Chapter 1 - 1850s: Solar Society

Summary

Chapter 1 introduces the basic patterns in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico’s energy regime. After a brief overview of Mexico’s longer history, it presents a panoramic view of Mexican society in the 1850s and analyzes the relationship between economic activity, environmental conditions, and the country’s energy regime, which depended on the annual solar cycle. It sketches the basic contours of Mexico’s pre–fossil fuel era, providing a baseline against which the social, economic, and environmental developments examined in subsequent chapters can be gauged.

The energy of the universe is constant.

Rudolf Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat, 1867

From the small villages that domesticated maize, beans, and squash some 7,000 years ago, to the Aztec empire of 1500, to the colonial possession that declared independence from the Spanish crown in 1821, the region we now call Mexico has sustained many human societies. Some lived off hunting and the collection of plants, nuts, and roots for centuries, perhaps millennia, and continued doing so into the mid-nineteenth century. Others built large cities featuring massive structures and long, straight thoroughfares. A few organized some of the world’s first capitalist economies, mining vast amounts of silver that shaped global trade. The majority organized themselves in small rural communities that cultivated maize, beans, and squash, the trinity of Mesoamerican staples. But regardless of when, where, or how these societies lived, all subsisted within the energy constraints of the sun’s cycles and rhythms – the solar energy regime. Such was the case for every human society until the emergence of coal as the basis of eighteenth-century British life.

Like their predecessors, the diverse populations that made up Mexican society in the mid-nineteenth century depended on the flow of light energy from the sun to produce food to feed animals and humans – the sources of all labor and transport. Sunlight set the hydrological cycle that regulated running water for irrigation and waterwheels. Life in 1850s Mexico was characterized by almost complete dependence on local environmental conditions. Even in the richest ecosystems, energy was scarce, so growth was exceptional and reduced to brief spurts.¹ The prohibitive energetics of transportation meant that little more than luxury items or low-bulk valuable items like silver could be carried overland beyond a few dozen kilometers. Overusing any given local resource faced relatively quick penalization. Overexploitation of forests for the increased production of iron could only be sustained for a short period before wood scarcity set in. By land, wood could only be transported over 30 or so kilometers before costs became exorbitant (with the exception of all-important fuelwood, for which mines often paid handsomely). Even if forests were abundant beyond that boundary, communities still experienced wood scarcity.

But things were beginning to change. The limits of the old energy regime were expanding through a combination of increased waterpower and the introduction of steam power. Until the advent of the steam engine in eighteenth-century Britain, the only way humans could put to work the solar energy stored in plants was through biological converters (animals and people). When Mexico’s mining companies and factories introduced steam power to their operations, wood became a fuel to generate work for the first time.² Nevertheless, the mid-nineteenth century marks a transitional moment in Mexican history. If we were to take a snapshot of this moment, the constraints of the solar energy regime still shaped every aspect of society. Yet new ways of extracting and transforming energy were spreading, setting in motion a series of developments that would transform Mexican society over the following decades. During the 1850s, Mexico existed on the boundary between two ages.

To understand this critical moment, the chapter presents a panoramic view of mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It emphasizes the material and environmental conditions across the country, paying particular attention to energy use. The chapter analyzes the relationship between economic and political institutions, cultural practices, and the country’s solar energy regime. Through this snapshot, the chapter seeks to sketch the basic contours of Mexico’s pre–fossil fuel era, providing a baseline against which the energy, social, economic, and environmental changes and continuities examined in subsequent chapters can be easily assessed.

The Basics

Before turning to our story, however, a word on key concepts used throughout this chapter. The notion of energy is frequently discussed throughout this chapter – indeed, throughout this entire book. What is energy exactly? It is best thought of as a flow. Through thermonuclear reactions, the sun radiates thermal energy that plants (autotrophs or primary converters) transform into chemical energy, building the basis of most life processes on our planet.³ Other organisms such as animals (heterotrophs or secondary converters) consume plants or other animals and transform chemical energy into life-sustaining heat. A small percentage of this energy is converted into mechanical energy, or work. Solar radiation also drives the hydrological cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff. The sun heats surface ocean water until it evaporates, rising into the atmosphere as water vapor. At certain heights, the moist air cools and loses its capacity to retain water vapor, which initiates the condensation process. Clouds form and are transported by wind currents around the globe, where they return water to the surface as precipitation. Water on the ground can either return to the atmosphere as transpiration, empty as runoff into lakes, rivers, and oceans, or seep into the earth as groundwater. Finally, the sun’s uneven heating of the earth causes air to move, creating wind. During daytime, the air heats faster over land than over water. Warm air expands and rises, leaving cooler ocean air rushing inland in its place. At night, this process reverses, as air over land cools faster. Chemical energy, the hydrological cycle, and wind currents were all components of the solar energy regime under which Mexican society operated well into the nineteenth century.

Another important aspect of solar radiation is what ecologists call the net primary productivity of ecosystems.⁴ Every organism uses energy to grow and reproduce. Plants, the basis of both terrestrial and maritime ecosystems, use energy in biomass production, growth, and reproduction. They capture a mere 0.1 percent of light that reaches the earth, converting it into plant tissue and chemical energy.⁵ The net primary productivity (NPP) is the energy that remains after these processes and is stored as organic matter. NPP in Mexico is highly variable, but it averages 3 tons per hectare annually. Given the country’s total territory of 197,255,000 hectares, Mexico’s entire vegetative cover produces some 591,765,000 tons annually. Assuming 4,200 kcal per kg of biomass, all of Mexico’s ecosystems thus produce 2,485,413,000,000,000 kcal per year. This annual energy flow represented the theoretical limit of energy available to mid-nineteenth-century Mexican society.

Of course, human beings had to share this flow with countless other animals and could tap into only a fraction of it. Agriculture represented the basic way to appropriate some of this flow. Like every other farming system around the world, mid-nineteenth-century Mexican agriculture sought to control and harvest as much incoming solar energy as possible for human needs. It concentrated solar energy in crops to sustain human and animal labor, which performed a wide variety of tasks: making shoes in small workshops; extracting ore from deep shafts in industrial-scale mining operations; and building towns and cities and the roads connecting them.

All of these basic processes lay at the heart of Mexico’s mid-nineteenth-century energy system. Scholars refer to this energy system as the solar energy regime, the biological ancién regime, the somatic energy regime, or the organic energy regime. All four terms are useful but emphasize different aspects of energy use. The terms “biological” and “organic” underline the importance of organic components like plants and animals for the societies that depended on them. That said, they implicitly suggest that the fossil fuel energy regime under which we currently live is not organic. This is misleading: both coal and oil derive from fossilized vegetable matter,⁶ which is organic. The term “somatic” draws attention to human and animal muscle’s capacity to do work but overlooks the importance of hydraulic and eolic (wind) power to some societies living under this regime. The term “solar” avoids both problems and reminds the reader of the non–fossil fuel basis of these societies.⁷ As such, I will use the concept of “solar energy regime” moving forward.⁸

Mexico’s solar energy system had specific ecological and technological characteristics. By far the most important energy source was food, a form of chemical energy that humans and animals converted and transformed into Mexico’s main source of mechanical power: muscle. Another source of energy was water, transformed by nonbiological converters like the waterwheel into mechanical energy that moved mills, spindles, and so on. Wind went to work at sea, moving sail ships along Mexico’s coasts. Wood was the main source of heat energy, although dung and cornstalks substituted in some wood-scarce regions.⁹ A small number of steam engines burned wood and small amounts of imported coal in mines and textile factories (and one or two ships), but they represented a marginal percentage of Mexico’s overall energy output.

The Longer History

Mexico’s history, of course, did not begin in 1850. Timeframes and periodizations are contested historical constructs. Still, historians have to start their stories somewhere. While this chapter offers a snapshot of the country in the mid-nineteenth century, this picture must be historically contextualized to avoid misleading. A succinct overview of the fundamental ecological transformations that marked New Spain after 1500 and Mexico before 1850 will ensure that.

