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The Birth and Consequences of Industrial Paternalism in Monterrey, Mexico, 1890–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Michael David Snodgrass
Michael David Snodgrass
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Extract

For as long as the people of Monterrey, Nuevo León could remember, class harmony had characterized their preeminently industrial city. Local residents attributed this aura of industrial peace to the unique character of the region's workers and the inherent benevolence of their employers. They took special pride in both. Like all northerners, Monterrey's workers had a reputation for hard work, industriousness, and staunch independence. They manifested the last through their celebrated autonomy from Mexico's national labor federations. The industrialists, in turn, earned local renown for having built their companies with Mexican capital. Furthermore, such pillars of local industry as the Cuauhtemoc Brewery and the Fundidora Iron and Steel Works provided fringe benefits unique by contemporary Mexican standards. Since the 1920s, local boosters claimed, company paternalism had established the basis for Monterrey's industrial peace and prosperity. Then, just as General Lázaro Cárdenas assumed the presidency in 1935, class struggle seemingly engulfed the city. In a startling development, the steel workers broke from the Independent Unions of Nuevo León and affiliated with the national Miner-Metalworkers Union. Two weeks later, the operatives of Monterrey Glassworks, a Cuauhtemoc subsidiary, voted in support of militant unionism.

Type
Patronage, Paternalism, and Company Welfare
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 53 , Spring 1998 , pp. 115 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1998

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References

NOTES

I am most grateful to David Montgomery, Gunther Peck, Jonathan Brown, Marc McLeod, Manuel Callahan, and an anonymous ILWCH reader for their insightful comments and critiques. I owe a special thanks to Kevin Kenny for his help in restructuring an early draft of this essay. Financial support from the Fulbright-García Robles Commission and the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas-Austin made this investigation possible.

1. El Porvenir, Monterrey, January 10–February 7, 1936; Excelsior, Mexico City, February 2–6, 1936 and Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN): Presidebtes-Lázaro Cárdenas 432.2/184.Google Scholar

2. Saldafla, Jose P., Crónicas historicas (Monterrey, 1982), 250.Google Scholar

3. For three outstanding studies that shaped my own understanding of industrial paternalism see Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society, and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, 1981);Google ScholarZahavi, Gerald, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890–1950 (Urbana, 1988);Google ScholarFlamming, Douglas, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884–1984 (Chapel Hill, 1992).Google Scholar

4. On Monterrey's industrialization see Cerutti, Mario, BurguesIa, capitales e industria en el norte de México: Monterrey en su ámbito regional, 1850–1910 (Mexico City, 1992);Google ScholarCanales, Isidro Viscaya, Los orígines de la industrialización de Monterrey, 1876–1910 (Monterrey, 1931);Google ScholarSaragoza, Alex, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State, 1880–1940 (Austin, 1988), 30–71.Google Scholar

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6. Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo Leon, Monterrey (hereafter AGENL): Correspondencia con el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1903–4, box 58.Google Scholar

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8. AGENL: Informe del Gobernador Juan M. García, 1920–21.Google Scholar

9. By the 1920s, ASARCO, Cuauhtemoc, and the Fundidora collectively employed only fifteen foreign workers. See AGN: Departamento del Trabajo (hereafter AGN:DT), Labor Inspector's Reports: 166/2 (1919), 436/3 (1922), and 625/6 (1923). For the often conflictive process by which Mexican workers largely supplanted North Americans by 1910, see Brown, Jonathan, “Foreign and Native-Born Workers in Porfirian Mexico,” American Historical Review, 98:3 (06 1993), 786–818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. For events in Monterrey see Torres, Oscar Flores, BurguesIa, militares y movimiento obrero en Monterrey, 1909–1923 (Monterrey, 1991), 99–204.Google ScholarOn the revolution see Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar

