Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class

Praise for Radicals in the Barrio

"Hundreds of books about the history and contemporary experiences of Mexican Americans in the United States have been published since the 1960s. Until now, however, a book on the role of the Mexican American working class in the development of the US Left has remained largely missing. Radicals in the Barrio is a remarkable book that fills the gap. In particular, the author has done an excellent job documenting the role of Mexican men and women on both sides of the US–Mexico border who played a significant role in Left organizations beginning with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 1900s to the Socialist and Communist parties, unions, and other Left organizations up to the 1950s. The author also details the reasons for both the emergence of those organizations and their decline. In short, the book is a valuable contribution on the lessons of the past that can be useful for the emergence of new Left organizations in the twenty-first century."

—Dr. Carlos Muñoz, Jr., author of Youth, Identity, Power

"Justin Akers Chacón’s Radicals in the Barrio is a broad, transnational history of the working men and women of greater Mexico. This well-documented book offers a gripping narrative of more than half a century of radical ideologies and organizing among Mexican Americans, ranging from anarchist traditions that predated Mexico’s 1910 revolution to Cold War struggles among farm, mine, and other workers across a broad borderland. Two essential takeaways of this excellent book are that US immigration policies and racism structured the economic exploitation of Mexican Americans, and that their transnational labor and struggles were essential to the making of both nations."

—John Lear, author of Picturing the Proletariat

"Radicals in the Barrio is truly an impressive book. Justin Akers Chacón’s study is the rigorous recording of a historical process that propelled social development in the United States and Mexico. The transformation of these countries is analyzed from the social struggles undertaken by men and women located at the very base of American and Mexican societies. To understand the dimension of this research, which covers a wide period until the 1950s, it is sufficient to traverse the bibliography used. It is exhaustive, supported by impressive documentation that includes archival sources, periodicals, testimonials, and iconography that allow Akers Chacón a critical perspective and an undeniable contribution to social history. It is therefore advisable to take a deep breath and carefully and attentively read this exceptional book, and be prepared to better understand our past and our present."

—Javier Torres Parés, professor of history at the Universidad Autónoma de México and author of La revolución sin frontera

"Justin Akers Chacón’s Radicals In the Barrio gives the most comprehensive account we have of the making of the Mexican working class in the United States. From its origins in the transnational experience of extractive and industrial labor in both Mexico and the United States, through the period of the Mexican Revolution and the intense class warfare of the US West in the 1910s, to the organization of agricultural and industrial workers in the 1930s, and through the McCarthy period and the civil rights movement, Akers Chacón focuses on the political experience of Mexican workers. He does all of this within a Marxist framework, and with particular attention to the role of women workers. A formidable book in every way, it will be of interest to labor activists, Latino communities, and scholars. I highly recommend it."

—Dan La Botz, author of What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution

"It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Mexican workers in the US working class, yet their story is little known outside academia. Justin Akers Chacón has set out to change this, with a thorough, detailed, and well-told recounting of their history. What a history it is—miners fighting a US boss and starting the Mexican Revolution, taking on the Rockefellers in Colorado’s coal wars, providing the backbone for Communist- and Socialist-led strikes in the California fields, or organizing the unemployed and homeless to build a base for the historic pecan strike in San Antonio.

Akers Chacón pays attention to the radical ideology that drove the social struggles of Mexican people in the United States, not just their actions and tactics. He profiles the activists who developed that ideology, from Texas Communist strike leader Emma Tenayuca and The Mexican Question to Bert Corona, father of the modern immigrant rights movement, and to Luisa Moreno who led the CIO in California in its most radical years. Their desire to change society fundamentally is a contribution that still resounds among workers and in unions today.

Akers Chacón shows that linking working-class struggles in the United States and Mexico isn’t just a product of NAFTA, or the recent decades of deportations. Emma Tenayuca went to the Workers University organized by labor leaders in Mexico City. Radicals in the Workers Alliance fought deportations throughout the Southwest eighty years ago.

It’s not just that this history belongs to working people today. Akers Chacón describes in detail the importance Mexican workers gave to left-wing politics and organizing. This is rich material for understanding their value to winning the same fights today. Akers Chacón’s book is at the same time exciting history and a resource with real meaning for Trump-era struggles for social justice."

