The unionization of public schoolteachers was one aspect of the sweeping social and economic changes that occurred in the Mexican Revolution. Some students of modern Latin America have looked beyond the origins of such spontaneous worker and peasant movements to emphasize the role of government in the creation of social and economic institutions. Fredrick Pike has suggested that Mexico’s President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) carried out reforms and at the same time built a corporate power structure that absorbed peasant and labor organizations. Once assimilated, these institutions became devices by which the government influenced and perhaps controlled the activities of their members so as to insure political and social stability.1 One test case for this hypothesis involves the Mexican teachers’ unions which experienced the critical period in their development from 1931 to 1945.2 It is the purpose of this paper to explore their evolution during this decade and a half and to examine their relationship with the government.
Education occupied a prominent place in the Mexican Revolution. Public schoolteachers were leaders in the government’s attempts to stimulate social and economic change. Although politicians proclaimed the importance of teachers in the Revolution, the latter were generally among the lowest paid civil servants, and conditions of job tenure and promotion were at times uncertain. Therefore, the relationship between teachers’ unions and the government was seldom congenial and occasionally hostile. Clearly teacher unionization was a significant factor in the Revolution, but specialists in the history of labor organization usually ignore this area to concentrate on industrial workers and the peasantry.3
The history of Mexican teachers’ unions in the 1930s reveals some of the contradictory tendencies characteristic of a nation in the midst of rapid change. The government used education as a means of spreading literacy and technical training to both rural and urban lower classes. These policies were intended to benefit previously downtrodden elements of Mexican society. At the same time, the expansion of schools led to a rapid growth in the number of teachers, many of whom turned to unionization as a source of protection and security. However, these early unions were dominated by individuals who used personal loyalty as the basis for their leadership. Their organizations became enclaves for small groups which often took exception to the government’s overall plans for education. As a result, the revolutionary government encountered unexpected opposition from these unions which represented, in principle at least, a portion of the exploited classes for whom the Revolution had come into being.
The Teaching Profession
The Revolution of 1910 facilitated the realization of social changes, some of which had their inception in the previous century. The appearance of teachers as an important social group occurred in the late 1800s. One landmark was the establishment of the first national teacher training institution in 1887 by the government of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910). Its graduates found that the concentration of affluence in urban areas confined public education largely to the national capital and other cities.4 During the last decade of the Porfiriato, the Ministry of Education began to explore the possibilities of rural schools for the large Indian-mestizo population. By 1910 the goal of mass education for rural Mexico had wide support among politicians and educators, but the violence and disruption of the next decade severely hampered progress in this area. Instead, teaching conditions worsened. Even in the relatively wealthy Federal District, local governments were unable to pay teachers’ salaries on a regular basis. In 1919 a teachers’ union in the Federal District, the League of Teachers, struck in protest against the local government’s failure to pay salaries. However, the strike failed, and teacher unionization suffered a major setback.5
It remained for José Vasconcelos to revive public education in 1921 by founding the Ministry of Education, an agency of the national government. Vasconcelos, with unflinching support from President Alvaro Obregón, secured large budgets for public education which he used to expand the network of federal rural schools and to hire more rural teachers. At the same time, the ministry raised its standards for teachers in hopes of improving the quality of instruction. However well-intentioned, the higher standards caused problems for many dedicated rural teachers who only had a few years of schooling and could not meet the new requirements.6
A North American sociologist, Edward A. Ross of tire University of Wisconsin, visited Mexico in the early 1920s and took a special interest in the position of teachers. He was dismayed by the absence of job security in the profession, even in the Federal District. Apparently some teachers lost their jobs at the whim of school administrators who could dismiss a subordinate without showing cause. Ross denounced “the political tyranny which now weighs upon them and makes them easy victims of their superiors when these wish to use them for their personal ends.” Conditions were worse in the states (outside the Federal District) where teachers had to endure the additional hardships of partial defaults on their salaries because of inadequate state funds.7
The teachers began to unionize in order to improve their position vis-à-vis the federal government, and by 1930 their unions had become an important but divisive factor in education. In 1934 the Ministry of Education conducted a census which revealed that nearly one-half of the teachers in the Federal District were members of seven distinct unions.8 Even before the census, union representatives had entrenched themselves in ministry agencies and used their power to play favorites with their own organizations. The ministry’s efforts to regulate interunion rivalries were futile. Union leaders saw their positions as secure enclaves within the rapidly growing educational bureaucracy.9
Bassols and the Unions, 1931-1934
Narciso Bassols who became Minister of Education in 1931 was a young lawyer and an avowed Marxist with a reputation for sharp intelligence and immense energy. His responsibilities included administration of public primary, secondary, and technical schools in the Federal District; direct control of the vast network of federal rural schools; and supervision of all private schools, both in the capital and in the states. Bassols was determined to bring increased efficiency to the operations of the ministry by reforming its bureaucratic structure. Presidents Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1929-1932) and Abelardo Rodríguez (1932-1934) apparently accorded him considerable latitude in his work.
