Feeding Chilapa: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Mexican Region

Abstract

Chris Kyle has composed a fine book on the history of an economic region in southern Mexico from the pre-Columbian era down to the present. A cultural anthropologist rather than an historian, the author used both ethnological investigation and archival research in assembling this study. Kyle divides his work into six chapters that deal substantially with different historical periods, plus an introduction and conclusion. Since 1990, he has spent about three years in Chilapa and the greater Atemba River basin for which the town has served as a primary market.Chilapa served as a regional market throughout the colonial period. Its local economy relied on cacao beans as a standard of exchange into the early national era. In the 1790s, Chilapa’s population numbered around 10,000. In the 1840s, it had risen to 14,000, but by 1860 the population had fallen to 6,500 and would stay at that figure for 90 years. During most of the colonial period, the Atemba basin did not constitute a regional economy, for the few small communities in the region were primarily agricultural. Finally in the 1790s, with the emergence of the cotton cloth industry in Puebla, Chilapa emerged as a transit center along the route from the cotton-growing areas near the Pacific coast. This trade attracted a non-Indian population to the community to work as long-distance merchants, administrators, and muleteers. The existing population, mostly Indian, did not engage in the business.In the early 1800s, Chilapa developed its own minor textile industry. This dominated its economy into the 1850s, as the town’s transport sector faded during this period. In 1842, a large-scale local uprising by agrarian renters against their landlords destroyed the regional government and militia and threw open the countryside to squatters. From the 1850s through the 1950s, the economy stagnated, showing no impact from either the Porfiriato or the Mexican Revolution.By the late 1970s, the region could no longer feed itself. With no local options available, government planners assumed control over the shortage and brought in large quantities of imported grain to Chilapa, where it was distributed to urban consumers free of charge. This was just one dramatic way in which the government intervened in the local economy. Its increased activities entailed the destruction of the regional economy. Government bureaucrats became located in Chilapa. Electricity was brought into the region, to be followed by telecommunications and modern transportation systems. The number of day workers plummeted while numbers of salaried employees skyrocketed. Increased numbers of people identified themselves as physicians, engineers, teachers, nurses, secretaries, and government officials.With the national government’s emphasis on economic liberalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the region found itself increasingly integrated into the international economy. But this transformation did the region’s population little good. While some availed themselves of government-funded make-work projects, others migrated to major Mexican cities or the United States. Chilapa has not been able to find a new export industry and is a service center that depends on remittances from migrants.While the history of the Atemba region is distinctive, as all regions are, in broader terms it represents some dozens of remote valleys outside of central Mexico. Such pre-industrial areas tended to be fragile economic units that survived only by adjusting themselves to changing patterns in interregional trade.Kyle has composed a model study of an economic region across time. As he notes, economics is always intertwined with politics. He makes his book even more useful by commenting on the larger themes of migration and development schemes. Although his region is remote, Kyle’s analysis shows how much it has to tell.