Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City

By focusing on how working women and men experienced Mexico’s early-twentieth-century armed conflict, John Lear’s Workers, Neighbors and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City brings a fresh perspective to questions about collective action, regional politics, and social change that have long interested historians of the Mexican Revolution. This long book is based on extensive archival research and presents rich detail regarding the daily lives of workers in the nation’s largest metropolis. Building on an older historiography of labor activism and on a newer body of research regarding the social and cultural dimensions of work from the Porfiriato through the 1940s, it demonstrates that in the aftermath of what has most often been portrayed as a nationalist conflict over rural property rights and political participation, laboring men and women emerged from the revolution as willing activists with a strong sense of their economic and political importance that they would carry with...