Some of Bassols’ proposals to reform the ministry alarmed the unions. The teachers wielded their greatest influence on the ministry through the Council of Primary Education of the Federal District and the Comisión de Escalafón (commission in charge of salary and promotion). Both of the agencies represented the interests of the teachers in their dealings with the ministry. Bassols wanted to eliminate their involvement in decision-making, a proposition which the teachers interpreted as a direct attack on the unions.
The first major conflict between Bassols and the teachers involved the Council of Primary Education of the Federal District. Originally the council had two functions: consultation with the minister on technical problems in education and representation of the teaching profession in its relations with the ministry.10 In both areas, the council’s domain included the entire nation and not simply the Federal District. On November 11,1932, Bassols proposed the elimination of the council’s representative duties in order to make it solely a research body, stating that union politics had come to interfere with the council’s activities.11 Bassols’ reforms went into effect on December 30, 1932,12 and for the next several months teachers protested them vehemently.13 The protest movement was spearheaded by David Vilchis, formerly president of the council, and Lino Santacruz, recently removed as its secretary. Both men were active in a teachers’ union, the CNOM (Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Magisteriales), and they called on their fellow members to oppose Bassols.14
The second ministry-teacher conflict involved the Comisión de Escalafón. When Bassols came to the ministry in 1931, teachers’ unions rivaled the ministry’s influence in the Comisión. According to Bassols, teachers used their seats on the Comisión to reward their loyal following and to build a power base within the profession by a selective distribution of promotions and raises.15
The complex escalafón reform was further complicated by the Mexican government’s budgetary deficits in the early 1930s. Bassols devised a new escalafón that contained objective methods for determining promotion and salary increases. The old system relied on subjective evaluations which were often made by powerful teachers on the Comisión. Unfortunately for Bassols, the general reduction of salaries for government workers in 1932 gave his opponents the opportunity to falsely link the reduced pay scales to the escalafón reform in order to garner support from teachers. The minister’s attempts to explain the purpose of the reform were rejected by a large part of the profession.16
In 1933 union opposition to the escalafón reform became a national issue. The two leading unions, Vilchis’ CNOM and the CMM (Confederación Mexicana de Maestros), were the primary sources of protest.17 On January 10, 1933, Bassols launched a verbal counterattack on these two organizations. He argued that “the great majority of the members of the unions … are far from being in agreement with the agitation ... of the leaders.”18 He named Vilchis and Santacruz as agitators who were motivated more by their loss of positions on the Council of Primary Education than by any concern for the welfare of teachers as a group, and insisted that other leading proponents of dissent were disturbed by the prospect of loss of power on the Comisión de Escalafón.19 Vilchis responded to Bassols that the protests did express the desires of the many teachers who wanted the ministry to abandon its controversial policies.20 But Bassols, with solid backing from President Rodríguez and quick action from the national congress, implemented the new escalafón in the summer of 1933.21
The cessation of ministry-union hostility during the remainder of 1933 did not signify a full reconciliation between Bassols and the teachers. In January 1934, the recalcitrant teachers resumed their protests when they discovered that Bassols had ordered a secret census to determine the union affiliations of all teachers in the Federal District.22 In spite of the conciliatory efforts of Jesús Silva Herzog, a young economist serving as Vice Minister of Education, the teachers remained adamant in their criticisms of Bassols’ ministry.23
In mid-March the ministry made public the findings of the survey. Of the 4,194 teachers in the Federal District, the ministry received replies from 2,736; of these 280 or 10.3 percent were members of the CNOM. There were six other unions in the Federal District (the CMM being second in size only to the CNOM) with a combined membership of slightly over 1,000 or 38.5 percent of the total number of respondents. The ministry interpreted these statistics as substantiating its claim that the CNOM spoke for an atypical minority among the Federal District’s teachers.24
The CNOM disagreed vigorously with the ministry’s policies relating to the census. The union claimed that the ministry had taken an unrepresentative sampling, deliberately avoiding school zones known to have a high percentage of union affiliations.25 The CNOM also accused the ministry of reprisals against union leaders during the protests against the census. These retaliatory actions usually consisted of the abrupt reassignment of teachers to schools located considerable distances from their homes. David Vilchis and Lino Santacruz sent a formal protest to the ministry in which they listed six CNOM teachers who received such treatment.26 Ministry spokesmen replied that these changes were necessary to maintain discipline among the teachers,27 and President Rodríguez issued a statement in support of Bassols’ actions.28