—David Bacon, author of Illegal People and The Right to Stay Home

Radicals

in the

Barrio

Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies,

and Communists in the

Mexican American Working Class

Justin Akers Chácon

Haymarket Books

Chicago, IL

© 2018 Justin Akers Chacón

Published in 2018 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-776-1

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

IPS_Intlsales@ingramcontent.com

This book was published with the generous support of

Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Dedicated to the memory of Guadalupe Chacón Mena y Magaña

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

The Mexican Working Classes

Mexican Workers: From Liberalism to Anticapitalism

Los Caballeros de Labor

The Japanese Mexican Labor Association

Mexican Miners in Arizona

Early Mexican Labor Radicalism in Texas

Part 2

Ricardo Flores Magón and the Rise of the PLM

The PLM Turns to the Working Classes

The PLM and Borderland Internationalism

The US Socialist Party, Race, and Immigration

The Partido Liberal Mexicano and Socialists in Los Angeles

The PLM and the Socialist Party in Texas

Socialists, the PLM, and the Mexican Revolution

The PLM and IWW Join Forces

Part 3

Radicals in the Arizona Copper Mines (1907–1917)

From Casa del Obrero Mundial to Communist International

California Agriculture and Migrant Mexican Labor

Wobblies and Mexican Farmworkers in Wheatland

Socialists and Mexican Miners in Colorado

Mexican Miners in the Colorado Coal Wars

The State, Mexican Immigration, and Labor Control

Part 4

Communists in the California Fields

The CAWIU and the Strike Wave of

Mexican Workers in Depression-Era San Antonio

Mexican Women at the Forefront of Labor Militancy

Communists and the Workers Alliance in Texas

The Pecan Shellers Strike of

Emma Tenayuca and the Mexican Question

North American Communists and the Good Neighbor Policy

Communists, the Popular Front, and the New Deal in California

Mexican Labor Militancy in s California

Radicals Build the CIO in the Barrios

El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (1939–)

Sleepy Lagoon: Communists, the CIO, and Civil Rights

Communist Miners and Cold War Civil Rights

Acknowledgments

Notes

Introduction

The United States can intervene in Mexico with men and it can intervene with money. It can intervene with guns and it can intervene with gold. The means differ but the purpose and the effect are the same. The cause of liberty can be shot to death by long-range guns from Washington, Berlin, and London just as readily as by rapid firing guns at Mexico City.

—Pancho Villa*

The Mexican working class has a long and deeply rooted history in the United States, one that is intimately interwoven into the experience of the labor movement as a whole, and one in which Mexican workers have played a pivotal or leading role at its most critical junctures. Alongside epochs of rising class struggle has co-evolved a rich tradition of Mexican labor radicalism, referring to the formation of left-wing political ideologies that have informed collective action. Anticapitalist political doctrine entered into Mexico with European immigrants and co-evolved with indigenous and organic expressions of Mexican radicalism. While the Mexican working-class experience has been intrinsically interconnected with other segments of the working class in the United States, Mexican workers, and especially those who migrated after the turn of the century, brought with them a radical and revolutionary tradition emanating from their collective experiences in Mexico.

US Imperialism in Mexico

An historical analysis that links the experiences of the working class in Mexico, Mexican migrants to the US, and the Mexican American working class must begin with a discussion of US-Mexican relations at the turn of the twentieth century. The nexus of US imperialist domination of Mexico, class conflict, radical ideological formation, revolutionary struggle, transnational migration, and political cross-fertilization infuse the character of Mexican labor radicalism in the United States. The Mexican laboring classes, while not triumphal, were instrumental in shaping the course of events and outcomes of the revolutionary process in Mexico. As transnational workers, they took their organizations, traditions, and doctrines with them into the United States. There, this outlook and their experiences cross-fertilized with radical organizations and the dynamics of class struggle north of the border. As an integral part of this working class, Mexican workers also influenced the trajectory of the labor movement in the United States.

Between 1876 and 1910, Mexico underwent a tumultuous period of uneven and combined capitalist development.¹ This was driven externally by the imperialism of the United States and the European powers, who scrambled to extend their empires into the rich soil of Mexico. Three factors influenced US capitalists to stake out a claim over Mexico’s natural resources, markets, and labor. Corporations were legislated into existence to serve as the progenitors of capital accumulation, reinvestment, and profiteering on an international scale.² Secondly, the international banking crises of 1871, 1893, and 1907 led the US and European nations to expand their investments into Latin American and Caribbean markets, looking for political stability and monetary mechanisms that would permit them the most favorable conditions for their business operations.³

The third impulse was driven by international competition. As US investors began to enter foreign markets, they found Europeans were already afoot in extending their own economic spheres of influence in the same terrain. The first US intervention into the world-imperialist system began with the acquisition of Caribbean and Asian colonies after the defeat of decaying regional rival Spain in 1898. As international competition increased in contested places such as Mexico, each country’s diplomatic corps and military attachés became the arbiters of their nation’s capitalist interests there, contributing to Mexico becoming one of the staging grounds for World War I.

