The Mexican Mining Industry in the Nineteenth Century with Special Reference to Guanajuato

Abstract

In 1822 when Joel Poinsett, first American minister to Mexico, visited Guanajuato, he commented on the ruinous condition of the village of Valenciana, the refining mills of Marfil, and the great mines of the city. The population had fallen and production had failed. The mines of the Veta Madre which had dominated the city in the eighteenth century?Mellado, Cata, Rayas, Sirena and Tepeyac?and which had, between the years 1700 and 1810, produced silver to the enormous value of 342 million pesos, were now choked with debris, the workings flooded almost to the surface, and the miners and their tools dispersed. At the Valenciana, which Humboldt had described in his Political Essay,1 the offices had been burned down and the machinery of the main shaft destroyed by patriot forces, so that water had risen in the great shaft and only minimal production was possible. In the decade prior to the War of Independence the mines of Guanajuato had produced silver and gold to the value of over 5,300,000 pesos per annum. Over the next 10 years this had dropped to a little over 2 million pesos a year and, for 1820-1829, the annual average was only just above 1 million pesos.2 Notwithstanding this dismal picture, the result of the city being at the centre of the Insurgency movement, the mines of Guanajuato not only continued to produce great masses of silver during the nineteenth century but, at certain periods, actually increased output above the levels achieved in the previous century. They did so in spite of the fact that throughout the period no radically new techniques were introduced. The steam engines which had enhanced production in the coal and tin mines of Britain were found to be of very little use in Mexico. It was only in the years 1904-1906, when American companies bought out Mexican owners and introduced electricity and the cyanide process, that the structure of the industry was effectively transformed. In essence, for the mines of Guanajuato, the nine? teenth century was a prolongation of the colonial period. The story of how the industry recovered from the disastrous impact ofthe War of Independence, and how it managed to maintain production in a period of political unrest and civil wars which continued to affect the area, is largely unknown but is significant for any understanding of nineteenthcentury Mexico. This article proposes to examine (a) the success and failure of British investment in the years 1824-1848, (b) the question of labour, (c)