WORLD CUP ETC - SPECIAL INTERVIEW: Cornish Miners & Football in Mexico, with Dr. Sharron Schwartz

Jon Bonfiglio speaks to Dr. Sharron Schwartz about the history and legacy of Cornish Miners across Latin America, in particular how football accompanied them to the region.

To read Dr. Schwartz's work, the following books are now available online:

Mining a Shared Heritage: Mexico’s ‘Little Cornwall' (published in 2011)

The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack and the New World (2016)

Dr. Schwartz's most recent book, The Great Trek of the Transport Party, Mexico (1825-26): A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph is to be published this May in conjunction with the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Everyone, welcome back to the World Cup etc. With me, John Bonfiglio. I join you today, as I almost always do, from Mexico, which of course has particular relevance as a host to the upcoming World Cup, but also has a fascinating heritage of footballing history, one which goes back generations and has a strong, indelible link to the United Kingdom and specifically to a migration of Cornish miners in the early 19th century. And to talk about this history, I'm delighted to have us joining us today, Dr. Sharon Schwartz. Sharon was born and bred in Red Ruth, Cornwall, undertook a PhD at the University of Exeter exploring the migration of Cornish mine workers to Latin America. She was also the documentary research officer for the Cornwall and West Devon World Heritage Site bid, which I'm sure we'll talk about during the course of the recording, and is also Leverhume Fellow in Migration Studies at the Institute of Cornish Studies. Sharon is also the author of, for those of you who want to pursue some of this fascinating history in book form, she's uh the author of Mining A Shared Heritage, Mexico's Little Cornwall, published in 2011, and also The Cornish in Latin America, Cousin Jack and the New World, published in 2016. Her most recent book, The Great Trek of the Transport Party, Mexico, A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph, is to be published this May in conjunction with the Cornish Mining World Heritage site to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Of course, all of those are available online, and we will link to the titles in the notes on the show, as we will more broadly to Sharon's work. Sharon, welcome to World Cup, etc.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Thank you, John, and thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

No pleasure. Do you uh do you often get invited onto um onto uh footballing podcast shows? No, this is my first time, and I'm very much looking forward to it. That's interesting because it's kind of a surprise, of course, because when the Cornish did made the journey, they brought all of themselves with them. And um, and of course, an aspect of that was was football too. But um, just before we get there, it struck me just thinking about you and this recording this conversation before um um before we spoke. Uh, of course, you're you're now a world authority on Cornish mining migrations. That's a very particular sort of professional role. Is it something that was that it's been a long time coming, or did you sort of happen into it?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Well, I grew up in a Cornish family, both sides of my family are Cornish, born and bred for generations. And I grew up hearing stories about ancestors of mine that had migrated to various parts of the world. So it's very much my lived experience. And uh I became fascinated by Latin America specifically, probably due to my university course at London, which uh explored European empires overseas, Portugal and Spain in the Latin Americas, which absolutely fascinated me. So you can imagine my joy when years later I began to do my family tree, only to discover that three brothers named Inch from Red Ruth had migrated to Chile. Um, so it's a case of three inches making more than a yard. I found that one of those brothers who was named Guillermo, he went on to Bolivia, where he had an illegitimate family. And that happened quite a lot. I think the great Cornish historian A. L. Rouse commented once on the queer sex life of the Cornish miners. But I digress. One of Guillermo's descendants, Bernardo Inch Calavimonte, became a politician serving the mining province of Potosi, which includes several very important silver mines, which were formerly captained by Cornishmen. And Bernardo later became a minister with portfolio in the Bolivian government. Unfortunately, he and his mother were murdered in his flat in La Paz in 2013. And his late sister Marseilla, she became principal archivist at the National Archive. Another one of those inch brothers migrated to work in Mexico and was there for over 20 years as a mining captain. I then discovered more of the family worked also out in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, including Brazil and Uruguay. So, you know, my lived experience was very much focused around my research interests. And I've been absolutely um delighted that I've been able to build a career around something that really fascinates me. And so all my Busman's holidays and all of the talks and lectures and things that I give, it's it's done from very much a position of you know great interest, and I'm absolutely delighted to do it. So, yes, I built my career around something that I really love that's you know ingrained within my family history.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

I hadn't realized how personal um at I mean, of course, it it is you know, in terms of your your Cornish roots, but how personal it was to you as an individual and also how broad-ranging um the family links are geographically as well.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah, I mean, that's just Latin America. I have family members that uh went off all over the world to South Africa, to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, all over the place. Um, and I've actually connected with some of those cousins. I've been doing this now for over 30 years, and I've met people from all over the world who are related to me, which is always incredible, especially when some of those people come back home to Cornwall to visit their cousins for the first time. So we've had one or two fantastic reunions um with far-flung members of the family um coming home to Cornwall to you know engage with their roots.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Um, Sharon, we're going to come to football in a second, but I think before we get to that, um, could you just give us, of course, what we're talking about here is a great migration from Cornwall, particularly other areas as well, but specifically Cornwall to Latin America. Can you just give us the brass tacks of what that looks like and why and and where it happens?

