Adelman - Political Ruptures and Organized Labor Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, 1916-1922 PDF

Political Ruptures and Organized Labor: Argentina,
Brazil, and Mexico, 1916-1922

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Jeremy Adelman
Princeton University
Introduction
How do organized workers take advantage of political transitions to gain
ground for their movements, and conversely, in what ways do these transi-
tions shape workers' tactics and agendas? This essay compares popular
responses to political opportunities in three countries in the throes of deep
crises. Exploring the routes to divergent outcomes from a common junc-
ture during and after the First World War draws attention to the possi-
bilities of and constraints on working-class imprints on constitutional de-
velopment.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Latin Ameri-
cans experimented with and reshaped the unfulfilled principles of its
nineteenth-century liberal-constitutionalist heritage. Much of the nine-
teenth century was devoted to consolidating and stabilizing polities. The
twentieth century has largely been devoted to finding ways to include
popular sectors into the postcolonial representative order. Across the con-
tinent, 1916 to 1922 were decisive years in the shift from exclusive to more
inclusive regimes.
Workers' claims did not square easily with the individualist tenets of
nineteenth-century liberalism. Above all, they sought representation as
collectives, even as a class, to supplement individualist and electoral means
of representation. Recasting the constitutionalist story away from the for-
mal field of politics reveals alternative popular notions of representation.
In particular, workers demanded room for representation on the shop floor
to enable their delegates to bargain on their behalf with employers. These
demands, and the ways in which states accommodated them, gave new
meaning to the institutional channels that mediated class relations in Latin
America. Efforts to redefine legal forms of representation and to redirect
the path of constitutional development became recognizable later in the
idiom of populism.
This essay focuses on two overlapping spheres of collective action: the
formal political arena in which state leaders struggled to rearrange and
stabilize public power; and the shop floor, where labor leaders sought to
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consolidate gains through enforceable contracts. These levels, as the analy-

sis will show, overlap and interpenetrate, because state leaders often in-
truded in industrial relations in search of potential allies among workers,
and labor leaders enlisted the support of officials to bolster their position in
the labor market.1 The narratives which follow rest on actors' strategic
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 54, Fall 1998, pp. 103-125
© 1998 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
104 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
bargaining, especially between state leaders and labor leaders, in which the
respective pursuit of power united both in a complex dalliance. Yet, each
side's instrumentality did not lead automatically to intended results—quite
the opposite was often the case.2
Dependency and world-systems writers draw attention to Latin Amer-
ica's integration into the world economy, emphasizing the legacy of export-
led growth and the relative weakness of industry.3 It took the Great De-
pression, import-substitution industrialization, and elite fragmentation in
the 1930s and 1940s to bolster laborist opposition—by which time workers
became dependent allies in populist coalitions or minor cogs in corporatist
machines. In the more industrialized societies of Europe and North Ameri-
ca, significant labor sectors (though by no means all of them) entered the
national political scene during the upheaval of 1916-1922, thereby achiev-
ing a measure of autonomy prior to the deep "Fordist" phase of capitalist
development. In Latin America, so the story goes, the moment of incor-
poration came late, making the labor movement a supine ally in poly-class
movements. Latin America appears then as an exception to a trans-
Atlantic rule of secular incorporation of popular sectors.4
Yet, political conjunctures present important discontinuities not easily
reduced to economistic explanations. As an alternative, state-centered
comparisons stress the autonomous field of politics. Several recent works
examine sharp political ruptures as openings for class action.5 They see in
"critical junctures" moments in which established channels of inclusion
within (or exclusion from) the political arena are shaken. New coalitions
emerge to seize or even retain power, thereby shifting, in Adam Prze-
worski's words, the "institutional compromise" that shapes the behavior of
actors.6 This approach challenges the view of Latin America as a regional
exception to a liberal drift. It also draws attention to the significance of
timing in macrosocial development.
But what is "political incorporation"? Hitherto, political analyses of
"inclusion" frequently lump all forms of collective action into a narrow
view of the political: representation before the state, usually through inte-
grative elections. This is troublesome when dealing with alternative chan-
nels of representation—especially syndicalist, collective workplace-based
units of organization that get lost in the haze of party competition. Indeed,
during the First World War, unionists advanced claims to represent workers
alongside other working-class identities. Collective bargaining and dis-
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courses about the rights of laboring citizens became important components

of working-class constitutionalist visions in the twentieth century.7
As Latin America's nineteenth-century oligarchic republics began to
shudder, organized labor movements shaped and were shaped by emerging
political regimes. The breakdown of the world market, and in the case of
Mexico a full-blooded peasant insurrection, shattered the confidence of
traditional landed elites. State leaders began reconsidering their traditional
reliance on exclusivist political practices. Likewise, wartime economic and
Political Ruptures and Organized Labor 105
social troubles pushed labor activists to embrace legal, representational

concerns. Rights to negotiate collectively soon joined "material" demands. 8
By 1921, emerging political alliances scarcely resembled their prewar
makeup. Organized workers sought legal and political recognition while
elites sought new constituent partners.
This juncture, however, did not unfold uniformly. Some regimes
proved more accommodating than others. In Mexico, the Revolution bat-
tered elite confidence the most; in Argentina, the clamor for reform shook
but did not bring down the principal tenets of propertied rule; and in
Brazil, the regime faced a groundswell of unrest and some degree of intra-
elite conflict, but the challenge was muted compared to the other two cases.
Accordingly, labor's space for political maneuver was broadest in Mexico
and narrowest in Brazil. Likewise, the form of realignment varied. In Mexi-
co, the space for labor recognition opened with the new constitution of
1917, which created executive powers to create (or deny) bargaining rights
for workers. For their part, unionists bargained "politically" by playing off
contending post-Revolutionary state leaders. Argentine state leaders did
not inscribe statutory provisions for collective bargaining, but they did
open the political arena to multiparty competition. If workers won conces-
sions at the electoral level, they gained little ground in permanent and
codified legal rights to bargain on the shop floor. In Brazil, state leaders
effectively thwarted any fundamental change in the political rules of con-
duct, and workers tried but failed to transcend labor market weaknesses.
As a result, labor leaders relied on the meager and ad hoc concessions
granted by employers. In Brazil, the struggle for labor recognition did not
yield to collective rights at either the ballot box or on the shop floor; in
Argentina, workers won the former, but only tenuous gains in the latter;
and in Mexico, organized workers won both in principle, becoming a cor-
nerstone in the emerging single-party state apparatus.
Statist Incorporation: Mexico