On May 9, 1934, Bassols resigned as Minister of Education for a variety of reasons, including the opposition of Catholics to his enforcement of lay education in private schools. But probably the most important factor was his failure to win the support of the teachers.29 The unions’ ability to disrupt the normal operations of the ministry, particularly in Mexico City, revealed the importance of their role in education. Bassols possessed exceptional intellectual talents, but his innovative programs suffered because of the teachers’ opposition. The unions jealously defended their positions in the ministry against what they perceived to be attacks from the Bassols administration. Samuel Ramos, a ministry official in these years, concluded that the teachers’ agitation was “the fundamental cause of his [Bassols’] fall from the ministry.”30
The Cárdenas Administration and the Teachers
Lázaro Cárdenas became president of Mexico in 1934 and quickly set out to enact the Six-Year Plan, a far-reaching reform program which was intended to benefit farmers, industrial workers, teachers—in short most of the lower and part of the middle strata of Mexican society. In education he promoted the expansion of rural schools in the countryside and technical instruction in the cities. He advocated “socialist education” as the nation’s central pedagogical philosophy, but it became a highly divisive issue among teachers, students, and the general public. Lacking the support of a large consensus that favored socialist education, Cárdenas faced the dilemma of either continuing an unpopular, radical policy or returning to traditional standards. In a move that attested to his basic goal of promoting national unity, he abandoned socialist education after 1936 for a more moderate approach.31 National unity was a particularly vital concern for the Cárdenas government in the field of education.32 While Cárdenas abandoned socialist education, he maintained a constant, albeit at times circumspect, backing for the unification of teachers’ unions.
The two men who headed the Ministry of Education under Cárdenas (Ignacio García Téllez, 1935, and Gonzalo Vázquez Vela, 1935-1940) inherited the contentious teacher-ministry relationship left by Bassols and were further hampered in the early years by the disaccord over socialist education. Although García Téllez was in office so briefly that he had little opportunity to gain the teachers’ confidence, Vázquez Vela was able to do so and at the same time used the ministry’s growing influence to promote the unification of teachers’ unions. His policy was the antithesis of Bassols’ attacks on the unions, and yet both were consistent with the overall aim of consolidating educational institutions. Bassols tried to bring the delinquent groups to heel through punitive methods, whereas Vázquez Vela sought to encourage them to form a larger, more cohesive organization through moral suasion and cooperation.
To win the teachers’ support, Vázquez Vela had to address the problems caused by inadequate financing of public schools. Beyond the Federal District and the federal rural schools, state governments were responsible for most public education. Forced to operate with insufficient funds, these schools were often run by local politicians who had no understanding of their purpose. In 1935 a series of strikes in various parts of Mexico included work stoppages in several impoverished state and local public school systems.33 For example teachers struck against the state of Mexico twice, first in July and again in August. In both cases the cause was failure to meet the salary payment schedule. The Ministry of Education brought both sides together for negotiations, but finally the national government resolved the crisis by payment of the overdue salaries on the condition that the state government would supply full reimbursement at a later date.34
Other strikes and threats of strikes demonstrated the extent of teacher frustration. In the cities of Veracruz and Jalapa teachers refused to report to work, again for nonpayment of salaries. The Jalapa teachers added a charge of administrative incompetence against local officials.35 In the state of Guerrero teachers threatened a strike, claiming they would be unable to eat unless they were paid soon.36 In December 1935, teachers picketed the Coahuila state system,37 and in 1936 at least two walkouts took place: one in the city of Toluca (Mexico state)38 and another in Tamaulipas.39 Clearly the teachers employed by the state and local governments were unhappy with their predicament.
Lack of organization handicapped teachers’ efforts to attenuate their hardships. The most prominent union in the Bassols years, the CNOM, apparently disbanded in late 1934, bringing an end to an organization that originated in the 1920s.40 The CMM emerged as the most active union in 1935 and claimed 310 affiliated groups in several states41 although there were several small unions which maintained separate identities. The ministry’s census of 1934 listed seven such unions in the Federal District alone, and there were probably many that were not included.42 Apparently most teachers’ unions were local in scope, and, if any larger organizations developed, they were shifting coalitions of the smaller units. The most influential unions on the national level were those of the Federal District which capitalized upon a relatively high concentration of teachers from which to draw their members and easy access to the ministry, the national congress, the president, and the major newspapers.