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yeah, um it traces its beginning basically uh back to Travithic, Richard Travithic, our great Cornish engineer, pioneer of high-pressure steam, a venture that uh he engaged in at the Cerro de Pasco mines, which are high up in the Peruvian Andes. And it was there that he helped to install the first Cornish engines that were steamed by Holman's of Campbell's innovative high-pressure Cornish boilers in the decade before 1820. So we're talking about, you know, over 200 years ago. And at that time, it was believed that new fandangled high-pressure steam machinery would be impossible to operate at altitude. But Travithic proved that to be a fallacy. Now, although the engines were made at a Shropshire Foundry, Holman's exported the first Cornish mining equipment to Latin America. And indeed, Serra de Pasco persisted to use steam right through the 19th century, and several more engines were exported there from Harveys of Hale in Cornwall. All of the components were cast in parts that were no heavier than about 300 pounds, so they could be transited by mule from the coast along narrow, precipitous mountain pathways. It's really hard to imagine that today, getting precision-engineered equipment to remote mines like that, then riveting it all together and making it work. But Cerra de Pasco was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in Latin America, and Cornish are at the heart of that process. Cerra de Pasco today is a godforsaken place, half consumed by an enormous open cast mine. Its soil, air, and water courses are polluted, and it's exceptionally high altitude. It was bitterly cold when I arrived there in a sleep storm in about 2013, and I felt like someone was sitting on my chest as I strolled the ramshackle streets of the old colonial mining centre where Richard Travidic once walked. And unfortunately, there's a huge open cast there now, which is nibbling away at the colonial centre, which has been largely abandoned, and the engine houses that accommodated the Cornish steam engines are long gone. But Travidic's venture is important, not just because it of the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Latin America, but because it laid the foundations of Cornwall's reputation as a mining and engineering center of excellence, which ensured the future migration of tens of thousands of Cornish mine workers. And we really see that process beginning in earnest in the wake of independence movements across Latin America, across the Spanish Americas, and during the mid-1820s stock market boom, when a number of mining companies funded by British capital were set up. And people clamoured to buy shares in those companies. They were working copper mines in Chile and Venezuela, gold mines in Colombia and Brazil, and silver mines in Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru. And over one-third of those companies have Cornish directors and most employed Cornish labor. So you ask why did they go? Well, many companies were offering fantastic wages in those early years, far more than anything that could be earned in Cornwall. The company paid the man's passage, and they also supplied a suit of clothes. So, for instance, the Real de Monte Company in Mexico spent around £60 per man in 1825, sending a man out to Mexico. So it wasn't a small amount. But there was also the attraction of rising far higher up the mining hierarchy overseas than if a miner had remained at home, and the security of a three-year or five-year contract. That was attractive to the man's family back home in Cornwall, and the money could be remitted. Some of the money would be remitted back to Cornwall by the mining company, so the family were taken care of. So there was security around all of this. And it's it's really interesting, too, that we see over and over repetition in families of people migrating to where their fathers, their uncles, their brothers had worked. A lot of it is intergenerational as well. I'm currently writing the biography of a fascinating mining captain named John Penbirthy. And his father actually worked in Mexico. He was the first Cornish pitman to enter Mexico in 1824. He went as a pitman and came back as a mine agent. So, you know, the process of bettering oneself and providing security for the family back at home was highly attractive. But having said that, many of those early migrants didn't really know what to expect, and not all found their El Dorado in Latin America. Tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria claimed the lives of many going inland from the coasts of places like Venezuela, Colombia, or Mexico. Well, political instability, of course, was also a constant issue. In fact, countries like Mexico and to a lesser extent Chile had problems with bandits throughout the 1800s. Another thing which is very striking from the very early days of migration to Latin America is the specificity of movement. And it can really be focused on incredibly narrow areas, not just at parochial level, but down to even villages or even hamlets. And that's because of the role of core families that have been long settled in specific areas. And members of these clans facilitated social networks that provided jobs, critical resources, emotional support, and information that reduced the risks of moving and settlement. And some countries, including Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, contained sizable Cornish colonies of born out of this kind of core migration, the core family migration, containing wives and children who helped to create a home from home, which made it easier to travel from the loan to the loan.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

