Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico
Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico

Author: Robert F. Alegre

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1496209648

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Despite the Mexican government's projected image of prosperity and modernity in the years following World War II, workers who felt that Mexico's progress had come at their expense became increasingly discontented. From 1948 to 1958, unelected and often corrupt officials of STFRM, the railroad workers' union, collaborated with the ruling Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI) to freeze wages for the rank and file. In response, members of STFRM staged a series of labor strikes in 1958 and 1959 that inspired a nationwide working-class movement. The Mexican army crushed the last strike on March 26, 1959, and union members discovered that in the context of the Cold War, exercising their constitutional right to organize and strike appeared radical, even subversive. Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico examines a pivotal moment in post-World War II Mexican history. The railroad movement reflected the contested process of postwar modernization, which began with workers demanding higher wages at the end of World War II and culminated in the railway strikes of the 1950s, a bold challenge to PRI rule. In addition, Robert F. Alegre gives the wives of the railroad workers a narrative place in this history by incorporating issues of gender identity in his analysis.

Mexico's Cold War
Mexico's Cold War

Author: Renata Keller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1316352234

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This book is a history of the Cold War in Mexico, and Mexico in the Cold War. Renata Keller draws on declassified Mexican and US intelligence sources and Cuban diplomatic records to challenge earlier interpretations that depicted Mexico as a peaceful haven and a weak neighbor forced to submit to US pressure. Mexico did in fact suffer from the political and social turbulence that characterized the Cold War era in general, and by maintaining relations with Cuba it played a unique, and heretofore overlooked, role in the hemispheric Cold War. The Cuban Revolution was an especially destabilizing force in Mexico because Fidel Castro's dedication to many of the same nationalist and populist causes that the Mexican revolutionaries had originally pursued in the early twentieth century called attention to the fact that the government had abandoned those promises. A dynamic combination of domestic and international pressures thus initiated Mexico's Cold War and shaped its distinct evolution and outcomes.

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City
Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Author: Eileen Ford

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350040037

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City traces the transformations that occurred between 1934 and 1968 in Mexico through the lens of childhood. Countering the dominance of Western European and North American views of childhood, Eileen Ford puts the experiences of children in Latin America into their historical, political, and cultural contexts. Drawing on diverse primary sources ranging from oral histories to photojournalism, Ford reconstructs the emergent and varying meanings of childhood in Mexico City during a period of changing global attitudes towards childhood, and changing power relations in Mexico at multiple scales, from the family to the state. She analyses children's presence on the silver screen, in radio, and in print media to examine the way that children were constructed within public discourse, identifying the forces that would converge in the 1968 student movement. This book demonstrates children's importance within Mexican society as Mexico transitioned from a socialist-inspired revolutionary government to one that embraced industrial capitalism in the Cold War era. It is a fascinating study of an extremely important, burgeoning population group in Mexico that has previously been excluded from histories of Mexico's bid for modernity. Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City will be essential reading for students and scholars of Latin American history and the Cold War.

Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico
Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico

Author: Paul Gillingham

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0826360076

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Since the 2000 elections toppled the PRI, over 150 Mexican journalists have been murdered. Failed assassinations and threats have silenced thousands more. Such high levels of violence and corruption question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern societies, that democracy and press freedom are inextricably intertwined. In this collection historians, media experts, political scientists, cartoonists, and journalists reconsider censorship, state-press relations, news coverage, and readership to retell the history of Mexico's press.

Street Democracy
Street Democracy

Author: Sandra C. Mendiola Garcia

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-04-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 080327503X

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No visitor to Mexico can fail to recognize the omnipresence of street vendors, selling products ranging from fruits and vegetables to prepared food and clothes. The vendors compose a large part of the informal economy, which altogether represents at least 30 percent of Mexico’s economically active population. Neither taxed nor monitored by the government, the informal sector is the fastest growing economic sector in the world. In Street Democracy Sandra C. Mendiola García explores the political lives and economic significance of this otherwise overlooked population, focusing on the radical street vendors during the 1970s and 1980s in Puebla, Mexico’s fourth-largest city. She shows how the Popular Union of Street Vendors challenged the ruling party’s ability to control unions and local authorities’ power to regulate the use of public space. Since vendors could not strike or stop production like workers in the formal economy, they devised innovative and alternative strategies to protect their right to make a living in public spaces. By examining the political activism and historical relationship of street vendors to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mendiola García offers insights into grassroots organizing, the Mexican Dirty War, and the politics of urban renewal, issues that remain at the core of street vendors’ experience even today.