The form and depth of state crisis in Mexico determined the options avail-
able to workers, presenting opportunities which shaped their quest for legal
status—or "personality" in the vocabulary of the time. 9 By early 1915 the
Mexican Revolution had sundered the political pillars of the old regime.
Revolutionary leaders eventually molded themselves into a governing
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coalition. But their ascent forced them to reach out to popular urban
constituencies. Indeed, the depth of the crisis and the degree of popular
mobilization inhibited any solution that did not include some form of rep-
resentation from below. Under Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon
the revolutionary leadership combined coalition building, selective control,
and repression to cobble together a new historic bloc. In order to check the
popularity of rural rebels and urban anarchists, they had to champion a
progressive plan of their own. It was generally agreed that constitutional-
106 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
ism should become the framework for national integration and popular
incorporation.10
If the quest for a new legitimating mechanism compelled political
leaders to embrace popular causes, divisions within the emerging bloc cre-
ated opportunities for working-class leaders to play off rivals. The transla-
tion of political fissures into popular opportunities began as the constitu-
tional debate began to heat up. When the delegates to the constitutional
convention gathered in late 1916, divisions between rival political leaders
gave labor's representatives momentary and disproportionate (in terms of
their numbers) influence. Delegates forced the carrancistas to redraft the
original anodyne version of the labor code (Article 123) into something
with more substance.11
Opportunities for exploiting elite fissures intensified when the two
main revolutionary leaders, Carranza and Obregon, split openly. Entering
the breach was Luis Morones and a new brand of "pragmatic" unionism,
embodied in the Mexican Regional Workers' Confederation (CROM).12
Morones's importance grew as the fissures in the revolutionary bloc deep-
ened. By 1919, Morones had cut ties with Carranza and struck a secret deal
to support Obregon. In exchange for CROM electoral support for Ob-
regon, the organization secured a promise of a separate labor department,
official recognition, and full enforcement of the provisions of Article 123.
This pact laid the basis for the Labor party, which endorsed Obregon's
candidacy in January 1920 against Carranza. When Obregon entered the oil
center and port of Tampico at the end of March, large crowds of oil, dock,
and railway workers were there to greet him. Earlier that morning they had
organized the workers' convention that endorsed Obregon by a wide mar-
gin. Carranza declared open war on Obregon and sent the army after his
rival. Railwaymen hid Obregon in a boxcar and enabled his escape. Bereft
of popular support and losing large contingents of the military, Carranza
fled to the mountains in May, where he was captured and executed. In
ensuing elections, Obregon swept to power. His efforts to consolidate a
new regime based upon institutional representation and incorporation of
workers was simply a quid pro quo for labor support in his rivalry with
Carranza.13
But more than political opportunism guided the actions of labor lead-
ers. Rank-and-file militants demanded rights to organize unions and to
bargain legally with employers. Consider the example of petroleum work-
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ers. In Tampico, workers on the oil rigs sparked a unionization drive in the
wake of a strike at Huasteca Petroleum in 1916 for wage increases and the
eight-hour day.14 But in January 1917, when local oil workers received a
draft of Constitutional Article 123, claims-making shifted to union recogni-
tion and collective bargaining. Three days after the constitution's pro-
mulgation in May, strikes engulfed the largest refineries of the region as
incipient unions sought to use new constitutional provisions to force em-
ployers to the bargaining table. At Pierce Oil Company a local military
officer stepped in to mediate, but a final deal was only announced by the
newly founded arbitration boards in April 1918. By June, a general strike
had engulfed Tampico. The confrontation grew to such a pitch that the
army moved in to put down a strike at Pierce Oil in May 1919. In the end,
civilian authorities avoided a massacre and managed to curb more radical
unionists by giving bargaining units legal status and forcing employers to
accept mediation. 15 These victories, it is important to note, capped a local
groundswell of autonomous agitation—one which syndicalist leaders felt
compelled to harness.
But not all occupations enjoyed such autonomous bargaining power.
Consider the fate of textile workers. In a more atomized and decentralized
industry, and with a less homogeneous work force than oil, textile workers
faced deeper coordination problems that shaped popular quests for legal
personality. Indeed, for some time textile workers' representatives had
already been nurturing a dialogue—never easy, to be sure—with constitu-
tionalists and managed to secure, at least in principle, arbitration from the
Department of Labor. For textile workers, as Bernardo Garcia Diaz has
recently shown, collective memories of the massacre of 1907 and years of
frustration dealing with employers led them to champion early on the
principles of union recognition and of collective bargaining. Lacking the
strategic muscle of oil workers, textile leaders had to engage in much more
explicit bargaining with political authority. In the end, Mexico City textile
workers struck for higher wages in April 1917. Carranza's initial support
unleashed a strike wave throughout the industry in May, spreading from
Mexico City to Orizaba, Jalisco, Tlaxcala, and Puebla. Men, women, and
children joined pickets and appealed for presidential sympathy. The gover-
nor of the Federal District, General Cesar Lopez de Lara, offered some-
thing to both sides in order to restore industrial peace. 16
Direct appeals to the national executive only partially helped textile
workers overcome difficulties of coordination across industrial lines. On
the whole, however, repeated efforts over the ensuing years to convert de
jure concessions into de facto gains stumbled, while textile workers waged
a massive but unrequited campaign for control over the workplace. Tex-
tiles, like most industries, remained open shops until Morones struck the
political accord with obregonistas.17
Several patterns of labor-state relations appeared in the wake of the
1917 Constitution. One, exemplified by oil workers, relied on autonomous
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grassroots activism and local labor market power to win political support
for union recognition. The other, involving the vast majority of workers,
remained uncovered by the formal stipulations of law. How did the political
rupture enable union leaders to spread the oil workers' victories to other
workers? Luis Morones's doctrine of "creative opportunism" recognized
the weakness of large sectors of the working-class movement and the con-
sequent need for support among sympathetic officials to allow some politi-
cal representation and favorable action from arbitration boards. At the
108 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
same time, Morones saw in the dock and oil workers of Tampico constitu-
encies capable of scaring authorities and employers into less confrontation-
al settlements. The balancing act required institutions, and a political deal
to buttress the permanence of union representation.
The moment came when Obregon broke with Carranza, and Obregon
reached out for working-class allies. The deal with Obregon in August 1919
sparked a union drive among hitherto nonunionized sectors: railways, elec-
trical workers, and above all textiles.18 When a wave of textile strikes
gripped Veracruz, Morones appealed to Plutarco Elfas Calles (then Car-
ranza's secretary of industry, commerce, and labor). Calles, a man of some
ambition for whom Morones would prove an important ally in the 1920s,
pressed employers to concede. Signs of support from above only bolstered
labor activism and spawned full-scale factory seizures. In the end Calles
had to quit the crumbling Carranza administration, while employers, fear-
ing a complete loss of their plants, began to buckle.19 By the end of 1919,
textiles leaders signed their first collective contract (ending the massive
Orizaba textile strike) and ushered in their first legal union.
Two steps were crucial to working-class adaptation to this political
opportunity: the Constitutional provisions of 1917 and the tentative deal of
1919 between Obregon and Morones. Still, legal and political accommoda-
tion fell short of working-class institutional representation. To explore the
pattern of "incorporation" we need to shift attention to specific legal rules
governing the dispensation of legal personality. According to Article 123,
executives in the Department of Labor conferred or denied the legal per-
sonality of unions.20 Official patronage could help secure departmental
support, but until Carranza's death executive intervention was more ad hoc
than systematic.
Statist incorporation awaited one more step: a full alliance between
emerging postrevolutionary state leaders and the brokers of the CROM.
The pressure came from a leftward drift of much of the rank and file. By
the summer of 1920 workers demanded full respect for constitutional arti-
cles 27 (agrarian reform) and 123, paralyzing many areas and sectors of the
country. Obregon, not yet president but alarmed at the spreading urban
mobilization, carefully avoided seeming partial, calling for a "fair equilibri-
um between capital and labor." For his part, Morones did not want slender
victories lost to what he called the "voluntarists." Under pressure from
Obregon, local governors promulgated enabling legislation for Article
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123's collective bargaining provisions in order to create arbitration boards.

The new director of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Labor, Vito
Alessio Robles, promised real concessions. Hereafter, the Labor Depart-
ment (a wing of Alessio Robles' ministry) embraced the basic mechanisms
to resolve disputes, thereby fulfilling one of the central demands voiced at
the CROM's foundation: that "labor contracts between workers and capi-
tal should be, by conduct and mediation, negotiated by the groups which
represent them."21
The emerging representative structure within the executive branch of

the state had far-reaching implications for day-to-day shop-floor politics.
Most Labor Department efforts were limited to intervention in industrial
disputes. Emerging arbitration boards, enabled by new legislation, kept a
watchful eye on the most volatile plants and sectors and were eager to
make their presence felt at the slightest tremor. 22 Leaders recognized this
strategy's limitations. In the words of Morones, "[o]ur participation in poli-
tics works toward the formation of a government—if not of advanced
tendencies which many of us would want, at least a government which
adopts a transactional policy [una politico transaccional\ that recognizes the
authority of greater numbers and that introduces reforms to accompany
the progressive advance . . . and comply with the principles which were the
life of the Revolution.' 23 In the wake of the fusion of CROM leadership
with the postrevolutionary state and the conduction of labor strife through
executive-managed arbitration, union membership soared in the 1920s.
Morones's own role would eventually wane, but his brokered incorporation
of labor during the critical years after 1918 provided the basis for the next
round of struggles in the 1930s.24
Unionists succeeded in encoding the right to organize and the power
to negotiate with employers. Enforcing these concessions required an
alignment between labor and emerging state leaders who in turn found in
organized workers a significant constituency to help sort out struggles with-
in the revolutionary ruling bloc. The result was a bargain of sorts—one in
which workers began to enter the mainstream of public life, where they
would be crucial actors over the ensuing decades of Mexican state forma-
tion.
Electors, not Collective Bargainers: Argentina