For instance, despite allusions to the peaceful nature of international commercial expansion, US capitalist investment in Mexico came up against the threat of both European competition and popular revolt. Military power served as the scaffolding for projecting and protecting US investments, and so the development of an armed force to fulfill foreign policy objectives occurred in tandem with economic expansion beyond US borders. As Frederick Howe observed:

This is the immediate background of war and preparations of war, of preparedness, navalism, and the overseas interests of the great powers. Earlier foreign policies were bent on the maintenance of national boundaries and the preservation of the balance of power. The new imperialism is interested in loans, concessions, protectorates, spheres of influence, the closed door, and other privileges arising from the financial interests of the ruling classes, which have become world-wide in their extent.⁴

After the Mexicans ejected the French colonial regime in 1867 and repudiated the emperor’s debts, European capitalists colluded to lock Mexico out of international capital markets as punishment.⁵ They were not interested in seeing Mexico develop as a potential rival, but rather as a large store of untapped resources for their own enrichment. When international capitalists entered Mexico, they were not seeking free markets for which to compete, but rather they wanted to extend internationally their existing monopolies or create new ones.

Vladimir Lenin described this as a tendency for foreign capitalists to be a corrupting influence in the dominated markets, making corruption itself an institutional form of doing business.⁶ For this reason, the alliances formed between international capitalists and their local partners were saturated with payoffs, bribes, collusion, palace intrigues, and other techniques aimed at advancing their own interests against rivals and competing cliques.⁷ Oil baron Edward Doheny pithily summarized the American formula this way: You first try to win a man over, and failing this, you buy him.⁸

In their pursuits, foreign capitalists cultivated junior partners in the Mexican bourgeoisie. These cliques were geographically represented, with the most established group being a collection of prominent, old-money landowners and merchants known derisively as Los Científicos (the scientific ones). These men were typically capitalinos who were gathered around the self-styled dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910). A second group was clustered in the far north of the country and had more recently built their fortunes as a result of Díaz’s pro-capitalist policies and through partnerships with foreign capital.

Lacking large stores of capital and infrastructure, they saw attracting foreign investment from established, liberal-minded capitalist nations as a key to accelerating modernization. Científico thought envisaged the development of a native bourgeoisie through partnership with foreign capital, which, in theory, had a direct interest in supporting the rise of a like-minded liberal capitalist state along its southern border. Admiring their northern neighbors, the Científicos envisioned this as a spiritual liberal front with American Republicans, whose surplus capital could be deposited in Mexico, ensuring US investors profit while helping to foster a neighboring state in their own image.

Central to their project was the privatization of indigenous and communal land and unrestricted foreign capital investment, which necessitated the suppression of resistance movements that challenged rapid capitalist modernization. According to Justo Sierra, a leading light of this school, Mexico’s working majority had to be compliant, wages had to be suppressed, and unions had to prohibited in order to make Mexico stable for capitalist development, leading him to call for a social dictatorship in Mexico.⁹ As Jorge Basurto explains, the liberal state under Porfirio Díaz

assumed its role as regulator of the new relations of production; but with Mexican capitalism developing from a backwards and dependent position and having to manage the development of the country, the most important aspect was to impede any form of defensive action by the proletariat: in the relations between the national bourgeoisie and the proletariat to encourage capital accumulation, and between the international bourgeoisie and the proletariat in order to create the ideal conditions to attract foreign capital.¹⁰

Part of the allure of investing in Mexico was the abundance of exploitable labor. US owners willfully adapted to and embraced existing local coercive labor practices. This started with purchasing the services of labor contractors, local jefes políticos (state-aligned political bosses) or relying on the federal rural police (Rurales) to keep workers in line through constant surveillance and draconian punishment. In the oil camps, for instance, disobedient workers could be subjected to various forms of corporal punishment, put in stocks overnight, forced to work against their will, or arrested and expelled from the camp without any form of due process.¹¹ State-sanctioned repression became even more urgent when workers began to rebel against their conditions.

