UC Davis

This project examines four decades of foreign mining company activities in post-revolutionary Mexico, particularly through the perspectives of Salvador F. Treviño and Ramón Lugos, two Mexican refugees turned engineer capitalists. It illustrates the overlooked influence and power foreign companies had in forging autonomous spaces within and beyond the legal precedent put forth by Mexico’s government on its mining industry, and the impacts of that power in defying the “Mexicanization” mining law of 1961. Drawing on U.S. national newspapers, contemporary interviews of environmental activists, and oral histories, this article shows that the presence of these foreign corporations and their forged autonomous power demonstrated a striking contrast to the nationalist narratives and self-determination in post-revolutionary Mexico. Driving the autonomous power of foreign corporations were insidious manipulations and weaponization of the law to sustain company power throughout the twentieth century. Decades of resistance to reforms and regulation, this article argues, allowed for foreign corporations and their workers to traverse across not only Mexico but also the Pacific Ocean, setting them up with the proper organizational structure to forge autonomous spaces across the hemisphere.