While teacher discontent was spreading through the nation, the CMM attempted to assert its leadership through the public proposal of long-range goals intended to improve the position of all teachers in Mexico. Before the flurry of strikes in the summer of 1935, a CMM convention resolved that the federal treasury department should take actions to insure prompt payment of teachers’ salaries in the state and local systems.43 Other resolutions urged a strengthening of teachers’ rights in federal laws covering salaries and job security and, in response to the violence against rural teachers in some sections of Mexico, the arming of teachers in hazardous areas for self-protection.44 The delegates made frequent mention of union unification.45
The presence of David Vilchis at the convention provided evidence that ministry-teacher relations were improving. Vilchis voiced no opposition to the Cárdenas government nor to any of the resolutions of the CMM. He may have been occupied with the task of regaining some of the influence he had lost with the disbanding of the CNOM.46 In later years he became a central figure in the union unification movement.
Vázquez Vela’s attitude toward teachers and their problems offered a marked contrast to the conduct of Bassols. Where his predecessor had been outspoken and aggressive, Vázquez Vela made few public speeches and was sympathetic in his dealings with teachers. He insisted that a feeling of harmony between teachers and the ministry was essential if the nation’s education program were to succeed.47 In a memorandum circulated to teachers and ministry personnel, Vázquez Vela exhorted them “to give up their useless and harmful inter-union conflicts” in the interest of advancing the cause of socialist education.48
The escalafón reform of 1935 offers an example of Vázquez Vela’s administrative method. In response to a resolution of the CMM convention of that year, the ministry gave high priority to studying the feasibility of placing teachers in rural federal schools on the same promotion and salary schedule as the Federal District teachers.49 President Cárdenas announced his support for the reform, and Vázquez Vela moved quickly to complete the preliminary study.50 Not only did Vázquez Vela heed the request of the teachers, but he also allowed them to participate in the actual revision of the escalafón.51
The new Ley de Escalafón went into effect in late September. The committee which authored the reform was headed by Joaquín Jara Díaz, chairman of the ministry’s Department of Primary and Normal Instruction, who made a special effort to hear the opinions of the teachers on important questions. The law provided clear and detailed regulations concerning promotions, evaluation of teaching skills, and minimum requirements for beginning teachers. Most importantly, it placed rural and urban primary teachers in the same category, thereby ending the discrimination against rural teachers in terms of salary.52 In the course of the escalafón reform, the new ministry showed a willingness to grant concessions to the teachers and to include them in administrative decision-making.
The Struggle for Union Unification
The Cárdenas government placed a high priority on labor organization and, with the help of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, made the CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores de México) the most powerful confederation of trade unions in Mexico.53 Similarly, Cárdenas wanted teachers to form a single, cohesive union and instructed Vázquez Vela to promote but not to dictate unification. The Minister of Education found this a difficult task because of the high degree of parochialism in union organizations and the unwillingness of union chiefs to give up their limited but secure positions of authority.
Probably the greatest obstacle to the unification of the teachers’ unions was the deep split between the leftist maestros, many of whom belonged to the Communist party, and their centrist and rightist colleagues. Most teachers who turned to Communism probably did so because they believed Marxism offered more salutary solutions to Mexico’s social and economic problems of the 1930s than had the moderate reforms of Obregón and Calles in the previous decade. Only a minority of teachers were Communists, but their adamant advocacy of radicalism made them conspicuous. In spite of the appeal of Communism and the official acceptance of socialist education, however, very few teachers were sufficiently conversant with Marxist theory to be effective ideologues in the classroom. Most disputes among teachers were not genuine ideological debates, but rather value conflicts in which tradition-minded educators opposed sweeping changes based on vague and often distorted interpretations of Marxist theory.54
The Communists initiated a hard fought institutional contest to win control of the unification movement, aiming to make some inroads in the larger struggle against Lombardo Toledano’s CTM for dominance of Mexican labor organizations and to give their party a foothold in the public schools. This rivalry between the aggressive Communists and the relatively less organized non-Communist teachers constituted a disruptive factor in the unification congresses from 1935 to 1937.55
