Modern Textiles

The first line of manufactures in Latin America to be produced by the factory system was the cotton textile industry. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cotton textiles made up the greatest part of the industrial output of most Latin American countries. By the 1930s their relative importance had declined as other lines of manufacturing, such as paper, cement, and steel, adopted the factory system.

Cotton and wool goods were being spun and woven prior to the conquest of the Americas, and artisanal production of cloth continued throughout the colonial period. The two centers of colonial production were Puebla, Mexico, and Minas Gerais, Brazil. All production took place in the weaving sheds of independent cottage producers or in rudimentary manufactories that at times used coerced labor. The output of these operations was almost entirely coarse goods for the popular market, high-quality goods being beyond their technical abilities. Though the data are rough, wool goods were probably more important than cotton goods during this period, with the exception of Brazil, where cotton cloth production dominated.

EARLY FACTORIES

The first factories appeared in the 1830s, when Mexican entrepreneurs in the states of Puebla and México began to mechanize the spinning of cotton yarn. Most of the capital for the construction of these water-powered factories came from merchant activities, though the Mexican government provided some help as well through an industrial development bank, the Banco De Avío, founded in 1830. By the late 1830s, Mexico's textile industrialists had begun to move into mechanized weaving as well. In 1843 Mexico possessed 59 factories operating 125,362 spindles and 2,609 looms in the modern sector of the industry. Almost all of this output was in coarse, gray cloth called manta, because high-quality, fine-weave goods continued to be imported from Europe. By Western European or U.S. standards, Mexico's textile industry was extremely small, but it was the largest in Latin America. This relatively early start allowed Mexico to be the preeminent producer of cotton goods in Latin America until the turn of the century.

By the 1850s the factory system had slowly begun to spread to other countries in the region, and by the 1870s virtually every Latin American country was producing at least some cotton goods by machine. Mexico and Brazil, however, were clearly the two most important producers, because they possessed large markets, good lands for growing cotton, long traditions of artisanal cotton cloth production, and sources of water power near the population centers that consumed the output of their mills. By the early 1880s, the Mexican industry had grown to 99 factories running 249,334 spindles and 8,864 looms with a work force of roughly 11,500. An additional 9,000 spindles, 350 looms, and 700 workers were dedicated to wool production. The annual output of cotton cloth probably ran to 100 million meters. Brazil's industry was approximately one-third the size of Mexico's, with 43 factories running 80,420 spindles and 2,631 looms. Roughly 3,600 workers were employed in these firms, and annual output was in the area of 24 million meters.

EXPANSION

It was not until the 1890s that the textile industry began to grow at a rapid rate. The process of economic growth induced by the export boom of the last decades of the nineteenth century created conditions that were propitious for the industry's expansion. Incomes grew, markets were unified by the building of railroad networks, capital markets matured, and the wealth of the mercantile classes, the most important source of capital for the textile industry, grew rapidly. By 1920 the Mexican cotton goods industry included 120 mills operating 753,837 spindles and 27,301 looms and providing employment for 37,936 workers. Brazil's cotton industry had grown even larger, with 202 mills employing 78,911 workers and running nearly 1.6 million spindles and 52,254 looms. The total production of Brazil's mills was probably close to 500 million meters of cloth. By this point, domestically produced cotton cloth accounted for roughly 80 percent of the market in both countries. Other Latin American countries had viable, but significantly smaller, cotton industries by this time. Chile, for example, had but three mills employing less than 500 workers and running only 5,000 spindles and 400 looms, while Argentina and Colombia had cotton industries that were roughly three times that size.

LARGE FIRMS

What is particularly remarkable about the cotton industries in Brazil and Mexico was the size of the largest firms, which were gigantic even by U.S. standards. Mexico's largest firm, the Compañía Industrial de Orizaba (CIDOSA), founded in 1889, was by 1900 a four-mill operation employing 4,284 workers running 92,708 spindles and 3,899 looms. Had it been in the United States, it would have ranked among the twenty-five largest cotton textile enterprises. Brazil's largest producer, the Companhia América Fabril, was not far behind the CIDOSA operation; it controlled six mills employing 3,100 workers running 85,286 spindles and 2,170 looms. The predominance of a few large firms in both countries meant that the level of concentration was significantly higher than that which prevailed in the United States; the percentage of the market controlled by the four largest Latin American firms in 1910 was 7.5 percent in the U.S., 16.8 percent in Brazil, and 28.7 percent in Mexico. A similar situation prevailed in the production of wool textiles, where a few firms controlled the lion's share of the market. In Mexico, for example, two firms, the Compañía Industrial de San Ildefonso and La Victoria, S.A., most likely accounted for better than one-third of all the machine-produced wool cloth.

