Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890 1950

By Michael Snodgrass

Book Overview

The first comprehensive history of labour relations and the working class in twentieth-century Monterrey, Deference and Defiance explores how both workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico's revolution. Snodgrass's narrative covers a sixty-year period that begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's pre-eminent industrial cities. He then explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were both historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. By comparing four local industries - steel, beer, glass and smelting - Snodgrass demonstrates how workers and managers collaborated in the development of paternalistic labour regimes that built upon working-class traditions of mutual aid as well as elite resistance to state labour policies. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey thus offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico that remains overshadowed by studies of the countryside.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521034795
• ISBN13: 9780521034791
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"