British, French, and other European capital had entered Mexico as early as the 1830s. By 1896, the Díaz government had abolished all barriers to foreign investment and offered monopoly privileges, tax exclusions, tariff exemptions, and concessions to exploit natural resources, clearing the way for foreign corporate ascendancy within the Mexican economy.¹² This opened the floodgates for US capital, as regional cabals of investment bankers and speculative combinations in the US jockeyed for position to finance the exploitation of Mexico’s wealth and make their fortunes.¹³

In 1902, investment bankers such as Goldman Sachs, & Company, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan and Company, and others opened up a branch of the International Banking Company in Mexico City, becoming the first multinational bank, which soon operated on a global scale.¹⁴ Through its Mexican operations, it distributed some 250 loans totaling $1 billion between 1900 and 1913, with the largest amount earmarked for Mexico.

These loans financed the activities of US-based companies seeking to extend their operations into Mexico, or speculators pursuing quick fortunes. Between the years 1890 and 1910, over forty stock companies were organized to direct investment in Mexico in the cattle-production and farming industries alone.¹⁵ The massive infusion of foreign capital, led by the US, increased exponentially. As early as 1900, foreigners owned outright 172 of 212 commercial establishments in the Federal District.¹⁶ By 1906, 943 North American–owned businesses had been established throughout Mexico, and total US investment increased from $200 million in 1897 to nearly $1.1 billion in 1911.¹⁷

In the scramble for Mexico, US capital competed with European rivals Great Britain, France, and Germany. In his study of economic imperialism in Mexico, José Luis Ceseña looked at the prominence of foreign capital in Mexico’s seven largest industries in 1910 and 1911. Foreign capital arranged through investment companies controlled 100 percent of Mexico’s oil (US share: 40 percent); 97.5 percent of mining and metallurgy (US share: 81 percent); 96 percent of agricultural production (US share: 67 percent); 85 percent of manufacturing (US share: 15 percent); 77 percent of the banking system (US share: 18 percent); 87 percent of electricity production (US share: 8 percent); and 27 percent of railroads (US share: 9 percent; although US investors controlled a 50 percent share in the national rail system).¹⁸ By 1912, an estimated 62 percent of total foreign direct investment came from the US, which surpassed the investment of its rivals and the total Mexican national investment. Mexico was seen as an extension of the US for economic purposes.¹⁹

Key to the integration of the Mexican economy’s strategic sectors into US and international markets was the development of a national railroad system. Railroads reduced transportation costs and connected regional, national, and international markets, and drove up the market value of land, fueling rampant speculation. The Díaz regime granted extensive land concessions to British and US railroad interests and in some cases paid them from the Mexican treasury to lay track. This could range between $6,000 and $15,000 per mile depending on the terrain, and sometimes investors were granted additional land-use rights, tax exemptions, and other blandishments.²⁰

Between the years 1877 and 1910 the railroads expanded from 400 miles to nearly 12,000, with US capital accounting for 61 percent ($644 million) of the total investment.²¹ The impetus for the explosive growth was given by the passage of a federal law in 1882 that allowed for the expropriation of all lands required for public works. This was one of the various mechanisms used to radically shift the social balance of power and privilege toward the primacy of foreign investment. As historian Teresa M. Van Hoy concludes:

The law was intended to force railroad development on rural and provincial communities of late 19th-century Mexico, as is indicated in the ministry’s instructions to the first federal agent hired to implement it. The instructions stated that the expropriation law gave ample grounds so that an intelligent person can wield successfully the weapons which it [the law] offers in order to gain access quickly and cheaply to the land necessary for railroad development.²²

The expansion of the railroads was essential for linking Mexico’s nodes of production and transporting goods and people, with oil production and export being the greatest prize.

The foreign colonization of Mexico’s rich oil deposits took shape in a similar manner. The Díaz regime passed a law in 1901 that designated its right to grant concessions to foreign investors on public land and excluded oil deposits from public domain claims. Oil companies, investors, and speculators poured into the country in search of quick profits. By 1907, a single American oil speculator, Edward Doheny, controlled half of all oil production in Mexico, making an estimated $10 million in profit each year through 1925 (in today’s currency, about $230 million yearly).²³ By 1916 around 400 oil companies were known to be in operation; 75 percent were American owned.²⁴ An estimated 2,500 American personnel and 4,000 total foreign nationals were living and working in Mexico’s oil zones during this time.All told, by 1917 Mexican oil fields were churning out 55 million barrels annually, of which 97 percent was controlled by foreign (mostly American) interests.²⁵ Other sectors, such as the vast textile industry centered in the state of Veracruz, were dominated by French capital.²⁶

