Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bortz, Jeff.
Revolution within the revolution : cotton textile workers and the Mexican labor regime, 19101923 / Jeffrey Bortz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9780804779647
1. Textile workersMexicoHistory. 2. Cotton textile industryMexicoHistory. 3. Labor policyMexicoHistory. I. Title.
HD8039.T42M415 2008
331.8817721097209041dc22
2007018589
Preface and Acknowledgments
I LIVED IN MEXICO CITY for a number of years where I studied wage and labor issues. Over time it became clear to me that Mexican real wages followed many of the rules of underdevelopment: low and with a cycle often determined by trends in the world market. However, the protections and benefits that many workers in the formal sector enjoyed, and the relatively high wages of some industrial workers, ran contrary to some of those rules. After returning to the Unites States, I began to think about this anomaly, which eventually led me to the current study. While working on the problem, I discovered that the origins of Mexican protections and benefits lay in a labor regime created by revolutionary textile workers during Mexicos broader revolution. Subsequent generations of Mexicans benefited from their struggles, so whatever glory there may be in this volume must go to those who made the revolution.
This book argues that the revolutionary labor regime created outcomes favorable to a later political hegemony. The new rules of the work world greatly benefited generations of Mexican workers. Even to date, most Mexican workers enjoy an aguinaldo, a product of the workers revolution. On the other hand, there was no workers government in Mexico. Common workers did not run the postrevolutionary political system, although union leaders came to enjoy great power. To the degree that corruption and protectionism eventually devoured modern Mexico, and there is quite a debate about this in the literature, rank-and-file workers never constituted a ruling elite, so they can hardly take the blame for these vices, if indeed they were vices. In any case, an analysis of the outcome of the workers revolution in the 1920s and 1930s is better left to another volume.
Since I did not study history or Latin America as an undergraduate, all of my work in the field owes something to my professors in graduate school at UCLA, Brad Burns, Robert Burr, James Lockhart and Temma Kaplan. Some old friendsSteve Chernack, Dick Dickinson, and Dan Mihaljevichmade sure I got through school and stayed the course thereafter. Zoltan Gross was and is a teacher and a friend, as was Glenda Hubbard later at ASU. Shelby made sure I had access to the obscure materials at the UCLA Library, a place I still enjoy.
I first went to Mexico without knowing much about the country. Marcos Aguila, Francisco Colmenares, Ricardo Pascoe, Jos Luis Soto, and Edur Velasco lent their assistance and friendship, and to them I owe much of what I learned. Jos Luiss intricate knowledge of the Mexican work world became a useful starting point for my research. My first job there was at the Mexican Labor Ministry under Porfirio Muoz Ledo, and I thank him for his support of my work, then and later. I also owe a debt of gratitude that can never be paid to Crescen-cio Martnez Fernndez and Maclovia Soria Jurez, for whom I will always have the greatest affection. I extend this debt to Carmen Jurez, who lived through the revolution and told me many stories, some of which I believed. She is not the author of Chapter 3 on workers, but her spirit is present.
When I eventually returned to the United States, I had to make my way through an academic world that had become foreign to me. Mary Yeager and Stephen Haber facilitated that entry. Steves work on institutions has made the field much stronger, and his influence on Chapter 6, law, is obvious. At Appalachian State University, Nick Biddle, Larry Bond, and Marv Williamsen kept me focused on the tasks at hand when the distractions threatened to spiral out of control. And there were distractions.
Ma. Jos Corts, Quetzalli Corts, and Itzel Monge assisted me from time to time in the archives. Further assistance was provided by Sandra Mendiola during my stint at the UDLA, Alejandro Martnez Soria in Mexico City, and two graduate students then at ASU, Gregory Swed-berg and Sarah Koning. Greg also taught me how to make a good cup of coffee. Mariano Torres introduced me to the archives in Atlixco, and Bernardo Garca provided assistance in Orizaba. Lisette and Pablo Maurer gave me a place to hang out in Atlixco.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, a short Fulbright, and the Appalachian State University Research Council provided funding at various stages for the research for this book, and to each I express my gratitude. I want to thank my editor at Stanford, Norris Pope, and also the anonymous reviewer who made this a much better text than it would have been otherwise. An intelligent and accurate critique of the first draft measurably strengthened the argument.
I thank my wife, Josie, for her support through the years in helping me to understand Mexico and other things.
CHAPTER
Introduction
Purpose of the Book
Through most of the twentieth century, Mexicos history differed sharply from the rest of Latin America. When military dictatorships gripped the Southern Cone and dictatorship and revolution swept through Central America, Mexico was an oasis of stable and relatively tolerant, if not exactly, democratic governments. With peace and stability came economic growth, industrialization, and modernization. Without revolution from below or dictatorship from above, Mexico was an island of relative harmony in a Latin American sea of turbulence.
Political harmony is a product of hegemony, which raises the question of what created a hegemonic political system in Mexico. What happened in Mexico that did not happen in other Latin American countries of relatively similar social, economic, and cultural processes? While the obvious answer is the Mexican Revolution of 1910, it is less clear how the Mexican agrarian revolution, as Frank Tannenbaum aptly named it, could bring lasting peace to a country whose immediate future lay in industry and cities. Mexico needed urban as well as rural peace if it were to emerge from the chaos of revolution. Without doubt, the liquidation of the old land-owning class and the extension of land ownership to millions of campesinos, a process made possible by the rural violence of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and other agraristas, contributed to postrevolutionary hegemony. By itself, however, land reform could not have produced close to a century of stability in rapidly urbanizing Mexico.
It is a goal of this book to explain how a workers revolution within the revolution contributed to later political peace in Mexico. From 1910 to 1923, industrial workers challenged authority, threw out the old order, and forced new governments to come to terms with labor. This revolution within the revolution created the most hegemonic, proworker labor regime in Latin American history to that point, perhaps to date. It was this labor regime that became the foundation for political hegemony among the social class that represented Mexicos economic and political future, the urban proletariat. Of the many great histories of Mexicos revolution, the one actor ignored by historians has been the winner, the industrial working class. The standard explanation for a new labor relations system has been that it was a gift from above, from the state and its allies in the labor bureaucracy. These explanations either ignore industrial workers or see their participation in the revolution as marginal. As a consequence, the new labor regime appears as the miracle work of politicians and lawyers, a story in which workers do not appear.