1. The Origins of Mexican Anarchism
European Influences
The Mexican anarchist, or libertarian socialist, movement, which took root and grew during the fifty years prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, emanated from Mexico’s own unique developmental process and from European influences. Representing but one of several responses to a half century of profound industrial, social, and political change, anarchism as both a doctrine and a movement suffers from popular misunderstanding. Despite its consistent denial of state authority, the simplistic conception of anarchism as violent opposition to all forms of government and as unrestrained individualism is totally inadequate for understanding the role of this ideology in the turbulent history of Mexico’s urban and rural working-class movements and for measuring its impact upon that nation’s development. First developed in Europe, anarchist theory underwent substantial and often conflicting modifications prior to its importation into Mexico where further fragmentation of an already inconsistent body of thought occurred.
The precursors of anarchist ideology flourished during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The French philosophes in particular, by providing western society with an optimistic belief in progress—in the perfectibility of man and his social institutions—based upon human reason, created a climate of opinion conducive to the emergence of anarchist thought. Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the Enlightenment’s most creative thinkers, contributed additional impetus in the form of an examination of the relationship of man to society and the state. His observation that “man was born free and is everywhere in chains” became one of the fundamental tenets of the anarchist movement, which sought to break the chains by reorganizing the economy and the polity in order to eliminate the oppressive power of the state.
The initial stages of specific anarchist ideology—the “Holy Idea,” as its more devoted adherents referred to it—can be traced to two fanatical proponents of individualism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Max Stirner (pseudonym used by Kaspar Schmidt) in Germany and William Godwin in England. Stirner envisioned a “union of egoists” composed of independent supermen un-trammeled by legal fetters; Godwin, more importantly for the future course of anarchism, refined and developed Rousseau’s contentions. Godwin traced the sources of human travail to bad government and inadequate institutions; he insisted that human reason, developed by means of education, could solve man’s problems. Such refinement of man’s comprehension would enable him to control his passions, seek equality and the simple life, and dispense with government. Later anarchists drew upon and refined these ideas of individualism and placed them within the social context of the Industrial Revolution.
Anarchism attracted its first sizable urban and rural working-class support in response to the concept of the mutualist association advanced by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a product of the small-town culture and peasant agricultural economy of southern France. Proudhon carried the convictions and values of the French village artisan and farmer with him to Paris where he reacted against the severe conditions of working-class life in the industrializing cities of France. Many French intellectuals shared Proudhon’s negative response to the growing cities. The appearance of his first critical essays protesting the emerging capitalist-industrial culture and proposing political-economic alternatives to the government-supported capitalist social order coincided with the formation of entire communities in the countryside by expatriate intellectuals who extolled the peasant way of life. In the world of fine arts the Barbizon school of painters became famous during this period for its idealized portrayals of healthy, hard-working, clean-living peasants in a “natural” human order. Many of these artists and their writer counterparts adopted peasant attire, married campesina women, and worked part-time in the fields sowing, ploughing, and harvesting. Later nineteenth-century writers, such as Tolstoy and Kropotkin, sought psychological relief in much the same manner. To many early nineteenth-century French intellectuals and artists the mode of living and seemingly equalitarian way of life in the peasant village and farm, unlike that of the city, placed man in the midst of nature and in concert with both his fellow man and his environment. The individualistic-communitarian values expressed by Proudhon and those who adopted and developed his ideology found enthusiastic pockets of support among the transplanted former peasants who formed the world’s emergent nineteenth-century urban proletariat, and peasants in many parts of the world would agree with its principles. Emergent anarchism in the 1830’s and 1840’s was very much an intellectualization and defense of traditional countryside values and mores.
