Deference and Defiance in Monterrey
Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950

This book explores how workers both perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico's revolution.

Michael Snodgrass (Author)

9780521811897, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 June 2003

334 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.66 kg

'Snodgrass's greatest contribution to the literature of the Mexican revolution and working class history is that: the careful and thoughtful examination of those who did not rebel or rebelled but only for a little while.' The European Legacy

The first comprehensive history of labour relations and the working class in twentieth-century Monterrey, Deference and Defiance explores how both workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico's revolution. Snodgrass's narrative covers a sixty-year period that begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's pre-eminent industrial cities. He then explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were both historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. By comparing four local industries - steel, beer, glass and smelting - Snodgrass demonstrates how workers and managers collaborated in the development of paternalistic labour regimes that built upon working-class traditions of mutual aid as well as elite resistance to state labour policies. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey thus offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico that remains overshadowed by studies of the countryside.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Porfirian progress in 'Mexico's Chicago'
2. Revolution comes to Monterrey
3. Work, gender and paternalism at the Cuauhtémoc brewery
4. Making steel and forging men at the Fundidora
5. The democratic principles of our revolution: labor movements and labor law in the 1920s
6. Every class has its leaders: ASARCO, the Great Depression, and popular protest in Monterrey
7. Stay with the company or go with the Reds
8. State your position!: Conservatives, Communists and Cardensimo
9. The quotas of power: organized labor and the politics of consensus
10. The persistence of paternalism
11. The institutionalized revolution
Select bibliography of primary sources
Index.

Subject Areas: Revolutionary groups & movements [JPWQ], Political science & theory [JPA], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], General & world history [HBG]