Real Fábrica de Puros y Cigarros de México, 1769: seven thousand people of both sexes in one workshop
The crown's cigar factory in Mexico City opened in a rented house on the calle de Cadena at the end of June 1769 and grew, on the compilation's own account, to employ "siete mil personas de ambos sexos" in the barrio of Santa Catarina Mártir — one of the largest single workplaces anywhere in the eighteenth century, and among the first to put women into wage work at that scale. It existed because the independent cigar shops had been closed by decree.
Why this wins its question: The Mexico City cigar factory is famous in the historiography of Latin American labour and almost absent from English-language reference writing, where it appears — when it appears — as a nineteenth-century detail about cigarreras and strikes. This object dates it from the administration's own record: the viceregal commission of 12 May 1769, the treasurer who rented the house on the calle de Cadena, the move to Santa Catarina Mártir, the seven thousand people of both sexes on the compilers' own count, the tarea of seventy-two cajillas fixed by a viceroy's order of 1780, and the 20,000 pesos a year voted in 1776 for a building never put up. It also refuses the triumphal reading: the workforce was assembled by closing the private cigar shops, and the source for the achievement is the source for the cost.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The factory was set up by viceregal commission and began in a rented house. The compilation records that to bring about the establishment of the cigar factory in the capital the viceroy marqués de Croix gave commission, by order of 12 May 1769, to the treasurer of the branch D. Juan José de Echeveste, "quien tomó una casa en la calle de Cadena, de esta ciudad, y disponiéndola para el fin, tuvo efecto en fines de Junio de aquel año".
Its internal government was written down before it grew. Echeveste, once the factory was planted and the first trial made, drew up "el reglamento económico, para gobierno de los empleados y operarios", and made a comparison of costs and products for the first month showing the utility exceeded six per cent against the price at which leaf tobacco was sold in the estanco; he framed ordinances, which the viceroy approved with the fiscal's opinion and the king by real orden. The compilation dates that royal approval to 22 October 1768 and the factory's opening to June 1769, an order of events its own text does not reconcile; the date is reported here as printed rather than corrected.
The size of the workforce is the claim worth having, and the source states it plainly. The king repeatedly ordered the factory enlarged as far as possible so as to supply worked tobacco to the public of the kingdom, "y ha ido en tal aumento que hoy la ocupan siete mil personas de ambos sexos": at the time of writing, in the early 1790s, seven thousand people of both sexes worked in it. It stood provisionally in a quarter of the barrio of Santa Catarina Mártir, to which it had been moved under a commission given to the administrador general D. Simón de Huarte.
The capital's factory was the largest of several, not the whole of the system. Manufacture of cigars and puros was carried on in the factorías of Puebla, Jalapa and Orizava as well, and the branch's closing account counts "doce mil veintiocho mandones, jornaleros y elaborantes de la fábrica de cigarros" across the renta — so about seven in twelve of the crown's tobacco workers were in Mexico City and the rest in the provincial factories.
Work was measured by piece and set by regulation, and the quota is printed. A viceregal order of the marqués de Mayorga, dated 1 July 1780 on the consultation of the director D. Felipe del Hierro, reset the make: cajillas of the cut of ten to contain thirty-three cigars, those of eleven forty-two, those of twelve forty-five, so that nine could be sold for each tlaco. The reglamento that followed prescribed that "en las fábricas donde cada tarea consista en cinco cuadernillos de papel ó veinticinco pliegos, deberá producir la que hasta ahora ha sido del corte de á diez, setenta y dos cajillas y veinticuatro cigarros sueltos". The daily task of an operative was fixed in Mexico City by the viceroy's pen.
The factory's workforce existed because another one had been dispersed. The same volume records the bando of 17 March 1766 barring traders and shopkeepers from making and selling cigars, the crown's refusal in 1767 to let the trade go free, the prohibition on licensing new cigarrerías so as to extinguish the great number of them, and the "absoluta estincion de cigarrerías" in Mexico at the beginning of 1775. Whatever the seven thousand gained by entering the crown's workshop is not separable from what the independent shops lost, and the source that reports the one reports the other.
The crown voted the money for a purpose-built factory and had not spent it twenty years later. By real orden of 20 April 1776 the king ordered 20,000 pesos a year set aside from the net product of the branch, half for a building to house the factory, the direction and the general warehouses and half for casas de beneficio to receive the leaf at Orizava and Córdoba; the compilers record that this "aun no ha tenido efecto", the file on the first still running and awaiting a sovereign decision. The largest workshop in the viceroyalty was housed in adapted premises throughout the period this source covers.
The factory survived independence with the monopoly that owned it. Appendix table Nº 12 of the Mexican finance ministry's report for 1829-30, counting tobacco stocks at the end of June 1828, lists "en la fábrica de puros y cigarros de esta ciudad" ninety tercios, 17,346 net pounds, and a further 51,696 pounds of cernido in the same works — the establishment still running on the republic's account sixty years after Echeveste rented the house on the calle de Cadena.
The limits of this evidence are worth naming. The seven-thousand figure is the administration's own, given in a compilation its officers wrote for the viceroy who commissioned it, with no return by name or sex beside it; the phrase "de ambos sexos" establishes that women were a large part of the workforce but not what part, and nothing here gives wages, hours, the age of the workers, or the terms on which they could be dismissed. The piece-rate quota is quoted from the regulation as printed, which is what was ordered rather than what was performed.