Proudhon applied the libertarian principles of Godwin and Rousseau to Fourier’s earlier idea of regimented-authoritarian socialist Utopian communities, or phalansteries. His modification of Fourier’s theories resulted in a vision of an agricultural and small-shop industrial society based upon voluntary communes and workers’ cooperatives bound together by contracts of exchange and mutual credit. Proudhon’s system also provided for individual retention of the necessary products of labor and for equitable distribution of all surpluses. A people’s bank would provide economic assistance and development. Proudhon viewed associations as essential replacements of rule by the capitalists, whose power grew daily. He in effect hoped to preserve the values and perfect the way of life of the traditional society of pre-industrial France. He opposed private property because it was the cornerstone of French capitalism, and he deemed the state’s support of the new capitalistic organization of society the cause of increased governmental intervention in and regulation of individual lives. The individual, Proudhon insisted, represented the basic component of the community, and social and political control belonged in the village or working-class unit of society. But one did not challenge the intrusion of government into the life of the individual by advocating political reform alone. For Proudhon the ultimate defense of individual liberty required that social and economic reform must precede political adjustments. Proudhon favored change without violence—a communism which defended the sanctity of the community against the encroachments of capitalism and, by restricting large-scale capitalism or private property, removed the increasing threat of the state to individual liberty. His communal solution initially attracted elements of the artisan and agrarian population of France with their long-standing heritage of mutual aid, but after the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, Proudhon’s mutualism became increasingly unrealistic in a vastly more complex European society.
During their earliest stages, nineteenth-century working-class ideas for social change were moralistic in tone and Utopian in character, but, during the latter half of the century, these beliefs were elaborated into relatively hard doctrines and carried to the “masses” by organizers. Mutualism, as an initial stage in the development of working-class anarchism, became obsolete with the growth of industry and a massive urban proletariat during the nineteenth century. Anarchism was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution, and its development paralleled that of the bourgeoisie and urban working class. The tensions wrought upon the working classes by the changing milieu of industrial society encouraged modifications in existing doctrines and the formulation of new social and political conceptions.
Anarchism’s appeal to the European working class increased significantly during the 1860’s and 1870’s as a result of the ideology and activities of the movement’s leading revolutionary of the time, Mikhail Bakunin. A Russian revolutionary exile for most of his life, Bakunin developed effective techniques for the spread of the anarchist movement and its theory throughout much of Europe. Unlike Proudhon, Bakunin favored direct, violent, revolutionary action. His message was best received in those societies where the working class suffered the worst hardships, especially Spain and Italy. As the leader of the anti-Marxist dissenters in the First International Workingmen’s Association, Bakunin formed a counterorganization called the International Alliance for Social Democracy with branches in individual countries where he expected eventually to organize communes and cooperatives into federations on a regional basis. When sufficiently well organized, the regional organizations would develop and coordinate economic and trade activities through periodically convened congresses. As opponents of the nation-state the anarchists expected the regional bodies to affiliate in the common interest without regard to national boundaries because they believed economic, cultural, and natural barriers to be the decisive factors in sociopolitical reorganization. In anticipation of government repression Bakunin also encouraged the formation of secret, conspiratorial societies to disseminate political propaganda and carry on organizing efforts despite such opposition.
The most significant changes in economic focus between Proudhon and Bakunin are found in the sheer magnitude of working-class units as seen by the latter. As the Industrial Revolution progressed and its accompanying process of urbanization continued, the anarchist movement reacted to the changing needs of the times with Bakuninist collectivism. This form of anarchism paralleled Proudhon’s; yet, important differences existed. Bakunin envisioned and accepted larger groups of workers than did Proudhon and sought self-sufficient cooperatives intended for production and consumption in both urban and rural sections. Actually, collectivism represented the beginnings of a separate communal socioeconomic existence within the still-capitalist economy. While this order, as a way of life in the traditional countryside, repelled the new bourgeoisie, it seemed even more threatening to them when Bakuninists began to organize the urban working class. In part, collectivism owed its success to the artisans who adopted it in the 1860’s and 1870’s as a defensive response to their declining status as the Industrial Revolution reached its most brutal and exploitative stage.