In the early sixteenth century, what is today Mexico encompassed three distinct regions: the north populated by hunter-gatherers and a few cultivators; the tropical lowlands dominated by slash-and-burn farmers; and the Mesoamerican highlands with a maize-based civilization of family producers and large polities. While all indigenous societies shaped their environments, the latter inhabited a “sculptured landscape,” none more so than in the Valley of Mexico, where there were large urban centers with whitewashed walls like Texcoco. The surrounding countryside was dotted with villages and heavily cultivated with maize fields (milpas), some of them flanked by rows of maguey plants to protect from wind and soil erosion. In the middle were five interconnected lakes. The two lakes furthest north (Zumpango and Xaltocan) and the two in the south (Chalco and Xochimilco) were freshwater lakes located at a slightly higher elevation that drained into the saline waters of Lake Texcoco. Crisscrossing the lakes, a series of structures both connected and divided them. There were dikes that regulated the water level of the lakes and prevented flooding as well as keeping Lake Texcoco’s more saline eastern waters from mixing with its less brackish western waters, known as the lake of Mexico. There were also long, wide causeways linking all the main population centers with the largest urban conglomeration in the valley, Tenochtitlan. Located on an artificially expanded island on the western fringe of Lake Texcoco with a population of about 200,000, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world. The valley in which it sat was one of the most humanized landscapes in the Americas. It had been so for centuries, if not millennia.¹⁰

European arrival initiated a process of incalculable consequences for the whole of the western hemisphere: the Columbian Exchange. Two halves of the world separated since the land bridge of Beringia that had been submerged by the North Pacific sometime in the tenth millennium BCE came together on October 12, 1492. The exchange was an unequal affair. The influx of organisms from east to west was far larger than that from west to east, with Europeans bringing domesticated animals (horses, cattle, goats, pigs, and sheep), plants (wheat, rye, barley, oranges, sugarcane, and coffee, among others), and, most ominously, pathogens (smallpox, influenza, chickenpox, measles, and whooping cough). The flow from west to east included maize, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, squash, tobacco, peanuts, cassava, pineapple, peppers, and cotton. American plants would change the world, but among the animals domesticated in the Americas, only the turkey became important elsewhere.¹¹

Eurasian animal domesticates had no equivalent in the Americas. Although key species for the trajectory of human history such as horses and camels originally evolved in the Americas, they became extinct by the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, along with some 70 percent of all large mammals. This megafauna extinction likely resulted from human predation and climate change. When these large animals disappeared, the indigenous population lost a number of potential domesticates, with important long-term consequences for different aspects of their civilizations, including the dominance of human muscle, food production, and warfare.¹²

While, early on, domesticated animals numbered no more than a few horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, within decades their populations exploded into thousands of semi-feral roaming animals. It has been argued that Spaniards prevented animal populations, sheep in particular, from reestablishing a sustainable population in parts of central Mexico after their numbers crashed by artificially overstocking the region. This led to permanent degradation of landscapes, like those of the Valle del Mezquital, which was transformed within a century from a rich agricultural land into an impoverished and arid region of scrub vegetation. Other scholars have criticized this analysis for using a single factor (overgrazing) to explain a highly complex process like land degradation. There is evidence, too, that suggests Spaniards were aware of the danger of overgrazing and took steps to mitigate it, particularly through transhumance. Terrace abandonment due to native demographic collapse has also been signaled as an important cause behind massive soil erosion in places like the Valle del Mezquital. Climate change, specifically the relatively cool and dry period known as the Little Ice Age (roughly from 1400 to 1800), may have played an important role in the environmental changes attributed to the “plague” of sheep. In any case, there is little doubt that the introduction of livestock into the Americas and into what is today Mexico deeply shaped the landscape.¹³

While the prehistoric extinction of the megafauna and the sixteenth-century introduction of Eurasian domesticates had great environmental impacts on the Americas, the arrival of Europeans and their diseases caused perhaps the largest demographic collapse in recorded history. Wave after wave of epidemic outbreaks of smallpox, measles, mumps, influenza, and other diseases decimated native populations, whose almost complete isolation from the Old World for millennia left them without immunity and highly vulnerable to these diseases. Moreover, most human diseases were of zoonotic origin (animal-borne), derived from the close contact between humans and domesticated animals. Native Americans arrived in the Americas before any large animal had been domesticated, with the exception of the dog, and thus received little exposure to zoonotic diseases prior to the Columbian Exchange. In addition, the ancestors of the indigenous populations had crossed Beringia when climatic conditions were very cold, which killed off most pathogens. In all, between 1492 and 1650 perhaps as many as 90 percent of the indigenous population in parts of the New World succumbed to disease. For example, the population of the Basin of Mexico – which included the valley of the same name plus adjacent areas – declined from 1–1.2 million in 1519 to only about 100,000 people in 1650. Only in the twentieth century did the local human population again reach the one-million watermark.¹⁴

Human depopulation changed everything. In a society overwhelmingly dependent on human labor, muscle power became scarce. A rapidly declining indigenous population in the tropical lowlands was replaced by enslaved Africans. In the Mesoamerican highlands, Spanish authorities concentrated, with the mediation of local elites, the remaining indigenous population in landed republics. Dwindling numbers made it impossible to maintain large infrastructure works like the complex hydraulic system in the lakes of the Valley of Mexico, leading to recurrent flooding and centuries-long drainage projects. Labor-intensive chinampas declined in number and area. On the other hand, demographic collapse made land plentiful. Radical changes ensued. Villages became self-sufficient and enjoyed a large degree of political and cultural autonomy, although many partook in the commercial economy as seasonal laborers for cash wages (necessary for maintaining ritual life and paying taxes). Old World fruits and livestock increased the chemical energy at their disposal. Provisioned by large estates devoted to commercial crops like wheat, urban centers became manufacturing and financial centers and seats of political and judicial power mediating social conflict. Native and mixed-race migrants, vast herds of livestock (cattle, sheep, and horses), and some Europeans pushed the frontier north of Mesoamerica into the vast arid plateau.¹⁵

These newcomers built a highly commercialized economy organized around the extraction and export of silver in the Bajío and the far north. Chinese demand and an emerging global trade increasingly dominated by Europeans drove silver mining across this vast region. Urban centers like Querétaro provided mines with textiles and manufactures crafted in their many obrajes, workshops, and, in the eighteenth century, huge factories (tobacco, for example). Cash wages were the norm. Large haciendas and ranchos supplied the silver economy with leather products, tallow, fuelwood, and animals as muscle power to move complex machinery and winches. It was one of the earliest capitalist societies anywhere, whose main product, silver, profoundly influenced the early modern world.¹⁶

By 1800, these two core areas of New Spain, the central highlands and the Bajío-North, were among the richest in the Americas. They were also highly urbanized and featured several important cities, including Mexico City. The largest in the western hemisphere at the time, Mexico City was the financial and trade center linking the north’s mining economy with the world of relatively autonomous peasant communities, commercial estates, and chinampa agriculture in the central highlands. Sustained by the enormous flow of silver and connected to global circuits of trade, this urban, commercial world came crashing down in the second decade of the nineteenth century when an explosive mix of population growth, overexploitation, and a political vacuum created by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain erupted in a devastating war and popular insurgency. The country became independent in 1821.¹⁷

The postindependence decades saw a number of conflictive changes. Silver production fell by half and only began to recover in the 1840s.¹⁸ The commercial economy suffered, especially mines and large estates, but not communities that depended mostly on subsistence farming, which enjoyed renewed autonomy and abundant harvests.¹⁹ Exports and trade declined, hurting fiscal revenues and leading to recurrent rounds of loan acquisitions, crippling debt, defaults, and political instability. Some cities, like Querétaro, lost population. Others, like Mexico City, generally maintained the level of urbanization that had existed under Spanish rule. Importantly, Mexico’s textile sector began mechanizing in the 1830s – one of the earliest in the world to do so – and continued growing throughout the century and beyond.²⁰ In 1846, war broke out between Mexico and an expanding USA, with disastrous results for Mexico. The country lost its vast northern territories, which contained enormous agricultural, mineral, forest, and, crucially, coal and oil resources, all of which would play a central role in the rise of the USA as an industrial power by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In essence, the war transferred huge energy resources from Mexico to the USA, with long-term implications for both countries and the world.²¹

The Mexico of the 1850s emerged from these changes. On the one hand, the country’s elites kept developing a mechanized textile industry as they continued the search for alternatives to the silver economy of the past. On the other, Mexico was a more agrarian, less commercial, less dynamic nation than its 1800 predecessor. Food production was both the main occupation of the vast majority of the population and its main energy source.