In 1935 and 1936 three separate attempts to bring teachers’ unions together failed.56 The most promising negotiations between the CMM and a smaller union, the CNTE (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Enseñanza) led to the signing of a “provisional pact of solidarity” on February 25, 1936, which contained some high-sounding statements on mutual cooperation in the attainment of long-term objectives, but noticeably avoided mention of socialist education. Indications of disharmony appeared in a “brotherly appeal to all teachers” released by the CMM on October 23 which called for the “disinterested assistance” of all concerned.57 A few days later President Cárdenas dispatched a personal representative to both unions to emphasize his continued support for unification.58 On October 28, El Universal, a large Mexico City daily newspaper, announced that disputes among union leaders had brought the process of unification to a standstill.59
In February 1937, President Cárdenas sent Francisco J. Múgica, his Minister of Communications and Public Works, on a special mission to the teachers’ convention at Querétaro. In his opening speech Múgica challenged the teachers to moderate their passionate devotion to local organizations and to work for union unification. Cárdenas endorsed this message in a telegram read before the convention. The CMM, the CNTE, and two smaller unions voted to consolidate under the banner of the FMTE (Federación Méxicana de Trabajadores de la Enseñanza).60
Nevertheless, both Cárdenas and Lombardo Toledano were alarmed by Communist party control of the FMTE. Lombardo Toledano’s concern intensified when Communists led a secession movement in the spring of 1937 that threatened to capture one-fourth of the CTM’s membership.61 These organizational triumphs made the Communists a serious obstacle to Cárdenas’ plans for labor unity under government direction. Lombardo Toledano managed to resolve the CTM’s internal split by June 1937, but the FMTE remained under Communist direction.62 In the fall of 1937, the CTM dispatched its specialist in education, David Vilchis, to build contacts with local teachers’ unions, presumably to undercut the Communists’ power in the FMTE.63
The work of Lombardo Toledano and Vilchis bore fruit in February 1938 when FMTE members established a new union—STERM (Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Enseñanza de la República Mexicana). The CTM played a vital role in organizing STERM and undoubtedly had a voice in the selection of the new union’s leadership which was largely non-Communist.64 The officers of STERM included leaders from defunct unions and enemies of ex-Minister Bassols, particularly Vilchis’ associate from the early 1930s, Lino Santacruz.65
Although the creation of STERM was a notable achievement, divisiveness among teachers remained in evidence. While the FMTE and CTM were resolving their differences, two rival groups of teachers in Veracruz were engaged in a bitter dispute for control of the local union.66 Another indication of the centrifugal forces at work among the teachers was the concession by the organizers of the 1938 convention that STERM did not “negate the autonomy of (state and local) teachers’ organizations.”67 Ideological divergence appeared in Sonora where one union endorsed the then officially abandoned policy of socialist education and elected the following “Presidium of Honor”: Cárdenas, Marx, Lenin and “the rural teachers fallen in the social conflict.”68 Communist disruptions continued for at least the next two years, and in February 1940, the STERM convention in Mexico City was the scene of another vicious exchange between Communist and non-Communist teachers.69 STERM represented the unity of the upper echelons of the teaching profession with the CTM, but among diehard radicals and independent local unions this harmony was called into question.
Unification Reaffirmed
In the early 1940s the Ministry of Education moved even further away from socialist education in the direction of moderate programs that emphasized national unity, industrial development, and the expansion of literacy.70 The Communists remaining in STERM were active, however, and clashed with Octavio Vejar Vázquez, the conservative Minister of Education from 1941 to 1943. Hostile to STERM because of the intransigence of its many Communist members, Vejar Vázquez diminished the union’s influence by removing its members from high positions in the ministry. However, the minister’s exceptionally conservative approach to education cost him much support within the government and made him a controversial public figure.71
In December of 1943 Vejar Vázquez resigned, ostensibly for reasons of health. An editorial in the conservative daily newspaper, Excélsior, praised his efforts in the ministry and condemned those radical teachers who called Vejar Vázquez a reactionary. At the same time, Excélsior censured ambitious and selfish union leaders for fostering dissension within the teachers’ union. Like Cárdenas and his successor, Manuel Avila Camacho, Excélsior urged union unification for the benefit of Mexican society in general as well as the teachers.72
The Avila Camacho administration considered the instability of teachers’ unions to be a “national problem” and sought to make the unification congress of December 1943 a success.73 Avila Camacho emphasized his concern by personally opening the congress on December 24. In his speech before the assembled teachers, newly appointed Minister of Education Jaime Torres Bodet adopted a moderate position on the sensitive ideological issues surrounding the religious restrictions that remained in Article Three of the Constitution. He insisted that “education should be respectful of our traditions without becoming an obstacle to progress.” His strategy was to play down the divisive questions and focus on the duties and responsibilities of teachers to the nation.74
