Workers, Neighbors & Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City

Beginning in the mid-Nineteenth Century, Mexico City became a primary destination for the multitudes of country folk who were in search of better economic opportunities. The depravity of life for many of the countryside?s population, along with those from nearby villages and towns proved to be a compelling force in the urbanization of growing metropolitan surrounding Mexico's Federal District. The economic opportunities were a direct result of the burgeoning industrialization of the region, which had been aided, in no small measure, by foreign investors whom had held the welfare of the Mexican laborers in pitiful regard. Though the indigenous industrialists, artisans and corrupt politicos were predominantly of the same ilk. As the population swelled, the physical dynamics of the city were transformed. Advances in transportation technology permitted the steady growth of suburbs, while simultaneously feeding into a distinct stratification of economic classes along geographical lines. As the numbers of workers, skilled and unskilled continued to escalate through the early part of the Twentieth Century, a series of national political revolutions changed forever their relationship in the political power balance in Mexico. John Lear's Workers, Neighbors and Citizens explores the relationship between the physical growth patterns of Mexico City during its forty year period of continued industrial growth, 1880's-1920's, and the formation of skilled and unskilled laborers as a nearly unified class of workers. Lear's argument is one of multi-causation. Some of the elements that force the reaction of the workers fed into the revolutionary zeal of the age. The preponderance of foreign capital and foreign industrialists which poured into Mexico during this period, certainly allowed this Latin American nation to move forward in the global economy, however, the cultural indignation that the workers suffered, both men and women, at the hands of the paternalistic elite was not unnoticed, nor easily forgiven. As the Revolution swept through the countryside, the workers repeatedly made attempts at labor reform through political and economic pressures, both of which were new elements within Mexican society, and both aided the working class in achieving some tangible reforms, such as a reduction of hours and minimal wage increases. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the physical geographical developments of Mexico City along both social and economic lines during the industrial expansion. Within this context the divergent paths of the elite and workers are very neatly laid out; the reader yearns with great anticipation of the inevitably of extreme conflict and unification by the close of the second chapter, a reoccurring phenomenon throughout the entire book. The following section, "Political Cultures and Mobilization" is of sufficient scholarly merit to stand alone as an individual work. The sense of class formation amongst the ran