Argentina, where the elite remained more cohesive, did not face the same
eruption of popular protest as Mexico. Nonetheless, the conjuncture
opened up a chapter of widespread political and social reform. What might
be described as a transition to liberal-democratic parliamentary represen-
tation presented opportunities for hitherto excluded sectors. If at one mo-
ment it seemed that the political transition promised widespread conces-
sions, however, the choices of labor leaders and the narrowing of electoral
competition truncated the consolidation of union demands into enforce-
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able juridical rights. Working-class demands for reform intensified but did
not disrupt the central tenets of bourgeois rule.
Calls for change came from several quarters. Unions joined a chorus of
demands for reform, usually restricting their claims to material concerns
like shorter work weeks, higher pay, and curbs on child and women's work.
Other civilian sectors, led especially by the Radical Civic Union party
(UCR), championed full respect for constitutional rule. The vast majority
of native-born Argentines did not participate, due to distaste either for
110 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
undiluted corruption or for the rigging of electoral lists. Led by Hipolito

Yrigoyen, the UCR waged a relentless war against a politically tight-fisted
regime.25
Combined UCR intransigence and union militancy came to a head
around 1910. Fearing a collapse of authority, the new president, Roque
Saenz Pena, promised electoral and social reform. His goal was to induct
excluded sectors into the mainstream of competitive party politics—even if
this risked electoral losses for the conservatives. The political patriciate
hoped that a free electoral system would generate popular acceptance, not
only of liberal democracy, but of the benefits of liberal capitalism. In short,
electoral reforms enacted in 1912, to be supplemented by social reforms,
would channel inorganic opposition to the regime into organic representa-
tion by parties that accepted the bourgeois order.
The existence of competitive party politics offered, as it were,
"space"—opportunities for privileged pockets of workers to bargain with
the state for concessions. Intra-elite competition through competitive elec-
toral battles forced rivals to broaden their constituencies. Electoral compe-
tition had one important wrinkle as far as working-class identity was con-
cerned: the trade union movement itself did not embrace the Second
Internationalism of the Socialist party (which vied with the UCR for su-
premacy in the largest electoral district of all, the capital, Buenos Aires).
Indeed, the dominant syndicalism eschewed parliamentarianism alto-
gether. Preferring direct action and free collective bargaining to encroach
on employers' control, unionists exploited the vulnerability of Radical ad-
ministrations to force the executive to pry legal concessions from employ-
ers. From the Radical point of view, this would deepen the wedge between
syndicalists and Socialists. As in Mexico, the union movement sought in
state support a bulwark to reinforce bargaining power with employers, and
not vice versa. But unlike Mexican unionists, Argentine counterparts re-
mained decidedly aloof from any attempt to incorporate unions within the
state.
This presents us with something of a paradox. Fissures within the elite
gave way to sweeping changes in the country's political life at the same
time that the labor movement was becoming Latin America's most
powerful—by the eve of the First World War. In 1916, the UCR came to
power and Hipolito Yrigoyen became president. Argentine unions, how-
ever, did not secure rights to collective representation and bargaining. The
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reasons for this cannot be reduced to state repression, though there was a
fair amount of that in moments of most acute confrontation, especially in
1919.26 Indeed, unions survived the bloodletting with more strength than
ever. Why did they not translate this strength into statutory rights to bar-
gain collectively?
Part of the problem lay in the structure of the union movement itself.
Dominated by syndicalists, labor leaders did not believe that they needed
anything more than temporary ad hoc support from the executive branch.
They cherished their autonomy and believed that legal ground had to be
won through union bargaining rather than in an enduring political alliance.
The strength and bulwark of the labor movement came from workers in the
core export nexus concentrated in Buenos Aires. The founding of the
Maritime Workers' Federation (FOM) in 1910, led by Francisco J. Garcia,
and with Garcfa's help the Railwaymen's Workers' Federation (FOF) in
1912, provided syndicalism with its bastions. Rank-and-file maritime work-
ers in Buenos Aires spearheaded a series of successful strikes against in-
shore and foreign shippers and provided a phalanx for the rest of the labor
movement—a force absent in Mexico.
The first decisive challenge erupted with President Yrigoyen's entry to
office in October 1916. Only weeks after the inauguration a delegation of
maritime workers presented a list of demands to employers. Rebuffed, the
workers shut down the port. The government worried that the confronta-
tion would fuel Socialist fortunes at the polls. At the urging of the Labor
Department head, Julio Lezama, an FOM delegation met with the presi-
dent. After weeks of intensive Labor Department brokerage the adminis-
tration eventually favored the workers. The victory of the port workers sent
a riptide through the rest of the union movement. Syndicalists fanned out
across the Republic, drafting members into new unions. Indeed, by 1919,
despite paramilitary bloodshed in January and February, the government
acceded to closed shops in the port of Buenos Aires, and the FOM man-
aged all hiring and firing in the industry.27
Maritime success was the product of several factors: strategic grip over
the country's export nexus; the relative homogeneity of the work force; the
proximity of workplaces to neighborhoods, which intensified solidarity; and
the shrewd leadership of Francisco Garcia. This did not apply to other
sectors. The meatpackers took their cue from the port workers but enjoyed
few of their advantages. Evidence from the Swift and Armor packers points
to a number of problems: more direct employer control over the labor
process, which fragmented workers into small clusters within giant plants;
ethnic divisions on the shop floor; extremely high rates of labor turnover;
and careful balancing acts between packinghouses along the rivers (which
allowed managers to resist a strike in one house by shifting the slaughter to
another). Packinghouses also segmented the labor process into well-
defined gender categories, foiling efforts at collective bargaining because
employers made concessions to skilled male operatives at the expense of
allegedly less-skilled child and female laborers.28 Yet, as in Mexico's textile
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industry, there was no lack of effort on the part of the rank and file.
Repeated strikes in 1917, often degenerating into street fighting between
police and private security guards and picketers, did not lead to permanent
union footholds. The agitation, however, prompted the American consul
general to warn Washington that "it would appear . . . that a distinct crisis
in the relations between labor and capital in the Argentine Republic has
presented itself in a most concrete form."29
112 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
Several points deserve emphasis. First, throughout the negotiations,

rank-and-file seamen stoutly defended their autonomy from the state, and
at no point were alliances like those struck in Mexico—direct and open
support for a political faction in the parliamentary arena—seriously con-
sidered. Second, while the strike proved victorious for the union, the Labor
Department never had the statutory power to give legal personality to
unions. As the conjuncture unfolded some sectors won de facto but not de
jure legal personality, generating a sense of confidence on the part of
syndicalists. But these victories did not easily spread in the form of consoli-
dated judicial gains to other sectors. Moreover, the ultimate objective of
creating a framework binding employers to a collective bargaining system
remained elusive. Leaders of Argentina's labor movement relied on a lop-
sided strategy of autonomous bargaining with employers and aversion to
any alliance with an arm of the state or a political party. Without the
codified means to determine legal personality, successful unions claimed
victories only so long as labor markets and the insecurities of the UCR
government tipped bargaining power with employers in their favor, secur-
ing only partial and contingent incorporation into the mainstream of bour-
geois rule.
Eschewing statist incorporation, trade unionists might have relied on
other sources of popular mobilization. They did not. From the time of the
1907 Buenos Aires tenants' strike organized by neighborhood leagues,
unions took little interest in barrio mobilization. Moreover, even after
1910, the syndicalists turned their backs on the haute politique of party
competition. In their view, political bargaining outside the union was futile
because all achievements for workers had to be won at the workplace. In
the words of La Organization Obrera, the syndicalist organ, unions win
workers' control through direct struggle and "do not take a political or
social form unless they have established the (economic) bases which them-
selves serve to replace them."30 Exclusive reliance on direct action—
effective mainly for workers involved in strong unions—weakened other
forms of action. Indeed, the bloodletting in January 1919, while terrorizing
immigrant neighborhoods, did not spark self-defense measures which Bra-
zilian workers created in the much milder repression of the 1917 jornadas
de julho (discussed below). Indeed, union leaders sought to bridle uncon-
trolled demonstrations. Fearing that the Yrigoyen government would re-
press the workers' movement as a whole, the syndicalists dissolved incipi-
ent neighborhood and resistance organizations, called off general strikes,
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and urged laborers to return to work. Having won so much ground, but not
yet feeling secure in their recent institutional base, unions saw alternative
social movements as potential threats.31
Nor were unions too keen about the strength of the Socialist party.
Syndicalists denounced any alliance with the Socialist party as "dangerous,
prejudicial and wrongheaded" since it accepted essentially bourgeois no-
tions of voluntaristic gains offered by those in control of the state appara-
tus.32 By 1921 the rift between the predominantly syndicalist labor move-
ment and the parliamentary Socialists had become a chasm. In that year,
the Socialist leader Juan B. Justo lambasted union leaders for their "pseu-
dorevolutionary verbalism" and "fanatic and exclusive dogmatism."33 In
sum, the phalanx of Argentine unions, based particularly in the export hub
of Buenos Aires, had narrowed the base of support to those privileged
pockets and had restricted mediation of class dispute to one channel: indus-
trial strike actions aimed at employers. In particular, notions of institu-
tionalized state backing faded—whether through affiliation with a parlia-
mentary force or the direct mediation of a bureaucracy. In this sense,
Garcia's syndicalism differed sharply from that of Morones.
The mechanisms of defeat illustrate the pitfalls of Argentina's pattern
of working-class incorporation, which rested on momentary concessions
without legally binding mechanisms of enforcement. By 1921, syndicalists
faced growing competition from a new brand of Bolshevist radicalism and
the Third International, the world economy slumped, and migratory flows
to Argentina recovered from the war. The bargaining position of leaders,
even of the hitherto robust workers in the port and railyards of Buenos
Aires, had begun to wane.
It did not take long for even the stronger unions to feel the changing
climate. In an effort to defuse internal rancor between syndicalists and
internationalists, maritime union leaders provoked employers to lock out
operators in May 1921. The slim solidarity left among workers quickly
dissolved. Dissenters refused to honor picket lines. To worsen matters,
Socialists adamantly opposed this confrontation, thereby denying public
unity of the workers' movement, and more importantly freeing the UCR
government from having to side with workers for electoral reasons. Belat-
edly, Garcia and union leaders tried to smooth out relations with shipping
companies. Their efforts were futile. The big shipping companies drafted an
army of strikebreakers from as far away as Montevideo and took advan-
tage of the post-harvest glut of workers in the city to replace many of the
militants from the docks. Picket lines broke up and desperate workers
returned to their stations. The shippers effectively broke the port unions,
and authorities weathered the failed general strike. Within a year, the
maritime unions and the syndicalist movement were shadows of their for-
mer selves, while employers restored open shops and tore up earlier con-
tracts. Bereft of legal personality, unions could not file cases before the
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courts.
From its stunning victories in the period from 1916 to 1919 Argentina's
revolutionary syndicalist unions fell into premature triumphalism, spurning
connections to other working-class social and political movements. For the
moment, the trade union movement gave up the initiative which had won it
considerable influence during the first Yrigoyen administration. This would
only return at the end of the Second World War. In the meantime, workers
entered the public domain as voters, but citizenship did not extend to such
114 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
legal rights as collective representation and bargaining. Liberal democracy

