reconcile with instances of successful enterprise or economic strategizing by Mexican businessmen or economic policy makers. In many instances, U.S. businessmen happily collaborated with Mexican colleagues.(23) But cooperation and collaboration did not exclude ideological lenses through which successful Mexican businessmen might take on the character of the bad capitalist -- corrupt, greedy, given to inappropriate profits, and ultimately suspect. Ideology can work effectively to obscure contradictions generated by experience; in this case, it provided ready explanations or qualifications for the seemingly anomalous evidence of economic competence.
Adolfo de la Huerta's successor as finance minister, Alberto J. Pani, complicated U.S. actors' ability to portray Mexicans as culturally-overdetermined economic incompetents. De la Huerta had facilitated such conclusions by making critical mistakes in policy and negotiations with the foreign bankers.(24) His successor, however, proved a shrewd adversary for the bankers, and while some of the bankers welcomed the competence, others found ways to denigrate a new, more formidable bargaining opponent. The ICBM's representative in Mexico City, E.R. Jones, was a trenchant critic of Pani, which the bankers attributed in part to the finance minister's annoyance with Jones' persistent pursuit of the business of his primary employer, Wells Fargo, with the Mexican government. "It seems to me each time I meet the Minister he has become more convinced that he is the master of this entire financial situation and that the creditors of the Government must accept the Minister's conclusions and offers," Jones reported testily to Lamont in 1926.(25)
Not only had Pani asserted firmer control of Mexican finances than his predecessor, but he had the temerity not to come to the international bankers as a supplicant. Jones had another similarly prickly view of another economically successful Mexican with whom the bankers dwelt frequently, Agustín Legorreta, president of the important Banco Nacional de México.(26) Ironically, Jones inability to deal effectively with economically successful Mexicans led Lamont to relieve him of his ICBM duties in Mexico.(27)
For his part, Pani on occasion used the expectation of incompetence in his dealings with the bankers. In the aftermath of Pani's 1925 renegotiation of Mexican debt repayment, a dispute arose over payments made by the Mexican government to retire a set of bonds held by the investment bank Speyer and Company. Speyer held about $600,000 in Mexican funds, and Pani avoided mentioning the funds to negotiators so that he could use the funds to cover the first year of $50,000 per month debt payments. As Jones wrote Lamont in a memorandum of a conversation with Pani:
Minister Pani said that first of all, when he made this Agreement he never had the slightest intention of sending an additional 50,000 dollars per month to Speyer and Co…..
Minister Pani was quite frank in his indication of lack of confidence in and respect for the House of Speyer & Co. While talking about these negotiations with Speyer and Co., the Minister jokingly remarked that if I would look his forehead, I would see a "P" printed thereon. This P meant Pani and not "pendejo" (damn fool) and that was the reason, during the talks with Speyer and Co., that no special mention was made of these funds.
My opinion is that the government will insist that the funds above referred to be applied to the retirement of the 1926 notes.(28)
Pani went on to frustrate the bankers even further, working actively and, ultimately, effectively to lobby against a proposed debt resettlement in 1930 (after Pani had resigned from the government and become a private businessman).
In other circumstances, Mexican entrepreneurs or economic policymakers who held views contrary to the preferences of North Americans invited criticism of the morality or ethics of the Mexicans involved. Though he complemented Legorreta's shrewd positioning of the Banco Nacional between the ICBM and the Mexican government, J.P. Morgan and Company operative Graham Ashmead took obvious pleasure in reporting Legorreta's apparent attempt to bribe Pani by offering to advance Pani a lot of railway bonds -- which were likely to increase in value if Pani subsequently saw to it payments on the bonds were resumed.(29) Ashmead was critical of the ploy, though a few years earlier Lamont had plotted to use the obligations of a company owned by Adolfo de la Huerta's to J.P. Morgan and Company to induce De la Huerta to end the rebellion he headed in 1923.(30) Lamont's attempt was an instance of shrewd and appropriate leverage in the pursuit of legitimate interests (i.e. reestablishing political stability to Mexico and hastening the resumption of Mexican debt service); Legorreta's offer and Pani's interest, a matter of graft.
