Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 326 Undercurrent
January 1636, 7, Mexico City.

The mornings in St. Francis Xavier's district are no longer as bustling and noisy as usual. The busy streets have become somewhat deserted. The scorching sun burns the cobblestone ground, and the air is filled with the sour smell of lanolin and fermenting dyes.

Once upon a time, whenever the first rays of sunlight shone down in the morning, the woolen workshops on both sides of the street would come alive with activity.

In the dye vat, indigo and ochre dyes churned and boiled under the heat of the roaring fire, sending up plumes of steam with a pungent odor.

The weavers sit in front of their creaking looms, their hands moving nimbly and their feet rhythmically pressing the pedals, spinning fluffy wool little by little into thick woolen fabric. The rising and falling sounds of the looms are the unique morning melody of this neighborhood.

But now, more than half of the factories are closed, and only a few are barely managing to stay afloat. The sound of looms is so sparse that it sounds like the gasps of a dying person.

"How is this possible?"

Diego de Mesa, a veteran workshop owner who has been in the wool industry for over twenty years, is standing at the entrance of his workshop, looking dazed.

His rough hands gripped a piece of Xinhua woolen fabric he had just bought from the market tightly, his knuckles turning slightly white from the force.

The fabric is delicate and smooth, as soft as flowing water, with a uniform and vibrant color that shows no signs of fading even in sunlight.

What he found most unacceptable was that such a high-quality woolen fabric was priced almost the same as the coarse woolen fabric produced in his workshop!
His rough fingers gently caressed the fabric, his brows furrowed, and his eyes were filled with disbelief.

"How can they sell it for such a low price?" Diego muttered to himself, his cloudy eyes filled with disbelief.

He gently stroked the fabric, his brows furrowed into a deep frown, as if trying to find the answer to this perplexing question within the fabric.

“Sir, I’ve heard that the New Chinese can turn a pile of wool into this high-quality woolen fabric by simply tapping it with a magic wand.” His apprentice, Orissa, a fifteen-year-old mixed-race boy, cautiously approached. “So, for them, the only cost is the expense of buying the wool.”

"Oh, that's possible. They might be able to conjure wool out of thin air with their magic wands, just like wizards, all-powerful and all-knowing! Oh God, it's simply amazing..."

"Shut up!" Diego abruptly interrupted him, glaring at him fiercely. His face instantly turned ashen, and his voice trembled with anger. "You believe such nonsense? Ignorant, foolish..."

Orissa was startled and shrank back into the workshop, squatting down beside a pile of wool, secretly watching the boss who was still cursing. She felt both scared and aggrieved.

Diego slumped against the doorframe, as if all his strength had been drained away.

He unconsciously tore at the piece of Xinhua wool with both hands. The tough texture of the fabric caused his palms to sting, but it did nothing to alleviate the anxiety and despair in his heart.

Reality, like a cold tide, completely overwhelmed him.

In Mexico City markets, local wool fabrics have been sluggish for more than half a month.

Even the most loyal customers started asking, "Do you have that kind of Xinhua?"

Some people even witnessed the priest of the Church of Santo Domingo presiding over Mass yesterday wearing a vestment made of Xinhua woolen fabric—the bright scarlet color was as dazzling as blood in the sunlight.

Are all Chinese people in Xinhua really wizards?

Those shrewd and greedy merchants would rather wait for months to buy smuggled Xinhua woolen fabrics from coastal ports than give a second glance to the expensive coarse woolen fabrics produced in local workshops.

Many factory owners like Diego are deeply worried, their faces constantly furrowed with anxiety, and some are even considering selling their products at near-cost prices just to keep their factories afloat.

Despite the Spanish government's long-standing restrictions and constraints on industries in its American colonies in order to protect its domestic industries, many handicrafts, such as wool fabrication, ceramics casting, leatherwork, metal processing, wood carving, weaving, and timber processing, stubbornly emerged and continued to grow from the 1970s onwards.

Especially with the booming development of animal husbandry, the wool industry, which uses wool as raw material, has become increasingly prosperous. Mexico City alone has dozens of medium-sized wool workshops with more than 20 employees, which supply the needs of the upper and middle classes in the colony.

In addition, Puebla is known for its high-quality wool products, which are sold to Peru and the Caribbean.

Oaxaca is known for producing coarse wool fabrics, which mainly supply the local market and mining areas.

After more than 50 years of development, Mexico has become one of the most important textile centers in the Kingdom of Spain, and the wool industry occupies a very prominent position in the local economy.

