Garza Sada Family
Garza Sada Family
Garza Sada Family, major Mexican entrepreneurial family. The original head of probably the single most influential and extensive capitalist family in Mexico was Isaac Garza Garza, the son of Juan de la Garza Martínez, mayor of Monterrey, and Manuela Garza, Jewish immigrants from Spain who had settled in the region of Monterrey, Nuevo León. After studying merchandizing in Santander, Spain, he went into the grocery business with José Calderón, who married his aunt. Isaac married Consuelo Sada Muguerza, daughter of Francisco Sada Gómez, and in 1899 founded with his father-in-law Fábrica de Vidrios y Cristales de Monterrey, of which he became president. With other partners, he established a number of major firms at the turn of the century, including Cervecería Cuauhtémoc (1890), whose partners, often related by marriage, included José A. Muguerza and Francisco Sada, and the Fundidora de Fierro y Acero, with Vicente Ferrara.
His union with Consuelo produced numerous children, among them Eugenio Garza Sada, Isaac Garza Sada, and Roberto Garza Sada. Eugenio, the oldest of this generation, took over the leadership of a major group of interlocking corporations, which became known popularly as the "Monterrey Group." These included the original brewery, Cervecería Cuauhtémoc; a bottling company, Hojalata y Lámina; and Empaques de Cartón Titán, a packaging firm. Another son, Isaac, took over another set of firms, and also developed his own businesses. These children, in turn, intermarried with other prominent Monterrey families, including the Laguera and Sepúlveda families.
The untimely death of Eugenio Garza Sada, who was murdered in September 1973, served as a catalyst in breaking up the beer, glass, and steel empire into four separate, but complementary, holding companies. All of these conglomerates rank among the top fifty companies in Mexico. The most famous of these groups, the ALFA industrial group, the largest in Latin America in the early 1980s, was founded by Bernardo Garza Sada, grandson of Isaac and son of Roberto. The other components are led by VITRO, VISA, controlled by the Garza Laguera family, and the CYDSA group, presided over by the Sada Zambrano family. The Garza Sadas continue to be a dominant force among Mexican capitalists, as shareholders and board members of leading industrial firms, as members of entrepreneurial interest groups, as leaders of business organizations, and as managers of major industrial holding groups.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Isidro Vizcaya Canales, Los orígenes de la industrialización de Monterrey (1971).
Menno Vellinga, Economic Development and the Dynamics of Class: Industrialization, Power and Control in Monterrey, Mexico (1979).
Alex Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State, 1880–1940 (1988).
Roderic Ai Camp, Entrepreneurs and Politics in Twentieth Century Mexico (1989).
Additional Bibliography
Fernández Menéndez, Jorge. Nadie supo nada: La verdadera historia del asesinato de Eugenio Garza Sada. Mexico, D.F.: Grijalbo/Actualidad, 2006.
Franco Sáenz, Héctor. Los beneméritos de Nuevo León. Monterrey, Mexico: Comité de Archivo y Biblioteca, Congreso del Estado de Nuevo León, 2003.
Medina, Enriqueta, and Federico Arreola. Don Roberto Garza Sada: La pasión por la excelencia. Monterrey, México: Gobierno del Estado de Nuevo León, 1994.
Roderic Ai Camp