Bakunin and the collectivists made other important modifications of Proudhon’s thought. They altered his concept of small-scale individual possession with the idea of ownership by the voluntary collective, a modification which enhanced anarchism’s appeal to the broader spectrum of the working class. But the right of the individual to enjoy his own productivity, or its equivalent, still belonged to each worker. Thus, the collectivists maintained the dominant thread which runs through all varieties of anarchist thought—individual liberty. The major tactical shift between Proudhonism and Bakuninism lay in the adoption of revolutionary activism and the messianic propagation of anarchist doctrines wherever its disciples wandered.
Peter Kropotkin and his communist anarchists, who came to the fore during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, differed with the old teacher Bakunin and the collectivists on one major point. The Bakuninist system obligated the individual worker to perform a certain amount of work for which he received remuneration in direct proportion to his contribution of labor. Kropotkin and the communist anarchists regarded this stress on performance, rather than need, as a violation of the spirit of true cooperation and as another form of wage slavery. Kropotkin thus expressed a philosophical dimension of anarchism which found general acceptance within the movement and resulted in the rejection of the Bakuninist wage concept. He maintained that “love, sympathy and self-sacrifice” played an important part in the development of human morality, but solidarity—“the force of mutual aid”—provided the real basis for the success of human society. The well-being of the individual depended upon “a sense of justice” and equality for all—on this foundation humankind would progress.1
The communist anarchists took the position that a system of wages based upon the quantity and quality of production drew a distinction between inferior and superior labor and between what is mine and what is yours; in other words, it created a form of private property, and that, they felt, meant placing the rights of one individual above those of another. The communist anarchists therefore regarded this aspect of the collectivist system to be incompatible with the ideals of pure anarchism. The collectivist system also inferred the establishment of some form of authority within the collectives to measure individual performance and accordingly supervise the distribution of goods and services. Instead, Kropotkin proposed the principle of need in place of the wage system: “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.”2
An accomplished naturalist, Kropotkin stressed man as a social animal:
… the vast majority of species live in societies, and they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life, understood … as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of Mutual Aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. In man, the clan, tribe, village, guild, federation of villages, the city, are all examples of the need for association. The state, however, based on loose aggregations of individuals does not answer this need in individuals.3
Man prospered in free and voluntary cooperation with others. Contrary to T. H. Huxley and the contemporary Social Darwinists, Kropotkin held that spontaneous cooperation among animals, and therefore man, was far more important for survival than fierce competition.4 This generalized type of argument, typical of the nineteenth-century intellect, provided the anarchists with an essential refutation of the Social Darwinist elitist ideological onslaught. It also supplied anarchists with badly needed scientific-intellectual support for their optimistic view of human nature and their belief in the need for a future collectivist society.
Equally important, Kropotkin gave anarchism a theory of history. He identified human and technological progress with the practices of mutual aid and association :
The Greek City and the Medieval City gave man freedom…. They were a combination of Mutual Aid as it was practiced within the guild or the Greek clan with a large initiative left to the individual.5
 
… Consider the astounding rapidity of progress from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in weaving, working of metals, architecture, and navigation; and the scientific progress of the fifteenth century….
For industrial progress, as for any other conquest of nature, mutual aid and close intercourse are … much more advantageous than mutual struggle.6
He also anticipated the impact of anarchist revolutionary ideology in economically distressed and culturally traditional societies. He agreed with Bakunin that the anarchists would find “their supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual aid principle is the necessary foundation of everyday life.”7
Libertarian socialism reached its most mature industrial form with anarchosyndicalism, which appeared in Europe during the last years of the nineteenth century. This phase of development reflected a still further reaction by the anarchist movement to an increasingly urban and industrialized society. Anarchosyndicalists organized tremendous numbers of factory workers into syndicates which advocated communalized worker ownership of the factories based upon the principles developed by their mutualist, collectivist, and communist anarchist predecessors. The weapons used in the struggle for social revolution by this new form of anarchist organization included the general strike, the boycott, and sabotage. Because of its viable base of support and wide range of effective tactics, anarchosyndicalism attracted many of the diverse factions within the anarchist movement and synthesized them. Even Tolstoyist pacifists found its relatively nonviolent characteristics compatible with their own beliefs.8 Anarchosyndicalism primarily voiced a libertarian socialist response to the modern urban industrial complex, but it did not fail to consider the rural population.
