Culture Clash: Foreign Oil and
Indigenous People in Northern
Veracruz, Mexico, 1900–1921
Myrna Santiago
Oil revolutionized the world. In just over one century, the resource created an energy
regime that changed transportation systems, war technologies, agricultural production,
state politics, and, ultimately, the global climate. Petroleum is an American fable too. Highrisk investment, technological and scientific innovation, fierce competition, boom-andbust cycles, outsized personalities, environmental degradation, and the expansionist impulse
all feature in the drama of American oil since the mid-nineteenth century. But oil is also a
local story. In Mexico, the Huasteca, a region of northern Veracruz, underwent the first oil
boom in the country’s history between 1910 and 1921. The experience meant encounters
and clashes—not all of them well documented—with social actors. The lion’s share of
historiographical coverage goes to the oil companies and state officials, with oil workers
gaining attention more recently. Missing from the academic gaze are the responses of indigenous people as they lived the oil experience. They are not altogether absent from the historical record, to be sure, but they do not speak for themselves. Information about them
comes from observers who, for the most part, were sympathetic to them but also saw them
as victims. A careful reading of the evidence, however, reveals a more complex picture.
Encounters between oilmen and indigenous families ran the gamut from seemingly benign
interactions to deceitful transactions and outright violence. Moreover, there is no question
that by 1921 the indigenous world had been impoverished and transformed beyond recognition, while the oil companies reaped profits and power locally and abroad. Yet wealth did
not protect the oilmen from unpredictable politics, and the role of the indigenous lived
experience played in that plot. Therein lies the twist in the Mexican oil tale.1
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, one decade into oil production in the
Huasteca, rupturing lines of authority and opening up for debate the logic of oil development. In 1920 the military phase of the revolution ended and reconstruction began.
During the following year the oil industry went bust, leading to a new official discourse
Myrna Santiago is a professor of history at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Readers may contact Santiago at [email protected].
1
Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1992); John Gever et al., Beyond
Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades (Niwot, 1991); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Climate Change: First Assessment Report (Cambridge, Eng., 1990). Historiographical coverage of the connection
between oil companies and state officials includes S. Lief Adleson, “Historia Social de los Obreros Industriales de
Tampico, 1906–1919” (Social history of Tampico’s industrial workers, 1906–1919) (Ph.D. diss., El Colegio de
México, 1982); and Lorenzo Meyer, México y los Estados Unidos en el conflicto petrolero (Mexico and the United
States in the oil conflict) (Mexico City, 1982). On indigenous responses to the lived oil experience, see Jorge García
Granados, Los veneros del diablo (The devil’s oil veins) (Mexico City, 1941).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas114
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
62
The Journal of American History
June 2012
Foreign Oil and Indigenous People in Northern Veracruz, Mexico
63
about foreign oil. That year, discursively speaking, the oilmen ceased to be modernizers
worthy of respect and instead became agents of exploitation and environmental destruction. In the eyes of the state and the nation, the oil companies became synonymous with
“Yankee imperialism.” More time and conflict transpired before the Mexican government
nationalized the oil industry on March 19, 1938, making Mexico the first country on the
continent to do so. The companies were mostly gone from the Huasteca by then, but the
actions of indigenous men and women in northern Veracruz earlier in the century helped
shape the state’s resolution. This essay highlights the obscured actions of indigenous actors
in the local drama of foreign oil.2
The Oilmen’s World
Edward L. Doheny and Weetman Pearson, the men who founded the Mexican oil industry in 1900, brought a whole world to the enterprise, including the praxis of capitalism
and knowledge about oil. Both men commanded capital and knew markets, contracts,
competition, and how to turn land, labor, and natural resources into commodities.
