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4 sowing exclusion Machinery, Labor, and Industrialist Authority in Puebla in the s According to lawyer and textile-industry investor Francisco Doria Paz, on the night of July 23, 1943, labor leader Luis Morones called him over to his table at a restaurant in Puebla where both happened to be dining. As Doria Paz later recounted the story to the Association of Textile Entrepreneurs of Puebla and Tlaxcala (Asociación de Empresarios Textiles de Puebla y Tlaxcala , AETPT), Morones proposed a toast to celebrate the recent, albeit fleeting, settlement of an extended labor dispute at the Fábrica La Trinidad. Doria Paz did not explain how things heated up, but soon, Morones and his friends, likely emboldened by drink, began hitting the lawyer over the head with their bottles. The next day, an irate Doria Paz wanted to protest directly to President Ávila Camacho, but his fellow AETPT members urged restraint.1 Doria Paz had a long and turbulent history with labor. In his earlier days, he had been part of a group of business leaders in Monterrey who had supported the PNR’s ouster of the CROM from the revolutionary family. That coupled with his antilabor stance in some high-profile labor conflicts in Puebla led both the CTM and the CROM to assail him for dealing unfairly with unions.2 Morones, for his part, was one of the most corrupt and violent labor leaders in Mexico. His memories of the late 1920s assault on the CROM by business and political leaders, as well as the CROM’s later conflicts with Doria Paz and other industrialists in Puebla, probably were fresh in his mind that evening as he spoke with the lawyer. Regardless 1. Junta de la Directiva, AETPT, meeting minutes, July 24, 1943, and August 3, 1943, CITPT, F-VI/LAJD-3. 2. ‘‘La Bonetera Avant y las cc. separadas,’’ Acción, June 28, 1941; ‘‘Doria Paz, enemigo de la CROM,’’ Germinal, February 21, 1942; Saragoza, Monterrey Elite, 163. 132 兩 made in mexico of his motives, this incident reflects a monumental shift away from the prerevolutionary era, when labor had little or no legal recourse when subjected to managerial whims. By the 1940s, the historic dependence of textile workers on employers had been supplanted by a state-labor alliance that expanded union and state authority within factories and communities at the expense of paternal forms of managerial autonomy. Industrialists’ loss of local authority was made more bitter by the state’s growing focus on largescale production using modern technology. This occurred to the detriment of the traditional, small-scale textile manufacturing that predominated in Puebla. Furthermore, Puebla’s textile industrialists had good relations with the regional political leaders who constituted the avilacamachista cacicazgo. According to Wil Pansters, this was a sort of ‘‘collective caciquismo’’ that, rather than being forged around a single individual, was made up of a group of allied individuals, who built ‘‘a stable system of loyalties and patronage’’ that dominated regional authority, beginning with the governorship of Maximino Ávila Camacho (1937–41) and lasting until the 1960s. In contrast to earlier periods, however, Alan Knight argues that these modern caciques now were ‘‘usually members and servants’’ of the ruling party and its electoral machine. This provided them with access to the substantial patronage that the ruling party commanded during the mid-twentieth century, but their ability to mediate the intervention of the state at the regional and local levels was now more circumscribed.3 This, in turn, weakened the role of regional alliances in guaranteeing the interests of Puebla’s industrialists. Amid Puebla’s postwar economic crisis, textile industrialists’ concerns about their political and economic marginalization transformed into resentment against the new populist forms of state power and nationalist development that were displacing traditional labor regimes. The postwar crisis also provided the justification to invest in new machinery after decades of technological stagnation. The allure of modern machinery lay not just in its potential to raise the industry’s status within the national project for statist industrialism. State-of-the-art machinery would also allow employers to undercut the collective contracts that had protected the labor force and allowed for union control over the production process since the 1920s. In this context, the Alemán administration’s almost total refusal to grant import permits for machinery to traditional textile industrialists demonstrates how protected industrialism enabled the state to challenge the authority of regional industrialists. By rejecting the modernization...

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