Trabajo y tecnología en los ferrocarriles de México: una vision histórica, 1850–1950. by Guillermo Guajardo Soto (review)

Guillermo Guajardo Soto, a scholar of both Chilean and Mexican technological history, argues that the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920)—and its outcome—stunted the growth of railroad technological development. The large-scale use and abuse of railroad infrastructure during the war, as well as the implementation of inefficient practices, such as hiring workers not on the basis of merit but based on their allegiance to armed rebels, laid the foundation for inefficient practices after the war. Workers’ resistance to technological change workplace regulations exacerbated problems for the railroads from the end of the revolution to the 1990s, when the system became privatized and largely defunct.

The book is divided into eight chapters. The first two chapters provide a synthesis of the historiography on the railroad’s role in the late nineteenth century, emphasizing the positive role that Americans played in the construction of the system and in cultivating modern labor habits among largely American workers. The following four chapters draw on sources from Center of Railroad Documentation and Investigation (CEDIF), the Secretary of Public Education, and the Mexican National Archive to document the decline of labor discipline during the revolution, which took place both among battalions that fought alongside Emiliano Zapata as well as those who fought (against Zapatismo) for presidents Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924) and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928). The final two chapters take the analysis up to the 1950s, but the bulk of the primary source documentation is presented in the middle four chapters.

The book primarily contributes to the study of technological change in Mexico. In particular, it addresses the important question of why the railroad industry endured enormous deficits throughout the twentieth century. This is an enormously significant question, and the author should be commended for taking it on. Unfortunately, his conclusion is, on the one hand, outdated, and, on the other, extraordinary reductive.

Guajardo Soto argues that the woeful inefficiency of the railroad industry can be attributed to two factors. First, workers who fought during the revolution made a pact with generals who soon became presidents; in exchange for workers’ support during the war, generals and presidents Carranza, Obregón, and Calles handed out jobs to men unfit to carry out the work. This system of patronage continued until 1990. Second, workers defended their rights of seniority and workplace autonomy to the detriment of the industry. In proposing this view, the author states he is writing against a historiography that celebrates worker activism.

The author’s argument is strongest when he connects inefficiency to the mobilizations during the revolution. The documentation and the reasoning are solid. However, he undermines his point on the political pact made between workers and presidents by ignoring the most important book on the Mexican railroad industry in the twentieth century, Kevin J. Middlebrook’s Paradox of Revolution (1995). It is unclear how Guajardo Soto thesis adds to, or conflicts, with Middlebrook’s argument that the rise of Mexican workers’ power came during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). On this and a number of other points, the author should have engaged Middlebrook’s work.

The second part of Guajardo Soto’s argument—that workers were largely at fault for the chronic efficiencies of the industry—is more problematic. This section relies entirely on the records of railroad administrators. Moreover, the author provides no analysis of what political and economic concerns might have motivated these administrators. Rather, he takes them at their word.

The analysis is particularly problematic when it comes to the author’s description of workers’ culture and the railway community, presented in Chapter 7. The author could have consulted a wide array of primary sources that give us access to workers’ points of view and provide a window to...