Doheny and Pearson intended to monopolize Mexican oil production “free from direct
competition.” Doheny, an American, was a leader in the field. He built the “largest fuel
oil business in the world” in the first two decades of the twentieth century and led Mexican
production until the mid-1920s when he sold his establishments to the Standard Oil
Company in the shadow of the Teapot Dome scandal. His business résumé was extensive:
he was among the first to exploit oil successfully in California. By the time he traveled to
Mexico in 1900, he was already a millionaire. Pearson was an old Mexican hand, an English
engineer with a list of major projects and close ties to the modernist dictator of Mexico,
Porfirio Díaz. The discovery of oil at Spindletop near the Texas coast in 1901 spurred
Pearson to cable his man in Veracruz to “secure an option on oil land for miles around”
as quickly as possible to “get the thing very cheaply.” By 1910 he was Lord Cowdray, a
member of the British Parliament.3
Both men competed to develop the Mexican market, with uses for oil that were the
same as in the United States: asphalt, heating, illumination, locomotive fuel. Doheny was
well connected to corporate railroad networks, and Mexico’s northern lines were American
owned. Pearson was part owner of the Tehuantepec Railroad, which he was building in
southern Veracruz. Neither man was averse to exporting oil should the right market conditions arise. They did so two months after Porfirio Díaz was exiled to France in June
1911. Doheny, who was producing 85 percent of Mexico’s total oil output at that time,
began exporting Mexican petroleum to the United States. A rush of companies followed
suit, as more than one hundred set up shop in the port of Tampico, though none rivaled
Doheny and Pearson.4
2
In 1937 Bolivia nationalized the four wells that the Standard Oil Company had established in the country,
but not an entire industry as Mexico did the following year. The Soviet Union had nationalized its oil fields in 1920
but leased them back to the oil companies by 1923. Yergin, Prize, 238–39, 274. I have translated into English all
quotations from Spanish sources.
3
Martin R. Ansell, Oil Baron of the Southwest: Edward L. Doheny and the Development of the Petroleum Industry
in California and Mexico (Columbus, 1998), 53, 1; Caspar Whitney, Charles Adelbert Canfield (New York, 1930),
140; W. D. Pearson to L. Body, April 19, 1901, file C 43/1, box C, S. Pearson & Son, Ltd. Historical Records (The
Science Museum, London, Eng.).
4
Ansell, Oil Baron of the Southwest, 53–54, 83, 86, 105–7; J. A. Spender, Weetman Pearson: First Viscount
Cowdray, 1856–1927 (London, 1930), 116–17; Ezequiel Ordóñez, El petróleo en México: Bosquejo histórico (Oil in
Mexico: A historical outline) (Mexico City, 1983), 27.
64
The Journal of American History
June 2012
Thus the oil industry in Mexico was born integrated into the American market.
Mexican crude was refined in Texas and Louisiana and fueled factories in the American
Northeast, “where Doheny’s companies dominated the business.” World War I extended
those ties to Europe, although indirectly. Mexico’s heavy crude replaced the lighter products that the Americans sent to the Allied Forces, but Doheny did export two million
gallons of Mexican gasoline—50 percent of total production—to the old continent. In
1921 Mexico reached second place in world production (193,397,587 barrels), buoyed
by the American automobile market. The following year the director of Royal Dutch
Shell, Sir Henri W. A. Deterding, toured the United States and was “astonished” by its
oil consumption, as 10 million automobiles—85 percent of the world’s total—created
the largest gasoline market on Earth.5 Mexico’s consumption was insignificant; its oil
belonged not only to American and European companies but also to those nations’
economies. Making that possible entailed engagement with the first owners of the oil:
the Teenek.
The Indigenous World
The indigenous people who shared northern Veracruz with mestizo ranchers and laborers
and descendants of Spanish colonial families were known as Huastecos, hence the name
of the region. They called themselves Teenek. Distant cousins of the Maya, the Huastec
had occupied the rain forests, marshes, and bogs of northern Veracruz since 2500 bce,
subsisting on agriculture, fishing, and hunting. They knew oil. They scooped the chapopote
that seeped through the earth and collected in pools for sealing canoes, painting pottery,
and burning as incense in ceremonies. They owned the land communally, a practice they
defended—at times through force of arms—from liberal politicians throughout the nineteenth century. They also resisted hacienda owners who encroached on their properties to
turn the rain forest into cattle ranches. By 1901, the year that Doheny and Pearson made
the first acquisitions of hacienda land, the Teenek had reached a stalemate with the modernizers. They had lost lands, but they had held on to some and recovered others, including
Zacamixtle, later an infamous oil camp. In 1894 ninety-six Huastecs bought out the local
hacendado, who sold them 9,600 acres.6 No one held individual titles to the land, but
each household had plots to farm and pass on to heirs. Everyone was always on guard for
cattle incursions as a prelude to land conflict. No one expected oilmen.
