Ideology and Social Classes during the Porfirism

During the construction of the Sonora Railroad, several points of view were expressed about how to conduct the future of Sonora.

The national government had opposed for many years the economic development of the State. The reason, the fear of losing the border area. As Lerdo de Tejada would say: "let's cultivate the desert", that is, between Mexico and the US.

It wasn't until Porfirism when, reluctantly, this perspective was abandoned, and the Federal Government accepted to develop the border region, starting with the building of the railroad.

The Sonorenses received this project in several ways, like opposition from the cattle raisers, sabotage and a newspaper campaign against it in the Monitor del Comercio from Guaymas. A very interesting editorial published then in the official State newspaper, La Constitucion, deserves our reproduction, at least in part:

Who will always win is progress

Without realizing it, he have fallen in the terrible dilemma of Hamlet: To be or not to be (in English in the original). Let's show the foreign nations that today fear for our nationality, that by americanizing ourselves more, we also mexicanize ourselves even more, because when we are educated in their schools we turn more strong, more respectable, and we will be able to better defend the integrity of our national territory.

Associated with this interpretation, another idea was also then publicised by the US Consul, Frederich Simpich, in an article he published in the National Geographic magazine: Mexicans from other States call the Sonora natives, 'The Yankees from Mexico,' due to their savings habits, of advancement, as well as their nearness to americans.

However, contrary to this interpretation of the Sonorense which is still current in Central Mexico, the reality is that the Sonorense doesn't have a homogeneous attitude towards progress or the US, but one who has been determined by the social stata and economic condition to which one belongs.

Social Classes

For Instance, Sonora and Nogales during those times wasn't only the urban, progressive population, but also coexisted with them the other Sonora: the serrano, the farmer and the cattle raiser. The Sonora of the ranchers who had seen innumerable generations in an ahistorical process of sowing the land, of taking care of cattle, of fighting against the Apache or Yaqui. That is, of following the annual cycles of Nature. Those Sonorenses and Nogalenses continued living off the land, trying to keep their precapitalist way of life.

That's why the rancher from Sonora or Nogales, first opposed the railroad, and even later, with the economic development brought by the Porfirism, he continued his opposition in an underground manner, and when the Revolution had finished the war period, he would oppose openly the attempts from the Federal Government to direct them by first opposing against Calles, and even later the economic development of cattle raising proposed by Abelardo Rodriguez. But that would be in the future....

However, these two social sectors of Nogales, the urban and rancher, weren't the whole. There was also the great mass, those recently inmigrated to Nogales or Cananea or to other urban centers from the Porifism in Sonora. They constituted the human base on whose shoulders the economic growth would take place. That is, the workers of the mines, and of the new agroindustry, as well as of the urban economy.

This human mass, by 1895, in Nogales, came mainly from Sonora itself (85% of the total population), exactly half of them were less than 20 years old, a little over half of them were literate (53%), and were mostly country employees (21%), miners (12.5%), merchants (9%), home workers (9%), and public employees (6%), besides other smaller economic activities.

Ideology

Now, regarding ideological manifestations of Nogales during the Porfirism, the main secular celebrations were May 5, July 4, and September 16, when parades and sports tournaments extended to both towns.

Besides this, the Sonora Railroad had special runs to Magdalena on October 4 to facilitate the peregrines attending to the Fiestas. The old Autumnal Indigenous celebration had transfomed into a double fiesta: The Ohodham Indians went to celebrate, drunk, the ending of the yearly nature cycle of life on Earth, while the Criollos and Mestizos went to ask for personal favors to the image of Saint Francis of Assisi (Franciscan), who was celebrated in the day when Catholic Lithurgy celebrates Saint Francis Xavier (Jesuit).

1895 saw the beginning of the Spring celebration of the Carnival in Nogales, festivities that would last until the Second World War. In 1890, the prominent Nogalians founded the delegation in Nogales of the Sociedad de Artesanos Hidalgo (Hidalgo Artisans Society), following the example of the one in Guaymas. It was a mutualist society that followed the Anarchist ideas of Prudhom, ideas that had had a great following in France during the 1860's, and which here, in Sonora, had been disseminated by Ramon Corral and the Porfirism notables, influenced by French ideas.

These mutualist societies rejected political as well as violent action, and worked to reform society through the peaceful dissemination of workers associations that gave loans to their members. We have to recognize, however, that the Sonoran Porfirists had only canalized the already preexisting ideological trends of some sectors of society when they established these kind of associations.

That same year, the Philarmonic Club was founded, and 1897 would see the formation, in Nogales, Arizona, of Lodge No 6, of the Hispano American Lodge, although the main association in both sides of the border were the Masons.

Their first Lodge in Arizona, the Aztlan Chapter, received their patents in 1886, and Lodge No 9 of Free and Associated Masons of Nogales, Arizona, obtained permit on October 15, 1897, to also receive the Masons from Nogales, Sonora, as they didn't have their own.

In Nogales, Sonora, Lodge 250, Emilio G. Canton, would be integrated soon afterward. This Lodge would change several times it's affiliation between the Great Symbolic Diet, and the Great Lodge of Mexico, until 1905, when the Great Lodges were united in one.

After the death of Jesus Alonso Flores, in 1909, the local Lodge adopted his name, while Manuel Mascareñas was named Delegate of the Supreme Council in Sonora.