Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory

3. “Who Is Mr. Nobody?”

3 “Who Is Mr. Nobody?” The Rise of Democratic Unionism During the spring and summer of 1958, rieleros put themselves on public display by fomenting a campaign to democratize the politics of the stfrm, which had become a puppet organization of the pri. Their masculinity was heightened in the form of labor militancy, as their culture of combativeness became a resource for fighting the union and company on the streets and in the newspapers . Dissidents organized two strikes that summer, the first in June and the second in August. These strikes did not occur “spontaneously” after years of “labor peace,” as the most popular account of the movement maintains.1 On the contrary, activists who had been organizing clandestinely tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with charro representatives and declining wages. Workers blamed their economic plight on corrupt union officials. As organizers rallied the rank and file, railway men and women became labor activists, coming to understand that a wage increase depended on getting rid of the charros who controlled the stfrm. In view of the stfrm’s unwillingness to fight for economic concessions , railway radicals organized a fight for democratic unionism. Democratic unionism, as I define it, has two parts. First, it is the practice of carrying out transparent elections for union posts on a regular basis. The rank and file must elect their officials free of coercion. Second, it requires leaders to maintain their autonomy vis-à-vis the company as well as local, regional, and national politicians. Autonomy from the employer and the state empowers the union as a collec- The Rise of Democratic Unionism 103 tive as well as the individual member. At the everyday level, members are more likely to question management or in other ways assert themselves on the job if they know that their union leaders hold no allegiance to the company or government. As a collective, the union wields more power when autonomous, because company and government officials know that labor’s greatest weapon—the strike—could be employed if negotiations collapse. Because the pri’s postwar economic policies aimed to ensure a compliant working class by co-opting labor leaders, the democratic union movement delivered a direct blow to the ruling party’s hegemony. Just as important, it revealed that many among the working class now questioned the pri’s commitment to the populist principles of the Mexican Revolution, in which thousands of working-class men and women had participated. Detractors of the movement drew on the anticommunist zeitgeist that emerged in Mexico—and in the hemisphere generally—in the postwar era to marginalize the movement. From the summer of 1958 to the spring of 1959, when police and military personnel crushed the railway movement, politicians, fnm officials, and editorialists deployed anticommunist rhetoric to suggest that a secret core of labor leaders in cahoots with foreign communists sought to turn Mexico into a communist state and satellite of the Soviet Union. Former president Lázaro Cárdenas, who expressed his support of the labor and student movement throughout the period, lamented the tenor of public discourse: “It is necessary for men responsible for governing to ignore the clamoring [of those] attempting to fool the pueblo . . . with an anticommunist campaign that makes victims of those who ask for work to obtain bread, clothes, [and] housing for their families.”2 Cárdenas came to admire the railway movement for its effort to democratize the workplace and push for the broader redistribution of wealth in society. Rieleros and rieleras were motivated by democratic participation rather than Cold War geopolitics; they practiced democracy through consensus building in neighborhoods and by flooding the streets in protest. With the support of thousands of other workers and citizens whose standard of living had plummeted due to stagnant wages, they took over union buildings and avenues in a number of major cities 104 “Who Is Mr. Nobody?” and small towns throughout the country. I refer to these extrajudicial forms of protest as direct action. They were extrajudicial because they lacked court authorization, with protestors confronting riot police while congesting avenues and plazas. After exhausting legal channels because of the unwillingness of charros to represent them, dissidents circumvented the law, opting for directly and dramatically appropriating public spaces to convey their demands to the company, government , and public. These protests ranged from peaceful assemblies on company property to acts of violence against fnm equipment. At their...