Radicals in the Barrio

Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class

Justin Akers Chacón

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781608467761
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Radicals in the Barrio uncovers a long and rich history of political radicalism within the Mexican and Chicano working class in the United States. Chacón clearly and sympathetically documents the ways that migratory workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and shared class experience, as they crossed the border into southwestern barrios during the first three decades of the twentieth-century.

Justin Akers Chacón previous work includes No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis).

Part 1

Chapter 1

The Mexican Working Classes

“[T]he Mexican peon prefers to rebel rather than to work . . . This condition will make the task of the pacification of Mexico a difficult one, either for the Mexican chief who finally obtains power, or for this country in case we are obliged to intervene.”

—US newspaper editorial, 1913

Historian Rodney Anderson has argued that Mexican working-class politics were influenced more by the liberal political traditions of the native bourgeoisie than by what he refers to as “militantly, class-conscious European ideologies.” Only during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he implies, did workers rally behind these doctrines as the national bourgeoisie closed ranks against radical land and labor reform.1 While it is may seem intuitive to say that workers only consciously embraced revolutionary doctrine while participating in the revolution, this argument overlooks the dynamics of class struggle and the history of radicalism before the Mexican Revolution.

The incorporation of Mexico into the US sphere of imperial influence and the dislocations and despoliation that followed informed labor radicalization that transcended the framework of liberal, democratic capitalism. Furthermore, this argument misunderstands how revolutionary organizations influenced by anarchist and Marxist doctrine crystallized consciousness among the most militant workers in the years preceding the revolution, especially in those strategic sectors of the economy dominated by foreign capital.

As John Mason Hart explains, the tendency to ignore, dismiss, or underestimate the role of the working classes in the Mexican Revolution is the continuation of a “traditional-conservative historiography and fictional literature which denied a radical working-class tradition, revolutionary working-class consciousness or even a comprehension by workers of contemporary revolutionary events.”2 In fact, radical political movements rooted in anticapitalist ideologies began to germinate in the interstices of class struggle in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Due to the particular characteristics of Mexico, radical philosophies first entered into the country through European and continental American immigrants, which resonated with the local traditions of collective indigenous resistance. The two major radical schools of thought, anarchism and Marxism, entered and took root in Mexico, adapting, mixing, and informing the organization of the working classes. As Anna Ribera Carbó observes, “even though their recently created organizations lacked defined objectives, the Mexican working class embraced syndicalist, socialist, and anarchist doctrine.”3 These organizational expressions gestated during the Porfiriato and flowered through the period of the revolution.

The growth of the industrial working class and proletarianization of the peasantry occurred within the matrix of imperialist intervention and domination. Class conflict pitted Mexican workers and peasants not only against domestic, landowning oligarchs and the Porfirian state, but also against foreign capitalists backed by their respective states. By 1910, US and foreign capital established their presence in the Mexican political system in order to conform it to their interests. The working class came to resent the ubiquitous political corruption that sprang from economic colonization. They also resented the government’s willingness to repress the laboring classes who refused to accept their role as a commodity for capitalist accumulation and foreign profiteering.

For this reason, working-class consciousness gravitated toward anti-imperialism and anticapitalist political ideologies. As historians Jaime Tamayo and Patricia Valles explain: “It is important to pay attention to the specificities of this influence on the development of the Mexican working class, that although in an embryonic state—as a class—anarchist and socialist postulates were integrated into its practice.”4

While the Mexican working class was not politically cohesive on a national level at the time of the opening shots of the revolution, their participation was instrumental in undermining the Porfirian regime. Strikes led by industrial workers shut down capitalist nerve centers of the economy, while large numbers of radicalized agricultural laborers, the bulwark of the villista and zapatista armies, brought the seemingly omnipotent landowning oligarchy to its knees. These episodes of class struggle brought about the Díaz regime’s demise. The revolution’s momentum then shifted to the urban centers, where a radical workers’ movement emerged as an independent force amid the revolutionary factions vying for power. These experiences, radical political ideals, and incipient forms of organization were ingrained in class memory. They were carried across the border with the waves of migration that brought Mexican workers into the United States.

