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Industrial Process and Mexican Transport

Inefficient transportation deprived industrial centers like Puebla of the wider markets and regional complementarity necessary for the early stages of the industrial process to have taken root successfully after Independence. For example, over 56 percent of the cotton textile factory spindles installed in Mexico between 1835 and 1845 were located in or near the national capital or the city of Puebla. Since transport costs were cheaper for raw cotton than for finished textiles, it made sense to locate production facilities close to major urban markets, especially since these same locations offered access to capital, labor, and water power. Yet because cotton represented one-half to four-fifths of the cost of textile manufactures, inefficient material transport undercut fledgling Mexican industry whether domestic cotton from Veracruz or foreign cotton was employed. Transportation from the port of Veracruz raised the cost of imported raw cotton by one-third to one-half for Puebla manufacturers and by over 80 percent for those in Mexico City. Furthermore, since Mexico's industrial process began with the importation of foreign machinery, the difficulty experienced by freight haulers in moving heavy equipment severely hampered the efforts at industrialization in the 1830s and 1840s. The cost of imported machinery in Mexico City might be twice what it had been upon its initial arrival in Veracruz.

Slow and expensive landed transport diminished the potential stimulus that urban markets might have offered to producers beyond their immediate hinterlands in the early nineteenth century. Reflecting conditions that would continue to constrict commercial agriculture in post-Independence Mexico, the mining city of Guanajuato in the late colonial period was obliged to draw its supply of maize from a limited radius of about 34 miles (55 kilometers). Had overland maize shipments been able to travel at the rates charged by cargo canoes on the lakes around Mexico City, Guanajuato's agricultural hinterland would have expanded more than ten-fold. Although commercial agriculture demonstrated signs of recovery by the mid-nineteenth century, expensive and unpredictable transport continued to separate producers from their potential markets, except in times of great scarcity and inordinately high prices. For example, in the 1850s and 1860s, haciendas with top-quality land in Querétaro normally could not ship their wheat profitably to the Mexico City market. Other estates on more marginal land even found it hard to deliver wheat to the provincial capital. The high cost of transport in the pre-railroad era further discouraged landowners from investing in modern tools and agricultural machinery.