The Candelilla Trade

Candelilla is a grey green, all but leafless desert spurge that grows in stands on both sides of the Rio Grande and carries a hard wax on its stems to hold its moisture in. The stalks go into a vat of boiling river water, sulphuric acid is poured over them, and the wax comes up as a brown foam that is skimmed off and left to set in blocks. In that raw state it is called cerote. It stiffens candles, polishes furniture and floors, waterproofs cloth and goes into chewing gum and cosmetics, and demand climbed in both world wars, when armies needed waterproofing for tents and ammunition.

Four fifths of the output came from the interior Mexican states, but a steady share was cooked in camps along the river by a few men working a fire and a vat, and that share crossed to Texas buyers who paid cash on the spot. Presidio was one of the busiest doors. J. E. Casner, who refined wax at Alpine, kept buyers at Lajitas, Presidio and Candelaria and opened a factory at Presidio about 1942 that took as much as twenty five tons of the plant a day through the war years. His buyers supplied the acid, judged the blocks and paid by the pound: in 1976 one of them, Tom Ornelas, was paying forty cents.

For most of the twentieth century the trade sat awkwardly across the line. Mexico ran the wax through a government buyer who paid more but made producers wait a month or two; the United States did not forbid bringing it in and declaring it. So wax moved by burro, and later by pickup, to the river at night and walked through customs in daylight. Guillermo Galindo, a mayor of Ojinaga, was said to have bought wax in the San Carlos country for years and grown rich on it.