Food Energy

In the mid-nineteenth century, over ninety percent of Mexicans farmed.²² Most of this population were subsistence farmers who depended on human and animal muscle and weather patterns to produce food. These farmers consumed the majority of their produce, selling the rest in town and city markets. Commercial farming units included ranchos and haciendas, which sold most of what they produced to mines, towns, and cities. In 1850, Mexico had some 14,500 ranchos and about 3,400 haciendas.²³

Food production varied substantially by location. At the time, observers identified three broad agroecological and climatic regions within Mexico’s territory.²⁴ First was the “hot country” (tierra caliente). This region encompassed the tropical lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast, and the Yucatan Peninsula. Some interior areas with a hot but dry climate, like the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán, also fit the label. In parts of these tropical lowlands, such as Yucatán, peasants practiced shifting agriculture, an itinerant form of farming that involved using the same plot of land for several years, then opening up a new patch in the forest once the former was exhausted.

The system was relatively straightforward. First, peasants cut down the forest in the middle of the dry season in January and February.²⁵ Forest cutting in Mexico’s lowlands was energy intensive, representing about one-third of the work involved in shifting agriculture. Peasants then let the vegetation dry out until the end of the dry season (April–May) before burning it. The ashes fertilized the thin and nutrient-poor tropical soil. At the beginning of the rainy season (May–June) farmers planted maize, beans, squash, and sweet potatoes using a wooden planting stick (coa).²⁶ A first maize harvest took place in November and a second in February.

Field size was normally limited to 3 to 5 hectares, since the extreme thinness of the soils made plowing impossible, and cultivation depended entirely on human muscle. Productivity was relatively high for the first 2 or 3 years – about 1 metric ton per hectare – but typically declined by half after only 2 years, when another patch had to be cleared. The entire cycle took about 15 years to complete, at which point the farmer returned to the original plot, now covered in secondary-growth forest.

Although yields were low compared with more intensive forms of food production like irrigated agriculture or the chinampa system, the energy returns for shifting agriculture – the ratio of energy output (crops) to energy input (labor) – were probably high. Recent estimates for shifting cultivators in Amazonia indicate a ratio of 13.9, similar to that of wet rice cultivation in the Philippines.²⁷ This type of farming, however, typically supported very low population densities; areas characterized by this form of food production were among the most sparsely populated in Mexico.²⁸ Shifting cultivation could only feed a limited number of nonproducers, or city residents. Mérida, then the largest city in Mexico’s entire tropical lowlands, had a mere 25,000 inhabitants. Yucatec farmers were frequently unable to feed the area’s population, forcing the state to import grain from across Mexico or abroad.²⁹ Shifting cultivation also required large territories. While Yucatec farmers cultivated some 3,400 km² annually, the whole cycle required 51,000 km² or almost 40 percent of the state’s territory. It is unsurprising that the encroachment of commercial agriculture on seemingly empty forest could easily threaten peasant livelihoods and prompt a violent reaction.³⁰ Furthermore, scarce population in agrarian societies was historically associated with forced labor. Mid-nineteenth-century Yucatán is a good example of this.³¹ From an energy perspective, Yucatán’s infamous coercive labor systems can be considered attempts to secure and control a crucial source of mechanical energy: human bodies.

While the transition between tierra caliente and tierra templada was fairly obvious to observers and travelers, the difference between tierra templada and fría was subtler and more arbitrary.³² Combined, these two geographies made up two-thirds of the country, included the most productive agricultural lands, and supported the largest populations.³³ Particularly fertile were the valleys of the central highlands and the area to the north, known as the Bajío. While the Bajío only came under cultivation during Spanish rule using animals and European irrigation technologies, the intermontane central valleys had produced most of the food in what is now Mexico since pre-Columbian times. These places concentrated most of mid-nineteenth-century Mexico’s energy in the form of food and human and animal biological converters.³⁴ Agriculture in the state of Querétaro and the Valley of Mexico illustrates how systems of food production worked in the Bajío and the central highlands.

In 1850, Querétaro was one of Mexico’s wealthiest states.³⁵ It enjoyed a relatively robust system of food production reliant on human muscle, many draft animals, and even water-powered machinery. With 180,000 people living in one of the smallest territories in the country, Querétaro’s population density was three times that of Yucatan. About 70 percent of the state was under exploitation. Land ownership primarily consisted of haciendas and ranchos, which controlled 39 percent of the territory, while pueblos owned a mere 2 percent.³⁶ The overwhelming majority of farmers practiced rain-fed agriculture.³⁷ Less than half of 1 percent of land was irrigated, mostly belonging to haciendas. Tens of thousands of oxen, horses, mules, and donkeys pastured on roughly 30 percent of the state’s land.³⁸ These animals moved winches (malacates) in mines, pulled plows in fields, and carried loads on roads. Draft animals in mid-nineteenth-century Querétaro produced the energy output of 270,000 men.³⁹ They were so important that a “hacienda or rancho without pastureland [was] considered of little value.”⁴⁰ The period’s ratio of farmed land to pasture in Querétaro reveals one major energy constraint all agrarian societies faced: more land allotted to raising draft and burden animals meant less land for feeding human beings. In turn, feeding animals and human beings directly threatened woodlands, the main source of heat energy. In other words, if one wanted more wood to, say, increase iron production, it was at the expense of growing food to feed humans and animals. One simply could not augment all forms of energy simultaneously. For an agrarian society such as mid-nineteenth-century Querétaro, “the problem of energy utilization was one of alternative land uses.”⁴¹

Querétaro farmers developed ingenious strategies for expanding the number of farm animals without expanding the amount of land under cultivation. Much like their European counterparts, Querétaro farmers grazed animals in the forest for half of the year, effectively making forest ecosystems “subsidize” human husbandry. During the rainy-summer season, livestock was brought to forested areas to feed on plants like quelite and romerillo.⁴² During the dry-winter season, livestock depended on a mix of cultivated and wild crops like clover (trébol), wild oats, nopal cactus, mesquite, and maize and bean stalks. Alfalfa, wheat, and barley straw were reserved for time spent in pens. While it is hard to estimate its impact, this practice undoubtedly deprived forests of litter and essential nutrients and likely reduced the forest’s biomass capacity.

The final piece in Querétaro’s agrarian system was farm technology.⁴³ Farmers used a variety of technologies to increase production. The wooden plough was a fundamental instrument, tipped in iron or with an iron-tipped moldboard. In Mexico, a yoke of two oxen was common (see Figure 1.1). The yoke was driven by one man (gañán) followed by another who cast the seeds into the ground (sembrador). In general, Querétaro’s cultivated areas had light soils,⁴⁴ so it is possible a yoke could plow more land daily than the typical 0.4 hectares of land that a team of two oxen could plow in the heavy soils of northern Europe, but we simply lack the information to say this with certainty. Normally, haciendas owned both ploughs and oxen and provided them to sharecroppers,⁴⁵ but with only 124 recorded haciendas in the state at the time compared with 8,000 ploughs, it appears that this technology was widely available.⁴⁶ Shovels, hoes, wagons, digging sticks, pitchforks, and sickles were also common. Some haciendas (Tequisquiapan, for example) introduced locally made, likely water-powered machines to winnow and shell maize and wheat. They also employed threshing machines to separate straw from wheat grain. Estimates suggest that these machines reduced production costs by 35 percent. But mechanical winnowers and threshers were only accessible to heavily capitalized haciendas, so their impact on overall farm productivity in the state likely remained small.

Figure 1.1 Zapotec peasant in Oaxaca with wooden plough and oxen, the most common draft animal in nineteenth-century Mexico, ca. 1870.

Source: Fototeca INAH.