11. In theory, Article 123 promised radical change: the eight-hour day, union representation, the right to strike, an end to arbitrary dismissals, and the establishment of government arbitration boards. However, Article 123's opening clause conditioned its subsequent enforcement by assigning each state the right to design labor codes in accordance with local conditions. The law's enforcement remained under local jurisdiction until Congress passed the 1931 Federal Labor Law.Google Scholar

12. Nuncio, Abraham, El Grupo Monterrey (Mexico City, 1982), 122–58;Google ScholarSaragoza, , The Mon terrey Elite, 89–93, 142–44; Juan Mora-Torres, “The Transformation of a Peripheral Society: A Social History of Nuevo León, 1848–1920,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991), chap. 5.Google Scholar

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14. Archivo Histórico de Fundidora Monterrey, Monterrey (hereafter AHFM): Cooperativa Acero, 153/2.Google Scholar

15. AGN:DT 125/34, 444/10; AGENL: Trabajo–Conciliación y Arbitraje, 1/3; El Porvenir, September 30–October 24, 1922.Google Scholar

16. Torres, Flores, Burgesía, militares y movimiento obrero, 167.Google Scholar

17. Fábricas Monterrey (FAMOSA) is Cuahtemoc's subsidiary packaging plant.Google Scholar

18. AGENL: Asociaeiones y Sindicatos, 1906–1912, 3/4; La Voz de Nuevo León, March 26, 1903.Google Scholar

19. On cooperatives in Mexico, see Loria, Francisco, Sociedades cooperativas: cooperativismo como elemento de libertad y progreso (Mexico City, 1918);Google ScholarCoria, Rosendo Rojas, Tratado del Cooperativismo en Mexico (Mexico City, 1952);Google ScholarSecretaria de Educación Pública, La historia de las sociedades cooperativas (Mexico City, 1925). The Calles administration published and distributed 50,000 copies of the latter, a how-to manual based upon the British Rochdale model of the cooperative society.Google Scholar

20. Monterrey's militant railroaders, for example, established savings and consumer cooperatives within their locals. AGENL: Asociaciones y Sindicatos, 4/7, Confederación de Sociedades Obreras to Governor Porfirio González, December 28, 1920.Google Scholar

21. For the industrial elite's strategies of antiunion resistance see Snodgrass, Michael, “Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1998), chap. 4.Google Scholar

22. Author's interviews with Manual González Cabellero, June 30, 1995; José Salvador Castaneda Medina, December 5, 1995; and Elizondo, Juan Manuel (with Raul Rubio Cano), April 9, 1996.Google Scholar

23. While management never bargained with their representatives, a minority of steel workers maintained ties to national unions of mechanics, forgers, molders, boilermakers, and structural iron workers. AGENL: Asociaciones y Sindicatos, 2/8, Meliton Ulmer to Secretaria de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo, November 24, 1924; author's interview with Antonio Quiroga, March 26, 1996.Google Scholar

24. In one symbolic display of its practices of accommodation, Fundidora engineers developed the idea of transforming the structure of Mexico City's Legislative Palace, a prerevolutionary project interrupted by the civil war, into a Monument to the Revolution. Completed with Monterrey steel, the memorial contains the remains of Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas. González Cabellero, La Maestranza de ayer, 49–52.Google Scholar

25. Details on Cuauhtemoc's system of industrial paternalism were gleaned from the company magazine, Trabajo y Ahorro (1921 – 1933);Google ScholarDávalos, Gerónimo, Cuarenta a¯os son un buen tiempo (Monterrey, 1936), 7–15; AGN: DT, Labor Inspector's Reports: 436/3 (1923) and 1100/5 (1926). For the Fundidora, see that firm's company organs, Colectividad (1925 –1931). Triunfaremos (1931–1933), and CYPSA (1931–1934); Caballero, González, La Maestranza de Ayer, 109–20; AGN:DT, Labor Inspector's Report, 625/6 (1923).Google Scholar

