Worlds of Work in Mexico City

Notes from Chapter 2 of John Lear's Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City

Concentration, de-skilling, and division -- three important and inter-related dynamics that marked the development of the working class in Mexico City between roughly 1895 and 1910.

Urban Growth

Railroads played an important role. Gilly discusses the way in which the railroads marked the form in which foreign capital flowed into, and came to dominate, the Mexican economy. Lear expands on this and shows how the rails developed the Mexican working class. He writes,

"Railroads were constituted by and led the way for the flow of massive amounts of foreign investment and technology into manufacturing and urban infrastructure, which included substantial investments in electric power companies, tramways, and factories in Mexican cities. Railroads helped to create national markets for food and to connect Mexico to international markets for its silver, copper, coffee, and other exports...Railroads similarly linked and extended labor markets; for many Mexicans, working to construct, maintain, and conduct the railroad was their first experience with wages and led to their eventual incorporation into a growing and dynamic labor market that moved them back and forth along the railroad lines, from the U.S. border through northern mining enclaves, central textile regions, and coastal oil towns...working on the railroad provided valuable training with machines and industrial discipline...[Many] gained their first involvement with workers' organizations while working on the railroad." [51]

For others the railroad was the vehicle that transported them between their rural past and their new life in the city. According to a 1900 census, 66% of the total Mexico City population was born outside of the Distrito Federal, and a sizable number of the remaining were likely born in the DF and migrated to Mexico City. The character of migration to the City lends itself to a point Bookchin raises in The Third Revolution, that many of the upheavals of the revolutionary era were led by working people of peasant origin or who were removed by only one generation from village society. "Capitalism, in effect, had not fully penetrated into their lives or undermined their sense of independence. It was this kind of 'proletariat,' a class with one foot in the countryside and another in the city, that turned to revolution, if only to recover a sense of social rootedness, coherence, and meaning that was increasingly denied to them in the dismal shops and congested neighborhoods." [Bookchin, 14]

Many migrants came from Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Querétaro, Puebla, Michoacán, and Jalisco. Part of this migration was undoubtedly the rural-urban transition that is a fundamental piece of the primitive accumulation going on, yet it also demonstrates that that transition was not linear nor unidirectional, because the aforementioned states were actually densely populated with large urban areas. Some factors driving this migration from the central valleys of Mexico included "the expansion of large agricultural estates, high population density, and the decadence of traditional areas of mining and artisan manufacture in the face of new areas and forms of production." [53] So displacement from the land in rural areas often threw workers into diverse movements, moving in search of work from one rural area to another, from rural to urban, and from urban to urban. Efforts were continuously made by the emerging capitalist class and the state during the span of Mexico's colonial and early independence years to control this movement and enforce a discipline upon migrating laborers, with varied success.

So taking us back to Mexico City, census data suggests a strong presence of migrants with both urban and rural origins.

Middle Class ("Gente Decente")

At the end of the 19th century, Mexico City had a growing significance as the center of political and economic life for the consolidated nation state. Accordingly, a new elite and middle class emerged here. It entailed civil servants, army officers, teachers, and professionals like lawyers, doctors and engineers. Commerce often led to fortunes extending into finance and industry, especially for foreign-born merchants from Europe (mostly Spanish) and the U.S. Not all made it to the top of the commercial hierarchy, with many small shopkeepers and vendors struggling to maintain and often being pushed out of business by larger, better capitalized foreign-owned operations. Lear points out that the deterioration in the status of small shopkeepers meant that many either exploited their workers even harder, or they made common cause with their workers against the might of the large merchants. Many from the middle class would provide leadership and a base for political opposition against Porfirio Díaz at the time of the Revolution.

By 1910 the upper and middle class constituted about 22% of the city's population.

Urban Proletariat

Textiles and tobacco were the two main industries that underwent factory-scale production involving heavy machinery and large numbers of workers. Mexico City was not the most industrialized city in the country but it was an attractive location for capitalists because it offered the largest consumer market (in a country with a relatively weak market) and inexpensive and relatively experienced labor. The number of Mexico City factory workers rose 355% from 1895 to 1910 (at about 10,000), one-third of whom were women.

Textile workers tended to be country people from rural villages around DF, which had networks that helped feed the factories' labor force. Lear writes that, "As a result, workers in these towns would after 1910 occasionaly try to incorporate campesinos in their organizations or include demands for land in their petitions to government officials."

Important: Factory workers comprised only 4% of the Mexico City work force in 1910 (roughly the same percentage as the combined total of government employees and military men). Lear argues that the emergence of a factory proletariat in the city was important, it was neither numerically nor organizationally the most important sector of the working class.

A more influential dynamic than the introduction of modern factories was the reorganization of the traditional manufacturing crafts and a shifting divide between skilled and unskilled labor. Outside of textiles and tobacco, work tended to be reorganized around expanded, semi-mechanized workshops that relied heavily on the division of mental and manual labor. "Electrical power, new machinery, and new workshop organization incorporating unskilled workers into repetitive tasks resulted in large-scale production and the consequent displacement and deskilling of many traditional artisan groups." A similar process occurred in the U.S. but for Mexico (and for our purposes, Mexico City) this happened later and and in a much shorter period of time.

