During a revival of liberalism within Latin America in the late 19th century, liberal leaders yearned to replicate European customs (Wood, 131) while also establishing their place in the global trade market. Looking to modernize, many different nations implemented railroad construction, as it symbolized progress and industrialization (Burns, 134). In this picture titled, “Children on Railroad Tracks,” from the Tulane University Digital Library, said to be taken in 1850-1900, we see two children in Ajusco of Mexico City, Mexico, walking along railroad tracks. Liberals encouraged the utilization of vast landscape to grow their exports, either “temperate agricultural commodities,” “tropical agricultural commodities,” and “mineral products,” to trade to Europe and the U.S. This new form of transport made these vast untouched lands accessible to liberals and companies to use them to grow agricultural goods. Because of this rapid expansion, railroads facilitated the transport of these goods over long distances. They also carried workers to their job sites. Railroads, that ranged over thousands of miles throughout Latin America, (Dimas, 100) are a physical manifestation of the efforts made by liberals to not only open Latin America to the global stage, but to conform to the standards imposed by the Global north.
Through free trade and establishing an export-oriented economy, liberals brought conditions to the masses in which the economy could support population growths. In the same country in which the picture was taken, Mexico’s “population increased from 9.4 million in 1877 to 15.2 million in 1910,” because of the export boom and exponential growth of capital (Furtado, 267-269). The population growth is represented by the two children pictured. Although liberals attempted to push Eurocentric standards onto the rural masses, famously advocated by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina in his “Civilization versus Barbarism,” we see here in this picture the lack of shoes on the children. Sarmiento encourages the masses to take on European attire, as the culture of the countryside is “barbarous” (Sarmiento, 139). Although they pushed this rhetoric of economic and cultural “progress,” the realities of the impoverished masses were commonly dismissed because these large regions physically separated the rural masses from the state (Dawson, 100). Because these new forms of large-scale production over on privatized land demanded mass labor, the peasantry was transformed into a unique working class. Agricultural workers who worked for wages faced exploitative conditions and increasing inequality against landowners. There were massive economic and cultural transformations, at the expense of the rural masses and their children.
Works Cited:
Dawson, Alexander. Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Wood, James A. and Anna Rose Alexander, editors. Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations. 5th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.