According to incomplete statistics, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with Mexico as its core, produced about 12 to 15 pieces of woolen cloth annually. Although this output was negligible compared to the more than one million pieces produced in the mainland (more than half of which were blended and coarse), it was an astonishing achievement in the remote colony.

However, the Mexican wool industry has always faced the predicament of "inherent deficiencies" in its development.

Technological backwardness was like a heavy shackle, firmly binding the rapid development of industry. Moreover, it was frequently subject to various interventions from colonial official policies and human interventions, and was always in a state of stumbling progress.

Mexico's wool production mainly relies on hand-cranked spinning wheels and foot-operated looms, with technology essentially remaining at a medieval level, resulting in extremely low production efficiency.

In terms of dyeing technology, although Mexico has high-quality local dyes such as cochineal and indigo, the color-fixing technology of woolen workshops is terrible.

The woolen fabrics they dye would lose large areas of color after being soaked in water or washed, leaving the entire fabric looking unrecognizable, much like a baby diaper, and completely unable to compete with European products.

This led the upper classes in the colonies to prefer importing European woolens, especially fine textiles from Spain and Flanders.

The lower and middle-class mixed-race and Native American people did not particularly like this kind of coarse woolen fabric, and they either turned to smuggling European woolen fabric or buying cheap Oriental cotton, which kept the Mexican woolen fabric industry in a lukewarm state.

If they could just barely manage to stay afloat, the local woolen workshops, while unable to expand further, could at least survive.

After all, imported European wool fabrics are more expensive, costing between 15 and 20 pesos per bolt, while locally produced Mexican wool fabrics cost around 10 to 12 pesos, which is 30% to 40% cheaper than the former. This is quite attractive to the lower and middle classes who are not very well-off.

But two years ago, this delicate situation was fundamentally overturned.

From some unknown source, a batch of high-quality, low-priced woolen fabrics suddenly flooded the Mexican market. Rumors circulated that they came from the Northern Xinhua pirates, with each piece selling for only 14-16 pesos, immediately causing a huge impact on the entire woolen market.

Those once-prestigious European imported wool fabrics quickly lost out to Xinhua Wool Fabrics. In less than a year, the market share of European imported wool fabrics shrank by more than 50%, forcing European smugglers to either sell at a loss with tears in their eyes or reluctantly transport the fabrics to other places to find the next untapped market.

While many local woolen workshop owners were still observing and hesitating, these cheap Xinhua woolen fabrics began to slowly affect their businesses.

The wool market was the first to be impacted.

The price of wool in the Mexican market has begun to rise slightly, immediately putting enormous cost pressure on woolen mill owners.

However, they dared not raise the price of wool fabrics without authorization, fearing that they would lose their only customers.

It was initially thought that the rise in wool purchase prices was just a short-term market phenomenon. When most wool workshop owners reduced their purchases, plantation owners who raised large numbers of sheep would take the initiative to lower prices and then beg them to buy their products in the face of insufficient demand.

However, the market situation did not develop as they had hoped.

Wool prices remained firm; in fact, even during the off-season for wool production last summer, prices not only did not decrease but actually increased slightly.

Clearly, besides the local wool mill owners in Mexico, there is another wealthy buyer who is continuously purchasing wool, keeping the overall price high.

The buyer was naturally a new Chinese from the north.

They buy large quantities of wool from the Mexican region, transport it back to their own territory, and then process it into brightly colored, soft woolen fabrics.

The question is, how do they manage to sell their wool products so cheaply after such long-distance transportation and with the cost of wool raw materials slightly increasing?

In Mexico, they have defeated imported European wool fabrics and are gradually taking over the high-end market.

In order to minimize their losses, merchants who had stockpiled large quantities of European wool fabrics not only transported them to markets that were temporarily unaffected, such as Lima, Bogotá, Chalcas, Quito, and Santiago, but also sold them off at discounted prices, further impacting the sales channels of local wool fabric factories in Mexico.

Based on market feedback, some have estimated that within a year of the end of the New Zealand War, three to five thousand pieces of Xinhua woolen fabric may have flooded into the entire Mexican region.

Last year, this number rapidly increased to between 10,000 and 15,000 horsepower.

This is an extremely exaggerated figure, and one that would alarm all Mexican woolen factory owners.

After selling so many woolen products, will Xinhua further lower prices to seize the low-to-mid-end market that rightfully belongs to them?

