Anarchisms & The Mexican Working Class, 1860

During the late 1880’s and 1890’s, disorganization and demoralization plagued the anarchists. The continuance of difficult conditions for the working class, a few remaining adherents, student unrest, the flow of Spanish émigrés, a minor influence from anarchist members of the Knights of Labor in the 1890’s, and a more significant influence from the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World in the first decade of the twentieth century, however, helped to keep the cause alive. In the meantime, an aged Díaz regime encountered a deteriorating economy and mounting public resentment.

Despite a lack of leadership, Mexico’s industrial workers showed militancy throughout the Porfiriato. In 1885 worker unrest resulted in serious textile strikes at El Valor in Tlaxcala, Cerritos in Orizaba, La Magdalena in Contreras, and San Antonio de Abad in Mexico City. The intervention of an older and more conservative Pedro Ordóñez, now a city regidor, highlighted the San Antonio de Abad strike. Instead of a five-peso strike fine being paid to the owners by the defeated workers, the money went to a workers’ charity, La Casa Amiga de la Obrera. In 1888 a strike closed the La Victoria plant in Puebla for nearly three weeks. In 1889 walkouts closed the El Molino factory in Veracruz, San Fernando in Tlalpan, and Cerritos. The unrest during the period 1885–1890 usually resulted from salary reductions and involved workers fully aware of the almost routine hostility of the authorities and the omnipresent soldiery.¹

In January 1890 the San Antonio de Abad workers went on strike again, once more protesting a cut in wages. The San Antonio de Abad situation was significant because the factory was the largest in the Federal District and its workers were beginning to build a record for radical working-class militancy that would continue through the revolution with their affiliation with the anarchosyndicalist-dominated Casa del Obrero Mundial and through the 1920’s with the anarchosyndicalist General Confederation of Workers (Confederación General de Trabajadores, CGT). In 1892, in 1894, and twice in 1896 the San Antonio de Abad plant closed because of strikes. The issues ranged from salary reductions and increased working hours to management-employee relations.

Other plants with significant histories of worker militancy also experienced continuing unrest. La Colmena of Tlalnepanda, an older factory than San Antonio de Abad, whose workers Santiago Villanueva organized in 1868 and who affiliated with the workers’ Círculos and Congresos of the 1870’s and 1880’s, was closed down by a strike in 1898. Seven hundred workers struck and won negotiated concessions, a rare victory. An even larger and more significant strike occurred in 1900 when El Mayorazgo in Puebla was struck and three thousand textile workers in the state of Puebla followed suit.² This walkout, Mexico’s first “general strike,” inaugurated the twentieth-century era of modern syndicalism. Mexican workers not only remembered their heritage and how to strike, despite the illegalities, but also, after twenty-four years of “Porfirian peace,” utilized the most contemporary European syndicalist tactics. Nineteenth-century theory had become twentieth-century reality.

Americans from the Knights of Labor assisted in the campaign to organize the railroad workers of Nuevo Laredo in 1887, Monterrey and Puebla in 1898, and Aguascalientes and Mexico City in 1900.³ During the first years of the twentieth century, members of the Western Federation of Miners began their radicalizing work at Cananea. Many of these men were part of a developing tendency within the United States labor movement which soon produced the theoretically anarchosyndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. The IWW operated at Cananea in 1906. The Mexican Liberal party (Partido Liberal Mexicano), organized by Ricardo Flores Magón, a leader of the 1890’s university student protests in Mexico City, included substantial anarchist elements and worked with the Americans. Beginning in 1904, the Magonistas, from their American sanctuary, began to send emissaries—revolutionary culture brokers—into the mining camps of the Mexican north and into agrarian villages as far south as Veracruz and Oaxaca.

The Díaz regime was concerned. The role of American anarchists in the organization of Mexican labor during the last decade of the nineteenth century, joined by the exile Magonistas during the early years of the twentieth century, was reflected in the Second Pan American Conference held in Mexico City 1901–1902. The Mexican government demanded uniform and severe extradition laws dealing specifically with anarchists and applicable to all of the American nations.⁴ The conference delegates shared the belief that anarchists should be prosecuted, but the problem lay in finding an adequate definition of anarchism. The Mexican delegate, Alfredo Chavero, after several weeks’ delay, admitted his inability to define it. Nevertheless, he submitted a list of twenty-two crimes which he insisted constituted anarchist acts. The cited offenses ran the gamut of criminal behavior, from murder and robbery to sabotage. The last crime listed was a catch all: “los delitos de anarquismo” still undefined. While delegates agreed with and adopted the first twenty-one offenses as anarchist crimes, they dropped the last category of “anarquismo” from the final declaration of the conference.⁵ The other twenty-one charges were adopted and Chavero left only half-satisfied with the results.

During the Porfiriato industrialization created a growing urban complex and an increasingly powerful urban working class. Increased economic activity stimulated the larger urban centers. Those totaling over 20,000 population grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent between 1877 and 1910 while rural communities under 5,000 lagged behind at a 1.2 percent annual growth rate. Mexico City more than doubled in size during the Porfiriato from 230,000 to 471,000. Other industrial centers experienced even more spectacular growth; Monterrey increased by 461 percent and Veracruz by 490 percent. The growth of the cities was caused by increased trade, both foreign and domestic, and expanded factory production which provoked an influx of campesinos seeking urban opportunity. The rural-urban migration created an overabundant labor supply, which, complemented by the general economic slump after 1906, drove industrial workers’ real wages steadily downward from a high point reached in 1897.

In central Mexico an industrial worker whose daily income provided buying power of 1.92 pesos in 1897 found his daily real wages in 1907 reduced to 1.40 pesos, with no signs of recovery to console him.⁶ Higher food prices undermined his economic position, although other crucial items, such as rents, fuel, and clothing, also increased in cost far more rapidly than the growth of industrial wage earnings. Until 1897 rising real income and active government mediation in labor-management disputes discouraged both revolutionary activism and the acceptance of revolutionary ideology. Then, after more than twenty years of steady industrial and agricultural production increases accompanied by stable prices for essential goods, the Mexican economy faltered. The following ten years were exceptionally difficult for the lower classes.

