Iron Horse Imperialism: The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880 – 1951

Abstract

This book details the history of a U.S.-owned railway line that, after its completion in 1927, ran along Mexico’s Pacific coast between the border town of Nogales and Guadalajara, connecting the country’s northwest to its central population centers. Southern Pacific owned and managed the railroad from 1898, when it obtained the Sonora Railway from another American railroad giant — Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe — until the Mexican government purchased the line in 1951. Foreign-owned railroads have often stood as symbols of Latin America’s subservience to powerful outsiders. However, in this concise, clearly written volume, Daniel Lewis argues that the Mexican government sought to regulate the Southern Pacific of Mexico from its inception, and that it did so with increasing coherence and effectiveness over time. Drawing especially on the Mexi-can National Archives’ Secretary of Transportation and Communication record group, and on company records recently made available at the Huntington Library in California, Lewis concludes, “The Mexican government was able to influence the line so that it actually contributed actively to Mexican nation building” (p. 14). Although Mexican economic nationalism is often seen to have originated with the revolution or the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, Lewis demonstrates that it had antecedents in the Porfiriato. After detailing the familiar story of the foreign-financed, late nineteenth-century railroad boom, the author notes that some members of the Porfirio Díaz administration, most notably Finance Secretary José Yves Limantour, were wary of foreign, especially American, capital. After Díaz did little to enforce an initial regulatory attempt, the Railroad Law of 1899, Limantour proposed that the government buy a majority share in most of the country’s lines, thus taking control of the railroads while continuing to allow some foreign investment. Díaz agreed, and in 1908 he founded the Mexican National Railways to carry out the plan and manage the new system, an action that Lewis justifiably says has not received the historical scrutiny it deserves.As a firm in which the government did not invest, the Southern Pacific of Mexico remained independent on the eve of the revolution; this left the railroad vulnerable to armed groups more likely to target American than Mexican lines. Upon consolidating power, Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist government took control of the line, ignored its American board of directors, and rebuffed Southern Pacific’s demands for reparations for war-related destruction. Conflict over revolutionary-era damages did not subside until 1923, when President Álvaro Obregón, seeking diplomatic recognition from the United States, settled several disputes involving U.S. corporations. By then, Lewis argues, unlike Díaz’s científicos, few in the Mexican government embraced American firms unreservedly as avatars of progress. During a 1923 ceremony marking the resumption of construction on the railroad, Obregón welcomed American investors, but warned them that Mexico “does oppose and shall oppose the imposition of a certain kind of civilization” (p. 66).Meanwhile, Lewis argues, a tendency to see railroads as symbols of conquest over nature and inferior peoples continued to motivate Southern Pacific officials. Although it may not have made business sense to remain in Mexico, where it had been losing money, Southern Pacific agreed in 1923 to complete the last one hundred miles of track between Tepic and Guadalajara. In one of the book’s more colorful sections, Lewis details this remarkable four-year engineering project, which required construction of dozens of bridges and tunnels through a series of canyons, the largest of which was Salsipuedes Gorge, 860 feet high and 240 feet long. In a separate chapter on the 1920s, “Multicultural Mosaic: The Impacts of Otherness,” Lewis discusses several intriguing examples of cultural conflicts that stirred controversy and occasionally disrupted construction or railroad operations. The presence of Chinese workers, for example, provoked protests by nativist groups like the Anti-Chinese League of Sonora, and some government officials claimed that Mormons employed by the Utah Construction Company, which oversaw the Tepic-Guadalajara project, came to Mexico to proselytize. While these controversies had little effect on operations, Yaqui Indian resistance to railroad expansion and attacks by Cristero rebels between 1926 and 1929 caused significant delays and damage.Despite the succinctness of Iron Horse Imperialism, the author develops his arguments effectively. The book’s brevity, however, is also a limitation. Lewis makes a few suggestive comments about the history of railroads in South America; the book could have benefited from more complete comparative analysis. Important concepts such as “nation-building,” “otherness,” and “imperialism” receive cursory discussions, and the author engages with few secondary or theoretical sources. Finally, the text is marred by several minor yet distracting errors. Still, Iron Horse Imperialism remains a solid, engaging study of a relatively unexplored topic, and a worthwhile contribution to the history of Mexican economic policy and American business in Mexico.