The Global Perspective of Urban Labor in Mexico City, 1910–1929

El Mundo al Revés

Stephan Fender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367198466
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

The Global Perspective of Urban Labor in Mexico City, 1910–1929 examines the global entanglement of the Mexican labor movement during the Mexican Revolution. It describes how global influences made their entry into labor culture through the cinema, the theater, and labor festivals as well as into the development of consumption patterns and advertisement. It further shows how the young labor movement constituted its discourse and invented its tradition at meetings and in the columns of newspapers.

The local conditions constitute the framework for the examination of Mexican labor's perspectives on and engagement with contemporary events of global significance. Thereby, this book demonstrates how workers turned to the global context in search of guidance and role models, embracing global developments and narratives. It also reveals the differentiations from this context in order to create a unique local identity.

This approach allows new perspectives on the role of a neglected revolutionary actor and on the influence of global developments in a revolution that has been predominantly interpreted from a national point of view. It shows the way global ideas were brought to life in the framework of revolutionary Mexico City – providing new insights into the grand-narratives of Globalization and Revolution.

1
Introduction

“¡Viva la Revolución Mundial!”¹

By May Day 1913, only two years had passed since the resignation of long-standing dictator Porfirio Díaz and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. More than 20,000 workers took to the streets of Mexico City to commemorate the labor holiday for the very first time in the country’s history. Behind red and black flags and a banner demanding the eight-hour work day, they marched through the streets and attended speeches held by members of the newly founded Casa del Obrero Mun-dial, who invoked the spirit of the French Revolution, attacked the ruling elites, and connected the martyrs of the 1886 Chicago general strike with those of Mexican labor struggles. In a short span of time, the Mexican labor movement had developed from embryonic mutualist societies into the globally conscious actor with a clear political agenda that it represented that day.

Despite their relatively limited involvement in the violent military power struggles of the 1910s and 1920s, the urban poor were able to use the political space opened up by the revolution to start an unprecedented cycle of mobilization—one which eventually left them as one of the victors of the revolutionary turmoil. This cycle was characterized by the strong influence of global elements and the discursive figure of the global labor movement—its protagonists, ideologies, and history. The rise of the Mexican labor movement therefore allows for a fast-motion perspective on the integration of a national movement into the longstanding global labor movement’s discourse. Vice versa, this development sheds some light on the influence of an increasingly globalized world on a revolution—which has long been considered an almost exclusively national event.

The Mexican Revolution, as the “defining event of Mexican history” throughout the last century,² has been the subject of extensive and ever-growing historiographical research. Thereby, its nature and duration have been heavily contested; until today, there is no consensus about the temporal limits of the Revolution. The time frame covered here encompasses the phase of violent power struggles in the 1910s and 1920s up until the definitive ending of revolutionary mass violence and the Guerra Cristera. Furthermore, the establishment of the PNR in 1929 marked the onset of the incorporating state of the PRI and the invention of the myth of the “revolutionary family,” while the Great Depression marked a worldwide watershed in economic growth and trade relations.

The events following the 1910 uprising of Francisco I. Madero not only caused a political, cultural, social, and economic rupture in the national fabric, but its protagonists, programs, and iconic images also constituted the revolutionary myth—which would then be used to legitimize power relations in the revolutionary state for decades to come.³ This led to frequently revised and heavily contested interpretations of “The Revolution,” as put forward by historians and politicians alike. Thereby, the revolutionary process has long been described as a popular uprising with agrarian and nationalist characteristics with the aim to further the project of “nation-building” (forjando patria) in Mexico. Although new approaches and interpretations would repeatedly challenge this hegemonic narrative over the years, this notion ultimately prevailed.⁴ Recently, the rise of Global History has raised questions about and broadened perspectives on entanglement beyond the borders of the nation-state. However, the place of Latin America and the role of non-elite actors in the often-postulated first wave of globalization⁵ remain neglected topics in the field. In order to rectify this development and to once again update the national myth, this time by applying a global perspective, El Mundo al Revés examines how the workers of revolutionary Mexico City engaged with the global context: What mechanisms shaped this process and what were the repercussions within the national and global frameworks?

Its conceptualization places El Mundo al Revés within two differentiated historiographical frameworks: On the one hand, there is the treatment of the Mexican Revolution—the most extensively researched topic in Mexican historiography—and one of the largest fields of study in Latin American History. On the other, there is the context of Global History, and especially its subdiscipline, Global Labor History. Due to their vast nature and the rapid growth of literature in these fields, this chapter can hardly encompass them in their entirety. Instead, it outlines important developments and research directions—and provides examples of groundbreaking and innovative works therein.

The historiography of the Mexican Revolution is extensive and differentiated—characterized by major revisions to the official narrative,⁶ great syntheses,⁷ and myriad regional and microhistories.⁸ The ever-changing perspectives on and utilizations of the national founding myth have produced a broad variety of research approaches. Despite the general assumption that urban workers only played a marginal role in the national power struggle, they have still attracted the attention of historians over the years, resulting in a solid output of mostly political, economic, and organizational research.⁹

The decline of academic Marxism and the rise of New Cultural History in the 1990s especially promised novel perspectives for the research of the “subaltern.” With a new methodology that leaned toward anthropological approaches and unorthodox sources (such as oral history), this school hoped to shed some light on actors who typically did not produce written testimonies. However, since the approach leaves ample room for interpretation and reading between the lines, it has been subject to severe criticism from the very outset. As controversial as they may be, these new methods still had a notable impact on the scholarly landscape as new actors and areas came into focus—among them, the urban poor in Mexico City¹⁰ and the dynamics of gender relations.¹¹