Close Encounters with Geologists
History does not occur in a vacuum, no matter how ignorant of the past the actors might
be. Interactions between parties are informed by the history that each individual or group
brings to the meeting. Thus oilmen and Huastecs brought different worlds face to face
5
Ansell, Oil Baron of the Southwest, 148, 155; E. DeGoyler, “The Importance of Mexican Petroleum to the
United States and the Allies,” n.d., folder 5352, box 115, The Papers of Everette Lee DeGoyler Sr. (DeGoyler
Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Tex.).
6
Lorenzo Ochoa, “Introducción general” (Introduction) in Huaxtecos y Totonacos: Una antología históricocultural (Huaxtecos and Totonacos: A historical and cultural anthology), ed. Lorenzo Ochoa (Mexico City, 1990),
135–54; Román Piña Chan, “El desarrollo de la tradición huasteca,” (The development of Huastec tradition) in
Huaxtecos y Totonacos, ed. Ochoa, 172; Escritura de Zacamixtle (Zacamixtle property title), Nov. 10, 1898, folder
38 040/60, box 9, Departamento del Petróleo (National Archives of Mexico, Mexico City); Myrna Santiago, The
Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), 40–52.
Foreign Oil and Indigenous People in Northern Veracruz, Mexico
65
when they met. The first contacts seemed innocent enough, unfolding largely on indigenous terms. The earliest representatives of the oil industry that the Teenek saw were graduates of new American geology schools who were testing their theoretical knowledge on
Mexican ground. They initiated the process that would determine what sites should be
leased or bought. They were true harbingers, knowledgeable about the past and the future
of petroleum; if they “discovered” oil on location, the whole place would be transformed.
But their immediate present was frustrating. Geologists examined rocks above ground for
indications of petroleum underground. In the Huasteca of 1900, however, there were no
rocks to be found in the tangled foliage of the “jungle.” The scientists needed help to
do their job.7
Individual Teenek came to the rescue. They found lone foreigners, presumably nonthreatening, wandering through the rain forest and offering cash for being led to chapopote
springs. Indigenous men had the upper hand in these interactions that geologists called
“exploration” (notwithstanding language barriers, as communication took place with a
dictionary). The geologist Charles Hamilton explained in his memoir: “the Spanish of
the Mexican Indian is simple—mostly first person and present tense.” Since the Huastecs
knew the terrain and the routes and locations of seepages, they determined the pace of
exploratory work. They earned what to them were good wages for clearing brush, leading
the way, and carrying an instrument or two. Although indigenous men left no testimonies about their experiences, the fact that some worked with geologists on more than
one occasion suggests that they sensed no danger. Hamilton, for example, noted that he
hired the “Indian” Lucio Sánchez to be his guide in Tempoal and again in Tantoyuca.8
Thus Teenek men must have perceived such sporadic and momentary encounters as
innocuous or even advantageous. They received payment for pointing out natural features of the landscape to tongue-tied foreigners. There was no obvious harm in that. The
same would not be true for their dealings with the individual who trailed the geologist:
the land agent.
Close Encounters on Oilmen’s Terms
If the job of the geologist was to locate indigenous men to show him oil seepages, the job
of the land agent was to ensure that Indian men turned over plots that the geologists
identified as worthy of acquisition. Teenek men, however, understood dispossession and
had a history of resisting it. Even so, they were not familiar with the methods the oil
companies used to gain access to land.
