Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s–1940s

Chapter 3: The Passion and Rationalization of Mexican Industrialism: Rival Visions of State and Society in the Early 1940s

3 the passion and rationalization of mexican industrialism Rival Visions of State and Society in the Early s In September 1941, discontented workers from Materiales de Guerra, a government arms and munitions manufacturer, marched to President Ávila Camacho’s residence to petition for higher salaries and to lodge complaints against the company manager. With the women in front carrying flowers for the president’s wife, about two thousand workers, union members, and supporters made their way on foot from the factory to Los Pinos, the presidential mansion. Waiting at the presidential gates was a military battalion. Versions vary as to how the skirmish began, but by the end, between seven and thirty-three workers had been killed and fifteen to sixty injured. In response, railroad, mining, petroleum, telephone, and transport workers organized a demonstration in front of the National Palace, while labor leaders Vicente Lombardo Toledano and Fidel Velázquez scrambled to assuage the workers’ anger in order to preserve wartime national unity.1 Nevertheless, national protests continued, underscoring one of the most active periods of labor mobilization in Mexican history. The surge in labor mobilizations in the early 1940s resulted mostly from wartime scarcities and deteriorating real wages. Yet widespread poverty and the daily flood of migrants arriving in Mexico City transformed these protests from narrow demands for workers’ rights into a critique of the state’s efforts at political incorporation, agrarian redistribution, and labor reform in the 1930s. In this climate, industrialism increasingly appeared as a solution to perceived problems with postrevolutionary reconstruction. 1. Campa, Mi testimonio, 169–70; Bernal Tavares, Vicente Lombardo Toledano y Miguel Alemán, 115; Niblo, Mexico in the s, 106–8. rival visions of state and society 兩 95 During the 1940s, bureaucrats, politicians, and the business community held differing views of the proper role of the state in economic development , just as had been the case in the 1920s. Technocrats in the Banco de México’s Office of Industrial Research (Oficina de Investigaciones Industriales , OII) heavily favored economic planning, but they also had reservations about the state’s ability to pursue it without succumbing to the self-interested machinations of politicians. Many of these technocrats, including Daniel Cosı́o Villegas and Gonzalo Robles, had moved through the bureaucratic ranks in the 1920s and 1930s, and they had seen bureaucrats’ wellintentioned introduction of planning into policy making fall victim to economic crises, political intrigue, and the uncoordinated development projects of multiple state agencies. They therefore sought to supersede the heirs of the positivists, who had dominated policy making in the 1920s, by emphasizing rationalization as the means to counter politics and cronyism in economic planning. Their self-anointed mission was to define an economic plan that could coordinate industrial activities and rationalize the state’s role in the economy while promoting regionally balanced industrial development with a focus on basic industry. By the late 1940s, the Alemán administration recognized this mission and even at times encouraged it.2 Moreover, along with the Ávila Camacho administration, it often remarked on the potential benefits of planning as it extended state regulation over the economy . However, to the disappointment of Robles and others, the state under Alemán never authorized the creation of a single planning agency empowered to coordinate national industrial development. In contrast to the technocrats in the OII, the leaders of CANACINTRA pressured the state to intervene aggressively in the economy. In their view, Mexico’s burgeoning group of urban-based manufacturers of consumer goods should determine state intervention, not the bureaucratic and technocratic elite. Untroubled by the potential perils of unequal development, they urged the state to promote the concentration of industry in a few key urban settings. Both the OII and CANACINTRA sought to incorporate Mexico’s growing urban working class into their industrial projects in a way that could generate national wealth, improve standards of living, and bring social peace. With this in mind, technocrats at the OII proposed to transform workers into modern, capitalist producers by reshaping labor-employer relations according to an objective economic plan that alluded to social justice 2. Secretarı́a de Programación y Presupuesto, La programación de la inversión pública. 96 兩 made in mexico but obscured the perpetuation of traditional forms of social control. CANACINTRA , by contrast, focused on building a domestic market for Mexican manufactures based on worker commitment to consumption...