Mexican Brick Culture in the Building of Texas, 1800s-1980s

This work treats more than one hundred years of the brick industry of the lower Rio Grand Valley in Mexico and the United States between the twin cities of Brownsville/Matamoros and Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. Long before the advent of the maquiladora, brick production was a transnational affair, combining the knowledge, skill and labor of low-wage Mexican workers with judicious injections of Anglo, Mexican American, and Mexican capital to produce hand-molded bricks, products of what Cook refers to as “Mexican brick culture.” In an age of mechanization, Cook argues that the labor-intensive production of Mexican brick culture was a rational response to construction industries characterized by cycles of boom and bust. South Texans successfully mechanized many aspects of the production process, but from the 1930s to the 1950s they remained dependent on (mostly undocumented) Mexican labor for molding bricks. When Mexican workers were deported during the xenophobic Operation Wetback in the 1950s, Mexican brick culture shifted south of the border. For the next thirty plus years Mexican brickyard owners entered into a variety of economic relations with Mexican American and Anglo merchants, brick makers and transporters, and copious quantities of hand-molded brick, both crude and fired, flowed south from Mexico to homes, offices, and apartment buildings in Houston, San Antonio and elsewhere. Eventually the Mexican export industry also went into decline in the early 1980s, as a consequence of a severe crisis in the South Texas construction industry, as well as a furious propaganda assault waged against Mexican handmade bricks by the Brick Institute of Texas.A short summary cannot do justice to this complex work. Cook covers virtually every feature of the cross-border brick industry, including recruitment and training of the workforce; capital-labor relations; production, marketing, distribution, and consumption of bricks; brickyard culture and social relations; and the impact of national and regional government policies on the brick industry. Most of these topics are elaborated through detailed case studies during which the reader encounters a series of intriguing people who played key roles as molders, foremen, brickyard owners, investors, transporters, contractors, and brick salesmen. The wide variety of voices present in this book—from the most humble Mexican molder to the wealthy Anglo supplier—is one of its major strengths.The first three of the book’s four parts are organized chronologically, with one section given over to brick production in Texas (pre-1950), another mainly to the post-1950 resurgent Mexican industry. The level of detail is impressive, albeit at times somewhat imposing. However, the case studies rescue from historical obscurity many local actors whose roles in brick production contributed to the transformation of the built environments of cities and towns in Mexico and the United States. Moreover, these case studies, rendered through a combination of interviews and archival materials, constitute important contributions to regional history as does the publication of more than one hundred photographs of brickyards, brickyard workers and entrepreneurs, and brick constructions going back to the end of the nineteenth century.Part Four deals with class and ethnic relations in the brick industry. In interviews, Cook records the mutual perceptions of Anglo employers and Mexicans workers and brickyard owners. Drawing on earlier materials, Cook notes that many brickyard workers sought target incomes and reduced work time when employers raised piecework wages in an effort to increase production levels; employers met periods of rising demand by subcontracting out production or recruiting additional workers and renting satellite fields. When the market declined the temporary contracts were rescinded or the workers let go. Machine-based production lacked this flexibility. Cook also discusses the campaign unleashed by the Brick Institute of Texas against the importation of Mexican hand-molded bricks. A graphic photograph of the organization’s president biting a corner of a substandard Mexican brick punctuated the campaign. Anglos interviewed in the 1990s claimed that in the 1970s and early 1980s “opportunistic” Mexican brick makers flooded the booming Texas market with under-fired bricks. Cook notes that while this is not incorrect, “A great deal of money was made by selling whatever the market would bear, which, on many occasions, meant that poor-quality bricks were sold by many Reynosa brickyards to buyers who simply wanted bricks, regardless of their quality, to haul back to Houston” (p. 277). Although hand molded brick is not up to the standards of most factory brick, it is adequate for the environmental (rainfall, temperature) conditions of South Texas, and, as such, has been unfairly maligned. The “cheap labor discourse” that many Texas Anglos employ against Mexican brick makers cannot be explained on the basis of the Anglo business relationship to Mexicans, for these same persons “over the years profited considerably from the importation and sale of Mexican handmade brick” (p. 239). It is perhaps better grasped as the product of a recalcitrant racism.Mexican Brick Culture is a fine contribution to economic history, local/regional history of South Texas, and U.S.–Mexico relations. The book transcends the facile generalizations of many works that treat transnational economic relationships, and it does so as a consequence of a careful melding of social anthropological and historical methodologies. Cook shows how local social and economic relationships play out in a variety of ways in the context of a generalized global situation. The book should assume an important place within a growing body of literature that articulates the local and the global, giving each its due without succumbing either to mindless detail or gross and unsubstantiated generalizations. It is also one of the most sophisticated studies of a labor-intensive industry

Boom · Brick · Business · Civil engineering · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Political science · Wage · Engineering · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics

• Forgotten Border Actors

  Open Access•Stanislav Shmelev•Journal of Political Ecology•2002

  Add to list