had been won, but not the corollary of workplace representation.34
Mobilizing for Exclusion: Brazil

Brazil faced many of the same pressures as Argentina: Unions demanded
bread-and-butter concessions and began to call for legal recognition of
their representatives, while other social movements also insisted on greater
recognition of their needs. But political circumstances cramped the options
for collective mobilization. Brazil's political regime was almost as despotic
as Mexico's prerevolutionary porfiriato, but it did not endure nearly the
same degree of intra-elite divisions. The result was an especially inauspi-
cious context for redefining the scope of citizenship rights, whether on the
shop floor or at the ballot box.
It could be argued that Brazil simply lacked potent revolutionary or
reformist forces akin to those in Mexico or Argentina, and thus the elite
faced less of a threat. But the bloodshed at Canudos in the 1890s and the
destruction of urban resistance in 1904 suggest otherwise. Moreover, elite
factions repeatedly vented their umbrage, especially in periodic military
unrest.35 Yet, none of this translated into vibrant political opposition or
sustained urban social mobilization. Why?
The nature of the polity stymied competition within the ruling bloc. One
distinctive feature of the Brazilian state was its federalism. Both Argentina
and (with time) Mexico vested much power in the hands of the national
executive and induced political pluralism. In Brazil the constitution of 1891
redistributed power to state legislatures and governors. Decentralization
helped neutralize potential intra-elite conflicts. This made the Brazilian
regional state structure much more responsive to employers' concerns as
compared to either Argentina or Mexico.36 Moreover, the constitutional
makeup truncated universal suffrage. Liberal republicanism in both Mexico
and Argentina made—albeit often vacuous—nominal claims to representa-
tive legitimacy. Brazilian governors' brand of liberalism paid less lip service
to legitimacy and more to order, progress, and "administration." Brazilian
governors rallied around single-party rule at the state level.37
The oligarchic republic relied on a slim base of support. Despite re-
peated unrest from below, occasional military outbursts, and complaints
from weak regions, the exclusive regime survived, passing on the presiden-
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
cy to Wencelsau Braz in 1914 with ninety-two percent of the vote. In 1918

the presidency returned to former head of state Francisco de Paula
Rodrigues Alves with ninety-nine percent of votes cast.38 When Rodrigues
Alves died before taking office, the power brokers selected Epitacio Lin-
dolfo da Silva Pessoa, who had led Brazil's delegation to Versailles. This
move spurred an organized civilian challenge. Led by Rui Barbosa, a "civil-
ist" campaign denounced the old ways and appealed to the workers. Bar-
bosa called for a coalition of old abolitionist forces with urban labor, but he
firmly rejected class conflict in favor of state and industrial patronage to
ensure civil peace.39 While an uncommon campaign, civilists dissolved soon
after the setback at the polls (having won only 116,000 votes). Considering
the unrest of the time, Silva Pessoa's potentially lame-duck administration
fell back upon the apparently inexhaustible wells of regional patronage.
This excursus into Brazilian political history exemplifies the diffi-
culties that working-class organizations—whether parties, which did not
survive their first years of existence, or unions, which fared little better—
faced when trying to eke out some official support.40 At the height of labor
unrest, state leaders wielding unrivaled control over their political ma-
chines did not open political space to forge potential alliances with ex-
cluded working-class sectors.
If the political terrain limited the opportunity structure for contesta-
tion, no Brazilian phalanx of unions surged to overcome working-class
fragmentation. In Argentina and Mexico some strategic sectors of the
working class emerged to organize and collectively to press demands be-
fore the state and employers. Brazilian efforts to mobilize were troubled
from the start and did not enjoy potential patronage from class fragments
above them.41 The result was neither incorporation into the realm of the
state (as in Mexico) nor ephemeral autonomous economic gains (as in
Argentina at the peak of syndicalist strength) nor even the extension of
suffrage rights (as in both Argentina and Mexico). The story is indeed
bleak, but it was not necessarily foreordained.
As in Mexico and Argentina, Brazilian workers intensified their work-
place militancy after the turn of the century. By the First World War,
however, unions still had not achieved durable toeholds. In general, strikes
crippled only parts of plants and were of very short duration. Most, more-
over, occurred in the textile industry, seldom a propitious haven for inde-
pendent and enduring unions. The same trend continued through the war
and into the 1920s—although an increasing number of textile strikes af-
flicted the sector as a whole, reflecting workers' efforts even if these did not
translate into gains. Indeed, like Argentina and Mexico, Brazil's urban
proletariat had registered a high-water mark of militancy and agitation by
1919.42
If part of the problem can be traced to the doorsteps of Republican
political rulers, Brazilian workers also had to contend with a hostile labor
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
market. The combination of racial segregation, color-coded employment

