The File of Concrete

Today, concrete is the most widely used building material on earth. The distinct capital driven forces that have pushed the cement industry since its appearance in the 19th century and into its high rise during the 20th, have consolidated it as a material crucial in shaping contemporary natural and artificial landscapes. Its ecological impact extends past the buildings and the land they occupy, holding power over the last two centuries to transform landscapes, natural resources, social and labor structures, economies and environments. From the extraction of raw materials, to the construction of cities, cement is present in all its forms as an agent of change, taking over economies and even the very air that we breathe. The famous mix of five parts limestone (CaCO3), two parts alumino-silicate and added gypsum has radically changed the construction industry, its processes of production, distribution and use, have changed the world. Mexico is the world’s 14th largest cement-producing nation, home to the second largest cement company in the world, while domestically consuming 97% of all cement it produces. This condition is fueled by a land with 87% of its total made out of limestone, and a regulatory legal frame that exempts the extraction of rocks and products that can only be used for construction purposes, leaving the landscape unprotected against one of the largest industries in the country, and making it the perfect laying ground for it to grow exponentially. 

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Culture

Like all industries and big businesses, the cement industry has long used culture for propaganda to increase consumption. Cements’ introduction into the Mexican market at the beginning of the 20th century broke ground to the construction of the new post-revolutionary ideological image. Through architecture, concrete became a symbol of development, modernity, and status. The Committee to Propagate the Use of Portland Cement (later the National Chamber of Cement) was created in 1923 with the purpose of promoting the intensive use of the material. Mexican art and architecture history has highlighted how Federico Sánchez Fogarty, sales manager of “Cementos Tolteca”, turned out a main character in the industry. The two magazines he published between 1929 and 1932 funded by the cement industry, “Cemento” and “Tolteca”, reconfigured the construction landscape through the mass-marketing and commodification of the material aspirations of the population via advertising, media, and culture. With promises of “European design and American-style residences” for the rich and “affordable and hygienic houses that last forever” for the poor, cement became “the letter and the verb of contemporary architecture,” representing the “social justice” of the newly created revolutionary nationalism. The dissemination apparatus created by the cement industry that turned it into a common feature in high and popular culture, has reached all segments of the population, including art and design competitions for intellectuals, but also soccer teams as a promotional strategy to target the working class. Today, cement companies continue to sponsor competitions in Mexico, awarding projects that offer the best commercial cement uses, moving from cement as a medium to convey modernity, to one seeking to portray the industry’s social and environmental responsibility. And in an effort to create the impression of collective interests within society, the industry also sponsors over 43% of the Mexican Soccer League, establishing associations that have normalized cement.

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Labor

The working class was the center of post-revolutionary Mexico, and the cement industry quickly embraced the figure of the worker to lead the industry into the new country. In the 1920s, the new labor ideals prompted the “La Cruz Azul” Manufacturing and Portland Cement Company to establish the “Progressive Workers Union”, which signed the first collective labor contract in 1926 and consolidated the only cooperative in the history of the Mexican cement industry by 1934. In view of the in- creasing use of cement in public works, the cooperative opened a new plant and diversified its capital. Cruz Azul instated entire “cooperative cities” in Jasso, Hidalgo, and Lagunas, Oaxaca, urban developments by and for the workers. Built of concrete, they introduced Mexican 20th century social welfare ideals, providing housing, education, health systems, and infrastructure for all cooperative members.

The 1960s marked the decade in Mexican economic and labor history when Cruz Azul founded satellite cooperatives around its plants to replace services previously contracted from third parties to keep the kilns rotating. Under this formula, a restaurant and auditorium were created, as well as the soccer team and sports facilities. They acquired land, maintained housing, and granted loans to sister cooperatives for their expansion. Their factories, however, were burdened with high labor costs and became the center of an intricate and unclear system of support and subsidies between cooperatives, companies, and associations. By the late 1990s, Cruz Azul had created private companies that supplied all sorts of materials and services, and the cooperative, once an ‘incubator’ for others, was now hatching limited corporations. This change forced the privatization of associations, and the new ventures now had to open their services to the public to be profitable, while resource misuse caused a lack of member pensions and contemporary riots.

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Capital

The Mexican cement industry does not exist in isolation, but is an important component of a larger economic, social, political, and technological system. The complex geography of cement production and consumption has evolved over the 20th century, since the reconstruction of the country after the revolution. In the 1940s, concrete became a dominant construction material as a result of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) policy, which saw the beginning of national buyouts of the Mexican cement conglomerate “Cementos Mexicanos (CEMEX).” During the subsequent period of the ‘Mexican Miracle’ the country experienced dynamic economic, industrial, and population growth. The erection of concrete public buildings across the country contributed to Mexican political economy in the wake of the OPEC oil price increase, and by the launch of the National Production Alliance in 1978, which aimed to guarantee cement supplies and subsidize machinery imports to encourage the acquisitions of new kilns to streamline production. The Cement Industry Development Program was introduced as a means to cope with the unexpected demand in the 1980s. Government tax breaks, financing and differentiating energy prices for the industrial sector, resulted in unprecedented growth of Mexican cement exports in the midst of a global oil crisis. Since most cement exports went to the U.S, American companies curtailed Mexican exports by imposing quotas through an anti-dumping lawsuit and NAFTA signing. The country’s neoliberal period in the 2000s, which favored the private sector, and the global financial crisis of 2008, gave the transnational CEMEX Group the opportunity to expand internationally through foreign acquisitions, making it the world’s second largest cement company with plants all across the globe. Today, internal government agreements continue to promote the use of cement at the national level through high profile construction and large-scale infrastructure projects that have paved the way for new cement plants.