The relatively firm prices that prevailed before 1900 for consumer goods essential to the urban workers fell to inflation between 1900 and 1910. During the previous twenty-four years corn, bean, and wheat costs rose at an acceptable average of 4 percent per year. Cotton even decreased in price. In the next ten years cotton costs increased 98 percent, chiles 193 percent, and beans 64 percent. The final three years saw the problem reach a crisis stage. Between 1907 and 1910 corn prices went up 38 percent and wheat 20 percent. In addition to the steady decline in real wages, the urban workers also encountered a higher rate of unemployment during the last decade of the Porfiriato.⁷ Increasingly difficult conditions alienated many workers and contributed to the urban labor unrest that surfaced in 1898, peaked in 1906–1907, and was reasserted after 1910.

In the agrarian sector, the unprecedented extent of village land seizures and the extreme development of latifundia during the Porfiriato created large numbers of landless rural workers, resulted in a search for crops which would maximize cash earnings, and left the Mexican domestic agricultural market vulnerable to fluctuations. That vulnerability was demonstrated between 1907 and 1910 when the reduced acreage still devoted to the production of essential domestic foodstuffs was afflicted by crop blight causing severe shortages. The number of haciendas increased between 1877 and 1910 from 5,869 to 8,431,⁸ while the greater part of the 57,778,102 hectares of land given out by the liberal governments between 1853 and 1911 was distributed after 1877.⁹ The more affluent recipients of those land grants, known as the “younger Creoles,” pushed labor productivity to new heights in order to increase their returns. Sugar production, which took place in both the lowlands and the more densely populated highlands, increased from 629,757 tons in 1877 to 2,503,825 tons in 1907.¹⁰ Spectacular increases were also recorded in other plantation products. Ward Barrett has demonstrated that the search for profits was a traditional aspect of the great estate in Mexico;¹¹ in the latter part of the nineteenth century that tradition was accentuated.

One insight regarding the overall impact of these trends upon the quality of rural village and urban worker life is seen in the increasing costs of corn, beans, and chile and, after 1907, in the sharp per capita decline in the production of these essentials. Meanwhile, throughout the Porfiriato, there were dramatic production increases of the intoxicants mescal and tequila, the consumption of which increased from 10,018 liters in 1877 to 26,068 in 1910, and pulque, which soared from 95,856 liters to 347,653.¹² deteriorated economic conditions exacerbated pre-existing social tensions in the lower strata of the working classes and were an important factor in both the resurgence of Mexican anarchism in the early twentieth century and the coming of the Mexican Revolution.

Working-class revolutionary leadership in 1910 came from the artisans whose difficulties paralleled those of the less skilled workers. In addition to the higher costs of essentials, the rise of industrialism and industrial workers spelled the decline of competitive artisan crafts. Sastres, or tailors, composed one artisan group that especially suffered throughout the development of the textile industry. During the late Porfiriato the accelerated rate of change literally destroyed them. In 1895 there were 41,000 independent tailors and 19,000 textile factory workers. By 1900 the number of tailors decreased to 26,000 and the textile factory workers had reached an equal total. In 1910 only 8,000 tailors remained, and 32,000 factory workers labored in plants which became ever larger and more centralized.¹³ The spectacular growth of the cement, brickyard, and typesetting industries spelled a similar fate for the typesetters, quarry workers, stonecutters, and stonemasons. The revolutionariness of the tipógrafos, canteros, and sastres during the early twentieth century did not occur by accident.

The artisan situation further deteriorated with the elimination of the alcabala, the principal legal bulwark supportive of the artisan’s economic position at the local level, during the late Porfiriato. The alcabala was a state or local protective tariff on imported goods from which local governments obtained their necessary operating revenues. The rise of industry, however, carried with it concomitant political influence for the industrialists at the national level and an increasingly dominant free trade ideology. Once the national government could provide alternative sources of fiscal support for state and local administrators, the local political elites separated from their traditional pro-alcabala allies, the artisans. The Díaz regime accordingly abolished the alcabala in 1896.¹⁴ Many local retailers and distributors welcomed the freer flow of trade. The artisans, isolated and outraged, organized in desperation.

In the early twentieth century, Mexican anarchism continued a pattern of development that roughly paralleled that of Europe. The developing factory system rendered the earlier organizational conceptions of mutualism and cooperativism obsolescent, and a larger urban labor force made the formation of an anarchosyndicalist union feasible. Mexican anarchism moved from the relatively escapist tendencies of the nineteenth-century cooperativists, who advocated withdrawal from the capitalist economy into independent societies and the joining together of capitalists and workers as brothers, to the anarchosyndicalists, who, alienated and belligerent, confronted capitalist society with such weapons as the general strike, sabotage, and workers’ control of the factories.

The Díaz regime, because of its early successes, acted something like a filter against the full transmission of the Mexican anarchist tradition.¹⁵ As a result, the twentieth-century Mexican anarchists turned, not to their nineteenth-century predecessors, but to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. The movement was once again stimulated by the presence of Spanish anarchists, and they played a comparable role to that of the previous century.¹⁶

The first powerful twentieth-century anarchist organization developed around the Liberal party led by the Flores Magón brothers. Ricardo Flores Magón first read Kropotkin at an early age and testified to the strong impression that he received. Between 1900 and 1910, Flores Magón and the Liberal party posed the only serious challenge to the Díaz regime and they became a symbol of resistance. The “Liberal party” actually operated as a revolutionary resistance against Díaz and not as a group devoted to political campaigns or activities normally attributed to political parties. Most PLM members and activists were not anarchists. Some were socialists, but a majority simply wanted democracy in Mexico. The majority abandoned the anarchist-dominated PLM Junta and supported Francisco I. Madero once the revolution against Díaz began.