hierarchies, and a deluge of immigrants after 1918 nurtured an elastic labor
market.43 But while skilled (male) workers such as weavers had led earlier
confrontations and managed to defend their guild-like control over the
workplace, other workers within plants remained unorganized. Divisions
between male and female operators fragmented shop-floor efforts even
more. Women accounted for fifty-five percent of Paulista textile workers.
116 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
Their low wages and high rates of turnover made them difficult partners in
resistance.44 Efforts to establish unions among the textile workers, the
largest sector of industrial wage laborers, floundered.
It is important to note that union weakness did not imply nonorgani-
zation. Without diminishing rank-and-file efforts, workplace weakness
shifted the terrain of struggle to other fields. One was neighborhood orga-
nization. Brazilian industrialization, and textile production in particular,
clustered new large factories as dominant features of urban landscapes.
Collective activity remained closely linked to neighborhoods, in part be-
cause single plants so dominated the daily lives of residents.45 This chan-
neled the struggle for new rights and incipient representation onto other
levels, away from the shop floor.
Consider the pattern of popular mobilization in Rio de Janeiro. The
workers of Rio de Janeiro had for years opted for mobilization outside the
workplace, in part responding to the disruptions imposed by urban beau-
tification campaigns. The Federagao Operdria de Rio de Janeiro waged
community campaigns against rising prices and increasing immiseration.
By the eve of the war the city was simmering with an urban discontent that
exploded in 1916 in protests over food prices and transportation fares.
Street demonstrations, strikes, attacks on the tram system, and destruction
of public monuments culminated in a general strike in July 1917 (although
in a strict sense this was not a strike involving withdrawal of labor power
but a general public manifestation of opposition to local political authori-
ties' malign neglect). By the end of the month employers were negotiating
deals with skeletal unions (though the use of this term to depict ephemeral
bargaining units may be questioned) in an effort to restore order. This is
important because shop-floor concessions followed protests originating in
the community.46
Sao Paulo also displayed an emphasis on community mobilization. As
the city became the hub of the country's manufacturing sector, factories
cropped up in outlying urban districts, especially during the war years.
From 1915 to 1917 alone, the number of textile plants jumped from forty-
one to forty-seven, and the number of workers employed from 17,978 to
23,000. A mosaic of plebeian suburbs, vilas operdrias, spread out among the
outlying belts of the city and were quite unlike the earlier downtown lower-
class neighborhoods dominated by crowded tenement housing (the legend-
ary cortigos). Tenant leagues, dating back to 1907, resurfaced in 1912 and
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
again in 1920, championing bread-and-butter concerns and voicing com-

plaints about paltry urban transportation services; they constituted an im-
portant framework for working-class mobilization. As such, they coincided
with, and often eclipsed, the shop-floor militancy more commonly associ-
ated with rapid industrialization.47
The possibilities and challenges of neighborhood working-class orga-
nization crystallized in 1917, reinforcing often unsuccessful rank-and-file
agitation. Rising inflation, housing shortages, and the pressing problems of
urban sprawl without proper infrastructure sparked a wave of organizing.

Following on the heels of rent strikes, bairro-dv/ellers formed a network of
Popular Agitation Leagues against high prices. Bras and Mooca in particu-
lar were sites of mobilization—especially among women—against land-
lords and municipal authorities.48 These public manifestations soon moved
into factories. In May, female textile workers of Mooca created factory
committees. Thereafter, committees began proliferating around the city,
sponsored by the Textile Factories Workers' Union, and drawing especially
upon community leagues to bridge many of the gender and ethnic cleav-
ages that divided the working class.49 As prices rose and bread shortages
taxed working-class budgets, workers began protesting, culminating in the
first general strike in Brazilian history. By the second week of July, fifteen
thousand Paulista workers were on strike and thirty-five plants were shut.
Possibly reflecting the prominence of women in popular organizations (this
remains a point of contention), worker demands transcended the standard
syndicalist fare of shop-floor concessions. Alliances were not restricted to
industrial location but embraced domestic and residential concerns. Arbi-
trated by a delegation of journalists, employers agreed to increase wages
and the municipal government agreed to take drastic action to curb infla-
tion and merchant hoarding.50
If the neighborhood and residence provided a terrain for organizing, it
did not foster enduring collective representation by either political parties
or trade unions. What the movement achieved in extended networks of
solidarity it lost in repression. Since most workers were still effectively
barred from electoral politics, demobilization was costless to politicians.
Concessions to workers gave way to a clamp-down on incipient organiza-
tions. Union and league halls were raided by police, their presses were
destroyed, and their leaders were locked up and frequently deported. Un-
der the helm of Municipal Prefect Washington Luis (later president of the
republic), authorities waged a campaign to destroy any working-class insti-
tutional base. Repression, however, was not the only malefactor. Bairro
organizations tended to attack diffuse problems such as rent levels or the
high cost of living, which, while causes of great hardship, were difficult to
pin on single individuals (such as an employer). Demands could more
easily be met by empty bromides OT ad hoc concessions. Either way, popu-
lar mobilization failed to translate into enduring institutional mechanisms
to mediate working-class representation before the state or employers.51
Nonetheless, the lack of incorporation and unruly labor relations
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
posed problems for individual employers. Without unions or other forms of

working-class representation, there were few mechanisms to channel dis-
putes. In Brazil, labor unrest was costless to the political order but could
cause untold problems for individual capitalists. Even O Jornal do Brasil
lamented the sorrowful state of the Republic's workers and called for "our
public men and . . . politicians of all stripes [to adopt] a policy of modera-
tion to assure the order which the country now lacks."52 Housing shortages
118 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
and poor services obstructed employer recruitment. As early as 1911 one

city councilor proposed to solve the dilemma of unrest and instability with
"worker quarters to allow the laboring classes to rent or buy cheap and
sanitary housing."53
The absence of investment in running water, sewage, electrification,
and schools meant that capitalists had to step in where the liberal state
would not. This early form of employer paternalism may even have inocu-
lated them against legal regulation—it certainly defused pressures for state
interference in contractual relations. The best-known example was that of
Jorge Street, president of the Centro Industrial do Brasil, owner of textile
mills in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (together employing over three
thousand workers), including the giant plant of Vila Maria Zelia. The
largest factories were built with Vilas Operarias, daycares, schools, hospital
clinics, and pharmacies—no wonder A Plebe described Vila Maria Zelia in
1920 as "Sr Jorge Street's industrial fiefdom."54 Street set a maximum work
day of ten hours. Writing in September 1917, shortly after the first wave of
unrest, Street urged that "we industrialists absolutely do not oppose work-
er protective legislation, but that we throw ourselves into an appeal to the
Brazilian Congress, so that these laws be enlightened and pacify, and not
destroy!"55 Street's proposals for industrial relations coupled with state
welfare programs made him a forerunner of later state regulation. In pater-
nalistic fashion, the factory and its attendant neighborhood could be a
healthy, moralizing force among the downtrodden masses.
Street was not alone. From 1918 to 1922, employers avidly entertained
visions of the "new factory." In Rio de Janeiro, the Cia. America Fabril put
up 259 houses for workers next to the plant; the Cia. de Fiacao e Tecelagem
Alianca built 152 residences, a health clinic, three schools, a daycare facility,
and a pharmacy for its employees. Francisco Matarazzo, a legendary boss
of a network of banks, sawmills, printing houses, and the giant Mariangela
textile factory in Bras, cultivated the image of a self-made businessman and
at least nominally presented himself as a great benefactor to workers. His
Vila Cerealina in Sao Paulo's Belem was a model of industrial paternalism.
In the neighborhood of Bangu, employers sponsored public works, a
church, and a Musical Progress Society. By 1919, Bangu workers reached
agreements with their employers in formal written contracts that included
medical and daycare benefits. During the unrest of 1917-1919 Bangu did
not record a single strike.56 Efforts to extend these measures to legislation,
however, went nowhere in Congress despite considerable campaigning.57
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
Institutional neglect of public leaders notwithstanding, private conces-

sions—modest and sub judice as they were—afforded some measure of
workplace stability.58
Faced with the hostility of the state, Brazilian workers found even the
most symbolic and petty employer concessions to welfare demands a con-
firmation that much more might be expected from the realm of civil society
than from the realm of the state. The Protective Association of Employee
Families of the Paulista Company, established by railway workers and later

(with the workers' endorsement) taken over by the company itself, helped
create housing and restaurant services for workers.59 Employers took over
and operated many workers' consumer cooperatives. This was not a case of
a defeated working class accepting crumbs. Even anarchists preferred com-
pany patronage, though they did not desist from insisting on state protec-
tion of work conditions and consumer prices. One of Jorge Street's employ-
ees wrote to A Plebe in 1920 to proclaim his gratitude: "As a worker for Dr
Street (may God protect him for many years) I can tell you of the benefits
he has done for us." Especially thankful for the new church and schools of
his neighborhood, this workers concluded: "such are the great expenses
that he commits so that we may see our children educated!"60 At the very
least, Brazilian workers accepted these meager services in exchange for
self-protective compliance with employer authority, thereby engaging in
strategic accommodations that helped "cover the tracks" of class conflict.61
Faced with a hostile state, employers unwilling to accept union repre-
sentation, and a dearth of potential allies, Brazilian workers secured little
in the way of public accommodation. Neither arbitration (as in Mexico) nor
electoral democracy (as in Argentina) served to induct working-class Bra-
zilians into the bourgeois order. Paradoxically, this left much of the day-to-
day effort to negotiate the terms of residential and work life to the local, if
less mediated, spheres of class relations. Recasting the constitutional
framework for the Brazilian political economy awaited a later juncture.
Conclusion
State crises and their evolution wove the backdrop to working-class collec-
tive action. The depth of intra-elite conflicts over political power offered
some space for workers to exploit. This was most extreme in Mexico and
least in Brazil. Working-class incorporation within the emerging political
economy became strongest in Mexico and weakest in Brazil. Argentina
made the transition to a representative order in a more stable fashion, and
doing so opened some niches for new tactical alliances. But propertied
interests there were never as severely split or challenged as in Mexico, and
thus did not succumb to full-scale social realignments. Nor were they as
united as in Brazil, with the result that that Argentine propertied sectors
had to admit some measure of representation.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
The form of political crisis mattered. In all three cases political crises
were decidedly constitutional (that is, challenging prevailing institutional
representation and mediation). Yet the channels of representation differed.
In Mexico, openings came by way of inclusion within the sinews of the
executive state. In Argentina, party competition enabled workers to offer
or deny popular support to electoral candidates. In Brazil, the continuity of
the old regime ensured that a complex network of regional bosses dispens-
ing patronage remained the dominant mechanism of mediating between
120 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
popular sectors and political authority. Changing state-labor relations