Anarchosyndicalism, through its avant-garde twentieth-century Spanish ideologues, provided the most comprehensive description of the anarchist society yet seen :
There is only one regime that can give the workers liberty, well-being and happiness : it is Libertarian Communism.
Libertarian Communism is the organization of society without a State and without private property.
It is unnecessary to invent anything or to create any new social organization to achieve it.
The centers of organization around which the economic life of tomorrow will be coordinated exist in present-day society: they are the syndicate and the free municipality.
Workers in factories and other enterprises … group together spontaneously in the syndicates.
With the same spontaneity the inhabitants of the same locality join together in the municipality, an assembly known from the origins of mankind. In the municipality they have an open road to the solution, on a local basis, of all the problems of communal living.
These two organizations, federative and democratic, will have sovereignty over their own decisions, without being subjected to the tutelage of any higher organs.
Nonetheless they will be led to confederate for the purpose of common economic activities and, by forming federations of industry, to set up organs of liaison and communication.
In this way the syndicate and the municipality will take collective possession of everything that now belongs to the sphere of private property; they will regulate … economic life in every locality, although they will have men in charge of their own actions : that is to say, liberty.
Libertarian Communism thus makes compatible the satisfaction of economic necessities and respect for our aspirations to liberty.
Because of the love of liberty the libertarians repudiate the communism of the convent, the barracks, the ant hill or the herd as in Russia.
Under Libertarian Communism, egoism is unknown; it is replaced by the broadest social love.9
While many variations of anarchist thought existed, they shared one important characteristic: a unique anti-intellectualism. Starkly visible in the written work of Bakunin and the Polish ideologue Jan Waclaw Machajski, as well as in the essays of Mexican José María González, anarchist anti-intellectualism stemmed logically from the general antiauthority, antielitist position taken by the libertarian socialists. This strident anti-intellectualism often manifested hostility toward university degrees and professional licensing. Within the socialist movement, the anarchists feared that the government envisaged by orthodox socialists would result in the ascendancy of a new bureaucratic elite composed of former déclassé Marxist and university-educated intelligentsia. Thus, the anarchists’ concern for a self-governing classless society, their contempt for the upper strata of society which they considered utterly corrupt, and their rivalry with Marxist groups (generally led by intellectuals) combined into a strong and persistent antagonism toward intellectual elites.
The most important consequence of anarchist anti-intellectualism lay in its special appeal to the working class in those countries where laborers found themselves most frustrated by the parliamentarianism of social democracy at the end of the nineteenth century. The workers expressed special disgust with the intellectual and nonworker leadership of social democracy, which seemed to compromise every important issue. As a result, anarchosyndicalism prospered in the societies of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France.10 But Latin America also suffered the same ills; and Spain’s former colony, Mexico, experienced a powerful and sustained history of anarchist activity.
Another, and fatal, consequence of anarchist thought in which antielite intellectualism played an important role stemmed from the anarchists’ failure to create a viable means to provide for the security of their society during the revolutionary period of change from capitalism to the anarchist utopia. It is true that anarchists saw the early communes, based upon the traditional peasant community and later urban labor syndicates, as the basis for this transition, but they failed to agree upon a durable thesis both in Europe and in Mexico as to how the commune or syndicate would survive the critical period of violence associated with the revolution. Anarchists unrealistically chose to rely upon workers’ militia and village defense units, both of which repeatedly demonstrated an inability to conduct campaigns successfully against disciplined and coordinated armies, because they could not accept any suggestion which advanced the idea of an army organized in the usual elitist-authoritarian manner.