26. El Porvenir, April 12, 1926.Google Scholar

27. During the 1920s, Cuauhtemoc's average labor force increased from 600 to 1,000 while beer shipments climbed from 14,920 to 21,760 liters annually. The Fundidora's work force doubled, from 1,200 to 2,400, while steel production ascended from 32,291 to 100,850 tons during the same period. Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite, 178; AHFM: Informes, 1920 – 1930.Google Scholar

28. The language of boosterism changed little, even as it spread beyond Monterrey. See El Porvenir, April 16–18, 1920, April 12, 1926; Excelsior, Mexico City, February 6, 1936; El Heraldo de Chihuahua, February 2, 1936.Google Scholar

29. El Porvenir, September 16, 1922, January 28, 1924.Google Scholar

30. Author's interviews with Antonio Gómez Cavazos (Cuauhtemoc), December 11, 1995. and Dionisio Palacios (Fundidora). January 3. 1996. Because the Cuauhtemoc Brewery workers cited herein still receive pensions from the SCYF, I use pseudonyms to protect their identities.Google Scholar

31. Rodríguez, Homenajes, 37; author's interviews with María de Jesus Oviedo, May 23, 1996; María de los Angeles Medrano, December 11, 1995; Estela Padilla, November 20, 1995.Google Scholar

32. AGN:DT: Accidentes, 1919 –1929.Google Scholar

33. Between 1921 and 1926, when the total work force doubled, Cuauhtemoc eliminated forty-seven percent of its mechanics and sixty percent of its electricians. By the mid-1920s, some forty percent of male workers and thirty percent of female operatives were contract laborers. AGN:DT: Statistics 280/3 (1921) and 1100/5 (1926).Google Scholar

34. Trabajo y Ahorro, March 20, 1926; author's interviews with Gómez and Alejandro Monsiváis Rodríguez, December 11, 1995.Google Scholar

35. Padilla interview.Google Scholar

36. Trabajo y Ahorro, January 16, 24; March 6, 1924.Google Scholar

37. Gómez interview.Google Scholar

38. Trabajo y Ahorro January 17, 1923, Marhc 13, 1926, September 22, 1928.Google Scholar

39. El Porvenir, July 17–18, 1922.Google Scholar

40. AGN:DT 726/7.Google Scholar

41. Oviedo interview.Google Scholar

42. Oviedo and Padilla interviews.Google Scholar

43. Trabajo y Ahorro, January 15, 1927.Google Scholar

44. Ibid, March 7, 1923, July 17, 1932.

45. AHFM: Cooperativa Acero, 153/1, Adolfo Prieto to Meliton Ulmer, April 2, 1928.Google Scholar

46. In contrast to the Cuauhtemoc Brewery, the steel mill recruited a work force composed less of rural migrants and more of workers' sons, displaced miners, and urban artisans.Google Scholar

47. Colectividad, November 17, 1926.Google Scholar

48. Cabellero, González, La Maestranza de ayer, 61.Google Scholar

49. “Memorias de Acero: Fundidora, 1900–1986,” El Diario de Monterrey, May 9, 1996.Google Scholar

50. Author's interview with Luis Monzón (Monterrey Glassworks), February 22, 1996.Google Scholar

51. Colectividad, february 8, 1925.Google Scholar

52. AHFM: Comprobantes de caja, November 1925: #17, May 1927: #65.Google Scholar

53. Colectividad, february 4, 1931.Google Scholar

54. Author's interviews with Castaneda and Salvador Solís Daniel, November 14, 1995.Google Scholar

55. AHFM: Cooperativa Acero, 153/2.Google Scholar

56. From mid-1931 to the close of 1932, membership in the Cooperativa Acero jumped from less than 700 to more than 2,200. CYPSA provided more than $20,000 in interest-free loans during 1932. AHFM: Cooperativa Acero, 153/2; AHFM, Póliza de caja, 1932: #50; CYPSA, February 25, 1933.Google Scholar

57. El Machete, Mexico City, June 20, 1932.Google Scholar

58. For the Depression's local consequences and the ASARCO strike see Snodgrass, “Deference and Defiance”, chap. 5; AGENL: Huelga ASARCO.Google Scholar

59. Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite, 178; AHFM: Informes, 1930 –1940.Google Scholar

60. AGENL: Informes de gobernadores, 1923/1924–1932/1933.Google Scholar

61. For examples see AGENL: Junta Local de Conciliación y Arbitraje (JCA), 5/266, 5/278, and 8/321. The “red” unions included those affiliated with the Communist party's Mexican Confederation of Trade Union Unity (CSUM) and those tied to the ruling National Revolutionary party (PNR).Google Scholar

62. Gómez, Monsiváis, and Medrano interviews.Google Scholar

63. CYPSA, November 28, 1931.Google Scholar

64. AGENL: Trabajo—Conciliación y Arbitraje, box 3, Contrato colectivo: Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey y la Federación de Sindicatos del Acero, December 1, 1932.Google Scholar

65. CYPSA, November 28, 1931.Google Scholar

66. AGN: Presidentes, Lázaro Cárdenas 433.1/8. The steel workers comprised more than half of the federation's 5,600 members and fifteen of its forty member unions.Google Scholar

67. El Porvenir, February 26, 1935.Google Scholar

68. Quiroga interview; Edward Nathan to United States State Department, United States National Archives, Washington, D.C. (Record Group 59), “Report on Current Wages in Monterrey”, December 1, 1931, 812.5041/48, January 8, 1937, 812.5041/107.Google Scholar

69. Interviews with Palacios and Rafael Reyna, May 22, 1996.Google Scholar

70. Palacios interview. Most commonly, foremen enlisted loyal workers to instigate fights with dissidents, thereby establishing the legal conditions for the latter's discharge.Google Scholar

71. Quiroga interview.Google Scholar

72. Reyna interview.Google Scholar

73. See Tonatiuh, MarcosAguila, M. and erea, Alberto Enríquez, eds., Perspectivas sobre el Cardenismo: Ensayos sobre economia, trabajo, politica y cultura en los anos treinta (Mexico City, 1996).Google Scholar

74. The organization of Local 67 did not entail a sudden turn from passivity to militancy. The furnacemen's union delegates had distinguished themselves from the tonnage men for their combativeness within the Federated Steel Unions. The workers consequently elected the Bessemer union's leader, another veteran of the 1922 strike, as first Secretary General of Local 67. Interviews with Castaneda, Quiroga, and Solís; Apolonio Belmares González, “Breve historia de como y porque se formó la Sección No. 67 el 21 de November de 1935,” unpublished manuscript in possession of author. On the “infrapolitics” that sustained the emergence of Local 67 see Snodgrass, “Deference and Defiance,” chap. 6.Google Scholar

75. El Porvenir, January 10–14, 1936.Google Scholar

76. Rank-and-file support for the Miners proved so broad that even Monterrey's antiunion press agreed that “with one glance it was evident that a scrupulous count of votes was unnecessary.” El Porvenir, January 20, 1936.Google Scholar

77. AGENL: JCA 58/1788; El Porvenir, February 2, 1936.Google Scholar

78. For the industrial elite's public crusade against unionism and the struggle for union supremacy at the Monterrey Glassworks see Snodgrass, “Deference and Defiance”, chaps. 6–8. On Cardenista retrenchment see Knight, Alan, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (1994): 73–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

79. Except where indicated otherwise, the following paragraph is based upon interviews with Manuel Carranza, January 1–4, 1996, Elizondo, and anonymous Cuauhtemoc workers.Google Scholar

80. Gómez, Medrano, and Monsiváis interviews.Google Scholar

81. AGENL: JCA 48/1383, 65/1989, 124, 173, 178, 199.Google Scholar

82. Elizondo and Oviedo interviews.Google Scholar

83. AGENL: JCA 212Google Scholar

84. AHFM: Informe de Ia Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey, May 11, 1937.Google Scholar

85. Castaneda, Quiroga, and Solís interviews.Google Scholar