In 1900, Ricardo, more radical than the youthful student leader of 1892, assisted in the publication of a new anti-Díaz newspaper, Regeneración. Later that year Ricardo and Enrique participated in the creation of the Students Liberal Committee (Comité Liberal de Estudiantes) in Mexico City. In February of 1901, Ricardo, acting as a delegate from the Comité, attended the nationwide “Liberal Congress” organized in San Luis Potosí by the antidictatorial social reformer Camilo Arriaga. During a speech to the congress, Ricardo repeatedly labeled Díaz and his aides “a pack of thieves” and he emerged from the congress as one of the new liberal movement’s most prominent spokesmen. In April he took part in the formation of a new liberal club in Mexico City, La Asociación Liberal Reformista, which affiliated with the San Luis Potosí Liberal Congress.¹⁷

During the next three years he suffered repeated arrest and fines, and the government permanently closed Regeneración. Finally, in 1903, confronted by the choice of constant police surveillance and frequent arrests or the abandonment of their convictions. Flores Magón and his closest liberal associates chose to continue the struggle from across the border in the United States. In February 1904 the Flores Magón brothers, Juan and Manuel Sarabia, Santiago de la Hoz, Librado Rivera, Antonio I. Villareal, Rosalio Bustamante, and Santiago R. de la Vega met in Laredo, Texas, and formed the Club Liberal Ponciano Arriaga as an organization through which to carry on their campaign against Díaz. Regeneración, published in San Antonio and intended to stimulate Mexicans on both sides of the border against Díaz, reappeared in November 1904.¹⁸

Police and Furlong Detective Agency harassment caused the liberals to move from Texas to Saint Louis, Missouri, after one year in Laredo and San Antonio. On September 25,1905, they formally announced the creation of the Mexican Liberal party in Saint Louis. The announcement included a call for the development of a network of underground revolutionary cells throughout Mexico in order to bring about the overthrow of the Díaz regime. The membership of the governing Junta of the new party consisted of Ricardo Flores Magón, president; Juan Sarabia, vice-president; Villareal, secretary; and Enrique Flores Magón, treasurer and included as vocales, full members of the directorate, Rivera, Manuel Sarabia, and Bustamante.¹⁹ During September 1905 their newspaper, Regeneración, reached twenty thousand copies per edition.²⁰

By this time President Díaz and United States Ambassador to Mexico David E. Thompson fully realized the presence of Ricardo Flores Magón, the PLM, and their intentions. The “Pinkertons” (Furlong) had already informed Díaz that Ricardo was “a dangerous anarchist.” Their report continued: “The Flores Magóns, Sarabia, and Villareal have always appeared to me as men fanatical over one idea and for that reason they are dangerous, as are all persons that one encounters with that obsession … they are always talking of tyranny … of the rich classes, in particular of the hacendados and industrialists, who exploit the workers.”²¹ A few months later Ambassador Thompson informed the United States Department of State that the PLM “worried” President Díaz, “harmed United States business interests,” and advocated “anarchism.”²²

In reality the Liberals had long been divided on the question of political perspective. Of the original Junta only Ricardo, Rivera, and Enrique developed an anarchist ideology. While in Laredo and San Antonio in 1904, some of them, a minority, sensing Ricardo’s deepening radicalism, rejected it and supported the moderate social reforms advocated by the wealthy Arriaga. During the Liberals’ year-long interlude in Saint Louis, Ricardo, Juan Sarabia, Rivera, and Villareal hosted frequent meetings with American anarchist Emma Goldman and with Spanish anarchist Florencio Bozora. These conversations deepened the anarchist convictions of Ricardo and Rivera, but Sarabia remained much more of a social reformer and Villareal tended toward an orthodox socialism which the Junta’s anarchist majority temporarily tolerated.²³ Enrique’s anarchist convictions were real although less profound than his brother’s. In 1923, after Ricardo’s death, Enrique returned to the forefront, urging anarchist ideology and tactics upon striking CGT textile workers in Orizaba. Although arrested, he remained outspoken on the subject thereafter.²⁴ During the intense campaign to develop a broad and multi-social-class base of support in Mexico against Díaz, the PLM leadership expediently decided not to expose its anarchist beliefs.²⁵ Despite continued Furlong interference, arrests, and frequent flights in order to maintain their freedom, the PLM Junta members continued to promote and organize considerable revolutionary momentum in Mexico. In 1906, in the midst of widespread labor strikes, Regeneration’s circulation increased to thirty thousand.²⁶

By 1906 the PLM had forty-four clandestine guerrilla units and Liberal clubs operating within the five zones into which they had divided Mexico. The northern sector, zone three, aided by intense activity on the American side of the border, was the best organized and comprised the states of Sinaloa, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas. A camarada de confianza who carried the title of delegado commanded in each zone. A national commander-in-chief who reported to the Junta in the United States directed the five zone delegados. Beneath the zone delegado was the guerrilla unit commander (jefe de guerrilla) and his assistant, the subjefe, the only two members of the local units who knew the identity of the zone delegado. Urban and rural working-class volunteers primarily comprised the guerrilla units, which varied in size, some as large as two hundred to three hundred members, but averaged somewhat under fifty. The volunteers elected the jefe and subjefe from among their own numbers. In that manner the PLM built a popular mass following, gave the members a sense of full participation, and maintained organizational security at the lower levels.²⁷ The Junta and Regeneratión were funded for the most part by small donations collected from all parts of Mexico. Despite full prisons, the Díaz regime failed to significantly compromise the security of the PLM clandestine infrastructure within Mexico. Rather, the PLM was spied upon at the top when agents of the Furlong Detective Agency, hired for the task by Díaz, infiltrated the exile Junta in the United States and almost completely compromised it.²⁸ Also, the American authorities consistently frustrated PLM plans.

