Fifth in this impressive series, En la revolución is the long-awaited volume on labor in the Mexican Revolution. Co-author Juan Felipe Leal (also co-author with José Woldenberg of volume II, Del estado liberal a los inicios de la dictadura porfirista) sets the stage with an interesting criticism of “Marxist paradigms” whose European-centered, evolutionist” dogma assigns the working class a historic mission but fails “to capture its complex and changing reality” (p. 7). He does not, of course, reject Marxist analysis out of hand, but, instead, offers a detailed empirical look at the structure, institutions, and events of the last years of the Porfiriato through the fall of the Madero government.
Separate sections, accompanied by useful tables on wages, numbers of workers, etc., are offered on miners, factory workers, artisans, and railroad workers throughout Mexico and the workers and artisans of the Federal District. Although readers will find much that is valuable, this section lacks the conceptual depth of Leal’s earlier work in the series and should be used in conjunction with that and with Ciro F. S. Cardoso and Francisco G. Hermosillo’s contribution to volume III, De la dictadura porfirista a los tiempos libertarios. The second half of Leal’s study chronicles worker organizations and their conflicts from the fall of Porfirio Díaz to the struggles which followed the overthrow of Madero. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and secondary sources, it stands as the finest treatment to date of this important topic.
José Villaseñor’s half of this volume eloquently details the political and organizational history of the epoch, drawing almost exclusively from contemporary newspaper sources. More than half of his work deals with the pre-1913 era covered by Leal, leaving less than a fifth of the book to present the critical years from Madero’s fall to the Constitutional Convention of 1916-17. As with most volumes in this series, Leal and Villaseñor cite few non-Spanish sources. Especially missed are the three recent works on the Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight, François-Xavier Guerra, and John Hart, as well as Douglas Richmond on Carranza’s labor policy, Michael Meyer’s controversial revision of Huerta’s relations with labor, and Barry Carr’s work on the Casa and his El movimiento obrero y la política en México, 1910-1929, vol. I. Given the importance of those years, Villaseñor’s mediocre treatment is particularly disappointing.
While this volume is a useful addition to Mexican labor studies, and is, for the period after the fall of Díaz, the most detailed study yet attempted, it does not reach the level previously attained in this series. Even what is new and interesting is less helpful than it could have been because of the lack of both an index and a bibliography.