The militias, while not leaving the communes and syndicates completely defenseless, could not sustain military discipline, logistics, or, as a result, a successful offense. As a result, after each defeat the counter-revolutionary forces had time to withdraw, reorganize, and strike again until they achieved success. This unresolved dilemma plagued the agrarian-peasant insurrectionists of nineteenth-century Mexico, the Makhno-led peasants of the Russian Revolution, the southern campesinos during the Mexican Revolution, and the anarchist militias in old Aragón and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.11
The historical patterns of Mexican anarchism in working-class history roughly paralleled the evolution of the movement in Europe and reflected a synthesis of the impact of social change in Mexico and the continuing intrusion of European anarchists, especially Spaniards, and their ideas.
The European and Mexican urban and rural working classes had a long history of preideological preindustrial protest. The historical urban crowds of Paris and the Mexico City tumultos of 1624 and 1692 exhibited a single-minded desire on the part of the lower classes to redress a particular set of grievances. These early manifestations of working-class unrest became quite serious at times and toppled governments, not just in Paris during the French Revolution, and in Barcelona, Spain, but in Mexico City during the Mexican Viceroyalty as well. The progressive development of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of nineteenth-century revolutionary ideologies, such as anarchism and communism, channeled deepening urban working-class grievances and hostility into the formation of organized workers’ groups. As the nineteenth century wore on, the social problems of the urban working class intensified and resulted in anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism. The modern early twentieth-century industrial workers’ syndicates of Mexico City flowed not only from contemporary conditions and events but also from long-standing social patterns.
The Mexican peasantry, like the European, had long contested, by both passive and violent means, political interference and economic control of the locality by outsiders. In the past such resistance meant “peasant wars,” such as those of sixteenth-century Germany and Mexico’s indigenous uprisings against the Aztec and Spanish empires. In Mexico a long-standing tradition of social banditry preceded the modern leader of violent peasant resistance, the agrarian revolutionary. The social bandit of Río Frío, Chihuahua, or eastern Morelos personified elements of peasant culture and reinforced the village economy by expropriating wealth from outsiders and expending it in the peasant community. He represented the most persistent violent form of peasant resistance to the hegemony of the European-oriented urban cultural-economic complex over the indigenous hinterlands. The symbiotic economic relationship between bandit and village and his consistent adherence to campesino values were essential for the continuance of his local support and, thus, to his survival. The long-standing socioeconomic grievances of the peasantry were consistently manifested in social banditry. The introduction and adoption of nineteenth-century revolutionary ideologies into the Mexican countryside provided agrarian resistance with a rationale and transformed bandits into revolutionaries. The social bandit was the preideological precursor of the Mexican agrarian revolutionary. Anarchism, a doctrine consistent with peasant values, helped to transform Mexican campesino resistance into militant Mexican agrarianism.
Domestic Influences
The Mexican Industrial Revolution transformed traditional socioeconomic patterns and intensified social stresses which developed during the three centuries when Mexico existed as a colony of Spain and which persisted after independence. During the late formative colonial period, a conservative elite composed of the Church, the military, the great landowners, and Spanish merchants and government officers dominated Mexican society. Leaderless and seemingly without hope at the time of the independence struggle in 1810, the poverty-ridden campesinos of the countryside, many of whom lived in communal villages, and the lower working classes of the cities joined the armies led by the first leader of the Mexican independence movement, Miguel Hidalgo. Confronted by an incipient popular social revolution, the conservative Mexican-born Creole elite, seeking to maintain its favored position within the colonial social order, sided with the Spaniards until the threat from below subsided. When the Creoles finally supported independence from Spain, they sought to create a sovereign nation under their leadership. The antagonistic positions taken during the independence struggle by revolutionary campesinos and conservative Creoles anticipated the pattern of rivalries that would plague Mexico until the revolution of 1910.
The chaos of the decade-long struggle for independence left Mexico with political instability, fiscal bankruptcy, economic stagnation, dire poverty, and social antagonisms—conditions that the nation could not quickly overcome. The revolution achieved national independence, but it did not dislodge the dominant conservative elite of colonial Mexico. The conservatives’ power remained intact, and, against all opposition, they tenaciously defended the sources of that power: the traditional, corporatelike Spanish institutions inherited from the past. For sixty-five years after the beginning of the independence struggle, the nation suffered from political instability, widespread corruption in government, economic decline, and miserable living conditions for the lower classes in the cities and the countryside.
