Deference and Defiance in Monterrey

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.

• Comparative study of workers and labour relations in four distinct industries • Explores relation between regionalism and state formation in revolutionary Mexico • Analyses how Mexican labour law was shaped by the historical struggle between workers, industrialists, and state policy makers

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.

‘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