This pocket-sized book is composed of three distinct parts, an essay, five detailed tables, and a collection of documents, most of which have been published separately in the 1950s. The preliminary essay, originally appearing in Historia Mexicana (Nos. 22 and 24), chronologically describes the most significant strikes which erupted during the Díaz régime, based primarily on newspaper sources. The author supports the research of other scholars that these conflicts were basically economic in nature, revolving around the issues of wages, hours, tiendas de rayas, and oppressive supervision.
Section two provides us with five extensive tables, originally published in the Boletín Bibliográfico of the Ministerio de Hacienda, which are of great value to the economic and social historian. The first lists the various textile factories existing in 1877, their location, owners, value of their machinery and plant, type of machinery, and amount and cost of raw materials required for operation. The chart continues by giving the number of men, women, and children employed, the range in salaries, types and quantity of textiles manufactured, their price, and their marketing outlets. The remaining tables give less detailed data for 1893, but include wage and employment figures. The documentary third of the study is comprised of a description of the major textile factories taken from J. Figueroa Domenech and ten newspaper editorials which appeared subsequently to the strikes of 1877 and 1906 to illustrate the shifts in press and management opinion during the régime.
It is a pity that the three sections have remained distinct units and have not been more closely integrated into an analytical treatment of the textile industry and its strikes. Why, as one editorial asks, was the textile industry plagued with more strikes than other industries even though textile workers did not compose the largest industrial occupational group? The relations between the círculos, European anarchist and syndicalist propagandists, foreign and domestic ownership, and the strikes still have to be unraveled. Did the textile workers influence the cigar-makers and railroad workers where they were in close geographical proximity? Can the Río Blanco confrontation be explained completely by their short term economic grievances if wages did not substantially rise between 1877 and 1893? González Navarro has given us some useful data so necessary to tackle these questions in the future, and hopefully it will spur further work in this still neglected area of Mexican history.