But nineteenth-century Mexico underwent dramatic and sudden changes. After three centuries of relative order and stability under Spanish governance, the liberalism of the Enlightenment and the heresies of the philosophes reached Mexico. Also, an indigenous liberal movement led by lawyers and other professionals whose main economic tenets echoed the laissez-faire economics and free trade of Adam Smith exacerbated growing social tensions. Had the conservatives confronted only these developments, they might have survived; but the added threat posed to them by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Mexico hopelessly undermined their position. Soon, a new class of factory owners, nuevos ricos, flaunted their vastly increased wealth in Mexico City and demanded concomitant political power. With the development of the factory system during the period following independence, this new urban-based group slowly increased in both numbers and economic strength. Allying with the conservative elite, they provided further reason for their rising antagonists, the urban working class, along with the increasingly large middle and professional strata of urban society, to increasingly identify with liberalism. As the latter two groups’ power and influence grew and the needs of the growing urban areas became increasingly apparent, the unresponsive government of the old, weakening conservative alliance became more and more obsolete. The result was a challenge the traditional elite could not forestall.
Even before the prominence of new industry the liberals viewed the old system as an anachronism which desperately needed modernization. The leading liberal spokesman of the 1830’s, José María Luis Mora, frequently noted the exorbitant expenditures in the national budget for an incompetent army which kept the nation in constant bankruptcy. Mora, like the other liberals, saw the costs of the military and the large tax-free and relatively unproductive landholdings of the Church held in perpetuity through mortmain as the major economic problems confronting Mexico. Mora and his colleagues also resented the hacendado’s ability to escape taxation, and they opposed the government’s policy of low tariffs which facilitated the acquisition of European-produced consumer gooods for the upper-class conservatives and at the same time discouraged the development of national industry. When the liberals took power by force of arms in 1854, they inaugurated a reform program, known appropriately enough as La Reforma, which attacked the traditional privileges of the Church, the landed oligarchy without threatening its holdings, and the military. The liberals in their flaming rhetoric promised liberty, justice, and hope for all; and they opened the door to new forces for change.
A program to bring the army, Church, and nation under one set of laws held first place on the liberal agenda of reform. The Ley Juárez, which became law in November 1855, overhauled the judicial system by restricting the special courts and privileges enjoyed by the military and clergy and subordinated them to the secular, civil authority. But the Ley Lerdo of June 1856 had even more far reaching consequences. It ordered the Church and all other corporate bodies to divest themselves of their landholdings. The law’s definition of corporate bodies included the traditional rural village governments, or municipios, whose communal holdings must now be divided. Some liberals failed to foresee the consequences of this provision. While the majority anticipated a transfer of agricultural holdings into nonindigenous and therefore more productive lands, an idealistic minority hoped that individuals in the local municipios would maintain possession of the affected communal lands; but those who anticipated such retention expressed incredible naïvete, because sufficient wealth and strength never existed in the majority of the comunidades to contest large-estate claimants without state protection. As a result, during the last half of the nineteenth century persons other than villagers obtained the great majority of tracts.
Typical of nineteenth-century liberals, the Reforma government sought to encourage private enterprise and small, private agricultural holdings. Despite delays in the Ley Lerdo’s fulfillment, brought on by chaotic civil wars, the Reforma and, especially, the succeeding governments of Presidents Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and Porfirio Díaz saw this process of village land seizures carried out to an extreme. Thus, communal holdings that had survived the Aztec Empire, the Spanish conquest, the entire Spanish colonial period, and the early years of independence fell sacrifice to the demands of agricultural impresarios espousing liberal economic theory based upon the doctrine of laissez faire. The battles for national political power between 1854 and 1867 basically constituted a confrontation between the old conservative oligarchy—the military, clergy, mercantile elite, and some of the great landowners—and the liberals of the Mora tradition and their urban supporters, including the professional and artisan classes. In spite of the seeming victory by the liberals, the losers did not forfeit all. The clergy lost much of its economic and political preeminence, but the military and hacendados survived the Reforma and throughout the rest of the century possessed much of the same power and prestige in society that they previously had enjoyed.