The major occasion of worker unrest in which the PLM played at least a partial role involved the Cananea Copper Company strike of 1906 in the state of Sonora. Because of the contending forces involved, the Cananea strike achieved far greater significance than could normally have been expected. Sonora was the bailiwick of the infamous Governor Rafael Izabal, the protegé of Vice-President Ramón Corral. After their seizure by the revolutionaries, Izabal’s haciendas revealed torture chambers and forced labor conditions for Yaqui Indians. At the time of the strike the company was jointly owned by the Anaconda Copper Company and former proprietor William D. Greene, a financially beleaguered promoter who continued to manage the daily operations of the mine but who maintained direct telegraphic contact, regarding important decisions, with John D. Ryan of Duluth, Minnesota, one of John D. Rockefeller’s most trusted and talented aides. Greene accepted a partnership with Anaconda in order to obtain the funds to remain operating. Anaconda, in turn, carried substantial influence with the territorial governor of Arizona, Joseph H. Kibbey, whose appointment the company had endorsed and who controlled the Arizona Rangers. Considerable PLM activity at Cananea preceded the strike. During the spring of 1906, Lazaro Gutiérrez de Lara of the PLM formed and served as president of the Club Liberal de Cananea. Strike leaders Esteban Baca Calderón, Francisco Ibarra, and Manuel Diéguez headed another Cananea liberal club, the Unión Liberal Humanidad, founded to support the PLM and to organize the workers.²⁹ Baca Calderón envisaged the development of the Mexican working class as a base of support for the PLM. Writing Villareal two months before the strike, Baca Calderón said:

… the miners here should know … that the dictatorship is their worst enemy and they should feel the just desire to overthrow it. In this respect I have an idea : … to found a miners union, without a hostile stance or political manifesto, at least for now. Later we would invite all of the miners in the Republic to found their respective unions so that we might all then merge into the Liga Minera de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. All of these unions will have the obligation to form a basis in order to help [workers] in similar conditions as indicated by the directing Junta [of the Liberal party] whenever necessary. These unions will then join the Liberal party providing it with mass resolute support.³⁰

On June 1, 1906, the workers at Cananea suddenly went on strike, demanding an eight-hour work day and a higher minimum wage and protesting racial discrimination against Mexicans in housing, job promotions, and rates of pay. Two days of rioting ensued in which buildings were burned and the Mexicans continued to resist with firearms from inside the workers’ living district. The PLM members, local union organizers, and the Cananea authorities were all taken off guard by the workers’ action, but both sides responded quickly and the significance of remote Cananea deepened accordingly. The mine management and local officials immediately tried to break and then repress the strike. PLM and other labor “agitators,” including nine Mexicans and seven Americans, were identified “visiting the mines scandalizing and procuring new disturbances.”³¹ The two days of gunfire, sabotage, and rebellion followed these actions.

Jesús González Monroy, a PLM member and striking miner at Cananea, explained the extreme actions then taken by the public authorities : “The rulers of Sonora correctly saw the Cananea strike as something more than a manifestation of protest against the company … it was necessary [in the authorities’ view] to terminate it quickly and completely if they did not want to see the fire of popular discontent communicated to every part of the national territory.”³²

The strike reached the national consciousness more quickly than the editors of Regeneración could have hoped for when American vigilantes crossed the border from Arizona led by Captain Thomas Rynning and five other Arizona Rangers. A greatly exaggerated account of attacks upon Americans telegraphed across the frontier by Greene had provoked the American action. The Arizona territorial governor made a half-hearted public attempt to discourage the vigilantes when he declared that they acted on their own.³³ The routine United States Army cavalry pursuit of Apache Indians across the frontier, an activity carried on for years with the full knowledge and approval of the Díaz regime, established precedence for the border violation.³⁴ The Cananea management and Sonoran officials wanted American intervention because the nearest Mexican army and rural detachments were more than a full day of travel from the scene.

The strike and rebellion ended on June 6 when Governor Izabal, backed by two thousand Mexican troops, threatened the forced conscription of the striking workers into the army and to send them to southern Sonora to fight in the Yaqui Indian war going on there. Between thirty and one hundred Mexicans lost their lives in the five days of fighting. The results of the sensational events in Cananea were multiple. The government suffered a severe setback in national popularity, especially with the usually sedate Mexican middle class, because of the “foreign invasion” of national territory. Nationwide workers’ unrest was further stimulated and the alarmed Mexican and United States governments began a concerted drive to break the PLM and its revolutionary “anarchism” before it was too late.³⁵

The Liberal party platform, promulgated on July 1, 1906, attempted to claim a broad base of support from all social classes. Its working-class provisions included demands for a national minimum wage, a six-day work week with Sunday rest, cash wage payments rather than company script monies tenable only in company stores, the abolition of the company store (tienda de raya), the abolition of child labor, owner-management payments for industrial disability expenses, and the establishment of minimum standards for job safety and working conditions. For the rural workers the platform provided for redistribution of unproductive lands held by great estates and thus appealed to campesinos while minimizing the alarm it caused with the landed elite. Another important proviso, steeped in Mexican history, demanded the restoration of usurped municipio political authority (article 46).³⁶ The party platform heralded what the Magonistas hoped would be the revolution.