Shades of red and brown
One means of obliterating the distinction between good and bad capitalists was to equate the revolutionary government with Bolshevism, an equation rooted in a deeper association of Mexican racial identity with unruliness rooted in the indigenous roots of the "Mexican race". The Red scares of this period of U.S. history extended far beyond Mexicans. Reds came in many colors, but particularly the darker hues: Indian bolshevism became a watchword of red hunters in the US in the decades after the revolution, and was applied to the Indian nations of North American as well as Latin American nations.(31) The fear of bolshevism as applied to Mexico and Mexicans intersected the cultural construction of Mexicans as either incompetent or venal capitalists: after all, what was worse for capitalism than communism?
As the United States government pursued a policy designed more or less to induce post-revolutionary Mexican governments to behave as a good debtor in the increasingly transnational political economy, various individuals and groups invoked a range of linkages between nationality, ethnic identity, phenotype, politics, and economic competence. Some of the ideological constructions used ideologically obscured combinations of these elements to cloak racialized notions of social identity as cultural tendencies; others, typically though not necessarily more on the fringe of public discourse, used more raw, direct expression. The following is from a letter addressed to "Property Owners in Mexico" by the International Association for Advancement of Religious and Political Liberty, Inc., in 1922, arguing that Americans needed to support counterrevolutionary factions in Mexico:
Their government, its treasury and its armament have been stolen by The Bolsheviks, and, although the Obregón usurpation is tottering and may fall at any time, they stand helpless without assistance. The fall of the present regime, unless honest Mexicans are ready to set up a legitimate government in its place, would only mean the continuation of Radicals in power, led by other Bolsheviks who would attempt to dominate the situation."(32)
Here, the image is not so much culturally reductionist as it is a manifestation of the anxiety about subversion in the U.S. that has been linked to liberal anxieties about threats to the sanctity of home, property, and national security posed by revolutionary subversion.(33) For the author of the letter and others associating the post-revolutionary state with Bolshevism, the government produced by the revolution, even if headed by a demonstrably moderate developmentalist President such as Alvaro Obregón, carried the threat of subversion of a liberal political and economic order.(34)
This organization is in some ways reminiscent of the conspiracy-minded groups that continue to thrive on the right-wing fringe, but his organization was far from alone in seeing red in Mexico. The previously discussed loan that Harry Chandler attempted to obtain from the First National Bank in Los Angeles was denied based on the understanding that the Obregón government, produced by revolution, was Bolshevik:
…our objection (and in this position we are in accord with bankers generally who are familiar with the situation in Mexico) is based on the fundamental that the Government and the people of Mexico, or possibly the people more than the Government, have become imbued with the philosophy which shows an extreme case in Russia. We cannot with safety to our stockholders and depositors advance loans against a property situated in a foreign country where the danger of confiscation, either direct, or more often by indirect methods, is threatened or possible.
The people of Mexico, unwilling to be restrained from confiscating private property, pose a potential threat to the depositors and stockholders of First National bank. The letter denies credit to Chandler and rebukes the tendencies of Mexicans. In a curious reading of American history that pits the First President against pre-Marxist Bolsheviks in the new United States (?), the banker's construction of events in Mexico seems scarcely less hysterical than Bates':
I feel constrained to call your attention to the fact that your letter was written under date of February 22 (Washington's Birthday). This calls to mind the fact that at the time our Government was in its infancy with Washington at its head, he was forced to fight just such philosophies as the Mexican people are now engaged in and that for a time it looked as though his fight might prove unsuccessful.(35)
If we circle back to the beginning of the discussion, the threat of Bolshevism in Mexico invoked not just the literal fears of radical subversion; it also invoked the subversion of group who as a race were themselves vulnerable to such subversion because they were racially inferior.(36) Perhaps acknowledging Chandler's ties with the Obregón government, the masses are seen as subject to subversion, and thus become subversive in term. What setting could be less secure in the eyes of a creditor?
Postscript/analysis: transnational racial formation and modernity.
The record of the engagements between U.S. investors and Mexicans in the Mexican political economy suggest that ideological formations used to convey racialized constructions of Mexico shaped the perceptions and actions of U.S. business interests in Mexico. The instances examined here reveal not just the racialized template of economic expansion, imperialist and/or otherwise, long ago recognized by critics of colonialism such as Fanon. The conveyance of racialized and culturalist conceptions of Mexico and Mexicans through the agencies of capitalist investors and entrepreneurs, like the structural expansion of capitalism, is symptomatic and, importantly, constitutive of modernity ascendant and energized by a probing, expansive capitalism.