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Self-Construction

The Mexican discourse surrounding cement has constantly revolved around the industry touting the material as a ‘necessity’ to support infrastructure development and public works, while establishing it as the foundation for the working class home and family. With the goal of increasing consumption and production in the country, demand sectors for cement have changed over time, from formal construction projects and government-sponsored public works before the 1970s to an urban growth dominated demand. In Mexico, as in most of the world’s rapidly urbanizing nations and expanding economies, it is housing construction that consumes most of the cement, appealing to low- and middle-income home builders who are convinced of the material’s durability and lower cost. Urban and architectural history has shown that Mexican housing construction has grown over the years, contributing to the increasing consumption of cement and proving repeatedly that there is too much reliance on the cheap material, based on cheap labor, and cheap fuel, instead of other alternatives. By 2000, most of the cement in Mexico was used by low-income, informal builders, who were building their own homes in expanding cities. More than half of all cement in Mexico is consumed in informal housing construction, with 80% of production sold in 50kg bags and cement blocks, and the majority of sales made through local distributors for housing projects. Cement companies such as Fortaleza, Holcim, and Moctezuma have adapted their business models by entering the consumption cycle not only at the production end of the value chain, but through widespread models that seek to serve the consumer through distributing centers spread across the country, offering also other construction materials, to diversify their portfolios, and directly meeting the all the DIY needs of the self-builder.

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Social

The insertion of cement into Mexico’s social organization has divided society and the environment, disrupting indigenous relationships with nature. Population growths at the beginning and end of the 20th century materialized the intersection of public and private instances. With increasing urban developments approaching the quarries in the early 1980s, earlier decrees attempted to relocate extraction zones. However, the emergence of illegally operated quarries and the questionable expropriation of land for urban developments have remained at an impasse, with shifting administrations favoring different sectors continuing to push for adjustments to the legal framework to secure internal businesses that exploit both labor and resources.

After 2000, the percentage of urban houses ‘prebuilt’ by private-sector homebuilders and purchased with government mortgages exceeded the number of houses built informally in Mexico. Government institutions such as INFONAVIT (Institute of the National Workers’ Housing Fund) and FOVISSSTE (Housing Fund of the Institute of Social Security of State Workers) providing funding to acquire “houses that have roofs, floors, and walls built with permanent materials”, and loan requirements contributed to the proliferation cement and home-builders such as Casas GEO, Homex, Urbi, ARA, and Sare. This expansion of metropolitan conurbations led to conflicts with mining companies in states like Nuevo León, where quarries have been partially regulated by the state’s Ministry for Sustainable Development and the private Nuevo León Limestone Extraction Association.

Intentionally overlooked in Mexican urban social history, extraction and development practices across the country have promoted the privatization of social property and communal lands through land sales and conces- sions. These regulated displacement and exploitation practices have increased around industrial sites throughout the national territory, leaving rural populations to fend for themselves for the remnants of social land tenure, as well as non-renewable natural resources, and protesting the lack of environmental impact studies and irregularities in mining permits.

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Environment

The kiln in the cement plant, as the heart of the capitalist exploitation of labor and nature, has long been dominated by the pursuit of technological mastery and the dream of using machines. Despite the negative environmental impact of limestone quarrying and the high emissions of CO2 and other pollutants during cement production, companies have chosen to combine the idea of sustainability with that of environmental protection, to portray themselves as ecologically minded. The expansion of the cement industry’s environmental communication is illustrated by the example of “Cemento Portland Apaxco”, which in 1964 became the entry point for the Swiss Holderbank group (now Holcim) to the Mexican market. The Swiss multinational’s paradoxical efforts to improve efficiency and increase profits in the name of the environment have been reflected since the 1990s in the operation of Ecoltec (now Geocycle), a subsidiary that provides waste co-processing services. Waste incineration—mainly of used car tires and all kinds of other residues—was introduced to replace part of the fossil fuels to achieve the required 1450° C kiln temperature, but from the perspective of political ecology, Holcim’s environmental destruction has been evident in recent history. While raw material extraction and production is successfully trivializing as sustainable, high levels of air pollution and health issues are reported around Ecoltec plants, especially in Apasco, which has become one of the most polluted places according to the UN. In 2009, the citizen environmental movement “ProSalud” of Apaxco-Atotonilco requested PROFEPA (Federal Attorney General’s Office for Environmental Protection) to take action after obtaining scientific technical advice on the problem and studies revealing the serious impact on the population’s health. Despite this environmental awareness by groups that are physically affected, Holcim’s Geocycle plants, like those of its competitors, continue to operate across the country, even after government observations and constant intersectional protests.