Rain-fed agriculture in the Valley of Mexico (and across much of the tierra templada and fría) looked fairly similar to that practiced in Querétaro. What was unique to the Valley of Mexico was the wet, raised-bed agriculture system known as chinampas. Though diminished from its heyday in the early sixteenth century, when it covered over 100 square kilometers, chinampa agriculture remained important in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. Once widespread across the lake system, by the nineteenth century, chinampas were largely confined to the shores of lakes Chalco and Xochimilco and the towns of Santa Anita, Ixtacalco, and Mexicalzingo. Like their colonial predecessors, nineteenth-century chinamperos first located an underwater mound (cimiento) by sounding out the bottom of the canal with an oar. Once found, peasants fenced the mound with reeds.⁴⁷ They then piled up alternating layers of lake mud and aquatic vegetation, known in Nahuatl as atapalácatl, until the mound was some 20–25 centimeters above water level. Willow trees or huejote were planted along the edges of the chinampa in order to stabilize the soil. The size of chinampa plots varied widely, from a few meters to the size of several modern soccer fields.⁴⁸

Chinampas produced several crops annually and were never left fallow. With the exception of a few vegetables – radish, turnip, and carrot – most plants were first grown in nursery beds (almácigos) and then transplanted to the main chinampa. Maize continued to be the most important crop cultivated in chinampas, both for local consumption and for market in Mexico City and other large population centers in the valley. Tomatoes, chili pepper, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, green tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, onion, spinach, and celery were also grown. Yields were sustained over time by adding aquatic vegetation and lake mud before every planting.⁴⁹ In the early sixteenth century, chinampa agriculture yielded on average 3 tons of maize per hectare and supported over 170,000 people with per capita annual consumption around 160 kilograms. Assuming a population of 200,000 for Tenochtitlan in 1519, chinampas provided 85 percent of the food requirements of the Mexica capital.⁵⁰ This was an extraordinary level of productivity, matched only by twentieth-century farming methods using mechanization and synthetic fertilizers. There is evidence that such levels of chinampa productivity remained stable as late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵¹

Given that most energy in agrarian societies came from food, how much surplus a farming system could produce mattered greatly. How much of this surplus the state or urban elites could force subsistence farmers to give up – an inherently political question – also mattered. Surplus food determined the size (and location) of nonfarming populations, meaning cities and towns.⁵² Around 1860, Mexican farmers produced enough food for a mere 10 percent of the total population to live in cities (Table 1.1). This urban population was not homogeneously distributed across Mexico but concentrated in areas with the richest farmland in the country.

Table 1.1 Estimate of rural and urban population in Mexico, 1856

Type of Population	Number	Percentage
Rural	7,443,309	90.3
Urban	804,351	9.7
Total	8,247,660	100

Source: Jesús Hermosa, Manual de geografía y estadística de la República Mexicana, 1857, 83.

With a population of about 200,000 residents, it is no coincidence that Mexico City was by far Mexico’s most populated urban center in the 1850s (Puebla came in a distant second with 70,000 inhabitants). No other region in the country surpassed the Valley of Mexico’s productive system of chinampas and rich alluvial plains.⁵³ As the largest market in the nation, Mexico City also attracted producers from outside the valley. Mexico’s very high land transportation costs at the time limited the amount of food that could reach Mexico City, or any city, from other regions. But Mexico City’s lake system – which connected the downtown area and rich hinterland in the south and southeast of the valley – made it the country’s only noncoastal major city with access to cheap water transportation.⁵⁴ By contrast, the average population size for other capital cities in 1850 Mexico was 24,000 inhabitants. A city’s population in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, then, indicated the productivity of its agrarian hinterland and the city’s capacity to access its surplus. As following chapters illustrate, cities played a central role in Mexico’s energy transition to fossil fuels, so this national urban geography based on local agrarian productivity had long-term implications.

The solar energy regime also shaped how urban spaces were utilized and limited the size they could achieve.⁵⁵ In the 1850s, Mexico City had an area of about 10–11 km², large by contemporary standards.⁵⁶ Although minuscule compared with its present-day size (about 1,500 km²), it was extremely difficult for a city relying on transport by humans and draft animals to expand beyond the boundaries that both could traverse efficiently in a short period. Such constraints had many repercussions for urban life. For one, it forced people of different classes to live in close proximity. A recurring theme in the period’s travel literature is the disgust elites felt sharing urban spaces with léperos (urban underclass) and other members of the lower classes. Small cities also shaped routines of everyday life. Work and private life often existed under the same roof. Workshops and stores typically devoted the first floor to business and the second to living quarters. Under the solar energy regime, cities concentrated energy in every form, from animal and human bodies to food resources and material goods.⁵⁷ To keep the circulation of energy efficient, urban spaces had to remain small.

In sum, food production was the basis of mid-nineteenth-century Mexican society. While some indigenous groups in the north still subsisted as hunter-gatherers,⁵⁸ the vast majority of Mexicans depended on agriculture. From an energy perspective, hunter-gatherers largely tapped the flow of solar energy without regulating it. Agriculturalists, on the other hand, controlled this flow. They replaced an enormous variety of natural vegetation with a few selected plants, concentrating dispersed energy into their crops. Like farmers in other agrarian societies, Mexican food producers managed a number of constraints and risks. Some of these constraints were more or less fixed, such as the amount of land that could be cultivated using animal power. Others were cyclical in nature, like devastating El Niño–induced droughts.⁵⁹ Population growth was relatively slow and fluctuated depending on harvests, epidemics, natural disasters, and war.⁶⁰

Forests

Photosynthesis is the basis of life on earth. Plants, trees, and phytoplankton (aquatic plants) are the only organisms capable of photosynthesizing or fixing incoming solar radiation for their own growth. They sustain the majority of multicellular life-forms, which eat either plants or plant-eaters. Plants and trees capture less than 1 percent of all the solar radiation that reaches earth, and only a fraction of that amount is transformed into plant tissue. This all means that the total amount of plant matter in any given place sets a limit to the energy that can be harvested. Such a limit imposes ecological constraints on societies that use wood for heat energy. A close look at wood use in households, factories, mines, and other mid-nineteenth-century industries will illustrate this connection.

Although pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations proved perfectly capable of overexploiting forests, the real assault on Mexico’s forests began with colonial mining.⁶¹ Over three centuries, successive cycles of expansion, stagnation, decline, and renewed growth on a larger scale – coupled with colonial mining of silver, gold, and other metals – took a considerable toll on Mexico’s forests. The central highlands, the two Sierra Madres, and the northern plateau’s “mining belt” were particularly hard-hit. One study suggests that under Spanish rule, some 315,000 km² of pine-oak and mesquite forest – an area slightly larger than Italy – may have been cut in the mining belt to meet the voracious fuel demands of smelting and refining.⁶² Another estimate proposes a much smaller overall impact of colonial mining, about one fourth of the deforested area.⁶³ Despite disagreement, it is clear that the silver currency that powered the global economy of the early modern period, filled the coffers of European merchants, and circulated in distant Chinese markets⁶⁴ literally consumed Mexico’s forests. If one considers the deforestation caused by other fuel-hungry industries like iron and glass, along with the comparatively less demanding expansion of agriculture and animal husbandry, the true scale of New Spain’s deforestation comes further into focus.⁶⁵

It is very likely, then, that Mexico’s independent history began with large parts of its territory deforested. “Forest” and “wood,” however, are generic terms that obscure a huge diversity of types, conditions, histories, ecologies, and energy densities.⁶⁶ Where were Mexico’s forests located in 1850? What type of forests were they? What was their extension and condition? A combination of altitude, latitude, precipitation, temperature, and soil composition determine forest type.⁶⁷ In broad terms, this means that vegetation is typically more abundant in areas of Mexico closer to the equator and decreases as one moves north. Mexico’s tropical lowlands came in two basic forms: 1) an evergreen rainforest with a tall canopy (up to 40 meters), average rainfall of over 2,000 mm annually, and high temperatures year-round and 2) a dry, deciduous tropical forest with a lower canopy (up to 20 meters) and a stark divide between rainy and dry seasons. These dry forests extended along Mexico’s Pacific coast and into the Yucatan Peninsula, shading into thorny woodland and eventually a scrub forest in northern latitudes. Mexico’s highlands supported montane forests, mostly fir, pine-oak, and oak forests. About a third of Mexico’s territory, mostly northern, was occupied by xerophytic brush vegetation, which turned into grasslands in areas with higher precipitation and adequate conditions.⁶⁸ Of course, these “theoretical” forest zones were heavily modified by human action by 1850, some even largely products of it. Consider the scrublands that cover vast areas in the mining belt of northern Mexico, once populated by a variety of dry oak, poplar, and willow forests; most were felled to fuel silver mining.⁶⁹ Other forest types regrew following heavy human disturbance, including tropical forests in the Maya area, but with concentrations of plant species useful to human beings that would not occur in the absence of anthropogenic influence.