CAPITAL

By the turn of the century, Brazil had overtaken Mexico as the region's premier textile producer, thanks in large part to the capital provided by the Rio de Janeiro stock exchange. Indeed, 28 percent of Brazil's cotton factories, predominantly located in São Paulo, were financed through the sale of equity, compared to just 3 percent in Mexico.

As in the United States and Western Europe, merchants played the most important role in industrial finance throughout Latin America. One reason for their prominence was that only merchants possessed the kind of liquid capital necessary to undertake the sizable investment needed. Another was that merchants had more knowledge of the market than other entrepreneurs and could dovetail their mercantile operations into their manufacturing operations. Indeed, the largest shareholders in the mills often were important cloth merchants who sold to their own wholesaling and retailing operations at a discount.

COMPETITIVENESS

Throughout its history the Latin American textile industry operated behind high tariff barriers and often received both direct and indirect government subsidies. This support was crucial for an industry that could not compete internationally against England and the United States. For this reason almost all of the production of most countries was consumed in the domestic market. Two factors prevented Latin America from developing internationally competitive textile industries. First, start-up costs were higher than those that prevailed in the advanced industrial countries. Lacking the ability to produce their own machinery, Latin American countries imported all of the necessary equipment from abroad and thus needed to set aside funds to cover the costs of transport and insurance in transit. They also needed to pay the salaries of the foreign technical personnel who set up the plant. These added expenses could push up the cost of erecting a mill by as much as 60 percent. Higher start-up costs were compounded by interest rates higher than those in the advanced industrial countries, due in part to a risk premium and less well-integrated financial markets. Second, the productivity of labor in Latin America was a good deal lower than that in the advanced industrial countries. Because workers resisted attempts to instill industrial discipline and routinize work, Latin America's mills typically employed from two to three times the number of workers per machine as did firms in the advanced industrial countries. Output per worker was therefore much lower as well; in 1925 labor productivity in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina was roughly half that of the U.S. Northeast, one-sixth that of the U.S. South, and one-third that of Japan. Thus, even though wages for Latin American textile workers were from one-third to one-half of those prevailing abroad, these lower wages were offset by lower work intensity.

Women comprised a significant portion of textile workers, particularly after 1900, and their participation had an effect on labor relations throughout Latin America. Employers in Medellín, Colombia, and São Paulo, Brazil, imposed rules to safeguard the morality of their women employees, who sometimes were stigmatized for working outside the traditional sphere of the home. In Mexico, although women worked as millhands, men continued to occupy the highest-paid positions in the Orizaba-Puebla corridor. However, a majority of females have long staffed Mexico's maquiladoras, initially dominated by textile firms. In the 1980s Mexican women formed a seamstresses union, but their struggle for higher wages and job security was defeated by their employers, the government, and male-dominated union leadership. Global competition in the twenty-first century forced most textile factories along the Mexican-U.S. border to close.

WORLD WAR I AND AFTER

Latin America's textile industry did not do well during World War I, since capital goods were hard to purchase and the domestic market was depressed because of the decline in the export sector. The industry did even worse during the Great Depression. It was not until World War II that the industry once again faced the kind of favorable conditions that it had experienced in 1890–1914. By this point, however, the industry was even further behind the rest of the world; though it did begin to produce artificial fibers, decades of protectionism and the lack of new investment meant that most of the installed plant and equipment dated from the years prior to 1914. After 1945 the textile industry persisted, but its economic importance steadily declined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850–1950 (1957).

Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (1969).

Dawn Keremitis, La industria textil mexicana en el siglo XIX (1973).

Richard J. Salvucci, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539–1840 (1987).

Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890–1940 (1989), and "Industrial Concentration and the Capital Markets: A Comparative Study of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, 1830–1930," in Journal of Economic History 51, no. 3 (1991).

Guy P. C. Thompson, Puebla de los Angeles: Industry and Society in a Mexican City, 1700–1850 (1989).

Douglas Cole Libby, "Proto-Industrialization in a Slave Society: The Case of Minas Gerais," in Journal of Latin American Studies 23 (1991), especially pp. 23-33.

Additional Bibliography

Bittencourt, Luciana Aguiar. Spinning Lives. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.

Cravey, Altha J. Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Gutiérrez Alvarez, Coralia. Experiencias contrastadas: Industrialización y conflictos en los textiles del centrooriente de México, 1884–1917, México: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2000.

Ramos-Escandón, Carmen. Industrialización, género y trabajo femenino en el sector textil mexicano: El obraje, la fábrica y la compañía industrial. México, D.F.: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2004.

Rodrigues, Jessita Martins. A mulher operária: Um estudo sobre tecelãs. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1979.

Winn, Peter. Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wolfe, Joel. Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

                                    Stephen H. Haber