From Idols to Antiquity
From Idols to Antiquity

Author: Miruna Achim

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0803296894

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From Idols to Antiquity explores the origins and tumultuous development of the National Museum of Mexico and the complicated histories of Mexican antiquities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Following independence from Spain, the National Museum of Mexico was founded in 1825 by presidential decree. Nationhood meant cultural as well as political independence, and the museum was expected to become a repository of national objects whose stories would provide the nation with an identity and teach its people to become citizens. Miruna Achim reconstructs the early years of the museum as an emerging object shaped by the logic and goals of historical actors who soon found themselves debating the origin of American civilizations, the nature of the American races, and the rightful ownership of antiquities. Achim also brings to life an array of fascinating characters—antiquarians, naturalists, artists, commercial agents, bureaucrats, diplomats, priests, customs officers, local guides, and academics on both sides of the Atlantic—who make visible the rifts and tensions intrinsic to the making of the Mexican nation and its cultural politics in the country’s postcolonial era.

A Revolution Unfinished
A Revolution Unfinished

Author: Colby Ristow

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1496208978

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In October 1911 the governor of Oaxaca, Mexico, ordered a detachment of approximately 250 soldiers to take control of the town of Juchitán from Jose F. “Che” Gomez and a movement defending the principle of popular sovereignty. The standoff between federal soldiers and the Chegomistas continued until federal reinforcements arrived and violently repressed the movement in the name of democracy. In A Revolution Unfinished Colby Ristow provides the first book-length study of what has come to be known as the Chegomista Rebellion, shedding new light on a conflict previously lost in the shadows of the concurrent Zapatista uprising. The study examines the limits of democracy under Mexico’s first revolutionary regime through a detailed analysis of the confrontation between Mexico’s nineteenth-century tradition of moderate liberalism and locally constructed popular liberalism in the politics of Juchitán, Oaxaca. Couched in the context of local, state, and national politics at the beginning of the revolution, the study draws on an array of local, national, and international archival and newspaper sources to provide a dramatic day-by-day description of the Chegomista Rebellion and the events preceding it. Ristow links the events in Juchitán with historical themes such as popular politics, ethnicity, and revolutionary state formation and strips away the romanticism of previous studies of Juchitán, offering a window into the mechanics of late Porfirian state-society relations and early revolutionary governance.

From Angel to Office Worker
From Angel to Office Worker

Author: Susie S. Porter

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1496206517

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In late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman’s presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolution and jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these “angels of the home” began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous. To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Worker examines the material conditions of women’s work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women’s movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married and unmarried. Office workers also developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside the workplace. From Angel to Office Worker is a major contribution to modern Mexican history as historians begin to ask new questions about the relationships between labor, politics, and the cultural and public spheres.

Routes of Compromise
Routes of Compromise

Author: Michael Kirkland Bess

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1496204018

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In Routes of Compromise Michael K. Bess studies the social, economic, and political implications of road building and state formation in Mexico through a comparative analysis of Nuevo Leon and Veracruz from the 1920s to the 1950s. He examines how both foreign and domestic actors, working at local, national, and transnational levels, helped determine how Mexico would build and finance its roadways. While Veracruz offered a radical model for regional construction that empowered agrarian communities, national consensus would solidify around policies championed by Nuevo Leon's political and commercial elites. Bess shows that no single political figure or central agency dominated the process of determining Mexico's road-building policies. Instead, provincial road-building efforts highlight the contingent nature of power and state formation in midcentury Mexico.