In the 1890s, Spanish entrepreneurs spearheaded the emergence of Córdoba, Veracruz, as Mexico’s largest commercial center for coffee preparation and export to the Atlantic community. Seasonal women workers quickly became the major part of the agroindustry’s labor force. As they grew in numbers and influence in the first half of the twentieth century, these women shaped the workplace culture and contested gender norms through labor union activism and strong leadership. Their fight for workers’ rights was supported by the revolutionary state and negotiated within its industrial-labor institutions until they were replaced by machines in the 1960s. Heather Fowler-Salamini’s Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution analyzes the interrelationships between the region’s immigrant entrepreneurs, workforce, labor movement, gender relations, and culture on the one hand, and social revolution, modernization, and the Atlantic community on the other between the 1890s and the 1960s. Using extensive archival research and oral-history interviews, Fowler-Salamini illustrates the ways in which the immigrant and women’s work cultures transformed Córdoba’s regional coffee economy and in turn influenced the development of the nation’s coffee agro-export industry and its labor force.

This volume untangles the multiple threads of the Mexican Revolution to present an accessible introduction to its causes, development, and consequences. Grounded in a detailed narrative that readers can actively explore through accompanying primary sources, the book also provides a broad view of Mexico’s cultural, political, and social evolution from the 1870s to the 1940s. It traces the promises and perils of export-led modernization during the late nineteenth century, the subsequent explosion of popular discontent, the difficult process of reconstruction, and the lasting legacies. The book emphasizes the promises and shortcomings of liberalism; the demands from workers and peasants; the gender underpinnings of revolutionary principles; new forms of authoritarianism; and how conservative resistance curbed the revolution’s reform agenda. Featuring a number of learning tools such as a chronology, glossary, and introduction to key historical figures, The Mexican Revolution is a helpful resource for undergraduate students and non-specialist readers interested in Mexico and its major revolution.

An international history of radical movements and their convergences during the Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico. From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.

2019 Thomas McGann Award for best publication in Latin American Studies In late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman's presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolution and jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these "angels of the home" began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous. To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Worker examines the material conditions of women's work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women's movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married and unmarried. Office workers also developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside the workplace. From Angel to Office Worker is a major contribution to modern Mexican history as historians begin to ask new questions about the relationships between labor, politics, and the cultural and public spheres.

In 1910 Mexicans rebelled against an imperfect dictatorship; after 1940 they ended up with what some called the perfect dictatorship. A single party ruled Mexico for over seventy years, holding elections and talking about revolution while overseeing one of the world's most inequitable economies. The contributors to this groundbreaking collection revise earlier interpretations, arguing that state power was not based exclusively on hegemony, corporatism, or violence. Force was real, but it was also exercised by the ruled. It went hand-in-hand with consent, produced by resource regulation, political pragmatism, local autonomies and a popular veto. The result was a dictablanda: a soft authoritarian regime. This deliberately heterodox volume brings together social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to offer a radical new understanding of the emergence and persistence of the modern Mexican state. It also proposes bold, multidisciplinary approaches to critical problems in contemporary politics. With its blend of contested elections, authoritarianism, and resistance, Mexico foreshadowed the hybrid regimes that have spread across much of the globe. Dictablanda suggests how they may endure. Contributors. Roberto Blancarte, Christopher R. Boyer, Guillermo de la Peña, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Paul Gillingham, Rogelio Hernández Rodríguez, Alan Knight, Gladys McCormick, Tanalís Padilla, Wil G. Pansters, Andrew Paxman, Jaime Pensado, Pablo Piccato, Thomas Rath, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Benjamin T. Smith, Michael Snodgrass

Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940 is a history of the gendered corporation, a study that examines how ideas and ideals about domesticity and the cultures of sewing and embroidery, being gender-specific, shaped the US-headquartered Singer Sewing Machine Company’s operations around the world. In contrast to production-driven and culture-neutral analyses of the multinational enterprise, this book focuses on both the supply and the demand side to argue that consumers and the cultural worlds of those—mainly women—using the sewing machine for personal purposes or for the market shaped corporate organization. This book is a global history of Singer, but it also focuses on the cases of Spain and Mexico to highlight nations where the sewing machine multinational never established manufacturing operations. Casa Singer was a mostly profitable and a long-term selling and marketing operation in both countries. Gendered Capitalism demonstrates that local Spanish and Mexican agents, both men and women, developed and expanded Singer’s selling system to the extent that the multinational company was seen as domestic, both in the location sense, and because of its focus on the private sphere of the home. By bringing the cases of Spain and Mexico, and the cultural, everyday realm of practices related to sewing and embroidery that the sewing machine was part of, to the center of the study of international business, Gendered Capitalism further reveals the layers of complexities and multitudes that conform the history of global capitalism. This book will be of interest to readers and scholars in the fields of business history, economic cultural history, management studies, international business, women’s history, gender studies, and the history of technology.

Tracing the historical development of Mexico from the pre-Hispanic period to the present, the Historical Dictionary of Mexico, Third Edition, is an excellent resource for students, teachers, researchers, and the general public. This reference work includes a detailed chronology, an introduction surveying the country’s history, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section includes cross-referenced entries on the historical actors who shaped Mexican history, as well as entries on politics, government, the economy, culture, and the arts.

In this political history of twentieth-century Mexico, Gladys McCormick argues that the key to understanding the immense power of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is to be found in the countryside. Using newly available sources, including declassified secret police files and oral histories, McCormick looks at large-scale sugar cooperatives in Morelos and Puebla, two major agricultural regions that serve as microcosms of events across the nation. She argues that Mexico's rural peoples, despite shouldering much of the financial burden of modernization policies, formed the PRI regime's most fervent base of support. McCormick demonstrates how the PRI exploited this support, using key parts of the countryside to test and refine instruments of control--including the regulation of protest, manipulation of collective memories of rural communities, and selective application of violence against critics--that it later employed in other areas, both rural and urban. With three peasant leaders, brothers named Ruben, Porfirio, and Antonio Jaramillo, at the heart of her story, McCormick draws a capacious picture of peasant activism, disillusion, and compromise in state formation, revealing the basis for an enduring political culture dominated by the PRI. On a broader level, McCormick demonstrates the connections among modern state building in Latin America, the consolidation of new forms of authoritarian rule, and the deployment of violence on all sides.

Dancing on the Sun Stone is a uniquely transdisciplinary work that fuses modern Latin American history and literature to explore women’s lives and gendered politics in Mexico. In this important work, scholar Marjorie Becker focuses on the complex Mexican women of rural Michoacán who performed an illicit revolutionary dance and places it in dialogue with Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s signature poem, “Sun Stone”—allowing a new gendered history to emerge. Through this dialogue, the women reveal intimate and intellectual complexities of Mexican women’s gendered voices, their histories, and their intimate and public lives. The work further demonstrates the ways these women, in dialogue with Paz, transformed history itself. Becker’s multigenre work reconstructs Mexican history through the temporal experiences of crucial Michoacán females, experiences that culminate in their complex revolutionary dance, which itself emerges as a transformative revolutionary language.

2020 Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Book Prize In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications. Motivated by a desire for self-representation both visually and in politics, female artists and activists transformed existing regimes of media and visuality. Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated. Through their concern for self-representation (both visually and in formal politics), these women played a crucial role in transforming existing regimes of media and visuality—increasingly important intellectual spheres of action. Foregrounding the work of female artists and their performative and visual, rather than written, interventions in urban space in Mexico City, Aceves Sepúlveda demonstrates that these women feminized Mexico’s mediascapes and shaped the debates over the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence during the last decades of the twentieth century. Weaving together the practices of activists, filmmakers, visual artists, videographers, and photographers, Women Made Visible questions the disciplinary boundaries that have historically undermined the practices of female artists and activists and locates the development of Mexican second-wave feminism as a meaningful actor in the contested political spaces of the era, both in Mexico City and internationally.