The labors of Avila Camacho and Torres Bodet seemed to have been fruitless in the early stages of the congress. One small union, SNATEP (Sindicato Nacional Autónomo de Trabajadores de Educación Pública), discerned an inconsistency in the government promotion of union unification. According to the SNATEP view, “it does not seem proper that the government should organize a union whose goal is to defend its members against that same government.”75 This statement probably reflected the opinions of the leaders of the many small unions absorbed or destroyed by the drive for organization in the teaching profession so carefully orchestrated by Cárdenas, Vázquez Vela, Avila Camacho, and Torres Bodet. During the course of the meeting old animosities were quickly resurrected, and emotion soon outweighed logic. One reporter claimed that at times disruptive behavior and shouting made it impossible to converse with one’s neighbor in the immediately adjacent seat.76Excélsior held the main cause of the disturbances to be the left wing of the defunct STERM organization led by the vitriolic José Fernández Zamora. The leftists were able to squelch the speaking efforts of David Vilchis (CTM representative) by loud hisses and whistles.77
In spite of the six days of conflict, the teachers voted to form a new national union, SNTE (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación). After tempers cooled and polemical rhetoric ceased, approximately two thousand teachers gathered on the last day of the conference to participate in the founding of the union. Also in attendance were Minister of Government (Gobernación) Miguel Alemán and labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Minister of Education Torres Bodet closed the conference with a congratulatory speech in which he praised the teachers for their acceptance of the “principle of unification.”78
A measure of the growth of government-union harmony was revealed in the SNTE Conference held from November 23 to December 3 in 1945. SNTE supported the proposal of President Avila Camacho to modify Article Three of the constitution by removing its overtly Marxist aspects. Avila Camacho explained that one purpose of his reform was to avert a reactionary offensive in the national congress by the expanding political right, most probably a reference to PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional).79
Participating teachers at the conference demonstrated considerable concern for administrative and technical problems in education and sought to avoid ideological extremes.80 The Executive Committee of SNTE advocated in special session the reform of Article Three for the purpose of removing all ambiguous language which meant, in effect, the eradication of the socialistic phrases. Even Lombardo Toledano agreed that the radical verbiage was unnecessary although he reminded teachers that the struggle against the Catholic Church and reactionary politicians should not be abandoned.81 The SNTE-backed proposal passed both houses of Congress easily by December 30, 1945, under the guidance of President Avila Camacho. The ideological content of Article Three became sufficiently vague to eliminate any cause for controversy.82
Conclusion
One of the main trends in Mexican education from the early 1930s to 1945 was the extension of government influence over the teachers’ unions. Union leaders perceived the aggressive policies of Minister of Education Bassols as threats to their recently created organizations, and their protests contributed to Bassols’ downfall in 1934. The Cárdenas administration continued the effort to dominate teachers’ unions but used conciliatory methods to restore stability and promote union unification. Finally, in 1938 after several abortive conventions, teachers organized STEBM, a national union which was succeeded by the SNTE in 1943. Under the guidance of the CTM, the new union was relatively free of the Communist teachers who had been a disruptive factor in union politics in the middle and late 1930s. Like the larger CTM, the teachers’ union was deeply committed to order and stability and closely tied to the increasingly powerful Mexican government, an arrangement that solidified even further state dominance of education.83 This subordination of the teachers’ unions to the government is consistent with the observations made by Pike and Wiarda concerning relations between the corporate state and labor unions. Viewed from this perspective, the Cárdenas and Avila Camacho governments engaged in more than social reform; they were also effective in political and institutional manipulation. Thus the potential antagonists in union-employer conflicts were linked in a way that seemed to favor the large bureaucratic state over the less powerful union. In the mid-1940s, harmony and placidity supplanted the conflict and uncertainty of the Bassols years and furnished testimony to the successful redirection of the teacher unionization movement by the Cárdenas and Avila Camacho governments.
Fredrick Pike, Spanish America, 1900-1970: Tradition and Social Innovation (New York, 1973), chapter 4. Other writings on this topic include: Howard J. Wiarda, “Toward a Framework for the Study of Political Change in the Iberic-Latin Tradition: The Corporative Model,” World Politics, 25 (Jan. 1973), 206-235; Wiarda, ed., Politics and Social Change in Latin America (Amherst, 1974); Kalman Silvert, Man’s Power (New York, 1970), especially pp. 136-139; Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism (Notre Dame, 1974); and Paul W. Drake, “Corporatism and Functionalism in Modern Chilean Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 10 (May 1978), 83-116.
