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

This book is an example of interdisciplinary history at its best. Gomez-Galvarriato’s social, industrial, and economic study of Mexico between 1890 and 1920—when the country was in the midst of large-scale industrial and social revolutions—focuses on the Orizaba region of south central Mexico in the state of Veracruz. This area was the site of a textile industry that grew exponentially from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century. Using a unique data set of company records—including production numbers from the factories, minutes from board meetings, reports of labor unions and arbitration offices, and an extremely detailed analysis of the legal developments that first enabled the industrial revolution and then eased the social and labor revolution—Gomez-Galvarriato paints an intricate picture of the relationship between labor, capital, and government. In the process, she demonstrates that none of the people involved played the role traditionally ascribed to them.

The labor reforms for which the Mexican Revolution has received credit were in fact the product of consistent labor activity and commitment that were in place well before the Revolution; many of the transformations that improved working conditions after the revolution were designed and enforced by the factories, not the government. Local governments were significantly weaker than many of the hagiographic histories of the Mexican Revolution have made them out to be. When factory owners appealed to governors to exercise pressure on the labor unions, the governors often responded that they did not have the political capital, or the military troops, to temper union zeal.

In writing a history of the Mexican Revolution from a business standpoint, Gomez-Galvarriato shines a new light on the nature of that revolution. Bypassing analyses of individual heroes and activists and concentrating instead on the collective actions of unions, factory managers, workers, and suppliers, Gomez-Galvarriato draws an intricate picture of the scale and scope of a revolution that owes much to the work of Chandler.¹ Gomez-Galvarriato’s broad reading of the contribution of the textile industry to the global industrial revolution help to place the accelerated development of Mexico’s late-blooming industry in perspective, and her deft articulation of the industrial organization and labor economics that ruled the industry locally shows how they related to labor unions, capital, governments, and revolutions in the broader twentieth-century world. Left in the hands of a historian without quantitative skills, or an economist without historical training, the exploration of the textile industry in Mexico during this time period would have been significantly weakened; much of the this book’s strength lies in its detailed reading and examination of company records that had never before been analyzed, let alone archived.

Today, Veracruz’s textile industry is moribund. Textile manufacturing mainly survives in foreign factories on the border between the United States and Mexico. Gomez-Galvarriato’s book explains the genesis of that industry during the nineteenth century as well as its slow demise, in the wake of the extraordinary labor victories of the revolutionary period.