Although there is little information for accurately estimating forest cover in Mexico by the mid-nineteenth century, it is possible to make some rough calculations. One source from the early 1860s suggested that about 14–15 percent of the country’s total area was devoted to agriculture, 9–10 percent was fallow farmland, 8–9 percent was pasture and meadows, 6–7 percent was partially wooded (montes), a mere 4 percent was forest (bosques), and the remaining 55–60 percent consisted of human settlements, uncultivated or unmanaged land, rivers, and lakes.⁷⁰ Woodland and forest may have covered 10–15 percent or roughly 200,000–300,000 km² of Mexico in the middle of the nineteenth century (Table 1.2).⁷¹

Table 1.2 Estimate of distribution of land cover in Mexico, ca. 1860

Type of Land Cover	Area (km2)	Percentage
Forest	83,825	4.0
Woodland	142,345	6.8
Cultivated	326,025	15.7
Fallow	215,600	10.4
Grassland and Meadows	196,630	9.5
No Cultivation	1,099,385	53.2
Total	2,063,81072	100

Source: Hernández, Estadística de la República Mexicana, 58–9.⁷³

Limited forest cover in densely populated areas created severe problems for mid-nineteenth-century Mexico’s wood-based civilization. Various nonfuel uses exerted constant pressure on local timber stands. While typically walled with lime-mortared stones, wealthy homes required large amounts of timber for flooring and roofing. The poor also used wood for the frames of their homes when it was available. As mentioned before, most farming implements were made of wood, as was complex machinery like waterwheels. Some waterwheels had enormous dimensions, a testament not only to wood’s versatility but to sophisticated wood craftmanship. Wooden coaches were also common, although by the mid-nineteenth century US-made coaches became popular. In short, wood was easily the most important construction material for mid-nineteenth-century Mexicans.

But wood’s most important role was as a source of heat energy.⁷⁴ Virtually every Mexican household cooked using wood or charcoal in iron stoves or with iron or copper-made pots. Peasants everywhere made tortillas by placing flat iron griddles (comal) over a wood or charcoal open fire. Meat was also roasted over open flame. Only in wood-poor areas did the rural population resort to using animal dung, corn husks, dry maguey leaves, or any combustible material available.⁷⁵ We lack precise figures for domestic fuel consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, especially rural consumption. Still, it is likely that people in the countryside survived with 1–2 kg of wood daily, if figures for urban and statewide consumption are any indication.⁷⁶ Residents in the city of Querétaro, by contrast, had access to about 2–2.5 kg of wood per day.⁷⁷

It is possible to roughly calculate mid-nineteenth-century Mexico’s domestic fuel consumption and its environmental impact. Most sources agree that the country’s population in the 1850s hovered around eight million. If we take an average daily consumption of 2 kg of wood per capita, Mexico’s population used some 16,000 metric tons of wood every day or 5,840,000 metric tons annually. Assuming an average annual growth of 600 metric tons of wood per square kilometer, Mexicans in the 1850s required the yearly product of 9,733 km² of forest or an area somewhat smaller than the state of Querétaro to cook their meals, warm themselves, and otherwise cover their domestic needs. This represented between 3.2 and 4.8 percent of Mexico’s total forest area at the time. Such a vast extension of forest, of course, was only needed if people were harvesting their forests sustainably, that is, restricting themselves to extracting their forests’ annual growth. A significantly smaller territory would have been needed if people had simply clear-cut. Many mines had the financial means to bring fuel over long distances, and itinerant industries like ironworks could move to a new area once local forest was depleted. But most communities in Mexico were attached to their land and depended on local forests. They probably sought to ensure the long-term availability of woods and avoided clear-cutting unless necessary.

Woods, especially fuelwood, were also necessary for a variety of manufacturing and extractive industries in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. Ironworks, glassworks, and saltworks all required large amounts of wood energy. Throughout the colonial period and until the mid-nineteenth century, Catalan forges produced virtually all of Mexico’s iron.⁷⁸ In these forges, an open charcoal fire melted the iron ore. A trompe, a device in which water fell through perforated pipes to produce an air blast, intensified the heat of the open fire. Workers then used a waterwheel-powered hammer to work the mass of wrought iron into bars, which merchants sold at local markets for approximately 6 to 8 cents per kilogram.⁷⁹ Due to the exorbitant cost of transporting wood and charcoal over long distances, ironworks were typically located in mountainous, forested regions close to their fuel sources. Indian and peasant charcoal makers would enter the forest, where they felled, cut, and split the trees.⁸⁰ After cutting the wood into small pieces, the charcoal makers stacked them in mounds. Leaving the center of the mound hollow to serve as a chimney, they covered it with leaves or grass and dirt to seal it. The charcoal makers then burned the mound and, in a process that could take up to 2 weeks, controlled the fire, making certain no holes emerged in the structure. Human porters or donkeys then transported the charcoal in bags to furnaces.⁸¹

In the mid-nineteenth century, a traditional ironworks consumed 6.3 metric tons of charcoal (32 tons of fuelwood) to produce 1 ton of pig iron. A Catalan forge in Durango in the 1830s consumed in 1 week the same amount of wood that 19 hectares of forest yielded in a year.⁸² Put another way, a typical ironworks in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico could, in a single year, exhaust the entire annual wood growth of a forest area equivalent to Mexico City’s total surface area in the 1850s (about 10 km²). In some cases, the real consumption would have been much lower, since some ironworks operated for about half of the year. Nevertheless, Lucas Alamán, the great Mexican historian and statesman, noted in the 1840s that “the consumption of fuel by ironworks requires that woodlands be carefully managed or soon these establishments will run out of charcoal.”⁸³

The production of wood-fired iron faced clear environmental limits. Suppose a total of 200,000 km² of forest in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. Assuming a very rough annual average productivity of 600 metric tons of wood per square kilometer, such a forest area yielded some 180,000,000 metric tons of dry wood annually. Even if the entire annual forest yield of Mexico had been harvested to fuel ironworks (which obviously never happened), total production would have been 5,625,000 metric tons of pig iron, well below present-day outputs. As an essential component of industrialization, these estimates illustrate the clear limits to large-scale iron production under Mexico’s solar energy regime.⁸⁴

But Mexico’s largest consumer of fuelwood, both historically and in the 1850s, was mining. There were hundreds of mines all over Mexico, the majority of them located in the traditional mine belt of colonial origin. This included Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Real de Catorce in San Luís Potosí, the Pachuca area mines, and Taxco, in Guerrero. Most mines were relatively small, worked by about a dozen miners, and yielded modest outputs. Human and animal muscle provided mechanical energy and wood supplied heat. Technological inputs included simple tools and the ubiquitous horse-powered winch (malacate) for draining mines. A few mines, however, were large-scale operations with thousands of miners. These also used steam engines, which had a gargantuan appetite for fuel. Take the famous Real del Monte, a highly productive mine in Hidalgo, northeast of Mexico City.⁸⁵ In the 1820s, the mines came under the control of British investors, who sought to make them profitable again following the production collapse during the wars of independence. The British introduced some of the first steam engines in Mexico to drain flooded tunnels. In 1834 alone, Real del Monte in combination with one refining hacienda devoured a forest some seven times the area of Mexico City.⁸⁶ Charcoal consumption must have risen further when the company acquired a 400-horsepower steam engine in 1853, a veritable giant at the time.⁸⁷ Other major mining operations had similar fuel needs. The nearby Mineral del Chico, Hidalgo, consumed the yield of some 90 km² of forest in 1849 to fuel production.⁸⁸ Fresnillo, in Zacatecas, required 89 km² annually in the 1840s. Even relatively small operations like the mines of Anangueo, Michoacán, used almost 13 km² of forest annually.⁸⁹

As more mines adopted steam engines, fuel consumption rose accordingly. Mexico’s steam engines, like their British counterparts, were first used to drain flooded mines. It is possible a steam engine was operating in the mines of Real de Catorce as early as 1819. Santiago Smith Wilcox, the first US consul in Mexico City, obtained rights to import steam engines in 1821.⁹⁰ In 1823, one Juan Black imported one of these devices into Mexico for the Temascaltepec mine, west of Mexico City.⁹¹ More reliable reports indicate that steam engines came to Real de Catorce between 1819 and 1823.⁹² Whatever the exact date, it is clear that steam engines were introduced in Mexico only a handful of years later than in Peru, the first territory in Spanish America to use the technology.⁹³ With 40 horsepower, the Temascaltepec engine operated 8 pumps that drained 3,153 cubic meters of water every 24 hours. For comparison, a malacate could draw about 900 cubic meters within the same period.⁹⁴ Later reports from the 1830s and 1840s on the mines of Fresnillo, Zacatecas suggest that despite an enormous initial cost, sometimes running up to half a million pesos, a steam engine’s operating cost could be less than half that of horse-powered malacates. Not to mention that steam engines could reach depths of 800 to 875 meters, far beyond the malacate’s reach.⁹⁵ But even a medium-sized machine like the Temascaltepec engine burned through 17 metric tons of wood daily, a rate that devoured some 10 km² of forest to keep running year-round.⁹⁶