Urban Workers

Mexican working-class formation and the character of class struggle have been shaped by the combined and uneven development of capitalism resulting from a history of colonial and imperialist domination. In Mexico’s complex colonial history, wage labor emerged alongside slave and indentured labor and peasant agrarian communalism. The homogenization of the workforce developed slowly over the colonial period through independence, accelerating rapidly during the period of the Porfiriato. By the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico’s class structure was highly stratified. A tiny but extremely wealthy and powerful landowning oligarchy and assortment of foreign capitalist classes controlled the countryside. Production was incorporated into international markets, depending on a vast population of agricultural laborers and small and subsistence farmers to till the soil, as well as large clusters of industrial workers to work in the mines, oil fields, and along the railroad lines. In the urban centers, a rising commercial and industrial bourgeoisie (both domestic and foreign) developed alongside a middle class composed of small business people, professionals, and government functionaries; while working-class barrios expanded rapidly in proximity to the burgeoning factory districts as displaced rural populations poured into city centers.5 Urban industrial workers soon eclipsed in size the artisanal workforce engaged in handicraft production in small workshops.6 In analyzing this social panorama, historian W. Dirk Raat concludes that by 1900, 91 percent of Mexico’s population of 13.5 million comprised the “popular classes,” including agricultural laborers, sharecroppers, industrial workers, soldiers, beggars, and other unemployed urban and rural poor.7

Between 1877 and 1910, the population of Mexico grew 61 percent, with the most rapid expansion taking place in emerging, urban industrial zones. For instance, by 1910, 30 percent of the population lived in the cities, with twenty-two urban zones containing a population of twenty to fifty thousand inhabitants.8 According to John Mason Hart, an urban craft-based working-class movement began to take collective action on a national scale as early as the late 1860s.

By 1871, the tailors of Mexico City, the vendors, the carpenters, street lighters, beauty shop workers, candlestick makers, alcoholic beverage deliverymen, schoolteachers, carriage makers, typesetters, musicians, weavers, button makers, and tobacco and textile workers had organized. In 1871, they sent representatives to a labor congress that met in the capital with delegates from worker groups from the cities of Durango, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz, and many smaller towns. They created the nation’s first workers’ council, the Círculo de Obreros de México, whose purpose was to coordinate union business such as negotiations and strikes over broad areas.9

Alongside the craft industries, a discernible industrial workforce developed in the mine, railroad, textile, and oil industries, especially in relation to the massive influx of foreign capital. As foreign investment increased in these industrial operations, the proportion of industrial workers grew as a result. For example, by the turn of the twentieth century there were about 90,000 to 100,000 factory workers (31,000 employed in 150 textile mills), 23,000 working on the national railroads, and an estimated 100,000 working in the mines.10 By 1910, nearly 750,000 people (of a total population of 15 million) had come to work in modern industry, accounting for 16 percent of the workforce.11 Alongside this grew an attendant urban workforce servicing the needs of an economy connected to the arteries and causeways of the world economy: warehouse workers, port workers, bank personnel, teachers, public employees, etc.12

The industrial proletariat began to grow and assert itself within Mexico’s largest cities. For instance, the cotton textile industry was heavily concentrated in four distinct zones in close proximity: Mexico City, Puebla, Atlixco, and Orizaba. Within this region, thousands of workers at hundreds of different mills established close communication, formed and spread unions, and participated in political affairs.13 While numerically small and regionally concentrated, the developing industrial working class wielded power disproportionate to its size and played a significant role in shaping the course of events during the revolution.

Women workers formed a portion of both the urban and rural workforce, albeit concentrated in certain economic spheres and regions. In 1895 there were 275,000 registered domestic servants, mostly women, working in near slave-like conditions. By 1902, they comprised 17 percent of the textile industrial workforce.14 Women workers were also distributed across artisanal occupations, as seamstresses, cigar-makers, needle-workers (empuntadoras), weavers, food serv...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Notes
• About Haymarket Books