| The main proposition of this dissertation is that the emergence of the Cardenist radical phenomenon during the 1930's, with the nationalization of Mexico's oil in 1938 as its climax, had as its immediate and necessary antecedent--at its root--the impact of the Great Depression on the Mexican economy, and the structural changes that it brought about. Some of these structural changes had already begun just after the Revolution of 1910. These changes eventually gave rise to both, a new national "labor pact," brought into being by the 1931 federal labor law, and a broad State project aimed at modernizing Mexico through import substitution industrialization and a radical agrarian reform. These structural socio-economic changes have tended to be eclipsed by the overwhelming influence of the mostly political historiography on the Revolution of 1910. Yet, the Great Depression had a larger historical importance than conventional historiography suggests. This dissertation focuses on the changes of labor relations, and in particular it details the effects felt by the mining sector--an ideal subject for studying the impact of the 1929 crisis.;The mining sector had a larger economic and political importance in Mexico during the 1930's than the restrictive view of enclaves in developing countries imply. Extensive areas of Mexico were affected by the fall of the international prices of minerals, thus impacting both Northern states of the Republic devoted to industrial mining, and the central states, predominantly producers of precious metals. The impact of the depression on Miners living standards did not affect so much wages as it did employment. Workers developed a complex struggle for resistance, generating a wave of shop floor, "defensive like" mechanisms to reduce lay offs and compensation and wage cuts. During the worst years of the depression, essentially 1929-1932, miners acquired important experience in collective resistance from below, both through union organization and traditional recurrence to individual mining. This experience, in turn, became a critically useful tool when the pro-labor policies of president Lazaro Cardenas favored the creation of national industrial unions and industry-wide collective contracts.;Mexican miners were able to found a single national union in late 1933, but could not achieve a national single contract. Nevertheless, the several new collective contracts they could sign with the mostly foreign mining companies, were well above the characteristic individual pacts of the Porfirian and 1920's labor conditions. Crucial in achieving these improvements were the federal labor inspectors who served as mediators of the labor-capital relations during those years. The Department of Labor went through a major overhaul from the Callista controlled machine politics into the Cardenas administration, very much in favor of enforcing existing pro-labor laws. Workers took advantage of these changes, participating vigorously in the making of their own history and that of the nation.;Principal sources for this research came from Mexican federal judicial labor disputes and government agencies; records of the United States consulates and a major local company archive (Archivo Historico de la Compania Real del Monte y Pachuca), as well as oral interviews and periodicals. |