The enormous energy requirements of steam engines concerned many Mexicans during the first half of the nineteenth century. Some found them ill-suited to a fuel-poor country like Mexico, which had neither vast forests like the USA nor rich coal deposits like Great Britain. The renowned Spanish mining engineer Fausto de Elhuyar, founder and director of New Spain’s College of Mines (Colegio de Minería) and longtime royal mine supervisor, adamantly opposed adopting steam engines in Mexico. When the Spanish crown consulted him in the early nineteenth century about a plan to introduce steam engines to revive New Spain’s mining industry, Elhuyar rejected the idea on grounds that the country lacked enough fuel. He claimed that steam engines were unviable in Mexico due to lack of coal and widespread deforestation, especially around mining centers. He favored animal-powered malacates to drain mines; though not very efficient or applicable to deep mines, malacates were cheap and easy to use. Aware that his opposition might be overridden, Elhuyar emphasized the necessity of implementing forest conservation measures in case steam engines came to New Spain. He also called for locating coal deposits as soon as possible.⁹⁷ Elhuyar’s proposition to conserve forests while simultaneously pushing coal as an alternative to wood would emerge time and again in similar discussions over the next century.

Fuel scarcity was not the only concern among steam’s opponents. During the 1820s, steam engines were located in distant mines in the countryside, far from most urban residents. In the following decade, however, several factories and urban establishments began adopting these devices. Some town dwellers decried their presence, deeming them noisy and potentially dangerous. Angry residents of an urban neighborhood where a steam-powered textile factory was being built complained that

in addition to [the steam engine] being very annoying to the people of this neighborhood due to the great noise it will make, which will certainly hurt one’s ears whether one is on the same street or three blocks away, it is frightening because it has happened that engines blew up entire city blocks, killing everyone living there and some who were close by, as was the case up north.⁹⁸

Their “just and rational fears” of steam engines seemed to have little sway with officials and industrialists, who viewed the machines as beacons of progress. In fact, the government granted privileges and tax exemptions to businessmen who introduced or invented new industrial technologies. One San Luis Potosí entrepreneur requested such prerogatives to establish a steam engine at a chocolate factory. The editors of the Gaceta de San Luís (the San Luis Gazette) opposed the businessman’s request on the grounds that the steam engine, which had been imported from France, would economically devastate the large number of chocolate dealerships (expendios), not to mention the countless number of women who manually ground chocolate (molenderas).⁹⁹ Indeed, many poor people initially viewed steam engines as a threat to their very livelihoods. Beyond being noisy and dangerous, other critics claimed that steam engines could contaminate or taint food.¹⁰⁰

Still, everybody seemed to agree these engines represented a turning point. For the first time in history, heat could be turned into motion. Under the solar energy regime, people viewed energy not as different manifestations of the same underlying reality but as a set of discrete sources.¹⁰¹ With the invention of the steam engine (and later the internal combustion engine and electric motors and turbines), the gates that had previously cordoned off different energy forms were lifted. As scholars have pointed out, it is no coincidence that a unified concept of energy as a single entity converted into different forms only emerged after the creation of the steam engine, the first nonbiological converter.¹⁰²

Aware of their enormous power, industries beyond mining began using steam engines in the 1840s. Textile factory owners were among the first converts. Both cotton and wool manufacturers employed them.¹⁰³ But steam remained an unlikely option, for it required an enormous financial investment. In places like Puebla, then the center of Mexico’s textile industry with its abundant water resources, most industrialists in the 1840s continued privileging cheaper waterpower. Out of the 21 textile factories located in Puebla in 1843, 18 used waterpower while the remaining 3 employed mule-powered machinery.¹⁰⁴

Despite cost and opposition, steam engines found various applications in Mexico. In 1843, engineers used steam engines to remove water from the foundations of the new dock at the port of Veracruz.¹⁰⁵ As early as the 1830s, some people in Mexico realized that these devices could be used in transportation. Likely, they had attended exhibitions demonstrating steam’s versatility and potential. One such exhibition featured a steam-powered coach running on a small, circular track laid in the patio of a Mexico City building. For only two reales (a quarter of a peso), visitors could admire “one of the greatest inventions of human ingenuity.”¹⁰⁶ Almost three decades before Mexicans successfully established a national railroad network in the late 1870s, a few steamships transported passengers and goods along Mexico’s coast and even on the lakes and canals of the Valley of Mexico.¹⁰⁷ (Figure 1.2). Accounting for mines, factories, and a handful of steamboats, there may have been up to 100 steam engines in Mexico by the 1850s.

Figure 1.2 Steamboat La Esperanza on the Canal de la Viga. This canal connected the valley’s southern lakes with Mexico City. The lithography was made from a balloon.

Source: Manuel Arróniz, Manual del viajero en Méjico, 1858, 52.

Steam engines required heavy fuel inputs, putting further pressure on forests. How much fuel, then, did mid-nineteenth-century Mexico consume between wood and charcoal for all manufacturing and extractive purposes? The short answer is that we do not know. There were no reliable statistics for this type of consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. That said, we can use proxy figures to gauge the overall impact industry had on forests. The most accurate data is for all-important silver production. Between 1851 and 1860, Mexico produced a total of 4,569,500 kg of silver.¹⁰⁸ Silver production burned through a forest the size of the state of Tlaxcala every year and consumed the yield of a forest area larger than the state of Puebla in those 9 years.¹⁰⁹ After adding in ironworks, glassworks, and the many other industries that required heat energy in their productive process, there is no doubt this total figure would be substantially higher.

The combined pressure on Mexico’s forests from traditional industries (iron) and new technologies (steam engines) inspired a growing interest in coal. As early as 1829, the state government of Nuevo León granted a concession to one Juan Woodbury and one Juan Cameron to exploit iron and coal deposits in the state. These individuals also obtained permits to import machinery, presumably steam engines for mines.¹¹⁰ From the 1830s, newspapers reported coal deposits discovered across the country, emphasizing their significance by claiming that no other fuel was “more appropriate for the steam engines that are currently employed to drain mines.”¹¹¹ Enthusiasm for coal came from the common view that coal would reduce dependence on Mexico’s depleted forests¹¹² along with the conviction that Mexico required large quantities of coal to enter what industrialist Estevan de Antuñano called the “English stage” of industrialization.¹¹³ Production needed investment, and investment depended on legislation. When, in 1841, General D. Vicente Filisola requested that the Mexican government grant him monopoly rights to exploit coal across Mexico for 10 years, a government-appointed committee refused. Members justified their decision on the grounds that coal was essential for “the progress of arts” (industry) and that England, the world’s “leading manufacturing nation,” never allowed coal monopolies in its territory.¹¹⁴ This laissez-faire approach, however, failed to increase Mexico’s coal production. By the late 1840s, the government decided to exempt imported coal from duties, a practice that would continue for decades.¹¹⁵ By the early 1850s, coal was present in ironmaking and as a fuel for steam engines in mines and for the handful of steamboats that called at Mexican ports.¹¹⁶ Overall consumption probably did not exceed a few thousand metric tons annually.

In sum, mid-nineteenth-century Mexico found itself in an unenviable situation. Centuries of silver mining, iron production, and agricultural expansion and animal husbandry (especially goat and sheepherding) had caused substantial deforestation, especially in the central highlands and the mining belt. The total forest area in the mid-nineteenth century was between 200,000 and 300,000 km², representing 10–15 percent of Mexico’s territory. While several European countries featured territories with a mere 6 percent forest cover, Mexico’s forested area was minuscule compared with that of the USA.¹¹⁷ But Mexico seemed to have little coal to supplement wood, as opposed to European countries and the USA. Put simply, Mexico was attempting to develop its industry with relatively scarce wood supplies and little to no coal. Forests provided almost all the heat energy and an increasing share of mechanical energy for steam engines. Combined, domestic and industrial consumption probably exploited the annual yield of 10,000–15,000 km² of forest, or anywhere between 3 and 7.5 percent of the country’s total forest area. While many peasant communities were forced to harvest wood on a more or less sustainable basis to maintain forest cover, between a third and a half of all Mexican forest was likely clear-cut. Most of the clear-cutting came from mines and factories, which could afford fuelwood transported from distant sources. There is little doubt that overall pressure on forests in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico was considerable and made other sources of energy attractive.

