Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory

2. “Born into the Railway”

2 “Born into the Railway” Patriarchy, Community, and Underground Activism in the 1950s Sometime in the early 1930s, a Zapotec woman from Mogoñe, Oaxaca, took her twelve-year-old son, Demetrio Vallejo Mart ínez, to find a job at the railway station, where she sold food to hungry men on lunch break. In these men she must have seen a career path for her son, a job with a steady wage, benefits, and prestige. Although she mainly spoke Zapotec, she knew enough Spanish to persuade the station manager to take on Demetrio as an assistant. As she sold the produce that she and her husband harvested on a nearby farm, she kept her eye on Demetrio, who quickly grew fond of his job and dreamed of becoming a telegraph operator for the railway. Little did she know that her boy would become the most prominent rank-and- file leader in the industry’s history. Vallejo followed his sister Isaura on a path to upward social mobility. She had married a railway worker in Salina Cruz, a major railway hub. She soon gave birth to Lilia Benitez Vallejo. Like Demetrio, Benitez lived near the train station, where she played with friends and waited for her father and grandfather—both ferrocarrileros—to punch out. By the time they were in their teens, Demetrio was living in Salina Cruz with his sister and niece and working at the railway yard with his brother -in-law. The railway industry penetrated most aspects of the lives of the Vallejo-Benitez family; they lived near the tracks, depended on the industry for work, and socialized on streets bordering the station.1 Demetrio Vallejo took such pride in his work and developed such affection for his colleagues that he decided to become a union rep- 66 “Born into the Railway” resentative for Section 13 of Matías Romero while he was still in his twenties.2 When the railway movement came to a head in 1958, he had had well over a decade of union leadership experience. As Vallejo rose meteorically to lead the movement, he realized he needed trustworthy allies as he fought the charro union establishment. It was during those heady days of 1958 that Demetrio Vallejo called on his niece, Lilia Benitez, to join him in Mexico City and help him in the independent railway movement. Benitez was one of thousands of railway women whom historians have failed to include in the history of the industry. These women joined the movement on unequal terrain, with their male relatives soaking up the spotlight in newspapers and consequently becoming for historians the sole protagonists of postwar labor activism. But women had no less pride in being rieleras than their men did in being rieleros. They participated in an industry indispensable to the nation’s economy , but they remember their experiences with much less nostalgia. Wives endured men’s tendencies to spend much-needed pesos in bars and on lovers, and they often suffered physical abuse when their husbands did come home. While men cherished their time spent on the rails—often spending weeks away from home—wives complained of loneliness and neglect. Moreover, by the 1950s women’s expectations that railway work would provide a decent family wage proved illusory. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it contends that railway patriarchy—which was based on men’s exclusive right to work on trains and in yards—shaped the organization of work and community . Second, it shows that rieleros in Mexico City drew on their shared experiences at work and in neighborhoods to organize clandestinely in the early 1950s. These experiences on the job and in the community would enable rieleros and rieleras to build a broad, national dissident movement in the late 1950s. Roots of Discontent From 1948 to 1958, charros refused workers’ demands for wage hikes in order to keep rates on cargo low and thereby help strategic industries , such as mining and textiles, which were critical for industrial- Patriarchy, Community, and Activism 67 ization. When the rank and file complained, fnm officials and newspapers threw their support behind charros, explaining that higher wages would only hurt the economy.3 The mobilization of railway families in the late 1950s reflected a well-founded perception that these policies had left them behind. According to Jeffrey Bortz, “Real wages fell sharply in 1939, reached a low point in 1946, remained exceedingly...