Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments This project has led me down many different paths that I could hardly have anticipated when I started. Many people have offered me their wholehearted support on this marvelous journey. I want to first acknowledge the warm and continuous support that I received from so many Veracruzanos in this endeavor. Without their help, I could never have completed this study. As a friend, colleague, and confidant, Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, who grew up in Córdoba, has helped me immeasurably from the work’s inception, introducing me to many Cordobans as well as explaining to an outsider many of the traditions and customs of her birthplace. Her mother, Isabel Chávez-Hita de Naveda, and her sisters, Beatriz and Christina, opened their homes to me and provided me with valuable personal contacts within the Spanish business community. Javier Domínguez Sánchez, Luis Sainz Pardo López Negrete, Baltazar Sánchez Regules, and Eduardo Alvarez Amieva provided me with valuable information about their Spanish immigrant families. Javier Domínguez Sánchez graciously lent me the unpublished biography of his grandfather, Severo Sánchez Escobio, written by his nephew. Before his untimely death, Aquileo Rosas Juárez lent me a copy of his unpublished manuscript on the Revolution of 1910 in Córdoba. Other Cordobans, including Luis Puig Hernández and Ruben Calatayud, were also extremely generous in sharing time x Acknowledgments with me. Finally, Reyna Ríos Dominguez, director of the Córdoba Municipal Archive, brought me hundreds of boxes of documents to pore over and placed me in contact with some of my first interviewees . In my search for retired sorters in Coatepec, Soledad García Morales located administrators and coffee sorters for me to interview. Her uncle, Antonio Díaz Sarauría, took me to an abandoned plant to explain the entire coffee preparation process and helped me to understand the nature of the sorter culture. In Huatusco, Susana Córdova Santamaría arranged a marvelous interview with the former coffee exporter, Rafael Fentanes Guillaumin. Ricardo Romero introduced me to two family members who had worked in the Orizaba beneficios. I would like to especially thank the fifteen sorters who agreed to be interviewed. Brígida Siriaco García, Delia Ortiz Sarmiento, and Estela Velázquez Ramírez welcomed me every summer into their homes when I returned to pepper them with additional questions. Olivia Domínguez Pérez, director of the Veracruz State Archives, and her staff went out of their way to make available to me all the documents that I needed, even though at times it was undergoing reorganization . In particular I want to thank José Luis Barradas López for tolerating my incessant requests for more folders from the State Board of Conciliation and Arbitration and to Ana María Salazar, who was in charge of the Matías Romero Library in 1999. Sara Buck generously shared her index of Gobernación y Justicia. Over the years, I have had the pleasure to work side by side with a distinguished group of Veracruz scholars at the Instituto de Investigaciones Histórico-Sociales of Veracruz University, who enriched my knowledge of the state’s history and included me in their social events and excursions into the countryside. They include Rosío Córdova Plaza, Pedro Jiménez, Alberto Olvera, Juan Ortiz Escamilla, and Davíd Skerritt Gardner. Carmen Blázquez Domínguez has been a wonderful colleague, assisting me in tracking down inaccessible archival collections and Veracruzanos with special knowledge of Veracruz history. At the Colegio de México, I would like to thank in particular Javier Garciadiego Dantán, Romana Falcón, Alicia Hernández, Acknowledgments xi Marco Palacios, Anne Staples, and Gabriela Cano for welcoming me into their vibrant intellectual community during my stays in Mexico City. I want to acknowledge the assistance of a number of Veracruz students in data collection. Gilberto Cházaro García entered data on union membership and created the tables found in chapter 2. Gerardo Ciruelo Torres, Andrés Aguilar y Portilla, and Davíd Ruiz Ramón transcribed my interviews. The research for this project was originally funded by a FulbrightGarc ía Robles Lecturer/Scholarship in 1998–99 when I lived for a year in Xalapa, Veracruz. I returned almost every summer to continue my research, very often funded by a Bradley University Research Award. In the fall of 2005, I...