The ongoing dynamic was and is a constitutive structural feature of U.S.-Mexican relations, but one that appears most readily in specific social relations. The general if not exclusive focus here on social relations of economic exchange and negotiation is meant to illustrate this. Prevailing understandings of Mexicans as members of a race, understood in turn as determined by their distinct culture, were used to imbue them with questionable capabilities and competencies to engage in capitalism. Yet the social contradictions of enterprise in Mexico, such as the necessity to find local allies, and the concrete fact of demonstrable economic competence, led to the uneven operation of cultural formations keyed to posted racial differences between U.S. capitalists and their Mexican counterparts. Such tensions marked a set of dynamic contradictions produced by the articulation of modern networks of meaning and confrontation -- between racial ideologies and lived experience; order and bolshevism; nation, race and culture; capitalisms articulated in the U.S., in Mexico, and in-between.
FOOTNOTES
1. See Slack (1996) on the derivation of articulation in Marxist and cultural studies, with a focus on the elaboration of Stuart Hall. return
2. This literature has grown well beyond a single citation. See, for example, Stoler's (1995) examination of colonialism. See also Omi and Winant’s overview and their theory of racial formation. return
3. Wendy Brown's (1995) discussion of the consequences of the paths taken by Marxist and Foulcaudian posing of political power was helpful here. Brown's focus -- the relation between state power, subjectivity, and the pursuit of a liberatory politics -- is different from my interest in the substance of economic subjectivity within in the structures of internationally-situated capitalism. But her readings of Marxism and Foucault are useful is posing the relationship between structures, economic and political, and how these structures impact not only subject formation but the elements of agency and the strategies chosen by people. return
4. The opposition between state-based and society-based causal models, for example, has been broken down by a set of approaches that see traditionally opposed couplets (such as state and economy, domination and resistance, etc.) as mutually constitutive and relatively underdetermined and underdetermining. return
5. This describes a general trend that encompasses many works, but a good view of the issues at work in the study of Mexico is Joseph and Nugent (1994). See also Alonso (1995) ps. 6-10 return
6. From Graham's introduction to Graham, editor, 1990, p. 1. return
7. See Williams (1977) chapter 8 for a basic explanation of these terms. return
8. Alexandra Stern is at work on a major project that deals in part with the trajectory of medical and evolutionist models of racial thinking in Mexico during this period. See her forthcoming article in Hispanic American Historical Review. return
9. García Canclini, 1995, p. 265. Identifies the advent of modernity as the unfolding of four dynamic features articulated in a "contradictory and unequal manner": emancipation, expansion, renovation, and democratization. See ps. 264-266 return
10. Henson (1996) chapter 2 contains data and description of this process. For a general description of the shift in the U.S. role in the region in the early decades of the twentieth century, see Schoultz (1998) chapters 13 and 14. return
11. All of these examples require specific explications of their manifestations in specific circumstances. Some general discussion of the strains of thought in Mexico are found in Alan Knight's essay in Graham (1990). A very brief account of the impact of scientific theories of race in the U.S. can be found in Omi and Winant (1994) ps. 61-65. ON the counter subversive impulse in U.S. culture, see Rogin (1987). For a useful discussion (and example of) how ideological formations articulate to create notions of race, see the discussion in Stoler (1996) 32-54. return
12. As with, for example, Stoler's (1996) of colonialism, sexuality, and race, the articulation of modern industrial capitalism, geoeconomics and geopolitics, and race in U.S.-Mexican relations created an uneven ideological and social terrain that was constitutive not only of racialized social relations, but of many of the other spheres implicated in ongoing processes of social formation. return
13. See the discussion in Pike (1992) 221-224. As the authors of the essays in Graham (1990) so amply illustrate, the hierarchical racial schemes used by people in the U.S. were also well-received among Latin American intellectuals and elites seeking to justify varying forms of racialized (and racist) policy, e.g. the pursuit of "whitening" and the cults of mestizaje that constructed a precarious mix of valorizing the Indian past while erasing through a mixing that sought to erase the present manifestations of that past. return
