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“A Dangerous Demagogue”: Containing the In.uence of the Mexican Labor-Left and Its United States Allies
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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“A Dangerous Demagogue” Containing the Influence of the Mexican Labor-Left and Its United States Allies Gigi Peterson Through the last decade of the twentieth century, coalitions of Mexican and U.S. activists worked to address the tangled issues of workers’ rights, inter- and intra-American inequities, and racial and ethnic discrimination. Their work echoes that of a previous generation of Mexican and U.S. activists, whose efforts marked the beginning, rather than the end, of the Cold War period. From the mid-thirties through the immediate postwar years, a Mexican labor-left and its allies across the border evoked the U.S. government’s Good Neighbor Policy as justification for anti-imperialist, anti-discrimination, and prolabor struggles. These activists may be termed “grassroots Good Neighbors,” for they challenged U.S. policies that fostered hegemony over other American countries , U.S. corporate actions that encouraged Latin Americans’ economic dependency , and Anglo American claims of superiority over other American peoples. Their challenges helped shape U.S. officials’ “containment” of progressive forces in the Americas. In both Mexico and the United States, the ranks of the grassroots Good Neighbors included the overlapping categories of union organizers, Communist Party members and sympathizers, community and civil rights activists, and Marxist intellectuals. The Mexican labor-left discussed here coalesced around the dynamic figure of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Marxist lawyer-turned-labor leader who helped found the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers, or CTM) in early 1936. Soon after, Lombardo and his circle also inaugurated the Universidad Obrera de México (UOM, or Workers University of Mexico), which by that summer had developed an English-language newsletter and summer school to foster cross-border solidarity.1 Inspiration for the newsletter sprang from the contacts established by Lombardo and other CTM leaders in the spring of 1936 when, soon after the founding of their own labor confederation, 245 they toured the United States to meet with leaders of the newly-formed CIO and with other U.S. organizations, including communist groups and schools.2 Working from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, the lombardistas and their U.S. allies helped shape a unique period of relative symmetry between Mexican and U.S. organized labor. The grassroots Good Neighbors found encouragement and useful rhetoric in the much-publicized “Good Neighbor Policy” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Numerous factors shaped this policy, including earlier administrations’ shift away from military occupations that came to be seen as ineffective or counterproductive. As articulated in 1933, the policy promised to end U.S. military intervention in Latin America and to give Latin Americans “a fair share” of their nations’ earnings.3 Policymakers in the Roosevelt administration also hoped that an improved U.S. image would enhance trade relations with Latin American countries. Initially, this dimension of the Good Neighbor Policy also included support for modest Latin American development programs, aimed at increasing the potential consumer market for U.S. goods. Elements of the U.S. policy fit well with the Mexican labor-left’s work to build an anti-imperialist lobby in the United States, particularly during the midto -late 1930s. These marked the final years both of Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidential term and of the last major reformist phase of the Mexican Revolution. Cardenismo, the policies swirling around the charismatic figure of President Cárdenas, included land and labor reform, economic nationalism, and attempts to institute socialist education. Cardenistas comprised a heterogenous set of supporters , the lombardistas among them. Recognizing that cardenista reforms sometimes threatened foreign properties and ignited anti-Mexican campaigns in U.S. investors’ circles, the lombardistas defended cardenismo as a “Mexican New Deal.” Paralleling New Deal plans for economic recovery from the Great Depression , by the late 1930s the Good Neighbor Policy shifted from redistribution and industrialization to emphasis on wartime production. By the end of the decade, the policy had evolved to stress hemispheric solidarity against the Axis powers.4 At the same time, influential U.S. policymakers came to view Latin American nationalism and statism as threats to their economic plans for the postwar world. Likewise, by late 1941 the lombardistas’cross-border campaigns had moved from emphasizing that neighbors keep their “hands off” the Mexican Revolution to promoting inter-American cooperation with the Allied war effort. Nevertheless, they consistently linked labor and civil rights struggles to the international struggle against fascism, and by the war’s end reinvigorated their criticism...