Molina Solís, Olegario (1843–1925)

Olegario Molina Solís (b. 6 March 1843; d. 28 April 1925), governor of Yucatán, Mexico (1902–1909), Mexican minister of development (1907–1911). Born and raised in Bolonchenticul, in present-day Campeche, Molina moved with his family to Yucatán's capital, Mérida, in 1857, after the Caste War of Yucatán ravaged his family's properties. After securing degrees in law and topographical engineering, Molina served as secretary to Liberal General Manuel Cepeda Peraza, who defeated Emperor Maximilian's forces in the peninsula in 1867. During the 1870s Molina became an engineer, superintendent, and later a partner in the first railroad built in Yucatán, the Mérida—Progreso railway, which he helped complete. Later he established a profitable import-export company, O. Molina y Compañía, that largely exported Yucatán's principal crop, henequen, a fiber used by North American cordage and binder twine manufacturers. Some scholars contend that in 1902, Molina y Compañía became the International Harvester Company's agent—at the time Harvester was the largest buyer of fiber in the United States. It is believed that Molina and his son-in-law, Avelino Montes, worked to depress fiber prices to benefit their North American partners (and themselves). Molina and Montes used their dominant position in the fiber trade to expand the investment base of their company dramatically. Ventures in real estate, import/exports, and speculation in local industry, commerce, and infrastructure made Molina and Montes, and their extended network of family and friends, an economic octopus in turn-of-the-century Yucatán.

It is noteworthy that Molina's financial success coincided with his political rise to Yucatán's state-house. Driven by the desire to make his native state a dynamic partner in the modernization of Mexican society, Governor Molina is best remembered in the peninsula as "the builder." An indefatigable public servant, he is lionized for the number of schools he built, the paving and draining of Mérida's streets, and a spate of capital improvement projects in Mérida, including the O'Horan Hospital, the Juárez Penitentiary, the Peón y Contreras Theater, and the Ayala Asylum. (O. Molina y Compañía received lucrative contracts for many of these capital projects.) He also reorganized the property registry, rewrote the state constitution, reformed the penal and civil codes, and reorganized the state National Guard and Mérida police force.

The embodiment of nineteenth-century positivism, Yucatán's own científico (technocrat), Molina reasoned that, to the extent that he and his affluent class prospered, so would Yucatán. His regard for Yucatán's Maya Indians might best be described as paternalistic; he did little to provide education or other services to the tens of thousands of peons who lived on haciendas throughout the countryside. In 1906 President Porfirio Díaz visited Mérida, and after marveling at all of the impressive physical changes, rewarded Molina by bringing him to Mexico City to serve as minister of development. After Díaz was ousted in 1911 by revolutionaries, Molina, like many of Díaz's científicos, went into exile, living out his life in Cuba.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Francisco A. Casasús, "Ensayo biográfico del licenciado Olegario Molina Solís," in Revista de la Universidad de Yucatán 14 (1972): 68-95.

Diane Roazen-Parrillo, "Las elites de México durante el siglo diecinueve en una economía regional: El ascenso de la familia Olegario Molina Solís de Yucatán hasta 1902," in Sociedad, estructura agraria y estado en Yucatán, edited by Othon Baños Ramírez (1990), pp. 257-295.

Allen Wells, "Family Elites in a Boom-And-Bust Economy: The Molinas and Peóns of Porfirian Yucatán," in Hispanic American Historical Review 62 (1982): 224-253.

Additional Bibliogrpahy

Pérez de Sarmiento, Marisa. Historia de una elección: La candidatura de Olegario Molina en 1901. Mérida, Mexico: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2002.

Wells, Alan, and Gilbert M. Joseph. Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

                                            Allen Wells