Water and Wind

Water and wind were subordinate sources of energy in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. While waterpower played an important role on land, wind power was rare. Waterwheels were common in haciendas and various workshops and factories, especially modern textile establishments. They milled grain, powered hammers in foundries and ironworks, and moved mechanical looms. Haciendas and ranchos used norias to irrigate land. Windmills were virtually nonexistent in Mexico, but wind worked at sea, where, with the exception of some steamboats, sailboats comprised the majority of the country’s small merchant fleet.

Where was Mexico’s water? Once again, geography was not kind to Mexicans. Most water was abundant where human population was not, particularly the southeastern tropical lowlands. Water scarcity marked the densely populated central highlands and the northern mining belt. Fifty-four percent of the country’s runoff comes from just three rivers: the Grijalva-Usumacinta, the Papaloapan, and the Coatzacoalcos.¹¹⁸ All three drain parts of the southeastern Mexican tropical lowlands. The biggest river system in central-western Mexico is the Lerma-Santiago, beginning in an area west of Mexico City and flowing into Lake Chapala, the country’s largest freshwater lake, and the Pacific. This system traverses 58 basins and its total annual flow represents only 3.4 percent of the nation’s water.¹¹⁹ Great seasonal variations mean that most of this flow occurs during the rainy months between May and September.¹²⁰ In other words, the majority of Mexico’s mid-nineteenth-century population, towns, and cities were located in a region characterized by mountainous terrain, numerous small basins, and relatively low-volume rivers that run high for just a few months of the year. The vast, semiarid region north of Mexico City was even less fortunate. Excluding the Sinaloa River and the Bravo-Conchos systems, rivers in the north were few and meandered across vast, largely empty desert landscapes.

These factors make it clear why the majority of the country’s water-driven machinery was located in farms, mines, workshops, and factories in central, western, and north-central Mexico. They also explain why water was a relatively subordinate energy source, especially compared with western Europe and the eastern USA. Since medieval times, several European societies had relied on waterpower for a variety of tasks, including grain milling, wood sawing, and operating heavy hammers in foundries and workshops. As early as the eleventh century, there was 1 water-powered mill for every 350 people in England. The three early nineteenth-century New England industrial centers, Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester, derived their energy from the Merrimack river.¹²¹ Places like Puebla, which had both a large population and water, were the closest Mexican equivalents and became industrial and manufacturing leaders in the 1830s and 1840s. The productivity of the state’s numerous water-powered textile factories was unsurpassed in Mexico at the time.¹²² But even in Puebla, most cloth was woven by hand using the 30,000 or so individual looms, also called malacates.¹²³

Originally introduced by the Spanish soon after conquest, waterwheels became common in both Spanish and indigenous settlements.¹²⁴ Some early colonial mills employed undershot waterwheels, which move in the opposite direction to the running water. This model was relatively inefficient at harnessing the kinetic energy of water and required high-speed running water to operate properly. Depending on local conditions, other mills preferred horizontal waterwheels (rodeznos), which were technically simple (no complex gears) and needed only a small volume of water.¹²⁵ Another available model was the overshot wheel, the most efficient of which could convert up to 85 percent of water’s kinetic energy to mechanical energy. Here, water was diverted from a river or stream into a channel or, typically, an aqueduct and then fed through flumes into buckets at great speed. Since the wheel’s movement was generated by the weight of the water, overshot wheels could be located on slow-flowing rivers, greatly expanding their range and applications.

In Mexican haciendas and pueblos, the waterwheel was used for milling wheat (not maize). One Hacienda de los Hornos in Chihuahua, owned by Don Leonardo Zuloaga, had a water-powered mill with an overshot waterwheel and two grindstones that could grind 2.7 metric tons of wheat every 24 hours. The water was carried into a canal – presumably from a storage pond, reservoir, or spring that ensured a reliable water supply – and fell from a height of 2.4 to 2.7 meters, filling the buckets and moving the wheel downwards.¹²⁶ Wheels like this probably delivered some 15 to 25 horsepower, if 1880s reports are any indication.¹²⁷ This was modest compared with later wheat mills. If it operated year-round without interruption (unlikely), the Zuloaga mill would produce 985.5 metric tons of wheat compared with the 5,000 metric tons of wheat that an enormous, electric 500-horsepower mill in Sonora could grind in a year by the early twentieth century.¹²⁸ Waterwheels in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico were commonly wood, given the paucity of iron in Mexico.¹²⁹ It seems that craftsmen preferred mesquite for its durability and ubiquity in Mexico’s arid plateaus and highlands.¹³⁰ Less iron also forced craftsmen to rely on nonmetals for watermill parts, including the runner stones, which were kept in place with tight leather strips, much to the amazement of foreign observers.¹³¹

In industry, waterwheels powered looms and various types of machines that beat, crushed, ground, and sawed cloth, leather, ores, wood, and many other materials. We already mentioned water’s role in the mechanized and modern textile industry that expanded in central Mexico between the 1830s and the 1850s. In general, the trend was a transition from muscle power (human and animal) to waterpower. Consider the mountainous, water-rich area southwest of Mexico City. Traditionally a fruit-producing area, the foothills became the locus of an incipient industrial corridor by the mid-nineteenth century. Scattered throughout the Valley of Mexico, most manufacturing establishments were located in the southwest, particularly along rivers. Heavy rainfall during the rainy season, sometimes three times as much as in the valley’s drier northern areas, meant an abundant supply of water. Water-powered machinery quickly became widespread in the region. Out of 17 textile factories established here in the early 1840s, 8 were powered by human muscle, 5 by water, 2 by mules, and 1 by steam. A decade later, most of these factories used water. Waterpower led to increased factory size and productivity over time. In 1843, La Magdalena, one of the region’s biggest textile factories, had 8,400 spindles and 90 water-powered mechanical looms (telares de poder), producing under 9,000 cotton cloth pieces a year. A decade later, La Magdalena increased its number of spindles to 8,472, but now had 326 mechanical looms. As a result, production skyrocketed to over half a million pieces of cotton cloth annually.¹³²

Waterpower production capacity had limits. The Valley of Mexico’s clear division between rainy and dry seasons produced enormous variations in the water volume that rivers and streams carried downhill throughout the year. It was common for mills to stop working altogether for extended periods. Some factory owners tried solving this problem by building reservoirs, which often caused conflict with local inhabitants who used water for irrigation and domestic consumption.

Despite these drawbacks, water’s relative cheapness as an energy source and the familiarity of Mexican craftsmen with waterwheels and milling technology (as opposed to, say, steam engines), made waterpower highly attractive to certain users. Gunpowder factories, for example, were still relying on waterwheels by the mid-nineteenth century, and some of these became increasingly large, powerful, and complex.¹³³ One wheel installed in an undefined location in the 1820s powered two gears that moved four large, bronze cones each weighing over half a ton. These cones rotated on a platform crossed by a canal holding charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Grooves surrounded the cones into which the ground paste flowed. A skilled worker then added water to moisten the mixture, a critical step that determined the final quality of the gunpowder. This water-powered gunpowder mill could grind the paste in 6 hours, a tremendous gain over the 24 hours required using muscle power. It also seems to have improved the quality and potency of the gunpowder and reduced human labor by three-fourths, highly appealing from the factory owner’s perspective.¹³⁴

In industry, waterpower and animal power were inversely proportional: the more abundant water was, the less likely it was that a mine or factory would rely on animal-driven machinery. The famous German writer Carl Sartorius, who spent most of his adult life in Mexico, confirmed this when he visited the foundries that processed ore from the Fresnillo mines, in Zacatecas. “These immense works [foundries]” – Sartorius wrote – “employ thousands of men and thousands of beasts of draft and burden because all the machines, due to the lack of water, must be set in motion by mules. This remark applies specifically to Zacatecas and its environs, for other areas, although not all, have waterpower.”¹³⁵

Perhaps windmills could have solved this quandary, but this ancient technology was nearly absent in Mexico.¹³⁶ Geography and environmental conditions were partly to blame. Although Mexico has substantial inland wind resources, most of them are concentrated in present-day Oaxaca, in the southeast.¹³⁷ Here, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico’s narrow waist separating the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific by just 220 km, creates an enormous wind funnel. Warm marine currents in the Gulf of Mexico produce differences in temperature and pressure, generating constant strong wind from October to April.¹³⁸ The Isthmus, however, lacked a strong manufacturing or mining tradition and had few inhabitants in 1850. But unlucky geography cannot be the whole explanation, because Zacatecas is also among the best endowed with wind resources in the country.¹³⁹ So why didn’t mining exploit this energy source using windmills? Perhaps people were simply unfamiliar with the technology or its applications. Or if they knew it, they maybe associated it with draining waterlogged or marshy soils to create farmland, not a problem in arid Zacatecas. Perhaps windmill intermittency discouraged industries that required machinery to operate without interruptions.