This is definitely not a small migration in terms of some of the numbers that you cite, but also the locations. Again, it is it is it reaches right across uh Latin America. Um I mentioned in one of my earlier comments that of course, whenever whenever everybody moves, they they bring, they take all of themselves. And for the Cornish, football was to be a big sort of cultural driver, presence, bridge in in Latin America. I wonder, did they know that that was going to be the case before? Is it possible to say whether they knew, or was it just an accident which then which um uh which accelerated as the as the Cornish presence expanded throughout the region?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Well, uh football came late, of course, and in the 19th century, both in Britain and then it was reflected that the interest in football was reflected overseas. Um in fact, from the sort of mid-19th century in Mexico, particularly in the Cornish areas, we call it uh Mexico's Little Cornel. So it's focused on Real del Monte, Pachuca, Mineral de Chico, that area of Mexico in Hidelgo, the state of Hidelgo, uh, cricket was the game that was really, really popular. And it was out of the cricket teams in Mexico that the first football teams were actually formed. So we get we get the first glimmerings of football in Mexico in the sort of late 1880s. And Pachuca prides itself on being the spiritual home of Mexican football. Uh, it's the the hometown of Los Tuzos, the gophers, um, again, a little burrowing creature which has the mining links there. Um, and it really was one of the forerunners of the game. Um, the Scots would claim that they were the ones who pioneered football in Mexico, the English say the same, but the Cornish were definitely right up there. And Pachuca did have one of the earliest football teams in Mexico, if not the earliest. And it was certainly in existence before 1892. And again, I said it was created out of its cricket team and some enthusiastic new arrivals from Cornwall. And Mexico, football wasn't common in Mexico at this point. In fact, when a game was played in San Cristobal against the employees of uh Pearson and Sons, nobody had knew how to play the game in Mexico. It was a new game to them. So it was happening in Mexico City and also in Pachuca, Rio de Monte at this time, and also in Orizaba, down in Veracruz, the interest in football with immigrants coming in and bringing the game with them from Britain. So, in our case, from the Cornish mining districts, where football had taken off. Um, and they bought that interest in football. Um, in 1895, the Pachuca Football Club merged with the cricket clubs at Pachuca and Velasco, which is a way uh not so far away from Real do Monte, to create the Pachuca Athletic Club. And football could really begin to take off with improved transportation and communication networks, which meant teams could travel to play the game. So the railway built during the Puerto Riato, um, and newspapers like the Mexican Herald, the English language newspaper that publicized the game were game changers. And this facilitated the setting up of a national league in 1902, and Pachuca Athletic Club was one of the five teams to compete in that league. And it won first won the league in the 1904 to five season. And that really uh you know set set football up in Mexico. The Mexicans gradually became incredibly interested in the game as well, and Mexicans were invited onto the team. The strip that the team chose was uh light blue and dark blue with dark blue shorts, the light blue and dark blue being the colours of Oxford and Cambridge. So that's a nice little aside. Um, of course, the his the strip today is is blue and white, not dark blue and light blue. But that was the strip that they chose, and that was the reason they chose it. So uh eventually football began to, as I said, began to take off in wider um Mexican society, not just not just in the but between the English community. And the game was seen as modern and it kind of encompassed British cultural imperialism, if you like, who became fashionable in societies wishing to emulate the British sense of fair play. And uh in 1908, the first Mexican, David Ilas, was invited on to the Pachuca football team, and that opened the way for more Mexicans to participate in the sport. And it has to be said that one of the key players in this era was Alfred or Fred Crowell. He was a Cornish miners' son from St. Who came from St. Blaze. So he was born in Pachuca in 1889, but he became a senior football player around 1908 to nine and became a master goalscorer. And he he he taught the Primera Fuerza, leading the goal chance, um, for two or three seasons on the trot. And he was eventually promoted to team coach, and he freely admitted Mexicans to all backgrounds to the team, which blurred class and ethnic boundaries. So that's a little bit about the the kind of history of the beginning of the Matuca football club. So the Cornish were definitely really in you know involved and important in its early years. And I have written a blog, it's on my website, cousinjacksworld.com, which goes into detail about the beginnings of football in Mexico and the Cornish influence in that process.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Thanks very much, Sharon. Um so many interesting points in in terms of what you say. Um, one of the those, of course, is as regards cricket being the forerunner to football. There's a famous photo uh of the Emperor Maximilian prior to him being um killed, uh shot, in which he is uh a part of a sort of standing team or a couple of standing teams in Chapultepec Park, where cricket was played at the time in the middle of a of a of a cricket game. And then as you say, the earliest cricket leagues, I mean, the Pachuca cricket team doesn't exist anymore. But if you look at the history of the um of the initial cricket leagues in in Mexico, it does exist and features highly, and as you say, then become sort of Pachuca athletic um club. Also really interesting, I think, the as regards the sort of soft power aspect of football, and how at least an aspect of the growth beyond the sport itself was this perception of um this aspiration towards Britishness, if if you like. Um as regards uh where we are today, there's of course still lots of clues and evidences of that ongoing relationship between Cornish minors, um, football, soccer, and how it manifests, continues to manifest um today, I think it's fair to say.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yeah, um obviously the uh the the Cornish descendants there are very aware of the fact that uh the that the the district that the Mexico's Little Cornwall district is is obviously to the fore in the dissemination, the popularization of the game of football in Mexico. Um it's not just I mean it's not just football, it's also things like pasties, um, which are an enormous uh in uh in the um in the in Mexico's little Cornwall district, and even as far away as places like Jalapa, you can now buy a pasty. But the first documentary reference I have to pasties being consumed are at a cricket match in 1891. So the link between pastes and and cricket, and then obviously leading into football is is is is clearly there. So yeah, it's um it's very much uh and also it's a there's a nice little bit of sort of rivalry between Real Del Monte and Pachuca as to which which settlement is the cradle of Mexican football. So Real Del Monte claims this, and obviously, Pachuca with its incredible um foot mundo football, this big museum, which I would advise everyone who's in town to go and visit this fantastic um claims to be the spiritual home of Mexican football. And I think this year it's actually hosting the um South African uh football team. And just recently, um our uh Atlis Quintada, the um tourism minister from Hidalgo, has been showing the team around Mexico's little Cornwall. So uh all of the towns there get a chance to meet the team, showing that football is you know really, really important to that part of Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

