Thoughts.com Blogs - Transportation Business in Mexico

View Blog

Transportation Business in Mexico

Roads and a supporting system of inns were built, but slowly and unevenly. A wagon road was built between the vital port of Veracruz and Mexico City in 1530-31, the years wagons were first introduced into regular use. These wagons, carretas, remained the sole freight wagons in Mexico until after 1550, when the carro also began being used. In 1555, another wagon road was opened, to Zacatecas, site of colonial Mexico's most important silver mines, and a road was gradually extended to Oaxaca. Wagons were otherwise limited to the areas in and around cities and valleys. For instance, even though Acapulco was Mexico's most important Pacific port and the home of the Manila galleons, the road there from Mexico City could not be traversed by wheeled vehicles until the twentieth century. Mule trains served that city, as they did other routes that wagons could not use, but much of Mexico—especially smaller towns and hillier regions—lacked roads suitable even for draft animals and remained linked only by tlamemes. Thus, a three-tiered system arose in Mexico, with wagons serving only the most important centers, such as Mexico City and Zacatecas, pack animals serving these areas as well as most other significant towns, and tlamemes serving all of these, as well as the numerous centers inaccessible by either. Moreover, the Spanish systems of transport concentrated on the upper economic end of the transportation business.

The use of Spanish ships eased some of the transportation constraints along the coasts of Mexico. Spanish sailing ships created sustained links between Mexico and the West Indies and Europe; links with South America were created within two decades, and links with the Philippines and Asia were available in five. These ships transformed the world, linking Mexico to hitherto unknown areas. The ships, up to 200 tons initially and up to 360 by the end of the century, brought an influx of people and goods alien to Mexico. And these ships also linked the growing Spanish bureaucracy to the royal court in Spain. But Spanish boats had little impact on the inland waterways; the same constraints on navigable water limited them as they had Indian watercraft. Nevertheless, water transportation was so much more efficient than land travel that to go from Veracruz to Tehuantepec, it was easier to proceed by ship to Coatzacoalcos, by canoe up the Coatzacoalcos River to Antigua Malpaso, and then travel overland for 12 leagues than it was to go overland to Mexico City and then south to Tehuantepec, over Mexico's best roads. Canoes continued to be used in the Valley of Mexico, but these remained in Indian hands, with the results that Spanish neglect, ecological changes, and early efforts to drain the lakes combined to undermine this system, largely confining it to the southern areas of the valley.