Whatever the reasons, wind was only used as an energy source along the coasts of Mexico. In 1852, of the 839 ships that called at Mexican ports, 73 percent were sailboats (frigates, brigantines, and schooners) and 27 percent used steam. Only 8 percent were Mexican, while 52 percent sailed under the American flag, followed by the English (13 percent) and French banners (8 percent).¹⁴⁰

In sum, while water was a relatively minor power source compared with muscle and wood, it played important roles in farming and manufacturing in Mexico by mid-century. Waterwheels and new water turbines transformed the kinetic energy of running or falling water into mechanical energy for textile looms, hammers, grindstones, factories, mines, wheat mills, and various types of workshops across the country. Like other technologies, water-driven machinery was concentrated in areas with the largest population and human economic activity, particularly the central highlands and the mining belt in the center-north. Wind was of negligible relevance on land but powered most of Mexico’s small naval fleet.

Transport

Like other societies under the solar energy regime, mid-nineteenth-century Mexico faced a “transportation problem.”¹⁴¹ Overland transportation confronted clear energy limits, dependent as it was on muscle. Costs became prohibitive for many enterprises after a relatively short distance, especially bulky, low-cost goods like grain and wood.¹⁴² A pack of mules covered 20 to 30 kilometers daily, and in the highlands it cost 12–14 cents to transport one load (carga) of 138 kilograms (12 arrobas) 4 kilometers (1 legua), or 3.5 cents per kilometer. Thus, transportation costs for daily necessities like firewood (38 cents per carga) exceeded the item’s price after 10–15 kilometers. Similarly, it only took a few dozen kilometers before items like grain and wood required more energy to haul than they contained. Only high-priced, low-volume goods like precious metals and luxury commodities remained profitable after long-distance transportation.¹⁴³

Poor road conditions exacerbated the energy constraints of muscle-based land transportation. The main colonial roads from Veracruz to Mexico City and the one linking the latter city with Santa Fe, New Mexico fell into disrepair after decades of neglect. Other regions, including parts of the all-important northern mining belt, relied on poor-quality roads largely used by mule trains, horseback riders, or foot travelers – hardly fit for carts or coaches. On May 22, 1822, English engineer Robert Phillips and a Mexican colonel named Martínez departed from the port of Altamira, in Tamaulipas, with 14 four-wheel, ox-drawn wagons loaded with parts for a 36-inch steam engine. Their destination? The mine in La Concepción, Real de Catorce. After taking the only road north through Saltillo before veering south, the party covered some 800 km to arrive in Real de Catorce on November 11, almost 6 months later. The travelers braved high temperatures, broken wheels, and water scarcity. Most stretches of road were in bad shape. At points, the roads became narrow passages carved into mountainsides. Other times, the party hauled the machinery over rivers, at one point requiring the assistance of fifty Indigenous Mexicans and twenty yokes of oxen, and constructing a provisional dam to slow water flow. The terrain shattered wheels, and impromptu forges were built to mend them, contributing to delays. When the party finally arrived at their destination, they found the machinery badly damaged from travel. Phillips spent another 2 years making repairs before testing it, only to learn it needed iron pumps from the USA and another voyage to retrieve them. The steam engine finally began draining the mine in late November 1826, four and a half years after the initial trip.¹⁴⁴

As English diplomat H. G. Ward pointed out, the condition of Mexico’s roads rendered wheat grown in the highlands an “article of luxury” to residents of the port of Veracruz: “For strange as the assertion may appear, in the present state of the roads it would be easier, and cheaper, for towns upon the Eastern and Western coasts to draw their supplies from the United States, or California, by sea, than from the nearest corn lands on the tableland.”¹⁴⁵ It cost half the price to ship wheat from Ohio to Veracruz than to import it from the wheat haciendas of Atlixco, Puebla, 300 km away (Table 1.3).

Table 1.3 Estimate of cost of cargo transport by land and water in Mexico, 1862

Type of Transport	Weight (metric tons)	Distance (km)	Cost
Overland (Mule)	1	100	21.70 pesos
Water	1	100	27 cents

Source: José María Pérez Hernández, Estadística de la República Mexicana, 1862, 40–1.

Unfortunately for Mexico, the country had few navigable rivers, and most could only be cruised by boats and ships with a small draft. The only rivers capable of carrying large ships flowed through the scantily populated tropical lowlands.¹⁴⁶ The exception was the Valley of Mexico. Here, the movement of people and goods depended on water transportation in the bottomlands, where large canoes crisscrossed the lakes and canals linking Mexico City with its hinterland.¹⁴⁷ Lakes and canals made accessing urban consumers easy and cheap. The lake system represented essential transport until the late nineteenth century, when most of it was finally drained. Only after the arrival of railroads later in the century would water cease to be the valley’s cheapest option for transport.¹⁴⁸

Conclusion

For millennia, societies inhabiting present-day Mexico lived under the solar energy regime. These societies depended predominantly on the solar energy stored in plants. This presented limits to population sizes and their capacity to transform the environment. That said, the region’s history from pre-Hispanic times until the middle of the nineteenth century was highly eventful from an environmental standpoint. There were phases of intense modification followed by recovery periods, and moments of acute exploitation and irreparable damage followed by permanent abandonment. In the absence of draft animals, Mesoamerican indigenous civilizations developed complex societies powered by human muscle. Humans were the main energy converters of chemical energy stored in plants into mechanical energy.

Then came the Columbian Exchange with the introduction of livestock and diseases from the Old World. New pathogens wiped out most of the indigenous population and set the stage for the emergence of New Spain, with a heartland around Mexico City and a northern area centered around the Bajío and mining provinces. The former became a society of peasant communities with substantial ecological and food autonomy, commercial estates, and urban centers that channeled silver wealth into the global economy. The latter formed a highly commercial, manufacturing, capitalist economy organized around silver extraction, which deforested much of the region. Livestock expanded the limits of New Spain’s solar energy regime, replacing humans in many tasks that required high energy expenditure. Then came waterpower, first introduced under Spanish rule, which increased the amount of energy available for manufacturing. After the silver economy collapsed with popular insurgency in 1810, Mexico’s elites began promoting an incipient water- and-muscle-based industrialization process in parts of the country in the 1830s – radically early by global standards. The loss of vast northern territories to an expanding USA severely diminished Mexico’s energy resources after 1848.

Mexico entered the 1850s with a less commercial economy, a shrunken territory, limited energy resources, and reliance on food energy and muscle power. That said, it was successfully developing a mechanized textile industry, reviving its mining sector, and amassing steam engines. First introduced in the 1820s to drain flooded mines, these devices made it possible for the first time to transform heat into motion. But the vast majority of these machines in Mexico used wood as fuel. Unlike, say, Britain, where they burned coal, steam engines in Mexico continued to depend on the amount of biomass available at any given location. Steam engines remained tied to local environmental conditions, operating under the constraints of the solar energy regime. This basic fact held enormous implications over the following decades as steam engine use in Mexico boomed with increased industrialization and the rapid expansion of the country’s railroad system in the 1870s and 1880s. This multiplied the effect on Mexico’s forests, depleted over centuries of silver mining. Forests began shrinking perceptibly in many regions, raising concern among state officials and industrialists over Mexico’s long-term industrial potential.

The environmental, energy, and social conditions of the mid-nineteenth century emerged from the complex conditions of Mexico’s previous centuries, which would deeply shape Mexico’s energy history moving forward. To paraphrase that famous Marxist dictum, people in Mexico would make their own history, but not under the environmental and energy conditions of their choosing.¹⁴⁹ At the same time, changes in the types of energy exploited and the manner of their use would dramatically transform those initial circumstances.