The defeat of the old guard did, however ironically, open up the society for the nuevo rico, or urban bourgeoisie. During the brief tenure of the French-dominated empire administered by Maximilian, liberals and conservatives shared a favorable impression of European methods and industry. When the liberals returned to power in 1867 they pursued economic developmentalism with increasing fervor and encouraged the formerly conservative urban industrialists and monied elements, as well as foreign capitalists, to invest in and develop key sectors of the economy. Enjoying the advantages of newly won political power concomitant with its wealth, this group of entrepreneurs purchased a considerable portion of the agricultural property made available by the Ley Lerdo. This process ultimately resulted in the partial economic consolidation of some of the new urban industrialists, the traditional great landholders, and the politically dominant liberals into a reconstituted elite amalgam which ruled Mexico until the revolution of 1910. During the reign of Porfirio Díaz this new landed elite was known as the younger Creoles. Despite differences between 1876 and 1910, these two groups, urban and rural, entered into a period of relatively harmonious co-existence known as the paz porfiriana. Characterized as an equilibrium of urban capital and rural hacendado interests, the paz also meant suppression of political dissidents.
The legalized seizure of rural lands that began in the 1850’s and continued until 1910 contributed greatly to the intensification of a series of agrarian uprisings that began in the 1850’s and did not terminate until the death of Emiliano Zapata in 1919. During this period anarchist theory, carried to the countryside by libertarian socialist organizers from Mexico City, came to play an important part in the developing struggle.
During the forty-five years that preceded the Mexican Revolution the anarchists, who were the first urban agraristas, helped to contribute a body of doctrine to the previously poorly understood Mexican agrarian movement. In this way they hoped to change the nature of Mexican agrarianism from profound but relatively inarticulate uprisings into a movement reinforced by a coherent peasant view of the world to come. Resistance provoked by oppression and the lack of basic necessities articulated a program designed to preserve traditional patterns of peasant life. The anarchist agraristas specifically demanded local autonomy from centralized government; seizure and redistribution of agricultural properties by the municipios libres, or free village governments; and an end to the political corruption of national and local government officials. Their success in becoming a part of the Mexican agrarian movement stemmed from the compatibility of their program with the values, traditions, and aspirations of the sedentary-indigenous people. This agrarian heritage consisted of individual identification with the local village; a sense of egalitarian-ism; an abiding distrust of outsiders, such as absentee landlords, labor recruiters, tax collectors, military conscriptors, and government officials; and a persistent suspicion of politics in general. The campesino population had long struggled to preserve a peasant order that included village control of the land and self-government. A long record of campesino insurrections in support of these aspirations, aided by anarchist and other radical ideologies after the 1860’s, challenged the very existence of the prevailing political and economic system and led to the agrarian upheaval of 1910.
At the same time that the agrarian movement acquired ideological dimensions, the Mexican urban labor movement evolved during the late 1860’s through the revolutionary period of 1910–1917 from mutualism to cooperativism to revolutionary anarchosyndicalism. Mexican working-class organizations, influenced by forceful and militant anarchist organizers, stressed deplorable working conditions in the factories, decried miserable living conditions in the cities, and aspired to a better life. Thus, the anarchists facilitated labor’s view of what the ideal society should be and in what manner the working class should organize in order to achieve it.
The rise of the bourgeoisie and the factory system of commodity production in the second half of the nineteenth century spawned an unprecedented number of urban workers. This new proletariat consisted of former farm workers who migrated to the city in search of the opportunities and social mobility that its expanding economy seemed to offer. They failed, however, to realize their hopes; new forms of futility confronted them in the seamy, unsalubrious vecindades—slums devoid of such basic services as adequate streets, lighting, water, transportation, sanitation, and health facilities.12 Such oppressive urban social conditions contributed to the rapid spread of revolutionary ideas and organizations.
