Bakers and Basques: A Social History of Bread in Mexico

Introduction

1 Introduction ; / A young bakery worker, maybe ten years old, appears in a photograph from 1930. He stands in the passage that divides the retail section of the panadería (bakery) from the workroom in back. Thin and dark, he is dressed in an apron and cloth hairnet and looks at the camera somewhat timidly out of the corner of his eye, one hand reaching across his back to grasp the other arm. Behind a long wooden counter stand three Spanish immigrants—probably the owner, his assistant, and a clerk—one of whom wears the wool beret typical of northern Spain. Another Mexican worker, behind them, has just set down a basket of bolillos, Mexico’s French rolls, to be added to the piles of bread. Two well-dressed customers, a woman and a man, will take the rolls home so their families can dip them into chocolate or coffee for breakfast and dinner. All the people in the photo together helped make bakeries vital neighborhood institutions and the bread trade Mexico City’s second largest industry. The workers, the immigrants, and the customers all occupy distinct spaces of the panadería. The counter, of course, separates the workers from consumers who went once, often twice, a day for bread. The doorway where the boy stands separates Mexican workers and Spanish employers; it was a passage that divided not only the productional and commercial halves of the shop, but also marked the distinctions of race and class that coincided with the bakery’s two sections. The conflicts and negotiations that sprang from these distinctions within panaderías are the focus of this book. From the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, Spanish, mostly Basque, immigrants owned most of Mexico City’s panaderías. From around 1870 up to the Great Depression in 1929, owners continually brought over relatives 2 Introduction and countrymen to work the front of the shop until the newcomers opened their own. Meanwhile, Mexican laborers kneaded and baked in the back or often below, in the basement. Occasionally, they managed to set up their own bakeries. But they operated on the fringes of what contemporaries called the “Spanish monopoly.”1 All of the collective actors represented in the photograph employed varying strategies to pursue their interests. Amid shifting antagonisms and alliances, the rituals of baking, selling, and eating bound together the immigrants , native workers, consumers, as well as government officials. In a broader sense, bread also linked them to the upheavals that characterized the history of Mexico City and contributed to the structuring and restructuring of the state and the market from independence through the decades that followed the Mexican Revolution. This book takes a long view of panaderías in order to explore how ownership patterns, state intervention, and labor strife contributed to the formation of markets. My original intention was to limit the study to the years when struggles between bakers and Basques were most intense: 1895–1940, a period that is, arguably, long already and unconventional given the established Figure 1. Panadería, Mexico City, ca. 1930. Fondo Casasola, Inventory No. 233. Courtesy of the Fototeca Nacional of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 3 Introduction chronologies in Mexican historiography. However, during my research I formed a series of recurrent questions that refer back to at least the late colonial period: Why were some groups, such as the Basque immigrants, able to establish monopolies or a monopoly-like control over the market, while others wereforcedtooperateatthemarginsornotatall?Whydidgovernmentauthorities almost invariably support these monopolies? And, finally, what role did theconflictiverelationshipsbetweenworkersandemployersplayintheforging of these market configurations between dominant and marginal groups? I address these questions by tracing the particular interests that linked owners, workers, agents of the state, and consumers. This book is not, therefore , about bread per se but rather about how politics and class struggle contributed to the formation of a market for a particular good.2 By examining relationships between capital, labor, and politics through a specific trade and exploring the social functions and cultural meanings of bread, I study the intersection of labor history, material culture, and politics.3 In this sense, the bookanchorstheprocessesofstateformationandlaborineverydaylife within Mexico, in contrast to both the rather abstract political science scholarship and the economic history that overwhelmingly emphasize Mexico’s export sector.4 My approach reveals how definitions of the marketplace sprang from political interests and, in particular, from class negotiation. In the case...