It's um it's gonna be interesting because Pachuca, for those who don't know it, is northeast of Mexico City and South Africa are playing in the Azteca, which is deep, deep, deep in the south of Mexico City. So uh it's a nice um nod to heritage and history, but I think the South African team are going to be perhaps recognizing the error of their choices once they start to experience live Mexico City's traffic as they move from right one side of the city to uh to the other. Um, Sharon, it strikes me, or it's struck me in the last few years that actually the Cordish pastis um or the pastis of uh of Pachuca have actually grown exponentially. There was a time when people were aware of them, but but you you had to go to Pachuca or Hidalgo or that area to to get some. But increasingly you're finding them across um across different parts of of Mexico now. I don't know whether it's because it's sort of a particularly sort of niche culinary um thing or whether the history is growing in in awareness too, but they're definitely much more readily available now across Mexico. They used to be.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Absolutely. I mean, it's now a multi-million peso industry. And I was coming from Veracruz last year on my way back to Pachuca, and lo and behold, there was a pasty out in Jalapa. And there also there are also um branches down right through Hidelago and also down as far as as Umesco City. So yeah, it really, it really has become it's it's as important uh a dish, a culinary dish in Hidalgo as Barabacoa. You know, it's it's right up there um as as something that's distinctive, that's typical Hidalgo Idense. So yeah, it's um it really is uh it's been a money spinner for places like Real del Monte, which relies now, of course, on tourism with the decline of the uh of the mining industry in the region. So yeah, it's it's it's really uh it's added uh an enormous amount to uh to the towns. And of course, the world's largest paste festival is held in Real del Monte every year in October, and a delegation from my hometown of Radruth, which of course is twinned with Real del Monte, comes across to participate in that event. And it is a fantastic event. Really, really it's it's incredible to uh to be there and to experience the the joy and the community spirit. An enormous pasty is made on the stage, um, and all the pasty makers of the town chip in with the pastry, with the potato, with the onion, the meat, and they make this enormous pasty, and then it's transported through the town to an enormous uh oven in a bakery, and there it's baked. While it's being baked, we all participate in plenty of purque and tequila. It's fantastic, it's a wonderful event. All the community is there, even the police come in, everybody is all there making making merry together, and then the pasty is taken out of the oven and paraded through the streets back to the stage where it's cut up and everyone present gets a piece. It's a wonderful community event. And if anyone is in Mexico and is at a Lucent this October, go to Real del Monte, go to the Paste Festival. It's three over three days, it's a fantastic event.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Um I I'm making a public commitment now, Sharon, that in early October I will be in Real del Monte for said Paste Fest. And um, and if you happen to be there, I'm sure we'll stay in touch. If you happen to be there, I'd be delighted to share a pulque or two with you. But for the moment, Dr. Sharon Schwartz, thank you so much for your time and just guiding us through this really interesting uh history ahead, of course, of the World Cup in Mexico in less than three months' time. Appreciate it.