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Transportation Improvements

Given the low productivity of the postcolonial Mexican economy, the transportation improvements that did take place in the generation after Independence lacked the power to transform the living conditions of most of society. Mexican diligencias (stagecoaches), for example, naturally were much faster than either riding or walking, attaining five miles (eight kilometers) per hour in mountainous stretches such as that between Veracruz and Jalapa, and nine miles (eleven kilometers) per hour on relatively flat tableland areas, speeds comparable to Wells Fargo stages in the United States. Yet even on federal roads, according to government reports from 1877 to 1882, only 6.5 percent of travelers took stagecoaches. More than two-thirds of those using Mexico's best roads walked, while another quarter rode horses or donkeys. While stagecoach fares do not appear to have been wildly out of line compared to those charged in the United States, most Mexicans simply could not begin to afford them. Daily earnings in the mid-1870s could purchase a journey of no more than a few kilometers by stagecoach. In two days, a person could walk the 41 miles (66 kilometers) between Mexico City and Toluca, the least expensive diligencia route, rather than pay the 10 days' wages it would have cost to ride by stage.

Improvements in post-Independence transportation in Mexico lacked the power to overcome the regional autarchy that thwarted efforts to raise economic productivity. Politically it is true that weak transportation did serve to protect local interests against the sometimes predatory forces of centralization. Under the conditions prevailing in post-Independence Mexico, national elites did find themselves obliged to share power with provincial caudillos (political strongmen) and local patronage networks. Through the civil and military struggles of the nineteenth century, federalism did ultimately emerge as a far more realistic basis for national politics than centralism. Economically, nevertheless, backward transport protected localistic inefficiencies and impeded the interregional integration required for the gradual economic development of the Mexican nation-state in the nineteenth century. As scholar Sidney Pollard notes, it is worth remembering that "industrialization in Britain was by no means a single, uninterrupted, and unitary, still less a nationwide process" between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. "Thus, industrialization, properly speaking, remained a local phenomenon even in the later stages of the industrial revolution." Good transportation would have enhanced whatever chances Mexico possessed to benefit from an analogous process after Independence, thus potentially avoiding the disruptive and dependent character of rapid growth during the Porfiriato (the rule of Porfirio Díaz).