If that's the case, these local woolen workshops will probably lose even their last glimmer of hope for survival.

"We can't just sit here and wait to die, we have to take action!" Lopez de Vega, the owner of the largest woolen factory, slammed his fist on the table, causing the candlelight to flicker violently. "All that Xinhua woolen fabric is smuggled in. We must petition the municipal officials and tax officials to have them confiscate all Xinhua woolen fabric sold in the market."

“It’s no use,” Martinez, with his white beard, shook his head. “If the municipal authorities and tax inspectors wanted to confiscate those illegally smuggled Xinhua woolens, they should have done so last year. And what does all this say?”

"What does that mean?" a factory owner in his thirties asked instinctively.

"What do you think?" Martinez asked with a wry smile.

"They..." The man had barely finished speaking when he suddenly realized something, stopped talking, and looked around.

“Then…we’ll go and petition the Governor!” Lopez said through gritted teeth. “As the King’s representative, the Governor has a duty to protect the interests of the kingdom’s people from infringement!”

"Would the Governor be willing to meet us?" Martinez was not optimistic about the idea.

“We can unite all the woolen mill owners in Mexico City, and that will create a powerful force,” Lopez said fiercely. “We can even mobilize the factory workers and dyers to follow us and bolster our strength.”

“Lopez, I advise you not to do this. Because, in the eyes of the colonial authorities, such an action is absolutely a very dangerous act.” Martinez was shocked upon hearing this. “You know, whether it is His Majesty the King or His Excellency the Governor, the most important thing, besides raising more funds to replenish the weak national treasury, is the security and stability of the colonial territories.”

"If you incite the factory workers and dyers to gather together and demonstrate and petition the governor's office, it will definitely be seen as a provocation, and there is a high probability that it will be suppressed by the army. In fact, it is even possible that you will be regarded as social unstable elements and all of them will be thrown into prison."

"Then what should we do?" Lopez rubbed his cheeks irritably and said in a deep voice, "Are we just going to watch Xinhua Woolen slowly devour our sales market?"

"Right now, they can sell at prices below our factory price. Who can guarantee that at some point in the future they won't sell directly at our cost price, or even eventually monopolize the entire market at a price lower than our cost price?"

"Do the new Chinese have such a large production capacity?" a factory owner asked in surprise. "I heard that their population is only tens of thousands, and the number and scale of their woolen factories must be extremely limited. It's already quite an achievement that they can occupy a certain market share in Mexico. Could they really take over the entire market and completely replace our local woolen production?"

“We can’t underestimate them!” Diego glanced at him, muttered “idiot” under his breath, then waved his arm and said loudly, “Two years ago, the Governorate underestimated the Chinese, which led to a complete military defeat and allowed them to gain a foothold in the North.”

"Similarly, we cannot underestimate the strength of Xinhua Woolen in the face of the potential threat from them. Haven't you noticed? The amount of Xinhua Woolen sold in the Mexican market is growing at a very rapid rate, from less than two thousand pieces two years ago to twenty thousand pieces now—oh, of course, the actual sales number may be more."

“Look, in such a short time, it has increased tenfold! If we don’t take action and continue to watch the situation deteriorate further, I am pessimistic about the development of Mexico’s wool industry. Well, perhaps the wool factory that my father passed down to me will decline and eventually disappear in my hands.”

“Diego is right!” Lopez immediately chimed in, looking at the woolen factory owners present. “If Xinhua Wool’s prices are the same as those of imported European woolen fabrics, then we don’t need to worry too much. Because we still have a price advantage, which can help us retain our customer base.”

"However, their prices suddenly dropped in April this year, almost to the same price as the wool fabrics we produce. This will put us in a huge crisis."

"Undeniably, Xinhua woolen fabrics far surpass our quality and color, and are even better than those imported European woolen fabrics. If their prices were almost identical to ours, what choice would buyers make?"

"Yes, our wool products will be abandoned by many consumers, and we will lose our rightful market share. At that time, our wool factories, which we have worked hard to build for decades, will be forced to close, and we will lose everything."

"Tell me, Lopez, what do you want us to do to prevent this terrible thing from happening?"

“We must make those bigwigs in the colonial authorities feel our unease, and make them take the necessary measures to protect the interests of all our woolen factories.” Lopez glanced at Martinez, a resolute look on his face.

"Therefore, we need to put a little pressure on those high-ranking figures."
-
(End of this chapter)