Rayon for Peons

Last week the Mexican Consul General in Manhattan announced a deal whereby 1) millions of pesos of native capital went to work in Mexico, encouraged by the new friendly atmosphere of the Avila Camacho regime, 2) Mexico took a big step toward her own industrialization, 3) Japan lost another customer in the Western Hemisphere, 4) a Massachusetts textile firm sold a batch of idle machinery.

Entrepreneur of this quadruple play was an Italian count (who likes to be called Mr.), debonair Giovanni Naselli. Born in Manhattan 45 years ago, and hence a U.S. citizen, the count is no Fascist although he spent about ten years making rayon and lire in the Rome branch of the huge Societ`a Generate Italiana della Viscosa, a world leader in cheap rayon manufacture. In 1933 he went to Mexico City, there started his own rayon twisting plant, Cia. Nacional de Artisela. S.A., whose 25,000 spindles now twist 60% of Mexico's rayon yarn and make it the world's No. 2 exclusively rayon twisting plant (No. 1: 34,000 spindles in a plant of the Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels in France).

To Mexicans, rayon (in bright colors) is as well loved as tequila and la corrida de toros. But the yarn had to be imported --first from Italy, and, after the war began, from Japan. U.S. yarn costs twice as much as Japanese, but the Japanese yarn is coarse and inferior, and Naselli began looking for some rayon-making machinery of his own. He found it some 3,000 miles away in Easthampton, Mass.

There the Hampton Co., cotton finishers, had set up a 1,500,000-lb.-per-year rayon plant as an experiment, discovered that American Viscose, Du Pont and Industrial Rayon were hard on newcomers, shut their plant in 1939. The machinery has been for sale ever since. Naselli bought it with money raised in Mexico, last week had men dismantling it for removal to San Angel, suburb of Mexico City. By mid-1943, says he, its production will be expanded to 6,000,000 lb., enough to make Mexico virtually self-sufficient in rayon.

Textile makers had tough sledding during the Cardenas regime, when the workers took over about one-third of Mexico's rayon industry. The count eluded them by employing 16-to-18-year-old, soft-fingered (best for rayon working) girls and paying them six pesos a day (2 1/2 pesos is the minimum wage). Mexican working girls, even though unmarried, take advantage of their right to a 40-day maternity leave with pay each year, followed by two half-hour baby-feeding periods daily.

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