Copyright by Andrew William Paxman 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Andrew William Paxman certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: William Jenkins, Business Elites, and the Evolution of the Mexican State: 1910-1960 Committee: _____________________________ Mauricio Tenorio, Co-Supervisor _____________________________ Jonathan C. Brown, Co-Supervisor _____________________________ H.W. Brands _____________________________ Richard H. Pells _____________________________ Alex M. Saragoza _____________________________ David G. LaFrance William Jenkins, Business Elites, and the Evolution of the Mexican State: 1910-1960 by Andrew William Paxman, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2008 Preface: Black Legends and Black Holes One spring day in 1993, when I was working as a reporter in Mexico City, an elderly American approached me after church and engaged me on my work. His name was Richard Johnson and he had lived in Mexico since the 1930s, when his father moved down to take a post with General Electric. Mr. Johnson complemented me on my feature articles in the Mexico City News , but wondered why I had not written more about the long-established U.S. expatriate enclave. “There’s plenty of interesting people in this country that haven’t been written about. For instance, there was a fella called Jenkins, William Jenkins…” Mr. Johnson proceeded to spin a fascinating mix of history and anecdote. Jenkins had once been one of the most powerful men in Mexico, and one of the richest, although he had arrived almost penniless. He was based in Puebla, where he arranged his own kidnapping during the 1910 Revolution and then started his fortune with the ransom. He had his pistoleros threaten landowners so they would sell him their haciendas, and they dealt with anyone that stood in his way. His main pistolero was a man called Alarcón, and together they owned a chain of movie theaters. Then there was another partner, Espinosa, and with him Jenkins owned a second chain; Espinosa was the brains of the Jenkins organization. Jenkins was close friends with Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was president in the ’40s. And when he died, he left all his millions to charity. A little later I asked Alex Saragoza, a historian from Berkeley then living in Mexico, if he had heard of this “William Jenkins.” Oh yes, he said, and reeled off a series of fragments, gleaned through his research into radio and TV magnate Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta. Jenkins had obstructed Azcárraga’s interests in film exhibition, prompting him to leave the business. Dr. Saragoza had seen him cited a lot in U.S. and British diplomatic correspondence, but Jenkins had not been written about very much because he had been so powerful. He was an enigmatic man. Though very wealthy, he kept a creaky office with just one secretary. He always wore the same clothes and shoes and the same shabby hat. Sometimes he would jog through the streets of Puebla while iv his wife took the tram; he said he ran behind it because he liked the exercise, but really he was saving himself the five-cent fare. There were various books I should read, Dr. Saragoza told me: Atencingo , which dealt with Jenkins’ sugar plantations; something called The Black Book of Mexican Cinema , by a veteran actor-director, which criticized Jenkins’ exploits in the film industry; and Arráncame la vida , a novelized life of Maximino Ávila Camacho, the former president’s brother. This man was a notorious governor of Puebla, for whom Jenkins or his partners had effectively pimped, providing him with movie starlets. He also mentioned a new book, El secuestro de William Jenkins – “it’s a dramatization of Jenkins’ kidnapping, which was probably a hoax.” But when I bought the book, I found its central thesis was that the abduction had not been arranged by Jenkins. This was no ordinary historical novel: it came with a twenty-page essay about archival sources. Preparing a story on the thirtieth anniversary of Jenkins’ death, I tracked down the book’s author, Rafael Ruiz Harrell. “It was a bona fide kidnapping,” he told me. “At the time, relations between Mexico and the United States were at a crisis. The Mexican government started to claim it was a hoax, in order to defend itself.” Ruiz Harrell was not interested in cleaning Jenkins’ reputation. He went on to describe how Jenkins took advantage of the Revolution to buy land using devalued currency; how he made high-interest loans to landowners whom he knew would fail to repay him, and then seized the farms they had put up as collateral; how he produced alcohol at his sugar mill during Prohibition and shipped it to Mafiosi on the Texan border; how a number of Puebla farmers had been killed so that Jenkins could expand his sugarcane property. This was when the seed began to germinate. If the story of the “self-kidnapping” were false, how reliable were all the other tales about Jenkins? Clearly he was no angel, but was he indeed as exploitative and murderous as conventional wisdom held? What of his decision to give all his money away – didn’t that gesture undercut the credibility of some of the anecdotes? v At the time that I was mulling these things, the Mexican press was full of debate about the pros and cons of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a U.S.