The land agents introduced new ways of doing business. They were salesmen, but not
in the traditional sense; they offered cash instead of demanding it. Their contracts utilized
a new vocabulary: subsoil rights, leasing, rights of way, royalties, rights of use, but not
sale. A proprietor with good Spanish language and negotiating skills could often obtain
greater quantities of money up front. Targeting individual heads of households, the
companies controlled half a million acres in northern Veracruz by 1906. That number
would grow to over 2 million by the time of the oil bust in 1922. Most of the acreage
represented large holdings—haciendas—but the Huastec lost much more.9
Charles Hamilton, Early Day Oil Tales of Mexico (Houston, 1966), 125.
Ibid., 44, 83, 85.
9
Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 68.
7
8
The Journal of American History
66
June 2012
A Guatemalan diplomat exiled in Mexico in the 1930s, Jorge García Granados, was
the first to document how the Teenek were despoiled. Cash was the most important
mechanism, liberally dispensed because the amounts (100 to 5,000 pesos) that Indian
men considered large were quite small for the companies. Deceit was another tool in the
kit. It was not unusual for indigenous owners to find out they had sold their plots when
they thought they had rented them. Since many were illiterate, they penned an X or made
a thumbprint on documents they could not read.10
If negotiations faltered or a landowner realized he had been swindled and made
demands, the land agent disappeared and violence ensued. García Granados described
several cases, but he was not the only one. A local congressman, Enrique Barón Obregón,
denounced a case before the legislature in 1922. It involved the locality of Juan Felipe,
whose communal owners rejected a deal from Doheny’s Huasteca Petroleum Company.
One night the whole town went up in flames. In the aftermath, having lost everything
but their lives, the owners accepted the company’s cash and turned over the rights to
the land.11
Murders of uncooperative indigenous men also took place, although those were difficult to document. No one was ever arrested, much less prosecuted, for killing Indians.
But men such as Ventura Calderón, the head of the land office at Huasteca Petroleum,
had reputations as hired guns. Calderón’s widow, Isaura Martínez, admitted in a 1980
interview that her husband was accused of “killing the peasants and committing atrocities
and a half.” She dismissed the claims, calling her husband “a man of action” who proudly
“wore the pants” in his department.12
As a whole, the cases show how quickly relations between indigenous landowners and
the oil companies soured. The companies succeeded in transforming the rain forest into
real estate—a commodity useful only in anticipation of the other commodity it might
yield: petroleum. The commercial value the oilmen attached to both commodities, moreover, was such that they would go to extremes to gain possession of the land when more
mundane market mechanisms failed. The Huastec, unaccustomed to competition on that
scale and unfamiliar with the brave new world of capitalist relations, were ill-equipped to
defend their property and sometimes even their lives. When the oil camps opened and
extraction began, they found a whole new set of challenges and less than optimal choices.
Negotiating the Oil Camp
The boom that started in 1910 was a profound shock to the human and natural ecology
of the Huasteca. The transformation of the rain forest into an industrial complex linked
to the United States and England posed enormous challenges to Teenek communities.
They witnessed the replacement of tropical ecosystems by derricks, dormitories, workshops, pump stations, pipelines, and huge open-pit oil reservoirs. Fires were frequent and
spills were massive. Land, lakes, and rivers turned black for miles and miles, blanketed in
thick, oozy crude. Villages became urbanized and life changed. Zacamixtle, which was
not in “the least interesting” to the geologist Hamilton around 1913 became by 1920
García Granados, Veneros del diablo, 143, 166–67.
Ibid., 40–53; Aurelio Regalado Hernández, “La Huasteca petrolera, testimonio de un diputado (1922),”
(Huasteca oil, a congressman’s testimony, 1922) El Sol de Tampico, May 23, 2008, http://www.oem.com.mx/
elsoldetampico/notas/n708424.htm.
12
Javier Santos Llorente, Episodios petroleros (Oil industry episodes) (Mexico City, 1988), 185–86.
