Conventional wisdom holds that railroads linked Mexico’s countryside and city to create a national market. A more cautious evaluation is that railroads provided the potential for a national market. Railroads drastically reduced transportation costs compared to mule trains and carting, but domestic freight rates remained high compared to the cost of international shipping by water and rail. The scholar John Coatsworth has observed that most Porfirian peasant rebellions took place within a 25-mile (40 kilometer) range of railways. This, along with contemporary reports of significant variations in labor, food, and commodity prices over short distances, suggests the practical limits of rail-net integration. Thus, while Irupuato lacked a national market for its abundant but perishable strawberry crop, railroad companies offered low package rates bringing thousands of U.S. touristinvestors to the “Land of Montezuma” to encourage the development of tropical plantations along their right-of-ways. International cargoes cheaply crossed the isthmus between the ports of Salina Cruz and Puerto México on the British-built Tehuantepec Railway, but its domestic rates were so high that coffee planters along its right-of-way packed their product by mule to U.S. railheads for shipment. Even in Mexico City, the hub of the national rail net, most of the city’s production was consumed locally, despite the pleas of businessmen for freight rate and tax reductions in order to expand their markets.

In short, relatively low international freight rates linked Mexico’s patrias chicas more efficiently to the global economy than to each other. Nowhere was the sensitivity of Mexican markets to foreign technology and demand more apparent than in the extractive industries. The U.S. protective tariff on exported Mexican ores was a catalyst for the construction of refining and smelting plants in Mexico such as those constructed by the Guggenheims. Electrification created a demand for copper, which led Colonel William Greene to develop the Cananea mines. Because cables had to be insulated, rubber prices skyrocketed, producing a flood of British and U.S. investment to establish Hule rubber plantations in tropical Mexico. The henequen plantations of the Yucatán perhaps best illustrate transformative effects of foreign markets. The introduction of mechanical reapers in the United States required vast amounts of tough sisal binding twine. As sisal’s price rose from less than three cents a pound in 1894 to almost ten cents a pound in 1902, Yucatán became a vast henequen plantation dominated by a 30-family oligarchic merchant-planter camarilla headed by the Molina-Montes clan, which enjoyed political hegemony through its collaboration with International Harvester, which effectively controlled the sisal market.