264 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
eroded communities or indirectly via the haciendas and plantations. Great numbers
fled to the anonymity of the cities, especially the major cities and provincial capitals,
which indeed had been the main beneficiaries of the economic “progress” that was
created by the priorities of both centralist and federalist governments. In and around
the cities were to be found real (and sometimes fictional) sources of employment in
the manual labor and service sectors of the economy. Thus, one of the fruits of neo-
colonial positivism and liberalism was the creation of a new rural and urban prole-
tariat.
It was thus in this period that the Mexican and Central American cities took on
their current mosaic of elite cores and suburbs, with interlaced working-class and
slum barrios. It was also during this period that because of the new transportation net-
works, deliberately built by the United States to link Mexico to U.S. markets, the
United States became a popular destination for the displaced rural and urban poor,
particularly from Mexico.
They found employment largely in the growing commercial agriculture
economies of the southern, western, and southwestern parts of the United States.
The greatly expanding U.S. rail network also provided employment opportunities for
Mexican laborers, creating sizable Mexican-American communities in places like
Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Kansas City. It is clear, therefore, that the events
we are discussing in this chapter came to influence quite directly the demography of
many U.S. cities as well as the vast region that would become known in our time as
the Sun Belt.
On the wave of positivism, and with the economic development that accompa-
nied the expansion of agricultural export production, came a huge flow of foreign
capital to Mexico and Central America. Frequently the production units themselves
(cattle ranches, and the henequen, banana, cotton, and coffee plantations), as well
as the processing and shipping facilities, were completely controlled by foreigners or
by newly arrived, wealthy immigrants. Governments, whether centralist or federalist,
conservative or liberal, tended to look benignly on this phenomenon. Why? Because
foreign control seemed a small price to pay for the economic transformation and
commercial infrastructure—railroads, power plants, and telegraph systems—that
would bring progress. The irony, of course, is the very one that continues to haunt
much of the region to this day: It was development that mobilized a continent to
provide raw materials, fiber, food, meat, and minerals to supply industrial Europe and
the United States without creating the capacity for self-sufficiency in the production
of industrial goods and technical skills on which they had become dependent.MESOAMERICANS AND THE
INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS
The independence movements in Mexico and Central America were led primarily
by creoles in order to retain political control over the Indian peasants and mestizo
masses who, it was feared, might otherwise rebel against colonial rule and usher in
genuinely revolutionary changes. This was a justified fear from their perspective,