This is the first archivally based history of the Mexican labor movement during the Revolution. It is a brave book, very welcome and very interesting, but also disappointing.
The author expresses an inclination to “revisionist” views of the Revolution. But his definition of his subject is the standard one, and the shape of his argument exceedingly familiar. The book begins with a scan of labor conditions in the late Porfiriato, then traces the agitation of labor during Madero’s revolution, its organization during his administration, the tribulations of the Casa del Obrero under Huerta, the Casa’s commitment to Carranza, its repression by him, the labor reforms in the new Constitution, Obregón’s treatment of labor up to the Bucareli agreements, and various state policies toward labor, and concludes with an attempt to draw a balance, all in 109 pages of text.
The book’s discoveries and main merits derive from the author’s work in three archives, the Obregón-Calles correspondence and the Ministry of Fomento records, both in the Mexican National Archives, and the Carranza papers in the Condumex Historical Studies Center. By far the most interesting source is Fomento. From its material the author gives brief but detailed and fascinating accounts of the development of the maderista, huertista, and carrancista labor policies. In all three cases—this is his principal “revision”—he makes clear the government’s persistent efforts to favor certain factions in the labor movement in order to control it. The book’s best passage is that on Carranza’s Labor Department director personally organizing Orizaba mill workers into agrupaciones de resistencia, which he could legally regulate more easily than sindicatos. Significantly, his campaign was in vain; the workers soon dissolved the agrupaciones and reinstalled their sindicatos. A theme running throughout the book, never stated but strongly implied, is an almost instinctive drive by governments even that early to institute a corporatist system.
The disappointments involve major questions. Granting the limits of “labor movement” studies, it is still falling short to discuss the Mexican movement as just a sum of commotions. Without systematic regional and industrial analysis, the author rarely even suggests the strategic differences between one strike and another. It is also a fault to concentrate only on the movement’s most dramatic current or most famous organization, like the Casa or the CROM. Even these the author portrays superficially, without conveying any sense of their internal complexity, and flatly denying their real autonomy. And outright independent, sometimes more important organizations, like the railroad or electrical unions, get little independent attention. Other notable groups, like the Catholic unions, get almost no notice. Moreover, though the author insists on the primacy of political opportunism in the history of Mexican labor, he offers no political analysis beyond simple oppositions to explain any specific opportunism or policy.
There are frustrating minor errors. Some are conceptual, like the idea of “a lasting settlement” (p. 32). Others are factual, like “Ferrer” (p. 27) for Ferrés. Missing from the notes and the bibliography are Araíza, Buve, Castillo y Peña, the Convention Chronicles and Debates, de la Cerda y Silva, Dulles, Gil, Huitrón, Levenstein, Lombardo, J. Meyer, and Valdivieso.
For the information the author has recaptured, and for his argument on Revolutionary labor policy, the book is indispensible for serious students of labor in modern Mexican history. But it wants a close critical reading.