Small workshops may have been the numerical majority of manufacturing firms at the turn of the century, but close to 75% of all workers in manufacturing were employed in mid-large sized shops. Simultaneously, a few companies organized around large workshops came to dominate many crafts (i.e. shoemaking), such that there was a decrease in the relative importance of manufacturing employment in Mexico City by 1910.

Construction was one trade where the number of workers grew rapidly by 1910. "Skill levels varied from basic bricklayers to highly paid plumbers, but wages and literacy levels suggest that, overall, construction workers were among the least skilled of the traditional trades," and many were day laborers (jornaleros) rather than permanent workers. [69]

By the end of the Porfiriato, craft workers were important in the overall picture of labor in Mexico City, yet few were artisans in the classic sense of the word. "Craftworkers in 1910 were more likely to receive wages than to offer their goods on the market; shops were increasingly separate from their owners' homes; and ownership was increasingly based on capital rather than skill." Craft workers became more and more precarious. Machinery and migration had the effect of reducing the skill and cultural boundaries between trades, which facilitated involvement in working class politics and organizations that emerged during the Revolution.

At the same time, new skilled and semi-skilled occupations emerge such as electricity and electric streetcar workers, and mechanics, conductors and electricians for railroads and tramways. The importance of their work gave these new skilled workers an importance far beyond their numbers, because the could bring the city to a standstill in a strike. And because of the large numbers of workers in these jobs, they facilitated a high degree of consciousness among workers whose send of themselves as workers and their relation to the city extended beyond the workshops.

The basis for nationalism was laid among these sectors because until the revolution, top management and technical positions went mostly to foreign workers, and the industries themselves were often controlled by foreign capital. Lear argues that "much of the organizational initiative in Mexico City after 1910 came from these three groups: textile factory workers, skilled trade workers in rapidly changing industries, and strategic workers in new infrastructure and transport industries...[who together] comprised barely 12% of the labor force." [73]

Unskilled and Casual Labor

The majority of the city's population worked in unskilled manufacturing and service occupations. Most rural migrants were likely to be employed in these sectors. It is in this sector that we begin to see some of the outlines of the gendered division of labor and gender roles. In contrast to social ideals about the domestication of women, women made up 35% of the work force in Mexico City in 1910. The vast majority were restricted to unskilled, short-term work in manufacturing and services that were extensions of household tasks. This raises the contradiction of women's unwaged work in the home -- in part because in this case it shows that women in the home provided the "free" training to workers that the capitalist exploited -- that are explored in detail by Selma James and Silvia Federici, among others.

The clothing industry is telling of the decimation of skilled labor. The factory system had less impact than the division of production and the use of simple machinery which allowed for the reduction of highly skilled labor into separated aspects of production. By 1910, the number of seamstresses and dressmakers combined almost equaled the number of industrial factory workers in the city. Production was divided in other ways to pit women against one another. Commercials shops often employed a core of regular seamstresses on the premises and then during periods of high demand would get other women to cover the excess by working out of their homes. This had the efect of pitting primarily unmarried women (working in the shops) against married women or single mothers (working out of their homes) since the latter was often paid less and used by employers to undermine labor inside the shops.

Domestic workers constituted the largest sector of the working class in Mexico City both because of supply and demand. For middle class and even some working class families, a maid was a necessary sign of respectability. Most domestic workers had few options for work, and they were almost impossible to organize (though complaints by employers about their servants stealing and quitting indicates there was a level of resistance and rebellion among them).

Prostitution was another source of employment for women. Many prostitutes came from the countryside, were often illiterate and indigenous and young, often also working in various service work. Like domestic work, prostitution often represented a transition for women, a "common route of urban assimilation, [for] women who moved into the urban world of free time, expendable cash and freedom from moralistic family structures." [77]

Shifting census categories suggest a floating population of underemployed workers who moved from job to job depending on seasonal and economic cycles. The presence of tens of thousands of underemployed workers acted as a constant downward pull on wages and presented some obstacles to working class organization.

Many were unable to make ends meet, particularly after the recession of 1907, and Lear details some family strategies to deal with the precariousness of working class life. In most working class families, women and children entered the work force regularly. In many cases, extended family grouped together in one household to support the collective. Lear doesn't mention that surely women's unwaged reproductive work in the home was a vital factor to keeping the working class alive and able to report to work for the capitalist each day.

Lastly, on gender roles and women's labor. Lear writes,

"In a world marked by the ideology of separate spheres for men and women, for women to work outside of the private, domestic sphere presented a moral dilemma for many families. Parents, middle-class reformers, labor inspectors, and even the working-class press frequently saw factories and shops as centers of disease and moral corruption for women, particularly where men and women worked together. At the same time, some employers who depended on female labor...insisted that their factories were virtual finishing schools of useful skills and good behavior for young women. Just as important, wives or daughters who worked outside the house were a challenge to male authority over the family...If necessity often drove women into the work force, many...felt a certain pride in the income they brought to their family and enjoyed a freedom from traditional constraints on their activities. The city and its sources of work could fulfill dire family needs but also provide unprecedented opportunities for women, both independence from the demands of male-dominated family life and a new sense of female sociability beyond the traditional spheres of home, tenement, and community." [81-82]