10
11
Foreign Oil and Indigenous People in Northern Veracruz, Mexico
67
“a North American Wild West town,” according to a Mexican observer. Drunks, prostitutes, gamblers, speculators, merchants, soldiers, “foul-mouthed youths,” and drifters
crowded its muddy streets—a perfect “picture of misery, filth, slovenliness, and improvisation,” wrote the highest-ranking Mexican in the industry, the engineer Ezequiel
Ordóñez. Within one year of oil exploitation, Zacamixtle was unrecognizable, “ruined,”
in the eyes of an American executive, not by the “vice” Mexicans deplored but “by waste
compelled by competition.”13
Again, the Huastecs did not document their reactions to such rapid and radical
changes, but the literature suggests that their options were few and poor. The three most
common were working for the companies, providing private services for workers, or
migrating. Oilmen and Mexican workers reported that indigenous men did oil work but
only temporarily and sometimes against their will. Workers recruited by the companies
recalled that Indians built the initial shelters upon arrival to open camps in Cerro Azul,
Amatlán, and Potrero del Llano. But the Indians refused to perform other kinds of labor.
In congressional testimony, Doheny attributed such reticence not to harsh working conditions or bitter experience with oilmen but to a lack of discipline “typical” of “native
laborers,” who, “while working for a very low wage (36 centavos per diem) were not
accustomed to the continuous application which was necessary in the opening up of an
oil field.”14
Thus forcing indigenous men to work was not unusual, particularly when wells
exploded or caught fire. The best-documented cases are the wells Juan Casiano No. 6,
Juan Casiano No. 7, and Potrero del Llano No. 4—all of which occurred in September
1910. For the Juan Casiano wells, Doheny called on local Porifirian authorities to round
up “close to one thousand Indians” to contain the gushers. At Potrero del Llano, likewise,
officials responded to Pearson’s cry for help by organizing thousands of men into “gangs”
during the thirty days of the spill. In 1914, the Huastecs were back at Potrero del Llano
No. 4, this time fighting a fire that lasted six months.15
Nevertheless, there is evidence that individual Teenek provided services to workers of
their own accord. Ordóñez, the Mexican engineer, suggests they commercialized chickens
and eggs in Zacamixtle, while a colleague, Manuel Mesa Andraca, wrote that two indigenous women set up a food stand to feed his work crew in the same camp.16
Leaving their communities was a third option for the natives who were threatened by
the oil industry. García Granados documents that women and children who lost
husbands and fathers in disputes over leases relocated to port cities such as Tuxpan or
Tampico. Eufrosina Flores, for example, ended up in Los Angeles, California. Zacamixtle
itself was abandoned sometime between 1913 and 1917, before the camps even opened.
13
Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 83–84, 108–16, 122–29; Hamilton, Early Day Oil Tales of Mexico, 69; Santos Llorente,
Episodios petroleros, 85; Ordóñez, Petróleo en México, 93–94. Paul Weaver to A. T. Beazley, Dec. 17, 1920, folder
5102, box 101, DeGoyler Papers.
14
Alma Yolanda, Cuesta abajo: Declinación de tres caciques huastecos revolucionarios: Cedillo, Santos, y Peláez
(Downhill: The decline of three Huasteca revolutionary strongmen: Cedillo, Santos, and Peláez) (Mexico City,
1991), 76; For Edward L. Doheny’s testimony, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Investigation of Mexican Affairs, 66 Cong., 1 sess., March 4, 1920, p. 232.
15
Boletín del Petróleo, 27 (Feb. 1929), 219, caption; Arthur B. Clifford, “Extinguishing an Oil Well Fire in
Mexico,” Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 63 (no. 3, 1921–1922), 3, 7–8.
16
Ordóñez, Petróleo en México, 43; Manuel Mesa Andraca, Relatos autobiográficos: Con las compañías petroleras;
mi vinculación con la reforma agraria (Autobiographical stories: With the oil companies; my links to agrarian reform)
(Mexico City, 1981), 34–35.
