The history of Mexican oil is essentially one of disappointed hopes for the Mexican people. It is a history which, in many respects goes back far beyond the time when the seepage of oil in some parts of Mexico, and the growing use of petroleum as an industrial fuel, led to the first growth of interest in a Mexican "petroleum industry," and the beginning of an organized search for recoverable oil reserves.
Even in pre columbian times, seepage oil was used by the Aztecs and other peoples as a ritual ointment. After the Spanish conquest, the natural wealth of the earth took on a deep historic and psychological significance for Mexico. The land of Mexico had after all, like the people who lived upon it, been in a sense stolen from themselves. Moreover, the new Spanish legal tradition, imposed after the conquistadors, made mineral wealth a patrimony of the entire society (or, strictly and more narrowly, of the crown), rather than assigning mineral rights to individual landowners as English legal practice generally assumed. From a broad emotional and symbolic significance, the ownership of Mexico's natural wealth became a real and immediate concern in the later nineteenth century. The reason was a failed development plan, that of Porfirio Diaz and his cientificos, who eagerly encouraged foreign investment in Mexico, and in the process allowed as much as a seventh of the country to fall into foreign hands.
The first strikes of oil in Mexico, early in the century, were based on the findings and recommendations of a Mexican petroleum geologist, yet the industry that developed through the three decades that followed remained in the hands of foreign interests. When, in 1938, the administration of President Lazero Cardenas expropriated the vast majority of the foreign oil holdings, Mexican opinion, elite and popular alike, erupted with joy. It was hailed even as a sort of reversal of the Spanish conquest; Mexico, e...