The United States – Mexican Border: The Beginning

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During the 1800’s the United States Border region began to rapidly grow and with new land and resources to exploit, men like William Cornell Greene and immigrants such as the Chinese arrived and took advantage of the people, the land and the resources.

Like similar businesspersons William Cornell Greene, a Tombstone rancher, began to explore the money making potential that Mexico had to offer. With the financial help of local elites Greene became a junior partner in ranching. (Truett, 84) It was when Dona Elena, Governor Pesqueira’s widow, put her family mines on the market in the 1890’s that Greene and several elites were able to combine their resources and found the Cananea Copper Company. Elena then leased four properties to Greene. (Truett, 85) Greene then, with the help of a Walter S. Logan, a lawyer from New York, created a Mexican corporation, the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company (CCCC) and a U.S holding company, the Greene Consolidated Copper Company. (Truett, 85) In 1901 Greene united with Packard and the Roberts family to “combine their lands in southern Arizona as the Greene Cattle Company”. (Truett, 94) In addition, Truett reveals that Greene organized two new companies in Sonora: The Cananea Cattle Company and Turkey Track Cattle Company. (94) That same year Greene purchased 344,000 acres around Cananea. Greene and Bernard and the Cananea Realty Company began “to sell and rent town lots”. (Truett, 94)

The CCCC and its cohort reoriented the Mexican countryside bit by bit, acre by acre, toward the orbit of copper mining. (Truett, 94-95) Greene’s connections helped him accumulated massive amounts of land. For example with the help Tomas and Ignacio Macmanus, who traveled between Cananea and Santa Cruz,...

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...ops, and restaurants onto a place that formerly lay beyond the reach of regional commercial networks”. (Truett, 121) The Chinese had control of restaurants and groceries; they were hired as gardeners, cooks, houseboys and handymen. Jobs and resources were being taken away from the Mexicans and given to the Chinese. Testimonies state that the Chinese knew “how to make themselves indispensable” and in fact the relationships between the Americans and Chinese were more amicable. (Truett, 121) The progress that the Chinese made led to prejudices against the Chinese and anti-Chinese sentiments began to fill the atmosphere during this time.

William Greene and the Chinese immigrants are two of many capitalists that traveled to the U.S.-Mexican border region in hopes financial success. They helped build the Mexican economy at the expense of the Mexican citizens.

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