Uses

Chicleros (1880-1950)

As the popular story goes, in the year 1866, Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana gave a kilogram of chicle gum to Thomas Adams, a dentist in New York City. After a year of experimentation, Adams marketed his first commercial chicle chewing gum, and the chicle industry was born (Hendrickson 1976, Morton 1987). While the details of this story may have been exaggerated, the chicle industry that flourished in the early 1900s had a huge effect on the region. Chewing gum had previously been made from the resin of spruce trees, which had less desirable characteristics than the new chicle gum.

The primary ingredient in chewing gum was the latex sap of the chicozapote tree. This sap was collected by native workers who came to be known as chicleros (Karling 1942, Egler 1947, Schwartz 1989). They collected the sap by using a machete to cut v-shaped diagonal slashes in the bark of the tree. Latex would run down the slashes into bags at the bottom of the trunk, which were picked up by the chicleros the next day. After heating the latex to reduce the water content, it was formed into blocks and sent to factories in the United States. From about 1880 until the late 1940s, chicle was the most important use of the chicozapote tree. At the peak of production in 1930, over 6.3 million kg of chicle were imported into the U.S. (Morton 1987). Other families of tropical trees can give latex, including the Apocynaceae, Asclepiadaceae, Campanulaceae, Compositae, Euphorbiaceae, Moraceae and Papavaraceae, but none matched the quality of chicle from the chicozapote (Egler 1947). Because of problems encountered by chicleros, including over-tapping and loss of forest habitat, chicle plantations were attempted, but were abandoned as impractical (Karling 1942). Extraction of latex from the leaves of chicle was also attempted (Morton 1987), but was found to be very inefficient. The industry declined after World War II, when cheaper synthetic substitutes were found for chicle, but never has stopped entirely.