To bring about that revolution, the PLM, under the field leadership of Praxedis Guerrero, mobilized its forty-four clandestine guerrilla groups for a series of coordinated uprisings scheduled for the fall of 1906. The PLM hoped that these revolts would trigger a larger mass upheaval. Ricardo Flores Magón and the Junta secretly moved their headquarters to El Paso in September in order to be closer to the scene of action. However, the alarm caused by the Cananea strike in the highest levels of the Mexican government had its effect. American authorities cooperated with the Mexicans in a massive roundup of PLM members in Douglas, Arizona, and Río Grande and El Paso, Texas. The Mexican government’s arrest of hundreds of Liberals disrupted the planned revolution, but three PLM attacks did occur. In September at Acayucan, Veracruz, three hundred men led by Donato Padua attempted to seize the town. Repulsed, they retreated into the countryside to begin a guerrilla campaign that spread into the state of Tabasco and continued until the forces led by Santana Rodríguez (Santanón) joined them to take part in the revolution of 1910. In October 1910 they launched a series of attacks that antedated the Madero-led revolution a month later. The composition of the Padua PLM-Santanón forces was largely campesino. PLM-led Indian uprisings in 1906 also failed at Chinameca, Minatitlán, and Ixhuatlán in Veracruz. Some of the remnants joined forces with Padua. The third attack, against Jiménez, Coahuila, originated in Del Río, Texas. It ended in failure. The composition of the Del Río forces, like most PLM units in the north, consisted of a cross section of Mexico’s lower and middle social strata. A PLM detachment was also defeated in October near Ciudad Camargo, Tamaulipas. A plan to seize Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso never materialized because of the devastating effects of coordinated police raids and arrests that took place in the two cities during mid-October. Ricardo barely escaped and fled to Los Angeles, where the Junta reorganized.³⁷ It took the PLM two years to recover from the setbacks of 1906.

The textile strike, lockout, and workers’ rebellion of 1906–1907, known as Río Blanco because of events that took place at that factory in Orizaba, had a minimum of visible PLM involvement and no identifiable anarchist participation. Yet, like Cananea, Río Blanco is significant in the history of Mexican anarchism and the working class because events there revealed the growing working-class unrest that fueled the PLM, the coming of the revolution, and the resurgence of Mexican working-class anarchism.

The Orizaba area became a site of worker unrest as early as the 1870’s. Later, the textile workers there were involved with the anarchosyndicalist labor federations, the Casa del Obrero Mundial, and the General Confederation of Workers. In 1906, Orizaba, an intensely industrialized area in comparison with most Mexican population centers, because of its relatively small population was one of the few areas in Mexico where the industrial proletariat constituted a sizable percentage of the populace. During the 1890’s large new textile factories had been constructed at Río Blanco and Santa Rosa that counted 35,000 and 33,000 spindles and 900 and 1,400 looms, respectively.³⁸ Río Blanco was the largest textile employer in the nation with 2,350 industrial workers in 1900. Santa Rosa was also unusually large with 1,100 employees in 1898.³⁹

The Orizaba-Puebla textile industrial area experienced increasing worker unrest beginning with the late 1890’s when the state of Puebla suffered Mexico’s first general strike. Most of the factory owners were French, something the workers did not forget. In 1901 the Río Blanco workers formed a “libertarian mutualist-cooperative society,” and a secret “resistance group” to regain their “lost rights.” Two years later, in 1903, the workers in the Río Blanco plant protested the abusive behavior of a supervisor, struck, and closed down the factory.⁴⁰ In 1904 the workers elected Manuel Avila their leader and created a “Gran Círculo.”⁴¹ In the winter of 1906 a protestant evangelist preacher, José Rumbia, opened a tabernacle near the Río Blanco factory and attracted a considerable number of workers to his congregation during the first few months. His sermons were a mix of fundamentalist Christianity and a radical-populist critique of the foreigners, “Roman Catholic church, and bourgeoisie.”⁴² Early in the spring a Magonista-PLM revolutionary culture broker (luchador obrero), José Neira, arrived in Río Blanco, obtained a job in the factory, and began attending the Protestant lectures. Soon the pastor had Neira leading political discussions after the sermons.

Together with Rumbia, Neira and a nucleus of twenty-seven workers met at the home of Andrés Monta on April 2, 1906, and launched the Gran Círculo de Obreros Libres (GCOL) in Río Blanco.⁴³ At their first meeting they voted to affiliate with the PLM Junta then in Saint Louis. Neira was elected president of the GCOL, which vowed to open branch Círculos at the nearby factories of Santa Rosa and Nogales. Neira and his followers enjoyed quick successes at both installations. The GCOL also began to publish a newspaper, La Revolución Social, which featured articles predicting the “holocaust” (el holocausto) and which branded both government and Church as criminal and corrupt.⁴⁴

The GCOL and its newspaper stirred up worker unrest, and the nervous Díaz regime promptly reacted by declaring the GCOL subversive and ordering the arrest of its leaders. Rurales armed with rifles duly surrounded the GCOL meeting place in Río Blanco on jueves de Corpus in June or July 1906 only to find it empty. The leaders had fled, including Neira and Rumbia. The rurales captured only Pablo Gallardo, whose wife revealed his hiding place. The authorities subsequently sent Gallardo to Quintana Roo as a forced military conscript and dissolved the GCOL, but many workers had been affected by the experience.⁴⁵

Several months later, José Morales, a foreman in the Río Blanco plant, founded a new GCOL and served as its self-appointed president. With the endorsement of President Díaz, the state governor of Veracruz, Orizaba political boss (jefe político) Carlos Herrera, and local judge Ramón Rocha, Morales vowed that he and the GCOL would “support the governor” and not involve the workers in politics.⁴⁶ He also expressed his affection for Díaz. Labor historian Luis Araiza has described the leader of the new GCOL as “more concerned with the interests of the industrialists than those of the workers.” With little opposition, the Morales-led GCOL quickly organized branches throughout the textile regions of Orizaba, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. Radicals were denied entry to the GCOL Río Blanco meetings.⁴⁷

In the meantime, the owners of ninety-three factories in the central region of Mexico, which included all the major textile mills, organized a textile industrialists’ group known as the Centro Industrial Mexicano. Late in November the factory owners issued a new ruling applicable to the industrial workers in Orizaba, Puebla, and Tlaxcala which prohibited friends and relatives from bringing un-censored reading materials into the otherwise untainted company towns for the workers to read in their homes. In addition, all workers were required to carry black passbooks that would contain their identification and employment discipline entries. This ruling, working conditions, and hours were argued and negotiated in November and December by the GCOL leadership and the Centro Industrial Mexicano.⁴⁸ Morales and the other union leaders came under tremendous pressure from the rank-and-file at large meetings to reject the new ruling and to insist upon at least some concessions.