68
The Journal of American History
June 2012
Mesa Andraca noticed that only “a few Indian huts” remained in the forest when he
arrived there in 1918, while Ordóñez said the buildings around the town’s plaza were “in
ruins” in 1919. An anthropologist confirmed the phenomenon, writing in 1919 that the
Huastec had fled “into the high mountains” beyond Zacamixtle. All three authors attributed the abandonment of Zacamixtle to the violence instigated by Manuel Peláez, a local
hacendado and business partner of the oil companies. He raised a local army to provide
protection to the companies from revolutionaries such as Pancho Villa who sought control over the oil fields.17 In all cases, the Teenek navigated the upheaval that the oil camps
wrought upon their territory as best they could, accommodating to or fleeing from new
environmental, economic, and social realities. When the oil bust occurred in the early
1920s, new opportunities arose and the Huastec were there to take advantage of them.
New Narrative, New Claims
Carlos González Salas, a priest and chronicler of his native city, Tampico, concluded that
oil “passed by like a summer storm, leaving very little and building even less.”18 It would
be more descriptive to say that in the Huasteca oil passed like a fall hurricane destroying
everything in its path. In 1921 the first oil boom in Mexican history ended as abruptly as
it had begun. The oilmen left the Huasteca to start the cycle again elsewhere in Mexico,
but the important point for this story is that the crash forced Mexico’s revolutionary
government to focus on the local history of oil exploitation in a very public way on the
front pages of the newspapers. Different groups used that national platform to air their
grievances against the companies. In doing so, they staged a discursive rebellion that
changed the way Mexicans expressed themselves about the oil companies. The Huastec
were among the historical actors who made that possible.
A drop neither in profits nor production caused the crash. Doheny’s Mexican Eagle
Oil Company, in fact, netted a profit of $22,449,426 in 1921, a gain of almost 7 million
dollars over 1920 and “a record of earnings unsurpassed in the history of the company.”
Similarly, Mexican wells continued producing upward of 100 million barrels through
1925, slowing to 90 million in 1926 until they dropped to 64 million in 1925. It was
rather the intersection of political conflicts and production practices that created the
crisis. In early 1921 salt water in the wells alerted the companies that hyperexploitation
had taken its predictable toll, but what tipped the scales was the battle with the government over Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which established the nation
as the sole owner of Mexico’s subsoil. In a show of force, the companies took the rare step
of cooperating to shut down the industry. Between May and July, they suspended production, firing approximately half the labor force—ten to twenty-five thousand men—and
locking out the rest. The oil industry was done in the Huasteca, and the reaction was immediate.19
17
García Granados, Veneros del diablo, 43, 59, 150; Ordóñez, Petróleo en México, 91–92; Mesa Andraca, Relatos
autobiográficos, 31–32. Walter Staub, “Some Data about the Pre-Hispanic and the Now-Living Huastec Indians,” El
México Antiguo, 1 (Sept. 1919), 54; Gabriel Antonio Menéndez, Doheny el cruel: Valoración histórica de la sangrienta
lucha por el petróleo mexicano (Doheney the cruel: A historical evaluation of the bloody struggle over Mexican oil)
(Mexico City, 1958), 83.
18
Carlos González Salas, Tampico: Crónicas de una ciudad (Tampico: City chronicles) (Tampico, 1977), 136.
19
New York Times, June 22, 1922, clipping, folder 5352, box 115, DeGoyler Papers; Meyer, México y los Estados
Unidos en el conflicto petrolero, 21; “25,000 Idle in Tampico as Oil Drilling Halts,” New York Times, July 4, 1921,
p. 20; “Two Warships Ordered to Guard Americans at Mexican Oil Post,” ibid., July 6, 1921, p. 1; “Cerca de 25,000
Foreign Oil and Indigenous People in Northern Veracruz, Mexico
69
The federal government rushed to the Huasteca. President Álvaro Obregón sent his
secretary of the interior (and successor in office in 1924) to investigate the crash. With
the press in tow, Plutarco Elías Calles toured Zacamixtle, Amatlán, Chinampa, and
Toteco—all historically indigenous areas. Calles listened to local groups, including the
Huastecs who, according to the daily press, “were the most affected,” having lost their
land to intermediaries and “lawyers.” The secretary, the newspaper noted, “received many
complaints” about indigenous dispossession. The Teenek were clearly going for broke.