were not entirely open to redefinition: State crises during and after the
First World War created fields of action that pushed collective decisions in
some directions and sealed off others.
If the political crisis shaped the opportunity structure of collective
activity, so did the preferences and choices of workers themselves. Mexican
leaders chose to align with one faction of the state and pursue their quest
for legal recognition through executive bureaucratic authority. Argentine
syndicalists preferred a voluntarist and autonomous relationship to the
state, believing that economic gains and not legal ones would suffice to
ensure a bedrock of durable rights. Brazilian workers, faced with such a
hostile state, instead mobilized neighborhood associations to reinforce and
make up for labor-market bargaining. Workers met the worst aspects of the
rule of capital with negotiation and resistance—shaped, but not deter-
mined, by political change. Workers' decisions about strategy and tactics
were as important as the structural features of class formation.
This critical juncture saw the flourishing of several planes of potential
representation and popular admission to public life that challenge the con-
vention of viewing political parties as the primary vehicles for incorporat-
ing workers into the dominant order. Accordingly, pluralizing these pat-
terns of associational life suggests that there was much more at stake in
constitutional struggles than securing stable competitive electoral regimes.
Workers' claims to property rights which hitherto belonged exclusively to
employers formed a cornerstone of their collective actions. In the long
march of Latin American constitutionalism, the years 1916-1922 saw
workers advance calls for democratic representation at the workplace to
parallel developments at the political level. Democratizing the public
sphere involved several channels of incorporation, with the struggle over
bargaining rights no less important than that over suffrage rights. This is
important to appreciate because shop-floor rights (and nonpartisan means
of representation more generally) would become so central to the popular
idiom of citizenship later in the century. The years 1916 to 1921 revealed a
more expansive social critique of nineteenth-century conceptions of citi-
zenship.
Moreover, the patterns of settlement during the 1916-1921 period
marked the terrain for later constitutional ruptures. Nothing could better
exemplify the differences than the various permutations of populism
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
opened up by Cardenas in Mexico, Peron in Argentina, and Vargas in

Brazil. Cardenas wrestled with an urban working class already accustomed
to using official channels of representation and mediation. Cardenas could
confer legal status and induct new constituencies into his alliance without
breaking the essential fabric of the state. Peron contended with a mobilized
working class bereft of solid juridical rights, and thus could offer precisely
what workers had been denied in 1916-1922: legal rights to organize and
negotiate collectively. Doing so, however, shattered the existing constitu-
tionalist structure of the state. Vargas still faced a relatively demobilized

working class. After an initial dalliance with a Mexican style of incorpora-
tion under the Estado Novo, he switched to a more Peronist mode—but in
neither instance did he succeed in exploiting intra-elite divisions to accom-
modate labor. Quite the opposite: It was Vargas's very effort to mobilize
that galvanized his opposition and thwarted working-class incorporation.
Each society built on the legacy of the first conjuncture of labor's
quest for legal personality, and made the right to bargain over legally
binding contracts a core component of its regime. Union representation
and collective bargaining—the pillars of a potential industrial democ-
racy—became for the rest of the century central issues for Latin American
labor movements and cornerstones of their constitutional visions.
NOTES
Special thanks to Reid Andrews, Miguel Centeno, John French, Shel Garon, Donna Guy,
Steve Haber, John Lear, Stanley Stein, Barbara Weinstein, and Joel Wolfe for their comments
and suggestions. I also owe a great debt to my former students at the University of Essex.
1. Bo Rothstein, "Labor-Market Institutions and Working-Class Strength," in Structur-
ing Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen
Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 33-56; Alessandro Pizzorno, "Political
Exchange and Collective Identity in Industrial Conflict," in The Resurgence of Class Conflict
in Western Europe since 1968, ed. Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno (New York, 1978).
2. Sven Steinmo and Kathleen Thelen, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Poli-
tics," in Structuring Politics, ed. Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, 1-32.
3. Hobart Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Work-
ers in Dependent Societies (New York, 1977); Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America:
Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford, CA, 1986);
Charles Bergquist, "Labor History and its Challenges: Confessions of a Latin Americanist,"
American Historical Review 98 (1993):757-64. For useful critiques, see Ian Roxborough, "The
Analysis of Labour Movements in Latin America: Typologies and Theories," Bulletin of Latin
American Research 1 (1981):81-95; Emilia Viotta da Costa, "Experience versus Structure:
New Tendencies in the History of Labor and the Working Class in Latin America—What Do
We Gain? What Do We Lose?" International Labor and Working-Class History 36 (1989):3-
24, and the response in the same volume by Barbara Weinstein, "The New Latin American
Labor History: What We Gain," 25-30.
4. Nicos Mouzelis, Politics in the Semi-Periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Indus-
trialization in the Balkans and Latin America (London, 1986); Ira Katznelson, "Working-Class
Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons," in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-
Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R.
Zolberg (Princeton, 1986), 3-41; Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness
and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working-Class
History l(t (1984):l-24.
5. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures,
the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, 1991); Dietrich
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and
Democracy (Oxford, 1992); Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy:
Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe (New York, 1991).
6. Adam Przeworski, "Democracy as a Contingent Outcome of Conflicts," in Constitu-
tionalism and Democracy, ed. Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (New York, 1988), 64.
7. Francisco Zapata, Autonomia y subordinacion en el sindicalismo latinoamericano
(Mexico, 1993), 11-29. Zapata argues that this juncture gave expression to "popular syndical-
ism" in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and not "class syndicalism." The result was a potential
for corporatist arrangements at some future juncture. On the role of opportunity structures
see Charles Tilly, "Contention and the Urban Poor in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century
122 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
Latin America," in Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America,
1765-1910, ed. Silvia Arrom and Servando Ortoll (Wilmington, DE, 1996), 225-42. For a
general discussion of state-economy relations, see Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi,
"Political Regimes and Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Perspectives 7 (1993):51-69;
Michael Mann, "Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century
Europe," New Left Review 212 (1995):25-26.
8. For general works on legal personality in Latin America, see Kenneth Karst, Latin
American Legal Institutions: Problems for Comparative Study (Los Angeles, 1966); Kenneth
Karst and Keith S. Rosenn, Law and Development in Latin America: A Case Book (Berkeley,
1975). Surprisingly little has been written on labor law. See Robert J. Alexander, Labor
Relations in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (New York, 1962). For a survey of the conjuncture,
see Bill Albert, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil,
Argentina, Peru and Chile (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
9. Alan Knight, "The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a 'Great
Rebellion?'" Bulletin of Latin American Research 4 (1985):l-37; Alan Knight, "Revisionism
and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France," Past and Present 134 (1992):159-
99.
10. Linda B. Hall, Alvaro Obregon: Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911-1920 (College
Station, TX, 1981), esp. chap. 6; Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2: Counter-
Revolution and Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 411-24; John Robert Lear, "Workers,
Vecinos, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City, 1909-1917" (Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 1993), esp. chap. 8; Douglas Richmond, Venustiano Carranza's National-
ist Struggle, 1893-1920 (Lincoln, NE, 1983), chap. 5; John Womack, Jr., "The Mexican Econ-
omy During the Revolution, 1910-1920: Historiography and Analysis," Marxist Perspectives 1
(1978):80-123; Hohler to Foreign Office, May 26, 1916, Foreign Office 371 (hereafter FO
371)/2701/123021, Public Record Office, London.
11. Hall, Alvaro Obregon, chap. 9; Douglas W. Richmond, "Carranza: The Authoritarian
Populist as Nationalist President," in Essays on the Mexican Revolution: Revisionist Views of
the Leaders, ed. George Wolfskill and Douglas Richmond (Austin, TX, 1978), 48-80; Rich-
mond, Venustiano Carranza, chap. 6; Barry Carr, El movimiento obrero y la politico en Mexico,
1910-1929 (Mexico, 1981), 84-86.
12. Rocio Guadarrama, Los sindicatos y la politico en Mexico: la CROM (1918-1928)
(Mexico, 1981). For a general appraisal of labor politics during the Revolution, see Alan
Knight, "The Working Class and the Mexican Revolution, c.1900-1920," Journal of Latin
American Studies 16 (1984):78-79.
13. Marjorie Ruth Clark, Organized Labor in Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC, 1934), 71-77;
Hall, Alvaro Obregon, 220-242; David C. Bailey, "Obregon: Mexico's Accommodating Presi-
dent," in Essays on the Mexican Revolution, ed. Wolfskill and Richmond, 82-99; John M.
Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley,
1987), 328-37.
14. Lief S. Adleson, "Identidad comunitaria y transformation social: estibadores y petro-
leros en Tampico (1900-1925)," Historias 1 (1984):29-44; Hohler to Foreign Office, April 4,
1916, FO 371/2700/98485.
15. Lief S. Adleson, "Coyuntura y conciencia: Factores convergentes en la fundacion de
los sindicatos petroleros de Tampico durante la decada de 1920," in El trabajo y los traba-
jadores en la historia de Mexico, ed. Elsa Cecilia Frost et al., 632-61; Boletin de Trabajo 1
(1922):38-39; Jonathan Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley, 1993), 351-61.
16. Bernardo Garcia Diaz, Textiles del Valle de Orizaba (1880-1925) (Xalapa, 1990), 65-
93.
17. Pabio Gonzalez Casanova, La close obrera en la historia de Mexico en el primer
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
gobierno constitucional (1917-1920) (Mexico, 1980), 32-52.

