Stolen Birthright: The U.S. Conquest and Exploitation of the Mexican People

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http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest5.html

Part II: Exploitation


Mexico never had a chance to recover from the war of 1846-1848. The brutal military conquest not only denied the people of Mexico their birthright in the Southwest, but it impacted the population and damaged the infrastructure of the surviving southern portion of the republic. In addition to the actual injury of the war, during the century and a half since the conquest the U.S. has used its position of power to subordinate Mexico to its own predatory interests, systematically plundering the resources of its southern neighbor, utilizing it as a private market for U.S. products and investment capital, and relentlessly exploiting the labor of the Mexican people. The exploitation of Mexican workers as a reserve army of labor for U.S. capitalism has been especially onerous. The labor repression and exploitation that was initiated soon after the military conquest of 1848 continues to this very day. snip

American capitalism has used Mexican workers as a reserve army of labor since the conquest. The proximity of the Mexican labor pool to points of production ensures a plentiful supply of workers during boom times and facilitates repatriation during economic downturns. The international border is no barrier to this exploitation -- U.S. capitalism targets Mexican workers in both countries. As migrants working in the U.S., or as employees of American firms in Mexico, Mexican workers have been excluded from minimum wage requirements, health care benefits, workman's compensation insurance, and social security plans. Moreover, government health and safety regulations have failed to protect them, while the education and social services that they and their families have received in both Mexico and the U.S. have been minimal. Because of these inferior wages and working conditions, Mexican labor has been a source of enormous superprofits (profits obtained over and above those squeezed out of native workers) for American capitalism.

The American bourgeoisie has jealously guarded these superprofits. At the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. companies regularly enlisted the aid of hired thugs, local law enforcement officials, and state agencies like the Texas and Arizona Rangers to protect their superprofits through the overt suppression of Mexican labor. Since the early 20th century, American capitalists have relied on the federal government to regulate the reserve army of Mexican labor. The U.S Border Patrol was founded in 1924 to control immigrant labor and continues to act as a gatekeeper for U.S. capitalism, opening and closing the border to Mexican workers as the needs of the U.S. economy dictate. Immigration law and government policy have alternatively encouraged Mexican workers to immigrate or subjected them to mass repression and deportation to meet the needs of U.S. capitalism. Furthermore, in order to insure a cheap supply of Mexican labor, the U.S. government has periodically intervened in the domestic politics of Mexico. snip

Large-scale exploitation of Mexican labor began with the U.S. annexation of northern Mexico. Between 1850 and 1880, more than 55,000 Mexican workers migrated to the U.S. to become field hands in regions that had originally been Mexican territory. Significant numbers of Mexican workers were also employed in the U.S. mining and railroad industries. As much as 60 percent of the miners and railway crews in the American West and Southwest during this period were Mexicans. From the very beginning, both the wages and working conditions of Mexican workers in the U.S. were well below those of white workers.

Anglo settlers and capitalists flooded into the annexed territory, and by 1860, just six years after the Gadsden Purchase, the new economic order of the American Southwest was already established with Mexican workers and their families at the bottom. Although both the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase guaranteed pre-war property rights, most Mexican landowners lost their land and either repatriated or sank into the ranks of the Mexican working class of the Southwest. Like their landless immigrant compatriots, they had to earn their living as wage laborers -- carpenters, blacksmiths, freighters, servants, field hands, and miners -- and always and everywhere at wages less than those paid to white workers.

Mexican workers proved to be essential to the expansion of cattle ranching and agricultural production from California to Texas. Indeed, Mexican labor fueled the southwestern agricultural revolution that took place between 1900 and 1920 and contributed to America's overall development. However, it was World War I that boosted the demand for Mexican labor in the U.S.