- Canadian pact that Mexico joined on January 1, 1994. Carlos Salinas, the Harvard- educated president, was staking his name on Mexico’s economic liberalization and promising a vast wave of foreign investment and job creation. Like the U.S. press, the more conservative local commentators cheered him on; when Mexico became the first developing country admitted to the OECD, they feted this entry into a so-called club of rich nations. But critics derided the Salinas agenda as a “ sueño primermundista ,” a mere dream of First-World status. They warned that NAFTA was a gateway to economic subjugation. Columnists reminded readers of the Mexican-American War, in which the United States had purloined half of the nation’s territory. Cartoonists sketched blond or freckled businessmen conspiring to appropriate Mexico’s oil and banks. While some of the arguments were moderate, and while Mexicans evidently had good historical reason to be cautious of their northern neighbors, much of what was printed played on people’s fears and prejudices. Such rhetoric was, in a word, “gringophobic.” It seemed that there might be connection between what I was reading in the papers and what I was hearing about Jenkins. What if Jenkins too, in his day, was the target of politicized fear-mongering? The extraordinary tales about this man might be more than the harvest of decades of casual chat; they might well be a mixture of fact, embellishment, and fabrication, put about by a succession of interested parties. To separate the fact from the fiction, to trace the evolution of the legend, could be a useful way of exploring how exaggerated fear of Americans had shaped political, economic, and cultural debate in modern Mexico. Other intriguing questions arose. The more I read of Jenkins and his milieu, the more it seemed that he was not that exceptional. Exceptionally rich, yes, but not so different from the Mexican business elite of his day. He hired private militia to defend his estates; so did they. He forged cozy relationships with governors, generals, and archbishops; so did they. He made predatory loans to owners of haciendas; this, it turned out, was a practice standard since the nineteenth century, when in the absence of banks, vi private lenders had preyed upon vulnerable landowners. He resisted unions, evaded taxes, and engaged in monopolistic practices – all standard activity. But few if any of his contemporaries seemed to have attracted as much flak. Could it be that Jenkins was sought out for special criticism because he was a gringo? As I asked around, it emerged that scores of people knew or remembered a thing or two about Jenkins. Ron Lavender, the dean of Acapulco realtors, recalled how Jenkins always announced his arrival at the city yacht club with an unmistakable booming voice. Alfonso Vélez Pliego, a Puebla college administrator, told me how Jenkins had tried to shape his image for posterity through charitable works. Margaret Hooks, an Irish author then living in Puebla, recounted seeing plaques referring to a Jenkins Foundation on walls all over the city. I met graduates of Mexican universities who had benefited from “Jenkins Scholarships.” A friend chanced upon him, as owner of a huge Los Angeles mansion, in a biography of the Hollywood director Billy Wilder. In following years I would meet countless taxi drivers in Mexico City and Puebla who had a Jenkins anecdote to tell; one had even worked for him, driving trucks by night that were laden with contraband alcohol. But people’s recollections of Jenkins were abnormally subjective – he seemed to inspire fondness or loathing, with no middle ground – and written accounts were permeated with combative nationalism and gleeful distrust. An old profile in Proceso , the leading news magazine, epitomized the trend. Entitled “The name is perpetuated of the ‘pernicious foreigner’ expelled by Abelardo Rodríguez,” the article was a deep trove of salacious Jenkinsiana, peppered with quotes from a half-dozen sources, none of whom had a good word to say. A sidebar discussed the use of Jenkins Foundation money to restore Mexico City’s colonial center.