18. Carr, El movimiento obrero y la politico en Mexico, 88-109; Clark, Organized Labor
in Mexico, 83.
19. Clark, Organized Labor in Mexico, 115-20; Gonzalez Casanova, La clase obrera en la
historia de Mexico, 100-109; Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2, 488-93; for examples
from Orizaba, see Garcia Diaz, Textiles del Valle de Orizaba, 205-9.
20. Joseph M. Cormack and Frederick F. Barker, "Mexican Labor Law," Southern Cali-
fornia Law Review 7 (1934):251-94; Jeffrey Bortz, "The Genesis of the Mexican Labor
Relations System: Federal Labor Policy and the Textile Industry, 1925-1940," The Americas
52 (1993):43-69.
21. Gonzalez Casanova, La close obrera en la historia de Mexico, 11; Carr, El movimiento
obrero y la politico en Mexico, 122-35.
22. Boletin de Trabajo 1 (1922):79-80. For an example of state management of industrial
relations, see the case involving the Veracruz Telephone, Light, and Power Company and the
construction union. Translation of Report from the Governor of Veracruz on intervention in
affairs of the Veracruz Telephone Constructing Syndicate, 4 July, 1916, FO 371/2703/153430.
23. Cited in Gonzalez Casanova, La clase obrera en la historia de Mexico, 118. For
alternative views, see Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries:
Mexico, 1911-1923 (Baltimore, 1976), 79-99.
24. It is important to appreciate the degree of oppression meted out by officially aligned
union bosses under Morones's leadership—one of the unintended consequences of rank-and-
file militancy during the revolution. See Gregory S. Crider, "Material Struggles: Workers'
Strategies during the 'Institutionalization of the Revolution' in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico, 1930-
1942" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1996). I am grateful to Barbara Weinstein for
bringing this work to my attention.
25. David Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1890-1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1975); Waldo Ansaldi, "Reflexiones historicas sobre la debilidad de la de-
mocracia argentina, 1880-1930," 12 Anuario, Segunda Epoca (1986-1987):393-416; Eduardo
Zimmermann, "Liberals, Reform, and the Social Question: Argentina, 1890-1916" (D.Phil.
diss., Oxford University, 1990), esp. chap. 3. On labor calls for reform, see Ronaldo Munck,
"Cycles of Class Struggle and the Making of the Working Class in Argentina, 1890-1920,"
Journal of Latin American Studies 19 (1987):208; Julio Godio, El movimiento obrero argentino
(1910-1930) (Buenos Aires, 1988), 22-77.
26. For general discussions, see Jeremy Adelman, "The Political Economy of Labour in
Argentina, 1870-1930," in Essays in Argentine Labour History, 1870-1930, ed. Jeremy Adel-
man (London, 1992); and Jeremy Adelman, "State and Labour in Argentina: The Portworkers
of Buenos Aires, 1910-1921," Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (1993):73-102.
27. Adelman, "State and Labour in Argentina," 84-93; Boletin del Departamento Natio-
nal del Trabajo 40 (1919).
28. Mirta Lobato, "Work and Conflict in the Meat Packing Industry, 1900-1930," in
Essays in Argentine Labour History, ed. Jeremy Adelman (London, 1992), 112-41; Mirta
Lobato, "Una vision del mundo del trabajo: el caso de los obreros de la industria frigorifica.
Berisso. 1900-1930," in Mundo urbano y cultural popular: estudios de historia social argentina,
ed. Diego Armus (Buenos Aires, 1990), 313-38.
29. Henry Robertson to State Department, September 24,1917, 5045/25, Record Group
835, US National Archives, Washington, DC; Departamento Nacional del Trabajo, Anuario
Estadistico (1917).
30. La Organization Obrera, November 30, 1917.
31. This was also a function of urban dispersal and suburbanization of working-class
communities. See Leandro Gutierrez and Juan Suriano, "Workers' Housing and Living Condi-
tions in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930," and Luis Alberto Romero and Leandro Gutierrez, "Bar-
rio Societies, Libraries and Culture in the Popular Sectors of Buenos Aires in the Inter-War
Period," both in Essays in Argentine Labour History, 1870-1930, ed. Jeremy Adelman (Lon-
don, 1992), 35-51 and 217-34; Diego Armus and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, "Conventillos,
ranchos y casa propia en el mundo urbano del novecientos," in Mundo urbano y cultural
popular: estudios de historia social argentina, ed. Diego Armus (Buenos Aires, 1990), 153-94.
32. La Organization Obrera, October 2, 1920.
33. Juan B. Justo, "El Partido Socialista y el movimiento gremial," reprinted in Revista
Socialista 9 (1939):l-5.
34. Joel Horowitz, "The Failed General Strike of 1921: A Turning Point in Argentine
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
Labor History," Hispanic American Historical Review 75 (1995):57-79; Jeremy Adelman,

