Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (review)

Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City. By JOHN LEAR. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Plates. Maps. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 441 pp. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $29.95.

By focusing on how working women and men experienced Mexico's early-twentieth-century armed conflict, John Lear's Workers, Neighbors and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City brings a fresh perspective to questions about collective action, regional politics, and social change that have long interested historians of the Mexican Revolution. This long book is based on extensive archival research and presents rich detail regarding the daily lives of workers in the nation's largest metropolis. Building on an older historiography of labor activism and on a newer body of research regarding the social and cultural dimensions of work from the Porfiriato through the 1940s, it demonstrates that in the aftermath of what has most often been portrayed as a nationalist conflict over rural property rights and political participation, laboring men and women emerged from the revolution as willing activists with a strong sense of their economic and political importance that they would carry with them into the next decades of reconstruction and reform.

Lear centers Workers, Neighbors and Citizens around the paradox that "during one of the greatest social upheavals of the twentieth century, urban workers had a limited military role yet emerged from the fighting of the revolution with considerable combativeness and new significance in the power structure" (p. 2). To explain this apparent contradiction, he examines three related processes: the ways in which changing ideas about work and community at the turn of the century served to undermine the legitimacy of the Porfiriato; how workers developed a sense of class identity and political consciousness that enabled them to participate in strikes and establish alliances with other urban sectors before and during the revolution; and how the new alliances that workers established with military and elected officials would shape Mexico's postrevolutionary political order.

To trace the transformation of a new and disorganized urban population into a coherent and increasingly unified working class, Lear has divided the text into three sections and eight densely packed chapters. These move chronologically from the industrial boom of the mid-1880s through the 1922 rent strikes. In the first section, Lear shows that while elites sought to modernize and sanitize the old colonial city, rural migrants challenged the elites' sense of European propriety by adapting tenements, plazas, public parks and market places to suit their own needs in an urban environment. As the pace of development accelerated, skilled and unskilled women and men became differentially integrated into the new industries and began to develop mutual aid societies to educate, moralize and provide each other with insurance in times of economic instability.

The next sections focus on the revolution itself, tracing the development and role of the Casa del Obrero Mundial organization in Mexico City. Lear argues that despite the Casa's asserted neutrality, its leaders ultimately decided to militarily support the Constitutionalist Army because they believed General Alvaro Obregón's "vigorous interventions . . . on behalf of workers," because they were skeptical of the Convention's potential to lead effectively, and because they believed they needed to do something to address the problems of unemployment and material hardship in the city. In this section, Lear also demonstrates how gender increasingly shaped protest patterns in the capital. While men joined the army or, more often, organized to demand improved labor conditions at their work sites, women organized to demand better prices for bread and other foodstuffs, moving throughout the city to target bakers, vendors and even legislators they deemed unjust. These separate issues came together in the General Strike of 1916, which mobilized men and women across the capital's labor sector.

The final chapters of Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens focus on the dissolution of the Casa del Obrero Mundial, the rise of new unions...