Experiencias contrastadas: Industrializacion y conflictos en los textiles del centro-oriente de Mexico, 1884-1917 (review)

Mexico's history of labor and industrialization meet in Gutiérrez Alvarez's study of industry, industrialists, and factory workers in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region during the Porfiriato and early revolutionary period. Winner of the Premio Salvador Azuela/INEHRM in 1997, this book describes the world of regional empresarios, including the origins of their capital, the workers who labored in their factories, and the government representatives who mediated between them. In the literature review Gutiérrez Alvarez states that she is interested in the point of contact between empresarios and workers, but her sources provide more information on the former than the latter. The author dedicates considerable time to examining how empresarios and government officials shared kinship, nationality (Spanish), religion, and political alliances that created a network that facilitated empresario access to capital, raw materials, and a work force. These ties compared to those of other regional elites examined by Mark Wasserman, Alex Saragoza, and others.

Historians such as Gustavo Garza have established the significance of Puebla-Tlaxcala in Mexican industrialization. During the Porfiriato one-third of Mexican textile factories—the focus of this study—were located in this region. Factories tended to be larger and were often built in old haciendas, as much for access to workers as to cotton. Gutiérrez Alvarez argues that ties to the hacienda lent to paternalistic labor relations. This, in combination with the fact that three-fourths of the Mexican population remained in agricultural production in 1910, in part explains the difficulties workers had in organizing. The 1906 strike staged by workers figures centrally in this history both as a demonstration of the workers' unfulfilled demands and as an excuse for empresarios to declare their own counterstrike.

For Gutiérrez Alvarez the revolution meant an uneven dissolution of the old state and the creation of the new, and in the breach empresarios relied on porfirian-era methods of controlling labor. While arguing that by and large empresarios were able to exert their will, Gutiérrez Alvarez brings depth to studies of porfirian labor policy with her research in the private gubernatorial archives. She reveals the tensions between Díaz, state governors, local business interests, and workers, and contributes to the argument that Díaz was sometimes more willing to support workers' demands than some have claimed. Despite Díaz's departure, regional networks continued to flourish; state and municipal authorities continued to largely determine electoral politics. Rather, it was the severing of ties between the state and federal government—as with Governor General Coss, a constitutionalist of a different socioeconomic background than that of the Puebla business class—that forced empresarios to seek to new methods of conducting business.

In the absence of familiar networks through which to resolve labor conflict, empresarios found new means of promoting their interests. While initially resistant to the 1912 textile convention, by 1914 empresarios realized the convention benefited them by reducing the number of labor conflicts. Furthermore, the weakness of organized labor made workers dependent upon the authority of the government, and in particular the Department of Labor, to intervene in labor disputes on their behalf. Industrialists assisted in selecting labor leaders, paid for fare to travel to Mexico City, and otherwise influenced those individuals chosen by the Department of Labor to represent workers' interests. Thus, Gutiérrez Alvarez argues, new life was given to paternalistic practices associated with the hacienda. While providing a wealth of empirical data, this monograph also suggests that historians might further qualify discussions of Porfirian-revolutionary continuity and complicate the term paternalism as more than a metaphor for unequal power.