Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz

4. Caciquismo, Organized Labor, and Gender

161 4 Caciquismo, Organized Labor, and Gender If you were to enter the headquarters of the local federation of the crom in Córdoba, Veracruz, you would find a plaque, installed in 1972, with the names of the six most outstanding union leaders of the region. Two of the names are those of escogedoras, Inés Reyes Ochoa and Sofía Castro González. These two leaders, along with a dozen others, dominated the leadership of Córdoba’s coffee-sorter union for five decades. This chapter shows how these sorters gradually built a collective leadership during the 1930s, not unlike those created by men union leaders, by serving as effective intermediaries between the rank and file and the national labor movement, setting the stage for the development of a women’s collective cacicazgo. How could these women workers establish a union cacicazgo when the workplace and union hall were conceptualized as masculine spaces ? This chapter begins to answer this question by examining the relationship between trade unionism, leadership, gender, and the state in Córdoba’s coffee agro-export industry during the 1930s. A number of national, state, and regional factors contributed to the rise of a women-led cacicazgo. At the national level the emerging modern state willingly cooperated with many hybrid and malleable forms of caciquismo that evolved in the postrevolutionary era. The relatively fluid political milieu opened up opportunities for both women and men 162 Caciquismo, Organized Labor, and Gender labor leaders to emerge as powerful powerbrokers or intermediaries and to gain and maintain power in an exclusive manner. As part of the centralization process, the state created and sponsored industrial-labor boards that played an important role in giving women leaders an equal voice in presenting their claims against their employers. The Orizaba–Córdoba corridor continued to remain a crom enclave, strong enough to block the penetration of rival Tejedista- and Cardenista-sponsored labor movements but still fragmented to the extent that it allowed workers a certain level of autonomy in controlling their own unions. In the case of Córdoba’s coffee-sorter union, a number of factors contributed to the formation of an all-women collective leadership: a female-dominated workforce, the intervention of competing rural and urban social movements that galvanized support for union leaders, and the leaders’ use of gender-neutral and gender -specific strategies to gain and maintain authority and legitimacy. I contend that women union leaders established a flexible and adaptable cacicazgo, which blended traditional and new elements of boss politics. The mechanisms of patron-client relationship, exclusion , and intermediation that they employed to concentrate power in their own hands should not be exclusively linked to masculinity. Their successful employment of a mixture of mobilization strategies demonstrated that the relationship between gender and caciquismo was in transition. Caciquismo, Revolution, and Gender Classic or traditional Latin American caciquismo has been characterized as a form of personal and informal political leadership. It is generally associated with male leadership patterns, but women cacicazgos have existed since preconquest and colonial times.1 “As products of the incongruous union of ‘modern’ politics with ‘traditional’ society,” says Alan Knight when referring to twentieth-century Mexico, “conceptually , they are representatives of patron-client systems, which embody hierarchies of authority, involving actors of unequal status and power, who are linked by bonds of reciprocity and patronage Caciquismo, Organized Labor, and Gender 163 (also unequal).”2 Traditional caciques distribute their favors personally , or informally; and they generally do so in an unequal manner. In return for the wealth, labor, and political positions they grant to the members of their power bases, they expect them to reciprocate with their personal services and loyalty. Normally they also exploit family and kinship ties to construct a loyal group of agents who practice violence or the threat of violence to control various political, economic , and social domains.3 In some respects caciques are Janus figures in the sense that they must cultivate “upward” or external linkages with outside organizations and “downward” or internal linkages within their organization. Acting as intermediaries or brokers, they seek to reconcile the specific demands of their clientele with the broader objectives of regional and state leaders.4 Mexican caciquismo experienced a significant transformation as modernization and revolution fomented dramatic social, economic, and political disruptions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Caciques found themselves forced to become more flexible and adaptable to changing...