The history of teacher unionization in Mexico is usually treated as a peripheral part of the institutional history of education. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz in Mexico: The Challenge of Poverty and Illiteracy (San Marino, Calif., 1963), pp. 118-122, stresses the spontaneity of teacher unionization in the 1930s and 1940s and minimizes government influence. David Raby’s Educación y revolución social en México (México, 1974), chapter 3, follows a similar approach but includes greater detail on ideological divisions and union politics. An effort to place teacher unionization in the broader context of the political and social modernization of Mexican education in the 1930s is Britton, Educación y radicalismo en México, 1931-1940, 2 vols. (México, 1976) I, 73-96 and II, 94-105. All of these studies fail to give sufficient attention to the role of government in teacher unionization.
Five of the many works in this area are: Marjorie Ruth Clark, Organized Labor in Mexico (Chapel Hill, 1934); Joe C. Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution under Lázaro Cárdenas (Chapel Hill, 1963); Ruiz, Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries: Mexico, 1910-1923 (Baltimore, 1976); Barry Carr, El movimiento obrero y la política en México, 1910-1929, 2 vols. (México, 1976); and Hobart A. Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America (New York, 1977), chapter 3.
Alejandro Martínez Jiménez, “La ducación elemental en el Porfiriato,” Historia Mexicana, 22 (Apr.-June 1973), 514-552. For a survey of nineteenthcentury Mexican education see Francisco Larroyo, Historia comparada de la educación en México (México, 1964), parts 3, 4, and 5.
Britton, “Indian Education, Nationalism, and Federalism in Mexico, 1910-1921,” The Americas, 32 (Jan. 1976), 445-458.
Ernest Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage (New York, 1928), pp. 522-523 and George I. Sánchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York, 1936), pp. 139-140.
Edward A. Ross, Social Revolution in Mexico (New York, 1923), pp. 161-164 and Gruening, Mexico, pp. 528-529.
Excélsior, Mar. 18, 1934, pp. 1, 8.
Secretaría de Educación Pública (hereafter cited as SEP), Memoria relativa al Estado que guarda el ramo de educación pública el 31 de agosto de 1931 (México, 1931), pp. V-vii and Verna Carleton Millan, Mexico Reborn (Boston, 1939), p. 49.
Francisco Gaxiola, El Presidente Rodríguez (México, 1938), pp. 297-298. For a more detailed discussion of the ministry-union conflict under Bassols see Britton, Educación y radicalismo, vol. I, chapter 3.
SEP, Memoria de 1933, II, 379-380.
Ibid., II, 385.
Ibid., II, 318-319.
Antonio Luna Arroyo, ed., La obra educativa de Narciso Bassols (México, 1934), pp. 110-111 and Excélsior, Jan. 11, 1933, p. 1.
SEP, Memoria de 1933, II, 306-308 and Samuel Ramos, Veinte años de educación en México (México, 1941), pp. 40-41.
SEP, Memoria de 1933, II, 311-315 and Ramos, Veinte años, pp. 40-41.
Excélsior, Dec. 30, 1932, pp. 1, 8.
SEP, Memoria de 1933, II, 318-319.
Ibid., II, 319.
Ibid., II, 320-324.
Ibid., II, 364-369.
Excélsior, Jan. 7, 1934, pp. 1, 5.
El Universal, Jan. 7, 1934, pp. 1, 6.
Excélsior, Mar. 18, 1934, pp. 1, 8.
Ibid., and Excélsior, Mar. 19, 1934, pp. 1, 4.
Excélsior, Apr. 1, 1934, pp. 1, 9 and Apr. 5, 1934, pp. 1, 8.
Excélsior, Apr. 6, 1934, pp. 1, 10.
Excélsior, Apr. 14, 1934, pp. 1, 8.
For a more complete account of Bassols’ problems see Britton, Educación y radicalismo, chapters 1-4.
Ramos, Veinte años, p. 41.
Britton, Educación y radicalismo, chapters 6 and 7.
Rafael Ramírez, “The Six Year Plan in Education” in Hubert Herring and Herbert Wienstock, Renascent Mexico (New York, 1935), p. 130.
Ashby, Organized Labor, p. 99.
El Nacional, July 19, 1935, pp. 1, 7; Aug. 19, 1935, pp. 1, 6; Aug. 26, 1935, pp. 1, 7; and Aug. 21, 1935, pp. 1, 4.
El Nacional, Sept. 6, 1935, p. 2.
El Nacional, Oct. 7, 1935, p. 1.
El Nacional, Dec. 10, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
El Universal, Feb. 28, 1936, p. 1.
El Universal, Nov. 3, 1936, p. 1.
Miguel Arroyo de la Parra, Federalización de la enseñanza (México, 1939), p. 9.
El Nacional, July 29, 1935, pp. 1, 7.
Excélsior, Mar. 18, 1934, pp. 1, 8.
