Alternating currents in Mexican labor: Electrical manufacturing workers in Mexico City, 1968--1986

The dissertation examines modern Mexican working-class culture by tracing how workers at three household appliance and electrical equipment factories lived through one of the most turbulent periods in recent Mexican history. The labor force at each company---General Electric, IEM Industries, and Kelvinator---displayed distinct characteristics. Whereas Kelvinator workers formed one of the strongest movements for union democracy in Mexico, the GE work force was divided between militants and company loyalists, and IEM workers tended to oppose the company while remaining loyal to authoritarian unionism.;In explaining these differences, the dissertation argues that workers were motivated especially by their desire for more secure and inclusive citizenship in factories, unions, and municipalities. Labor politics centered on struggles between companies, unions, and dissident labor movements for worker loyalty. Company labor relations policies decisively shaped the outcomes of these contests. More than IEM and Kelvinator, GE was able to thwart protest movements by dividing the work force between loyal employees---generally young male "breadwinners"---and temporary workers, implementing Japanese-style teamwork, and maintaining effective social programs.;Outside the factories, rural-urban migration experiences and frenzied urbanization profoundly affected workers, who forged communities by detaching from the countryside and relying on new urban social networks: company work groups and sports teams for the men, and, for the women, neighborhood organizations. Collectively, working-class municipalities developed distinct temperaments. In Tlalnepantla, home of IEM, divisions between the working and middle classes bluffed. In contrast, neighborhoods in Ecatepec, home of GE and Kelvinator, acquired a reputation as grimy locales to which inhabitants grew passionately attached and from which emerged many labor militants. These different mindsets shaped working-class movements significantly, as both official and independent labor mobilization was more vigorous in Ecatepec than in Tlalnepantla.;Ironically, the Mexican working class responded to the postwar transnationalization of the economy by disengaging from broad ideologies of nationalism and anti-imperialism so important to pre-WWII labor. Instead workers deployed nationalist ideology more often to demand the same citizenship rights and protections as other Mexicans than to criticize economic and cultural imperialism.