14. The strategies of the international bankers in dealing with Mexican actors are examined in Smith (1972) and Henson (1986) chapter five. return
15. Lamont to Hughes, 19 June 1922, quoted in Smith (1972, 216). return
16. See Smith's discussion of the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson (1972, 31-42). return
18. Chicago Daily Tribune 13 May 1922, enclosed in H.E. Frese to Obregón, AGN/OC 721-R-41. [Archival source appreviations follow text.] return
19. Vernon Munroe to William Ewing. 5 May 1928, TWL 196/25. return
20. Quotation attributed to Lamont in a New York Herald clipping dated 15 January 1922, enclosed in AGN/OC 104-R1-L. return
21. Harry Chandler to Harry M. Robinson (President, First National Bank), 22 February 1922, SL/CRLC 4. return
22. José I. Lugo to Obregón, 27 April 1922, AGN/OC 803-C-14. This is a translation of a translation -- it seems likely that the original phrase was something more akin to "neighbors with common parentage," but I have not seen the original English. For an interesting recent example of this image of the heroic binational,entrepreneur, see Emerging Powers: Mexico, produced for the Public Broadcasting System by the Wall Street Journal and available on VHS cassette. return
23. See, for example, the case of American-born Juan Brittingham, discussed in Henson (1996) chapter 4. return
24. For an extensive treatment of De la Huerta's dealings with the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico, and why his successor felt he had made critical mistakes, see Hall (1995), Smith (1972), and (on Pani's critique of De la Huerta) Henson (1996, 252n49). return
25. E.R. Jones to T.W. Lamont, 29 March 1926 TWL 204/1 (Henson, 1996, 268-269fn. 75). Jones primary employer, Wells Fargo Company, held Mexican bonds and was involved in negotiations with the Mexican government over their rail shipping concession. Jones also appears to have been personally invested in the Mexican bond market as well. return
26. Graham Ashmead to Ira Patchin, 27 April 1926, TWL 201/9; Henson (1996) 266-270. return
27. Lamont to Dwight Morrow, 23 September 1927, TWL 192/11. return
28. Jones to Lamont, 27 March 1926, TWL 204/1.return
29. Memorandum by Ashmead enclosed in Ashmead to Ira Patchin, 27 April 1926, TWL 201/09. return
30. Memorandum titled "Strictly Confidential - T.W. Lamont's conversations in Washington, Wednesday, January 30, 1924," TWL 193/20. Lamont's plan was apparently not implemented, as the rebellion was put down by the government shortly after Lamont' proposal. return
31. Pike describes common constructions in which communal social arrangements among Native American nations in the United States and the constructions of Latin American cultures as closer to nature fueled cultural constructions of Latin America in the 1920's. See Pike (1985), especially chapters six and seven.return
32. Addressed "To Property Owners in Mexico," dated 8 Nov 1922. Enclosed in W.P. Hobby to Alvaro Obregón, AGN/OC 104-R1-E-1. return
33. See Michael Rogin's interpretation in Rogin (1987) ps. 63-70. return
34. The probable author of the letter is the leader of the International Association for Advancement of Religious and Political Liberty, Inc, Wilbur Bates, who campaigned against the Mexican government in the United States throughout the 1920's. See also, for example, Bates to Thomas Lamont, enclosed in Lamont to Plutarco Elias Calles, 12 December 1929, APEC 39/37. return
35. Robinson to Chandler, 5/24/22, SL/CRLC 4 return
36. The presence of such vulnerabilities were also regularly played on in the press as the papers reported on strikes in Mexico. See the New York Times headlines on the following dates, for example, for coverage of strikes in the oil region: REPORT OIL PLANTS IN MEXICO SEIZED Word that "Reds" Hold Royal Dutch Properties Near Tampico Causes Alarm Here" (26 March 1924); OIL COMPANIES JOIN TO FIGHT 'RED' PERIL Properties of Mexican Eagle Were Seized by Radical Strikers, it is learned. (27 March 1924 ). Cllippings enclosed in TWL 197/11. return
Archival Sources and Abbreviations
AGN Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico, D.F.
/OC Ramo Presidentes, Obregón - Calles files.
/EPG Ramo Presidentes, Portes Gil files.
/AR Ramo Presidentes, Rodríguez files.
/LC Ramo Presidentes, Cárdenas files.
APEC Archivo Plutarco Elias Calles, Fideicomiso Archivos, Mexico, D.F.
SL Sherman Library, Corona del Mar, California.
/CRLC Colorado River Land Company Papers.
/GA General Archives
/OBP Otto Brant Papers
BLAC Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.
Bibliography
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Cárdenas, Lázaro, 1937. A Message to the Mexican Nation on the Solution of the Agrarian Problem of La Laguna." Mexico City: National Revolutionary Party, Foreign Information Bureau.
García Canclini, Néstor, 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Schoultz, Lars, 1998. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Williams, Raymond, 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
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