El Nacional, Apr. 19, 1935, pp. 1, 7.
El Nacional, Apr. 18, 1935, pp. 1, 2, 7.
El Nacional, Apr. 19, 1935, pp. 1, 7 and Apr. 20, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
El Nacional, Apr. 21, 1935, pp. 1, 7.
El Maestro Rural, 7 (July 15, 1935), 9.
El Nacional, Aug. 2, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
El Nacional, July 2, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
El Nacional, Aug. 6, 1935, pp. 1, 2 and Aug. 8, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
El Nacional, Aug. 18, 1935, pp. 1, 4.
El Nacional, Aug. 16, 1935, pp. 1, 7; Aug. 18, 1935, pp. 1, 4; and Sept. 20, 1935, pp. 1, 8.
Ashby, Organized Labor, p. 52 and Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America, pp. 118-125.
Britton, Educación y radicalismo, I, 144-159 and II, 24-34.
Raby, Educación y revolución, pp. 75-79 and Ashby, Organized Labor, pp. 83-85.
El Nacional, Jan. 27, 1935, pp. 1, 4; Sept. 19, 1935, p. 1 and Dec. 7, 1935, PP. 1, 8.
El Maestro Rural, 9 (Nov. 1936), 3-4.
El Universal, Oct. 27, 1936, pp. 1, 10.
El Universal, Oct. 28, 1936, pp. 1, 4.
El Nacional, Feb. 3, 1937, pp. 1, 6 and frequent notices in El Nacional, Feb. 7-15, 1937.
El Nacional, Nov. 19, 1937, pp. 1, 8 and Ashby, Organized Labor, pp. 83-84.
Ashby, Organized Labor, pp. 84-85 and Raby, Educación y revolución, pp. 75-79.
El Nacional, Oct. 7, 1937, pp. 1, 4.
El Nacional, Feb. 9, 1938, pp. 1, 6; Feb. 18, 1938, pp. 1, 6; Feb. 19, 1938, pp. 1, 6; Feb. 20, 1938, pp. 1, 4; Feb. 21, 1938, p. 1; and Raby, Educatión y revolución, pp. 75-77.
El Nacional, Aug. 6, 1935, pp. 1, 2; Sept. 9, 1935, pp. 1, 5 and Oct. 27, 1936, pp. 1, 10.
El Nacional, Feb. 10, 1938, p. 5.
El Nacional, Feb. 9, 1938, p. 8.
El Nacional, Feb. 17, 1938, p. 2.
Raby, Educación y revolución, pp. 78-79.
Josefina Vázquez de Knauth, Nacionalismo y educación en México (México, 1970), pp. 199-204.
Ruiz, Mexico: The Challenge, pp. 120-121 and Raby, Educación y revolución, pp. 78-79.
Excélsior, Dec. 22, 1943, p. 1; Dec. 23, 1943, p. 4; Dec. 27, 1943, p. 4; and Dec. 28, 1943, p. 4.
El Universal, Dec. 9, 1943, pp. 1, 9.
El Universal, Dec. 25, 1943, pp. 1, 6.
El Universal, Dec. 24, 1943, pp. 1, 13.
El Universal, Dec. 27, 1943, pp. 1, 15.
Excélsior, Dec. 28, 1943, pp. 1, 5 and Dec. 29, 1943, pp. 1, 6.
Jaime Torres Bodet, Discursos (México, 1965), pp. 421-422 and El Universal, Dec. 31, 1943, pp. 1, 6.
SNTE, Conferencia Pedagógica (México, 1945), p. 32. On the rise of PAN, see Donald Mabry, Mexico’s Acción Nacional (Syracuse, 1973), pp. 32-44.
For example see SNTE, Conferencias, pp. 17-19.
Ibid., pp. 17-12.
Vázquez de Knauth, Nacionalismo, pp. 204-205 and Carlos Alvear Acevedo, La educación y la ley (México, 1963), pp. 292-297.
The corporate state expanded in the 1930s and 1940s at the same time that certain of its parts acquired the characteristics of a modernized bureaucracy. For a more detailed analysis of modernization in the Ministry of Education in the 1930s, see Britton, Educación y radicalismo. While modernization within a corporate state may seem to be a contradiction, Wiarda has pointed out that corporatism may overlap with other types of institutional change including modernization. Wiarda, “Corporatism in the Iberic-Latin World” in Pike and Stritch, eds., New Corporatism, pp. 3-33. The subject of corporatism-modernization overlap in the Mexican Revolution deserves further study.
Author notes
The author is Associate Professor of History at Francis Marion College.