Just three months before, in March, “a delegation of the inhabitants of Zacamixtle
village,” wrote an oil executive, had traveled to Mexico City to meet with the president.
Their mission was “to request the return to them of the lands of which they have been
deprived.” Three months later, the Teenek pressed their case again, this time before the
national press. What would the secretary say?20
In early July Calles made his final statements to the press. He minced no words in
denouncing the companies as exploiters. He accused them of abusing Mexico’s people,
ruining its land, and wasting its natural resources. No official of his rank had ever
made such harsh pronouncements in public before. A new narrative about foreign oil
was born—a narrative of wasteland in which the companies not only had taken advantage
of Mexico and stolen its petroleum to develop the American and European economies
but also had thwarted Mexico’s own progress in the process. The new interpretation stuck.
It is the dominant narrative about foreign oil in Mexican popular and intellectual discourse to this day. It is the singular contribution the Teenek made to Mexican nationalism
and the revolution. By making their discontent known to the president and the secretary
personally, the Teenek joined much more vocal groups (such as the oil workers) in repudiating the companies’ self-congratulatory discourse. Recounting their stories publicly
also helped preserve their experience. While their words were not recorded directly,
their conflicts with the companies were retold by post–oil boom observers precisely
because the Huastec became an integral piece of a critical narrative. Although the Teenek
did not forge the new narrative on their own and they had no control over how their
lives would be represented, their voice was part of the chorus that made that discursive
uprising possible and triumphant.21
Other Huastec actions are more difficult to judge. After the bust a few Teenek became
involved in lawsuits seeking to collect royalties for oil produced. The cases were instigated
by enterprising young men who were sympathetic to the Huastec cause, strongly nationalist in sentiment, and infused with personal ambition. The classic case involved land lot
no. 113 in Amatlán. It included faulty property titles, informal land inheritances and sales
among community members, multiple transfers of rights, huge publicity, and a paper
company representing Antonio Zamora’s heir. The company sued Mexican Eagle Oil
obreros están sin trabajo en la zona petrolera” (Close to 25,000 laborers are unemployed in the oil region), Excélsior
(Mexico City), July 2, 1921, p. 1; “Se agrava la crisis obrera en Tampico” (The labor crisis worsens in Tampico),
ibid., July 3, 1921, p. 1; “Dificultades en Tampico” (Difficulties in Tampico), ibid., July 4, 1921, p. 1; “El gobierno
defenderá a los obreros” (The government will defend the workers), ibid., July 5, 1921, p. 1; “No todas las cias.
petroleras tienen suspenso el trabajo” (Not all oil companies have suspended work), ibid., July 6, 1921, p. 1; Meyer,
México y los Estados Unidos en el conflicto petrolero, 176.
20
“El general Calles habla ampliamente sobre la cuestión del petróleo” (General Calles speaks extensively about
the oil question), Excélsior (Mexico City), June 12, 1921; T. J. Ryder to D. Hutchinson, March 25, 1921, folder
5101, box 101, DeGoyler Papers.
21
“No todas las cias. petroleras tienen suspenso el trabajo,” 1. For an example of the “self-congratulatory discourse,” see James H. Hall, “How the Sea Lanes Are Laid,” Petroleum Age, 7 (March 1920), 43.
70
The Journal of American History
June 2012
Company in 1929, demanding 20 million pesos in royalties owed. The proceedings
lasted seven years, until the company settled out of court, paying 12,217,007 pesos to
the party that filed suit. However, nothing in the record states how much, if anything,
Zamora’s heirs actually received.22
Finally, the end of exploration and large-scale extraction of petroleum in the Huasteca
meant that indigenous landowners could reclaim what had been theirs. The landscape was
bereft of trees and blanketed in oil, but it was home. Encouraged by revolutionary legislation favoring the restoration of communal lands, community members from El Alamo,
Zacamixtle, El Humo, Tierra Amarilla, Juan Felipe, and Potrero del Llano petitioned the
state for communal lands (ejidos). The companies’ environmental legacy affected the
claims. Zacamixtle, for instance, had nearly two hundred wells drilled (sixty-one productive
ones) between late 1919 and early 1921, on 9,600 acres divided into 130 lots. The deforestation and spills had left only one lot unspoiled, no. 19, sixty-eight acres where the plaza had
stood. In 1921 “a great number of indígenas,” announced the press, claimed lot no. 19 as
an ejido. The paperwork apparently languished in the bureaucracy, because the archives
show the claim was formalized on February 20, 1932, a decade after the newspaper report.