On December 7 the GCOL held a large strike meeting in Puebla. About three thousand workers gathered to draw up their grievances and to request President Díaz to arbitrate. The list of workers’ demands included the release of workers at 5:30 P.M. on Saturdays instead of the usual 8:00 P.M., additional time for eating, a number of holidays, a pension plan, overtime pay, control of worker abuse by supervisors, the right to read newspapers, the entry of GCOL representatives into the factories as observers, and the prohibition of company stores and child labor (120 children were employed in Río Blanco alone).⁴⁹ A number of speakers addressed the weary crowd but an anonymous orator received tumultuous applause when he declared that thus far Mexico had experienced only two revolutions, those of independence and La Reforma, and that there was going to be a third one, “that of class war (la lucha de clases).”⁵⁰ The workers then developed a plan to strike against factories in selected regions. A strike by six thousand textile workers in Puebla ensued. A few days later, eight hundred more workers in Tlaxcala joined the effort. The textile industrialists, urged on by José Limantour, decided to shut down all the member plants of the Centro Industrial Mexicano, citing an accumulated warehouse supply inventory that required depletion as the reason for the closure. The plaintive GCOL leadership may have bargained in good faith but found itself caught between angry workers and intransigent factory owners.

The lockout began on December 22, 1906, and affected 22,000 workers in Puebla, 10,000 in Orizaba, and 25,000 more in and around Mexico City, Veracruz, Querétaro, and Guadalajara. The GCOL strike fund of 25,000 pesos lasted only four days. Some Puebla-Orizaba workers suffered extreme privation. About 2,050 of them migrated to other parts of the country seeking relief. The GCOL leadership had unsuccessfully petitioned the Díaz government to arbitrate the dispute on three separate occasions earlier in the month before the lockout began. Finally, when the government agreed to arbitrate, the industrialists predictably turned down its request. On December 31 the capitalists agreed to accept government arbitration.⁵¹ By then the desperate GCOL leadership was ready to accept almost any settlement in order to reopen the factories.

On January 4 the stern terms of the accords became public. The only proviso that even hinted at compromise by the employers was the cynical abolition of child labor for those under seven years of age, but child workers were already normally older than that. The prohibitions on reading materials and the other rules, including the required passbooks, remained in effect. On January 6, Pascual Mendoza, the GCOL leader in Puebla, addressed the assembled workers there and, citing the endorsement of the archbishop, “God,” “Church,” and “Country,” he gained majority approval for the new agreements. But in Orizaba a large and loud minority shouted down and denounced Morales after he gained a majority vote. In PML-like rhetoric the protesters shouted out, “Death to Porfirio Díaz!” and “Down with the dictatorship!” Leaders of the Santa Rosa GCOL, president Rafael Moreno and vice-president Manuel Juárez, led the opposition to the accords.⁵²

On January 7, Mexico’s textile factories reopened and events passed normally except in Orizaba. At 5:30 A.M. the first contingent of workers, arriving early at Río Blanco to get the plant ready for the first shift, confronted an angry crowd of dissidents; men, women, and children threw rocks at the buildings and shouted their protests. The sentiments expressed in the beginning are not known. Later that day the shouts clearly expressed rebellion against the government, as they had during the previous night. The arriving workers turned back and some of them joined the crowd.⁵³

As the crowd grew in front of the factory, Jefe Político Herrera tried to disperse it, only to be shouted at and stoned. Some of the women felt a deep grievance against the management of the large monopolistic and virtual company store, the Centro Comercial, run by Frenchman Victor Garcín and Spaniard Manuel Díez. There are various explanations of the provocation which led the workers to attack it, including the killing of a female worker-shopper and several accounts of verbal insults offered by Garcín against the strikers. At 9:00 A.M. Margarita Martínez called upon the angry crowd gathered in front of the factory, “¡A la tienda! ¡A la tienda!” The crowd sacked and burned the Garcín-Díez-operated store. The smashed merchandise littered the ground around Orizaba for days afterward. At that point a unit of the 13th Infantry Battalion arrived on the scene reinforcing a small force of rurales, who, caught up in the feelings of the crowd, had refused to take action. The soldiers took the rurales into custody and opened fire on the workers, killing seventeen and wounding eighty.⁵⁴ Eleven of the rurales, including their commander, Lieutenant Gabriel Arroyo, later died before a firing squad, shot for their actions. With the store sacked and burned, some of the workers marched to the center of town, shouting “Death to Porfirio Díaz,” seized the jail, and released all the prisoners. The strike-lockout had turned into a working-class rebellion.

Another large segment of the crowd, still led by Martínez, headed toward the Nogales and Santa Rosa factories, several miles away, shouting rebellious slogans: “Death to the dictator Porfirio Díaz!” “Long live liberty!” “Long live Mexico!” “Down with the oppressors and company stores!” About two miles outside Nogales they linked up with the workers from the Santa Rosa and Nogales factories who had heard of the events in Río Blanco and came out to meet them. The crowd, led by Santa Rosa GCOL leader Manuel Juárez, attacked the Nogales and Santa Rosa installations, burning down the company stores.⁵⁵ Returning on the road from Santa Rosa, they encountered Colonel José María Villareal and his units from the 13th Infantry Battalion. The troops opened fire on the workers, killing scores in the largest single massacre of nonindigenous people in the history of the regime.