The working hours for those fortunate enough to find full-time employment—men, women, and children—ranged from twelve to eighteen hours per day. Impossible working conditions and subsistence wages added to discontent. An open letter of protest written by the participants in one of Mexico’s first large urban labor strikes vividly portrayed the situation :
… there are workers who receive a weekly salary of sixteen cents, and this cannot be denied. The work day extends from 5:15 A.M. to 6:45 P.M. in the summer … in the winter from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., … the foremen only concede five minutes daily to the workers in order for them to eat.
The conditions within the factories in Puebla are not much better; working men receive a salary of 2 ½ to 3 ½ reales daily, while working women receive from ½ to 1 ½ reales. The work day spans eighteen hours with two fifteen-minute lunch breaks.13
During the fifty years before the revolution, the vecindades and factories increasingly became seedbeds of revolutionary ideas broadcast by ideologues and organizers expounding the European doctrines of Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and, to a lesser extent, Marx. The Mexican anarchists, a distinct group of social revolutionaries, are often incorrectly discussed in the context of subsequent Marxian socialism.14 Although they called themselves “socialist,” their anarchist ideology distinguished them from the post-Russian revolutionary Marxist movement. The “socialism” that they adhered to at first was the Proudhonist-Bakuninist version, exported first to Spain and then to Latin America. Later, in the early twentieth century, they adopted the communist anarchism of Peter Kropotkin and eventually espoused anarchosyndicalism. In Mexico and Latin America, anarchism far exceeded Marxism in importance until after the success of the Russian Revolution.
The organizers of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexican labor and socialist movements were sometimes students, common laborers, or intellectuals but usually artisans. Students who became involved in labor-organizing activities also had artisan backgrounds. The artisan class, with its tradition of the Spanish guild and the protected marketplace, traced its ancestry to the Roman conquest of Iberia. In Mexico, these handicraftsmen prospered until factories began to produce shoes, clothing, and bread. Unable to compete, they often descended to the status of factory workers, victims of progress. But they continued to be literate carriers of the Spanish guild tradition with its emphasis on mutual aid and fierce individualism. Apparently, a great majority of both the artisans and the urban labor force, in the name of progress and needed change, initially supported the liberals’ program. But the guild tradition of the artisans and the communal heritage of the campesinos were ill-suited to prepare this new urban working class for the situation which confronted it in the slums. Because Mexico’s prevailing social, economic, and political conditions could not meet their expectations, an eventual clash between the urban workers and the urban industrialists supported by the government was probably unavoidable. During the resultant conflict, a considerable portion of the Mexican working-class movement, led by the artisans, developed an anarchist ideological stance.
The nineteenth-century Mexican urban labor movement maintained direct contact with the Jura branch of the divided, European-based First International Workingmen’s Association and at one stage openly affiliated with it. During the late 1890’s and the first decade of the twentieth century, new anarchist leadership emerged which once again led working-class opposition to the ancien régime, helped to foment the labor strikes which immediately preceded the revolution, and organized urban labor during the seven years of revolutionary tumult. The anarchists’ record in organizing urban labor and in supporting agrarian reform unquestionably establishes them as precursors of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. During the revolution, aided once again by European influences, anarchism in the form of an internationally affiliated anarchosyndicalist union, the Casa del Obrero Mundial, made its appearance in Mexico. It played a significant role in the outcome of that struggle.
Anarchist sentiment received added impetus in the closing decades of the nineteenth century as a result of the considerable influx of Spanish immigrants into Mexico. Between 1887 and 1900 the number of Spaniards living there with émigré status increased from 9,553 to 16,258.15 Spain at that time had the largest anarchist movement in the world, and some of these Utopian revolutionaries naturally fled to Mexico. In the first years of the twentieth century the Spanish government’s policy of coercively exiling them ensured their flight and the Barcelona anarchists’ wish to organize Spanish America, including the Mexican working class, assured Mexico as one of their choices for exile.