Global History, the second historiographical context of this book, emerged more recently, although universalistic approaches are far from new. Unifying characteristics of the field are the desire to analyze processes of entanglement and to conceptualize—but not neglect—the nation-state, but without losing sight of larger power relations like colonialism and imperialism. However, beyond this consensus, there is little agreement among historians about appropriate methodologies, time frames, or spatial dimensions.¹² General tendencies point toward grand narratives,¹³ while—until now—few studies have taken a global perspective on connections and networks focused within a small region—or even a single location.¹⁴

A growing subdiscipline of the field is the research of labor relations and conditions, and the worldwide diffusion of people, goods, and ideas—an approach that aspires to deepen the insights on social inequality, labor migration, and economic relations: Namely, Global Labor History. Of course, the examination of global flows of people, products, and ideas has also previously been an integral part of labor history,¹⁵ but this new global approach—influenced by intellectual currents like subaltern studies and New Labor History—aims to overcome Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. These twin forces have been predominant in the field; where possible, Global Labor History attempts to establish a perspective that encompasses views from the Global South.

Most of the work done in the field focuses on the traditional core areas of Labor History in the economic realm and on migratory movements,¹⁶ or addresses the thorny task of theoretical conceptualization.¹⁷ Global approaches that follow the perspectives of New Labor History on the cultural and social frameworks within which workers operated¹⁸ are still rare. However, some comparative works on the emergence of labor movements do exist,¹⁹ as do two recent—and intriguing—studies of the possibilities that the examination of the anarchist movement offers to the field of transnational studies²⁰ and regarding the role of radical immigrants in the United States.²¹ El Mundo al Revés connects to these recent historiographical developments by using the analysis of informal solidarity networks to establish assumptions transferable to the fields of Transnational History and Global History.

In the researching of the Mexican Revolution, global reference points, connections, and comparisons have been of relevance for quite some time now. Important issues have been: economic topics and the question of foreign exploitation;²² transnational interconnections, with a special focus on the US-Mexican borderlands;²³ and the influence of foreign nations and nationals.²⁴ However, despite the manifold recognition of global influences during the revolutionary phase, Global History as a field and approach has not received much recognition in the scholarly landscape of the Revolution.

Despite the predominance of the national perspective, the events of 1910 and of the two decades that followed were neither singular nor isolated from the global developments of the time. In a world that had experienced a massive increase in global interconnectedness, revolutionary upheavals shook empires, states, and the global public at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Ottoman Empire (1908), Russia (1905, 1917), China (1911), and Iran (1905–1911) were all scenes of regime change that Maier boils down to national rebellions against global pressure,²⁵ an assessment quite similar to the early nationalist interpretations of revolutionary historiography. In a different approach, this work examines the influence of global developments on the revolutionary process in Mexico based on the example of urban labor. It seems plausible that outside pressure and exploitation by foreign capital sparked nationalist resentment and rebellion, but the interconnections between the global and local contexts shaped the form and content of this movement at the same time too.

In the cultural and scientific realms, the inventions of the nineteenth century brought on the Age of Electricity,²⁶ when telegraph, radio, cinema, mass publication, and faster travel knitted the world closer together—but also created new differentiations. Cultural developments and news could now find a global audience through unprecedented media and publication channels, World Exhibitions, Hollywood movies, and communication by letter and telegram. Traveling technology experts and adventurers created, along with many other networks, new forms of social and cultural entanglement whose specific manifestations always depended on local circumstances. Mexico City was no exception to this development as international theater stars and plays, the cinema, and globalized consumption patterns and brands entered the capital city already, prior to the Revolution.²⁷

Until now, neither urban workers—despite the extensive treatment of their political and organizational history—nor the capital—as the economic and political center of the country—have been regarded as overly important by historians following the paradigm of an agrarian/nationalist revolution.²⁸ However, due to the processes of industrialization and urbanization during the Porfiriato, Mexico City poses a particularly interesting location for this kind of analysis. Porfirian modernization had led to the development of sharp contrasts in the City of the Centenario, where recent, large-scale constructions came face-to-face with the tenements and slums of the urban poor. Three decades of oppression and paternalism had, meanwhile, impeded the emergence of an autonomous labor movement, which now burst onto the political stage and—in a leap—caught on to the development of the global labor movement and to processes that took decades to evolve in other regions. Furthermore, the capital city—where various revolutionary fractions, including the labor movement, renegotiated the very concept of national identity and the structure of the emerging revolutionary state—promises to offer a unique perspective on the issue of methodological nationalism as problematized in the research of Global Labor.²⁹

Building on the recent work of Lear,³⁰ Barbosa,³¹ Picatto,³² and others, as well as on approaches from New Labor History and New Cultural History, and taking into consideration the social and cultural spheres in which workers operated, El Mundo al Revés will shed light on how the idea of a global union of working people manifested at the local level—examining which exact mechanisms shaped this process, and also the interactions with the broader global context. This will provide a deeper understanding of interconnections, transfer mechanisms, and regional differentiations. Furthermore, this approach will demonstrate possible ways of making meaningful global comparisons within the fields of Latin American History and Global Labor History. Instead of assuming generalized developments along the lines of Western labor movements, this book presents voices from the Global South and aims at revealing the extent to which even lower class—or subaltern—actors could be masters of their own fate, should they take advantage of regional structures and global currents.

Obviously, it is not possible to talk about the global labor movement as a factual institution, just as it is not possible to talk about the Mexican movement either. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The World of Urban Labor
• 3 The Outward Perspective
• 4 Elements of Identity
• 5 The Question of Belonging
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index