The record shows that thirty men received land another decade later, in June 1944. It was
not lot no. 19, but rather “small fractions” of other lots. In 1955 the case was still not fully
resolved due to technical reasons, while the number of petitioners had grown to fifty-six.
Those who were alive and persevered finally obtained the ejido in 1963, forty-two years
after the process began. They received five hundred acres from Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex),
the state company that absorbed the foreign oil companies after the 1938 nationalization.
By then, the file read, Zacamixtle’s ecology consisted of tropical “shrubs” and pasture.23
Although some communities eventually found redress, undoubtedly many more
Huastec never recovered from their losses. Unwilling or unable to reclaim their land as
first owners, those families lost loved ones and familiar landscapes forever. They did not
disappear, but their presence receded as the mestizo population that the oil industry
attracted grew and occupied greater political space. After 1921 the industry’s center of
gravity shifted to Tampico’s refineries and the new oil fields that continued to feed the
American automobile and industrial apparatus. Labor took center stage, waging a revolution from below that led to the 1938 nationalization of oil by the Mexican government.
No one recorded what the Huastec thought of the nationalization decree, but they had
every right to be as jubilant as the oil workers were on the night of March 18, 1938, when
President Lázaro Cárdenas made the announcement.24 Their two cents were ensconced in
the decree.
The Huastec were the first indigenous people in Latin America to know oil development. Their experience echoed among others throughout the rest of the century and the
world. Although the political contexts differed, the companies’ way of doing business did
22
The chargé d’affaires ad interim R. Henry Norweb to Secretary of State, May 14, 1935 (microfilm: roll 126,
doc. 812.6363/2845), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1930–1939,
General Records of the Department of State, rg 59 (National Archives, College Park, Md.).
23
Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 274–77; “Concesiones” (Concessions), Boletín del Petróleo, 25 (Jan. 1928); Llorente,
Episodios petroleros, 85; “El general Calles habla ampliamente sobre la cuestión del petróleo”; Index of Zacamixtle
wells, folder 5148, box 103, DeGoyler Papers; Gerónimo Treviño to Everette DeGolyer, Sept. 10, 1917, folder
5102, box 101, ibid.; Informe, Zacamixtle (Report on Zacamixtle land claim), n.d., folder 1809, Comisión Agraria
Mixta (Mixed agrarian commission), Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (Veracruz State Archive, Xalapa,
Mexico).
24
Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 277, 339.
Foreign Oil and Indigenous People in Northern Veracruz, Mexico
71
not change much. The acquisition of access to land, the opening and operation of oil
camps, the social dislocation and conflict, and the environmental destruction would
remain remarkably similar in subsequent ventures, from Venezuela to the Middle East,
and from Ecuador to Nigeria. A template was set, and it proved to be exportable and
successful. Governments and peoples still look to oil discoveries today with hopeful eyes.
If not all do, it is because the political context, in fact, matters. If there are critical voices
that retard oil development, it is because the Teenek did their part to knock the oilmen
off their “pioneer” pedestal and to challenge their representation as “civilizers” of
“pest-infested, tropical wilderness.” That discursive revolt was a first step that others took
further later. It is still worthy of emulation.25
25
Miguel Tinker Salas, The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (Durham, N.C., 2009);
Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2006); Suzana Sawyer, Crude
Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, N.C., 2004); Anna Zalik,
“Zones of Exclusion: Offshore Extraction, the Contestation of Space and Physical Displacement in the Nigerian
Delta and the Mexican Gulf,” Antipode, 41 (June 2009), 557–82; Huasteca Petroleum Company, Expropriation
(New York, 1938), 1.