"Reflections on Argentine Labour and the Rise of Peron," Bulletin of Latin American Re-
search 11 (1992):243-59.
35. Todd A. Diacon, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil's Contestado Rebellion,
1912-1916 (Durham, NC, 1991); Teresa Meade, "Civilizing Rio": Reform and Resistance in a
Brazilian City, 1890-1930 (University Park, PA, 1997).
36. Steven Topik, The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889-1930 (Austin, TX,
1987), 8-12; Joseph L. Love, Sao Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford, CA,
1980).
37. The literature on this issue is now voluminous. See Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Os
124 ILWCH, 54, Fall 1998
Bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a Republica que nao foi (Sao Paulo, 1987); Angela Maria de
Castro Gomes, Burguesia e Trabalho: Politico e Legislacdo Social no Brasil, 1917-1937 (Rio
de Janeiro, 1979), 57-89; Marisa Saenz Leme, A Ideologia dos Industrials Brasileiros, 1919-
1945 (Petr6polis, 1978); Jose Murilo de Carvalho, "Brazil, 1870-1914—The Force of Tradi-
tion," Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (Quincentenary Supplement, 1992):145-62; Love,
Sao Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, esp. chap. 4; Paul Cammack, "Brazil: The Long March
to the New Republic," New Left Review 190 (1991):21-30.
38. Joseph L. Love, "Political Participation in Brazil, 1881-1969," Luso-Brazilian Review
7 (1970):9.
39. Rui Barbosa, "A Questao social e politica no Brasil," Escritos e discursos seletos (Rio
de Janeiro, 1960), 430-38.
40. Vamireh Chacon, Historia das Ideias Socialistas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1981);
Edgar Carone, A Republica Velha (Institucoes e Classes Sociais) (Sao Paulo, 1970), 200-210;
Sheldon L. Maram, "Labor and the Left in Brazil, 1890-1921: A Movement Aborted,"
Hispanic-American Historical Review 57 (1977):254-72; Sheldon L. Maram, Anarquistas, im-
igrantes e o movimento operario Brasileiro (Sao Paulo, 1979).
41. This notion that options were lost in struggle is a shift from preexisting corporatist
traditions as fetters on working-class independence. See Kenneth Paul Erikson, The Brazilian
Corporative State and Working-Class Politics (Berkeley, 1977); Michael L. Conniff, Urban
Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925-1945 (Pittsburgh, 1981).
42. Azis Simao, Sindicato e Estado: Suas Relacoes na Formacoa do Proletariado de Sao
Paulo (Sao Paulo, 1981), 134-49; Carone, A Republica Velha, 215-26; Barbara Weinstein,
"Impressoes da elite sobre os movimentos da classe operaria," in O bravo matutino: Imprensa
e ideologia: O jornal "O Estado de S. Paulo", ed. Maria H. Capelato et al. (Sao Paulo, 1980),
135-76; Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's
Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Durham, NC, 1993), 11-16; John D. French, The Bra-
zilian Workers' ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern Sao Paulo (Chapel Hill, NC,
1992), 22-27; Maram, "Labor and the Left in Brazil," 254-60.
43. Cited in George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil: 1888-1988
(Madison, WI, 1991), 65; Sheldon L. Maram, "The Immigrant and the Brazilian Labor Move-
ment, 1890-1920," in Essays concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese
India, ed. Dauril Alden and Warren Dean (Gainesville, FL, 1977), 181-89.
44. June E. Hahner, "Women and Work in Brazil, 1850-1920: A Preliminary Investiga-
tion," in Essays Concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil, ed. Dauril Alden and War-
ren Dean (Gainesville, FL, 1977), 87-117; Joel Wolfe, "Anarchist Ideology, Worker Practice:
The 1917 General Strike and the Formation of Sao Paulo's Working Class," Hispanic Ameri-
can Historical Review 71 (1991):809-46 and the ensuing controversy with John French.
45. Raquel Rolnik, "Sao Paulo, inicio de industrializacao: o espaco e a politica," in As
lutas sociais e a cidade, Sao Paulo: Passado e presente, ed. Lucio Kowarick (Sao Paulo, 1988),
87-91; Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, Bairros rurais paulistas: Dinamica das relacoes bairro
rural-cidade (Sao Paulo, 1973); French, Brazilian Workers' ABC; Eileen Keremitsis, "The
Early Industrial Worker in Rio de Janeiro, 1870-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1982); Meade, "Civilizing Rio", 127-36.
46. Teresa Meade, "'Living Worse and Costing More': Resistance and Riot in Rio de
Janeiro, 1890-1917," Journal of Latin American Studies 21 (1989):241-66; Meade, "Civilizing
Rio", 153-70; Murilo de Carvalho, Os Bestializados, chap. 3; Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The
Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870-1920 (Albuquerque, NM, 1986); Carone, A Republica Velha, 226;
Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 16-25.
47. Eva Blay Alterman, Eu nao tenho onde morar. Vilas operdrias na cidade de Sao Paulo
(Sao Paulo, 1985), 118-33; Rolnik, "Sao Paulo, inicio de industrializacao," 89-91.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232
48. Margareth Rago, Do Cabare do lar. Autopia da cidade disciplinar. Brazil, 1890-1930
(Rio de Janeiro, 1985), 47-55; Rolnik, "Sao Paulo, inicio de industrializacao," 91.
49. Wolfe, "Anarchist Ideology, Worker Practice," 822.
50. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro and Michael Hall, A Classe Operaria no Brasil: Documentos
(1889 a 1930), vol. 1 (Sao Paulo, 1979), 226-43; Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 280; Boris
Fausto, Trabalho urbano e conflito social (1890-1920) (Sao Paulo, 1976), 170-75; Christina da
Suva Roquette Lopreato, "As jornadas de julho," paper presented at the Jornadas sobre los
trabajadores en la historia del siglo XX, Fundaci6n Simon Rodriguez, Buenos Aires (July 17-
19, 1991); Wolfe, "Anarchist Ideology, Worker Practice," esp. 830-35; Rolnik, "Sao Paulo,
inicio de industrializacao: o espaco e a politica," 75-93.
51. Of course, this did not mean that workers gave up. Tenants' leagues reappeared in
1920 throughout the suburbs and hired lawyers to demand enforcement of earlier concessions.
Again, however, there is no evidence of institutional endurance. See Alterman Blay, Eu nao
tenho onde morar, 148.
52. O Jornal do Brasil, May 1, 1917; cited in Moniz Bandeira, Clovis Melo, and A.T.
Andrade, O Ano Vermelho: A Revolucdo Russa e Seus Reflexos no Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1980),
52.
53. Alterman Blay, Eu nao tenho onde morar, 100.
54. Ibid., 149.
55. Ideias sociais de Jorge Street, ed. Evaristo de Moraes Filho (Rio de Janeiro, 1980),
385-86; Palmira Petratti Teixeira, A Fdbrica do sonho: Trajetoria do industrial Jorge Street
(Sao Paulo, 1990). For a general treatment of social legislation, see Carone, A Republica
Velha, 239-43.
56. Rago, Do Cabare do lar, 35-47; Alterman Blay, Eu nao tenho onde morar, 143-45;
Keremitsis, "The Early Industrial Worker in Rio de Janeiro," chap. 3.
57. Cited in Margareth Rago, "Anarquismo e disciplina industrial no Brasil," paper
presented at the Jornadas sobre los trabajadores en la historia del siglo XX, Fundaci6n Sim6n
Rodriguez, Buenos Aires (July 17-19, 1991): 9. For a more general discussion, see Marissa
Saenz Leme, A ideologia dos industrials brasileiros, 1919-1945.
58. Sheldon L. Maram, "Urban Labor and Social Change in the 1920s," Luso-Brazilian
Review 16 (1979):215-23; John French, "The Origin of Corporatist State Intervention in
Brazilian Industrial Relations, 1930-1934: A Critique of the Literature," Luso-Brazilian Re-
view 28 (1991):13-26. For an important exploration of how these paternalist practices evolved
over the ensuing decades, see Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and
the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).
59. Rago, "Anarquismo e disciplina industrial no Brasil," 7.
60. Cited in Rago, Do Cabare do lar, 186.
61. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven, 1985), 281.
62. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 50—67;
Charles Tilly, "Theories and Realities," in Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in International
Perspective, ed. Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly (New York, 1989), 11.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900006232

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Political Ruptures and Organized Labor: Argentina,

Brazil, and Mexico, 1916-1922

consolidate gains through enforceable contracts. These levels, as the analy-

courses about the rights of laboring citizens became important components

social troubles pushed labor activists to embrace legal, representational

Statist Incorporation: Mexico

123's collective bargaining provisions in order to create arbitration boards.

The emerging representative structure within the executive branch of

Electors, not Collective Bargainers: Argentina

undiluted corruption or for the rigging of electoral lists. Led by Hipolito

Several points deserve emphasis. First, throughout the negotiations,

legal rights as collective representation and bargaining. Liberal democracy

Mobilizing for Exclusion: Brazil

cy to Wencelsau Braz in 1914 with ninety-two percent of the vote. In 1918

market. The combination of racial segregation, color-coded employment

again in 1920, championing bread-and-butter concerns and voicing com-

urban sprawl without proper infrastructure sparked a wave of organizing.

posed problems for individual employers. Without unions or other forms of

and poor services obstructed employer recruitment. As early as 1911 one

Institutional neglect of public leaders notwithstanding, private conces-

Families of the Paulista Company, established by railway workers and later

popular sectors and political authority. Changing state-labor relations

opened up by Cardenas in Mexico, Peron in Argentina, and Vargas in

tionalist structure of the state. Vargas still faced a relatively demobilized

gobierno constitucional (1917-1920) (Mexico, 1980), 32-52.

Labor History," Hispanic American Historical Review 75 (1995):57-79; Jeremy Adelman,

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