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Once We Were Corn Grinders: Women and Labor in the Tortilla Industry of Guadalajara, 1920–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2004

María Teresa Fernández-Aceves
Affiliation:
CIESAS, Occidente

Abstract

The mechanization of Guadalajara's corn mills—along with the building of the new revolutionary state, competition between secular and Catholic labor movements, the conflict between church and state, and changes in the labor force—created the conditions for a militant feminist working-class politics in the Mexico of the late 1920s and 1930s. The convergence of these processes sheds light on how men and women workers, entrepreneurs and the revolutionary state, and male and female labor leaders attributed different cultural meanings to sexual difference, work, and politics at this time. The example of women workers in the tortilla industry highlights how differences in gender and class became culturally significant and why specific gender differences changed and became politicized when mechanization at the corn mills was accelerated in the 1930s. This story challenges the myth of women's passivity, reveals the significance that women's mobilization and militancy had on the labor movement, and illustrates the difficulties encountered by secular feminists and organized women workers in a male-dominated trade union movement. It concludes that women gained a bittersweet victory by obtaining certain rights while remaining marginalized by male-dominated institutions.

Type
Gender, the Working Class, and the History of the Post–Revolutionary State in Mexico
Copyright
© 2003 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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