By late afternoon the remnants of the Nogales and Santa Rosa protesters struggled back to Río Blanco. In the meantime, the workers there, many of them with guns, seized the nearby railroad station and engaged in one-sided battles with the army. With the bitter remnants from Nogales and Santa Rosa assisting, the crowd tore down and burned the cluster of houses in Río Blanco where Morales and others in the GCOL leadership resided. Morales, fully understanding the situation, fled early in the day to Atlixco in Puebla. The contagion was not easily controlled. The military rounded up eighty workers from the Cerritos plant after they sacked and burned a pawnshop in Orizaba. Other armed workers formed roving bands. The one-sided gun battles between workers and soldiers continued through the night.

By January 8 an armed peace settled over Orizaba. Hundreds of workers resided in jail and 800 infantrymen, 150 local police, and 60 rurales patrolled the streets, roads, and factories. On the ninth, a crowd of still-angry workers gathered in front of the Santa Rosa plant. The troops opened fire, killing five workers. Santa Rosa strike leaders Juárez and Moreno also died that morning. Some reports allege that they fell in action. Others claim they were executed in the ruins of the burned-out company store at Santa Rosa as an example to the others. On the ninth, 10 workers were summarily executed in the Río Blanco jail.⁵⁶

The Río Blanco strike-workers’ rebellion resulted in almost 200 workers killed and countless casualties. Four hundred became prisoners, among them a number of women, including Martínez. About 25 soldiers died and 30 to 40 suffered wounds. Employers terminated or suspended over 1,500 workers in the Santa Rosa, Río Blanco, El Yute, San Lorenzo, and Mirafuentes factories.⁵⁷ Newspaper reports of Río Blanco, however distorted and muted, resulted in a severe loss of prestige to the government. Despite the praise offered by the American consul from Veracruz to the military commanders on the scene, “for decisive action,” the regime’s popular acceptance suffered. In the relatively calm aftermath of 1907, the country watched and waited.

With order restored, Limantour fired the jefe político of Orizaba, Herrera, for his failure to act. The government viewed the entire affair as the work of outside agitators. Justo Sierra, a high-ranking intellectual member of the regime, felt that infiltrators had contaminated the workers with “collectivist” ideas. Francisco Bulnes, another of the científico braintrust, saw the movement as “communist.”⁵⁸

The Cananea and Río Blanco “strikes” cannot be understood in all their complexity by the mere description of objective events or of PLM activities. They revealed the compounding problems that drove Mexico toward the revolution of 1910 : a growing national economic crisis, intensifying nationalist resentment against foreign businessmen, a restive working class, and the work of revolutionary precursors led by alienated segments of the urban middle class and provincial elites.

On January 9, 1907, El Imparcial, an important pro-Díaz newspaper, reported, in a lengthy article, on the “rebellion” in Río Blanco. It complained of “anarchist propaganda” circulated among the workers for months before the uprising occurred. El Imparcial attacked anarchist reasoning as invalid because it confused the economic order with the social order, two aspects of the human condition which the writers for El Imparcial felt were entirely separate. The propaganda, the newspaper claimed, “inculcated hate of the rich.” It concluded by asserting the need to “limit” access by the workers to “socialist, communist, or anarchist ideas … It is necessary that everyone understand that the rights of free thought and expression are not unlimited.”⁵⁹

After the Río Blanco rebellion of 1907, working-class unrest continued to smoulder and erupt in the Orizaba, Puebla, and Mexico City areas until the outbreak of the revolution in 1910. Heavy troop concentrations became necessary in Orizaba and, occasionally, in Mexico City to keep the situation under control. In Puebla the government created a new workers’ organization, the Gran Confederación de Obreros, out of the remains of the GCOL to help pacify the workers. The confederation’s bylaws prohibited strikes, stressed cooperation with employers and government, and threatened expulsion for any worker who advocated strikes. Despite the new chartismo,⁶⁰ workers continued to demonstrate their dissatisfaction.

In January 1907, shortly after the termination of the Río Blanco rebellion, the workers at the La Magdalena textile factory in San Angel near Mexico City—a site of documented anarchist-led workers’ militancy between 1876–1882 and 1911–1931 and continued strikes in the 1880’s-1890’s—struck and the installation closed down. The nearby La Hormiga plant workers briefly followed suit, but the strike failed with the arrest of five worker-leaders after the rurales occupied the factory. The owners of La Magdalena and La Hormiga blamed Río Blanco infiltrators for the trouble and strikes because hungry refugees from Río Blanco invaded San Angel during December 1906 and January 1907. In April of 1907 a strike once again closed the Nogales and Río Blanco factories, despite the formidable number of soldiers in the area. The workers still protested the hated passbooks, necessary for employment and designed to eliminate “troublemakers,” and the prohibitions against workers’ reading materials. The strike failed when the employers, backed by the army, threatened to bring in fifteen hundred strikebreakers from Oaxaca.⁶¹

Strikes in Mexico City, Puebla, and Orizaba continued through 1908 with the focus on another serious dispute in San Angel. The owners of La Hormiga tried to expel fifteen hundred workers from the company-owned housing area after the workers struck and refused to permit the expulsion of the fifteen selected strike leaders. The owners insisted that the fifteen were infiltrators, outside agitators, from Río Blanco. With the aid of troops and police, the management evicted all fifteen hundred of the workers from the housing area, at least temporarily.⁶²

In 1909 workers struck and shut down perhaps the largest textile factory in Mexico, San Antonio de Abad of Mexico City, on two separate occasions. The first time, the dispute between workers and management stemmed from the summary dismissal of an employee. The reasons for the controversial firing are not known. Later in the year a reduction in salaries resulted in another strike. Both efforts by the workers failed. The Puebla area experienced recurrent strikes and worker unrest despite the presence of the Gran Confederación de Obreros and its charro leadership. The Río Blanco workers tried once again to redress their grievances in 1909. They justified their strike by claiming abuses at the hands of their French employers, but the Río Blanco workers found the authorities impatient. Strikebreakers were quickly brought in from neighboring states and the plant reopened with new personnel.⁶³

During the period 1907–1910, strikes frequently occurred in the textile mills, Mexico’s most developed industry. Sometimes mass arrests of strikers took place, but usually a show of armed force by the government sufficed. The last and most serious strike of the prerevolutionary 1907–1910 period took place at the Santa Rosa factory in Orizaba. In July 1910, with PLM guerrilla activity under the direction of Padua and Santanón being conducted in the adjacent rural areas, six hundred Santa Rosa workers went on strike. Troops arrived on the scene, and the owners used selective firing and the threat of more strikebreakers to coerce the workers back to their posts. The revolution would have to come from elsewhere.

