Obraje

Obraje, a single enterprise that incorporated most, if not all, of the processes of wool cloth manufacture: dyeing, carding, spinning, weaving, fulling, and finishing. First established in Puebla, Mexico, during the 1530s, by the 1560s obrajes had developed in Peru. Obraje buildings were large: the examples Richard Salvucci gives for Mexico range from 5,600 to almost 40,000 square feet. Andean obrajes could be even bigger: Manuel Miño Grijalva cites the obraje of Pichuichuro (1777), which had five patios and weaving and spinning galleries, each 250 yards long. An obraje could house between 4 and 40 looms, and employ from 40 to 250 men, women, and children. Early in the colonial period obrajes were often owned and managed by clothiers from the wool-producing towns of Castile. By the eighteenth century, obrajes were more likely to be immigrant merchants from northern Spain. By then it had become common in Mexico and the Andes for obrajes to form part of broader, vertically integrated rural enterprises. Technology resembled that current in Spain: backward but an advance upon native techniques. Thus expenditures for wages and short-term credit greatly exceeded investment in fixed capital.

The real strength of the obraje lay in its control over labor in an imperfect labor market. Obrajes produced all kinds of woolen cloth, from coarse serges and blankets to fine paño de primera. The fine cloth originally produced in Puebla and Quito for distant markets gave way in time to cheaper, ordinary cloth produced closer to the source of the wool supply and meant for local markets. By the end of the colonial period, most obrajes in Mexico were on the point of collapse in the face of foreign competition and labor indiscipline; few survived independence. Ecuador's obrajes proved more resilient but underwent a continuing decline during the nineteenth century.

See alsoTextile Industry: The Colonial Era .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard E. Greenleaf, "The Obraje in the Late Mexican Colony," in The Americas, 23 (1967): 227-250.

John C. Super, "Querétaro Obrajes: Industry and Society in Provincial Mexico," in Hispanic American Historical Review, 56 (1976): 197-216.

Javier Ortiz De La Tabla Ducasse, "El obraje colonial ecuatoriano: Aproximación a su estudio," in Revista de Indias, 37 (1977): 471-541.

W. P. Glade, "Obrajes and the Industrialisation of Colonial Latin America," in Economics in the Long View: Essays in Honour of W. W. Rostow, edited by Charles P. Kindleberger and Guido di Tella, vol. 2 (1982).

Richard Salvucci, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539–1840 (1987).

Manuel Miño Grijalva, "El obraje colonial," in European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 47 (December 1989): 3-19.

Additional Bibliography

Silva Santiesteban, Fernando. Los objajes en el virreinato del Perú. Lima: Publicaciones del Museo nacional de Historia, 1964.

Gómez Galvarriato, Aurora. La industria textil en México. México, D.F.: Instituto Mora: Colegio de Michoacán: Colegio de México, 1999.

Ramos-Escandón, Carmen. Industrializaciión, género y trabajo femenino en el sector textil mexicano: el obraje, la fábrica y la compañía industrial. México, D.F.: CIESAS, 2004.

                                      Guy P. C. Thomson