STILLMANS' RACIAL VIEWS, LABOR PRACTICES IN MEXICO

(Ed.'s Note: For some reason or other, the local elite in Brownsville have canonized the Stillman family. They credit Charles Stillman with being the founder of Brownsville even though it's documented that he bought the land for the city from someone who did not own it and took what he could by force of arms through his private army and the Texas Rangers. His descendants have been trying to use philanthropy to polish their family's image, with some success. Here is an account by University of Houston professor John Mason Hart of his son James Stillman's views on Mexicans and his and other American investors' treatment of Mexican laborers in their mines in Mexico upon which their fortune was made.)

From "Empire and Revolution", U. of California Press, 2002, Page 123

"American expansionists in the financial and railroad industries and American political leader Mexico as a site of great wealth and a nation that should be wrested from the backward, corrupt, and incompetent control of the Mexican government. Only then could its potential be fully realized, as James Stillman declared in 1890:

The people of Mexico will have to be supplanted by another race, which is gradually being done, before any great development can be expected there."

Page 136:

"The high level of organization introduced by Americans..in the mines...and in the timber and oil industries, and in the industrial agricultural centers...resulted in an economy of scale that made previous tenuous businesses not only reliably profitable but sometimes extraordinarily so. The introduction of well-paid technicians and high technology was invariably the first result of capitalization.

"The managers and supervisors...received salaries ranging from $18,000 per year for the superintendent to $1,500 per year for an assistant electrician. The hundreds of miners earned about $1.50 per week. If they were employed the entire year, they could hope to gain little more than $75, despite the enormous wealth that they produced...

"The captains of American industry and finance applied their prior experience in the southwestern United States to their endeavors in Mexico. Shepherd's (Alexander Robey Shepherd, the last governor of Washington, D.C., had built after leaving the United States in 1875.) strategies for maximizing profits and maintaining segregated living facilities at Batopilas reproduced the contemporary practices in his counterparts in the New York financial community who maintained racially segregated mines in Arizona. Rather than instituting the salary ratio of 2.5 to 1 between managers and their employees that was common in the United States at the time, mine owners adopted the existing wage disparities they encountered in Mexico.

"The standard ratio of managers' salaries to workers was 20 to 1. This practice was one of many that reinforced the vast cultural differences that existed between the formally educated Americans, some of them engineers and the Mexican mine laborers.

"Owners and supervisors commonly lived in "big houses" and ordered the construction of chozas, or shacks, normally made of thatch with dirt floors, in neat rows within views of the big house, which had long porches that often reached around all four sides of the building. At Batopilas the owners built the workers' housing only at outlying mining sites so that the workers would not lose time traveling to the mines. The Americans that headed mines and plantations lived like an aristocracy that considered their Mexican employees as racially inferior rabble that they were bringing, ever so slowly, toward civility."