In 1907, the PLM, despite the setbacks of 1906, intensified its efforts. Under the direction of anarchist Praxedis Guerrero, the PLM collected arms and prepared clandestine groups to once again launch the revolution. However, in August a raid by the Los Angeles police and Furlong Detective Agency representatives resulted in the arrest of virtually the entire PLM Junta. Police took Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, Antonio Villareal, and Modesto Díaz into custody. While American radicals rallied to assist in their legal defense, the most opportune moment for the PLM revolution, the fall of 1907, passed. Despite the difficulties, Praxedis Guerrero and Enrique Flores Magón continued the mobilization of secret armed groups in Mexico well into 1908.⁶⁴

By June 1908 at least thirty armed groups planned to launch coordinated attacks later that month. But, once again, American and Mexican police intelligence compromised the PLM plan. On June 18, authorities rounded up a group of twenty PLM revolutionaries in Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, and on the twenty-third a successful police raid at the El Paso home of key PLM military leader Prisciliano Silva shattered the PLM’s chances. In addition to confiscating Winchester rifles, 150 homemade bombs, and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition, the police arrested PLM members. Simultaneously, United States cavalry troops deployed along the border opposite Las Vacas, Coahuila, one of the PLM’s planned targets for attack. On the twenty-sixth the Las Vacas PLM unit contested for control of the town with the local army garrison. At the same time a PLM group of about fifty men in Casas Grandes launched a futile attack against Palomas near the American frontier. The expected aid from PLM groups crossing the border from the United States did not materialize. A series of small PLM uprisings failed at Los Hornos, Matamoros, and La Sierra de Jimilco, Coahuila. The PLM leadership carried out a prodigious task of military preparations, but their lack of security at the very top compromised the Junta and disrupted the entire organization.⁶⁵

The arrested Junta members, after spending months in a Los Angeles jail, saw the charges against them finally dropped, but instead of gaining their freedom they were transported to Tombstone, Arizona, where a corrupt trial process featuring racial bias and perjury resulted in their conviction. Ricardo received a sentence of eighteen months’ internment at the territorial prison at Yuma, Arizona.⁶⁶ Field commander Praxedis Guerrero then carried on the enormous task of planning and preparing the next insurrection. He began by organizing Mexican workers living in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and gathering funds at public meetings. In the meantime, PLM guerilla units operated in Veracruz and Coahuila.⁶⁷

But 1910 was the year of Francisco Madero’s spectacular candidacy for the presidency of Mexico. Landowner, businessman, and financier, Madero had the resources to conduct a strong campaign. His reformist and idealistic approach attracted a strong following among the bourgeoisie and Mexico’s already disaffected populace. His defeat, protest, and revolutionary pronouncements drew away many former PLM adherents. The Mexican Revolution finally came in 1910, but the PLM was at a disadvantage. The Junta was in jail and, after initial military victories at Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, and other sites, the dynamic and strongest remaining PLM leader, Praxedis Guerrero, was killed at Janos, Chihuahua, on December 30.⁶⁸

Other PLM military commanders, some important and highly successful, such as Luis A. García with his three hundred men and José de la Luz Blanco, carried on a highly successful guerrilla campaign in cooperation with Madero’s chieftains. However, they were eventually overshadowed and outmaneuvered by Madero who, unlike Ricardo, was able to visit Ciudad Juárez immediately after its fall. Many PLM moderates and orthodox socialists, tired of the anarchist Junta, accepted Madero’s entreaties and joined his forces, thus eroding PLM strength. Then Madero arrested the most powerful and successful PLM military leader, Prisciliano Silva, in a purge of potentially dangerous left-wing elements within the revolutionary movement. In the following months, successful PLM units in the center and south of Mexico declared their support for the seemingly broad-based and open revolution under Madero. The only sector where the PLM established independent military control was in isolated Baja California during the winter and spring of 1911. Following Madero’s victory in central Mexico, the federal army easily retook Baja. Ironically, in mid-1911, after years of struggle, as a result of the Baja California episode where American radicals took part, many Mexicans regarded the PLM as a group of filibusterers and as traitors to the revolution. The bulk of Mexico’s population credited Francisco Madero with the winning of the revolution. The upper-class Madero, his upper- and middle-class supporters, and his basically peasant army not only defeated the army of Porfirio Díaz but also survived the internecine struggle against the lower-middle- and working-class revolutionaries of the almost leaderless PLM.⁶⁹

The PLM represented more than a mere precursor of the Mexican Revolution, however. A leading element in the early stages of the revolution, it continued to be important until after Madero’s victory in 1911. The significant difference between the PLM, the Madero-led revolutionaries, and the Constitutionalist movement of Venustiano Carranza that succeeded Madero was that the PLM represented a workers-peasant revolution. Between 1905 and 1910 the PLM helped to recruit working-class participation in the revolution. After 1911 its significance diminished as workers, in the liberalized climate that followed the collapse of the dictatorship, began to organize on their own without the assistance of the exile-based PLM. The only direct PLM influence on the emergent workers’ organization, the Casa del Obrero, in 1912 stemmed from the presence of former PLM members Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, Lazaro Gutiérrez de Lara, Manuel Sarabia, and Santiago de la Vega.