Industry & Revolution, Social and Economic Change in the Orizaba Valley, Mexico by Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato (review)

This is an important book that pushes scholarship about the Mexican Revolution in a new direction. Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato argues that events in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico did not constitute just one revolution, but rather two revolutions—an industrial and a social one. She states that while the processes underlying social and industrial revolutions shaped history globally across two centuries, Mexico’s experience was distinct because they occurred quickly, and almost concurrently, in a single setting. She develops this unique argument with a methodologically ambitious and rigorous analysis that combines economic history with business, labor, cultural, and social history. Her most profound contributions—both historical and methodological—come when she points an econometric lens at questions of social and cultural change. Similarly, notable is her focus on both business and labor history, which allows her to demonstrate how the political arrangements between business, labor, and the state that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, which supported social peace, ultimately imperiled both the textile industry and enduring social change. In doing so, she portrays revolutions as neither suprahistorical phenomena nor localized conflagrations but rather as large-scale structural processes rooted in local conditions.

The book begins with a superb overview of the Mexican textile industry. Characteristic of Gómez-Galvarriato’s later chapters also, she analyzes a prodigious amount of data to draw conclusions about business performance and workers’ quality of life. In this case, her data focus on productivity and wages in Mexico’s large, modern Compañía Industrial Veracruzana, S.A. (CIVSA), which she obtained by accessing company archives. Her conclusions ably question assumptions about the negative impact of the Revolution on real wages and instead point to World War I as the likely cause. Moreover, she shows the importance of the local institutional and social context in shaping Mexico’s industrial revolution. The industrial revolution may have been a global process, but its local form and function were a product of the Orizaba Valley.

The character of Orizaba’s textile industry emerges vividly in the subsequent chapters. Gómez-Galvarriato provides a rich history of the Barcelonnette underpinnings of CIVSA, portraying it as part personal firm and part modern managerial enterprise. Capital and trust were social, rather that guaranteed by state or banking institutions. This fostered business practices, such as the adoption of less modern machinery, and a highly concentrated business structure that narrowed later, postrevolutionary options vis-à-vis labor–capital relations. While much scholarship focuses on the political forces shaping postrevolutionary labor relations, Gómez-Galvarriato shows how decisions made about the industry’s infrastructure in the 1890s were at least, if not more important.

Gómez-Galvarriato also reveals the textile labor force in Orizaba to be a product of this pioneering, modern industry, though their organizing was inspired by broader social conflicts. Workers were a new social class formation, and, similar to enclave settings, their identity was constituted through the industry and region itself. At the epicenter of Mexico’s industrial revolution, Orizaba’s textile workers organized early and shared a unique and heightened sense of consciousness. Therefore, the tensions characteristic of labor–capital relations in early industrial settings were magnified; revolutionary groups like the Partido Liberal Mexicano helped to give them intellectual and organizational shape.

Most significantly, Gómez-Galvarriato challenges scholarship that fails to recognize the radicalizing role of labor during the violent phase of the Revolution or that overemphasizes it in the decades after. She contends that industrial workers compelled revolutionary governments to intervene in capital–labor struggles, even when they did not want to. Through tracing the creation of state-allied labor organizations and labor regulations, she shows how the Constitutionalists understood the potential of the working class to radicalize the Revolution if left to its own devices. Indeed, Article 123 of the 1917 Constitution merely crystallized what Orizaba...