US and European capitalist interests also had a significant foothold in agriculture, land speculation, energy, and banking. Effective control extended not only over the export of oil, precious metals, and minerals, but also beef and cowhides, cotton, chickpeas, rubber, vanilla, sugar, guayule, henequen, chicle, and ixtle.²⁷ British bankers set up the first commercial bank in Mexico, the Banco de Londres y México (Bank of London and Mexico) in 1864. French merchant capitalists and US investors joined efforts to counter the British by funding the Banco Nacional de Mexico in 1884. By 1910, these two banks controlled 75 percent of the nation’s deposits.²⁸ Furthermore, in 1902, US investors set up the International Banking Corporation as a conduit for US investments in government bonds and securities, mining, oil companies, agriculture, timber and ranching, qualifying it as the first US-based multinational bank.²⁹ Most foreign banks operated outside of the direct supervision of the Mexican government, and were typically capitalized at a rate three times higher than their Mexican counterparts.³⁰

Empire and Racism

As an extension of class relations in the United States, racism was instrumental in the functioning of US imperialism in Mexico. US intervention into Mexico evoked a racist paternalism in the discourse of the investor class, national political circles, and in the media; contextualizing the plunder of economically subjugated people as a civilizing mission on behalf of a self-proclaimed superior people. As an antecedent of the contemporary notion of humanitarian military intervention, disruptive foreign investment, military invasion and occupation, and the imposition of colonial-like relationships became couched in such language so as to reaffirm nationalistic and chauvinistic sentiment among the general populace.

Clarence W. Barron, the owner of Dow Jones & Company, manager of the Wall Street Journal, and founder of Barron’s magazine, was one of the most influential financial thinkers of the era. In his widely read 1917 book, The Mexican Problem, he promoted a paternalistic racism and heavy-handed imperative for imposing economic imperialism, stating that [t]he redemption of Mexico must be from the invasion of business, forcing upon the natives—the good people of Mexico—technical training, higher wages, bank accounts, financial independence, and the rights of citizenship and accumulation.³¹

Another intellectual proponent of US expansionism affirmed in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1881:

It is doubtful if any equal area on the face of the globe possesses larger deposits of the precious metals. . . . Now it is evident that any rapid progress in Mexico must come through the colonization of some higher and more progressive race, or by the introduction of capital in large amounts to develop her natural resources by the aid of native races, who are peaceable and industrious.³²

From the boardrooms of the leading investment houses in New York, Jim Crow racial stratification was required to maximize profits, and maintained from the fields of California to the mines of Arizona. This practice was reproduced within US-controlled zones in Mexico. As Gilbert Gonzalez describes it,

Blacks brought from the United States served as cooks and porters while whites were the managers and administrative personnel. Chinese immigrants cooked, cleaned, and washed in the American oil camps. More than just segregation marked the distinction between the American foreigner and the Mexican; the former dominated the town and often the region both economically and politically.³³

The importation and vertical integration of foreign labor within Mexican industry was most notable in the railroads, where [r]egional operating managers, train engineers, brakemen, clerks, telegraph operators, line men, and track foremen were Americans.³⁴

US personnel in Mexico were often housed in finer dwellings, given the better jobs, and paid more for the same work. They were also more likely to enjoy upward mobility, as English was used as the official language of business operations above manual labor. Racial divides reinforced social distance between European Americans and Mexicans that retarded skill transfer and local development. Often, indigenous workers were employed and treated with disdain. As Jonathon Brown describes racial divides in the Mexican oil fields: Back in the States, these men willingly taught the oil field business to their white brothers who had come off the farms. They did not teach the skills of modernization, however, to those whom they considered racially or ethnically inferior.³⁵ Even skilled Mexican workers were often shunned and disallowed from sharing in profits, growth, or development. In one recorded case, a journeyman Mexican miner named Luis Canizeros helped a group of American investors locate several million-dollar veins of gold. Despite his efforts, he was denied a share of the wealth, and later offered testimony that the American managers didn’t think a Mexican could do anything but carry ore.³⁶

Brown further concludes that the social structure of imperialism reproduced a new form of the colonial-era caste system:

Foreign [US] personnel occupied the ranks of the privileged, exactly as had the Spaniards in the colonial period. Native-born mestizos occupied the ranks of the semiskilled. Itinerant campesinos, many of them Indian, entered the work force at the lowest rank as peons . . . [This] new social hierarchy had many similarities to past models—except that the non-Spanish speaking, non-Catholic foreign workers were not immigrants and could not be absorbed.³⁷

For their part, the Mexican bourgeoisie also promoted racial ideology. Two prominent and influential liberal academics who informed Científico thought, philologist Francisco Pimentel and demographer Antonio García Cubas, wrote in the 1860s that the indigenous population (about 40 percent of the 10 million Mexicans in 1875, and a substantial component of the agricultural proletariat) could not be integrated into a modern Mexico, but had to either be dispensed with or forcibly dismantled and gradually intermixed with European immigrants.³⁸ Through the characterization of their own population as intrinsically backward, the liberals embarked on a project that gave foreign capitalist speculators priority over national economic development.³⁹

Empire and Migration

Through imperial arrangements, foreign capital sources and their Mexican partners profited enormously, with little or no intention to develop internal markets, share technical expertise, or reinvest in Mexican social development. The massive transfer of wealth, coupled with the dispossession of millions from the land and the integration of Mexican regional markets into the United States through the railroads, induced the beginning of Mexican mass emigration to the United States, especially the southwestern states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California. With the expanding railroad complex linking regional Mexican cities to the US Southwest, capitalist modernization induced contradictory circumstances in which foreign investment led to economic immiseration for the laboring classes, while simultaneously providing the means to escape it.

It was commonly circulated information among the foreign business community that the average annual rate of profit was 10 percent to 15 percent of investment during the era of the Díaz regime (known in Spanish as the Porfiriato), while in the peak years of 1895–1900, return on investment reached 20 to 25 percent.⁴⁰ In mining the rate of return for investors reached astronomical levels. Mexican historian Gastón García Cantú cites some shocking examples: between the years 1899 and 1909 two of the largest US-owned mining companies, Los Peñoles and Dos Estrellas, returned dividends to their investors at the rate of 2,876 percent and 2,520 percent respectively.⁴¹

As a result, a new class of American multimillionaires cropped up from profits derived from investments in Mexico. Oil magnates like Edward Doheny, William Buckley, Henry Clay Pierce, and others amassed personal fortunes amounting to the hundreds of millions.⁴² Not only did wealth accrue in the hands of speculators, but the benefits of transferring Mexico’s national resources at relatively low costs were a boon for US economic development as a whole. Between 1911 and 1919, for instance, crude oil export to the United States increased from 1 percent to 80 percent of total Mexican production.⁴³

The patterns of investment led to substantial transfers of wealth and natural resources from Mexico to the United States. For instance, the pattern of railroad construction linked Mexico’s resource-rich regions directly to major economic hubs north of the border. By 1910, for example, 77 percent of Mexico’s mineral exports were shipped directly to US markets.⁴⁴ At the same time, foreign-owned railroads charged up to 50 percent less to transport agricultural products for export to US markets than they charged to deliver to domestic markets within Mexico.⁴⁵ This monopoly over the movement of goods stymied the development of domestic industries, limited circulation of commodities within internal markets, and inhibited Mexican trade with Europe.⁴⁶

Substantial wealth transfers also took place in other industries. Between 1900 and 1910, for instance, US-owned mines in Mexico paid investors $95 million in dividends, an amount that surpassed by 24 percent the combined net earnings of all the banks based solely in the United States over the same period. Standard Oil’s Mexican subsidiaries paid yearly dividends amounting to 600 percent of its capitalization annually in the first six years of the twentieth century, reflecting profits that ranged between $2 and $3 million per year.⁴⁷ According to Raymond Vernon, companies that had negotiated oil concessions during the Porfiriato received on average a mere 10 percent tax levy on their profits, an arrangement unheard of anywhere in the oil-producing world ever since.⁴⁸ The value of Mexico’s exports not only enriched US investors and speculators in Mexico, it also benefitted US consumers and stimulated economic development in secondary ways in the United States. By 1918 total Mexican exports amounted to $183.6 million, of which $175 million was destined for US markets.⁴⁹

As wealth derived from Mexican land, resources, and labor flowed north, so too did a growing number of Mexican laborers as they became displaced from within the Mexican economy. The export of wealth through its extraction and repatriation to the United States, as opposed to its local development, more equitable distribution through sustainable wages and tax redistribution, and reinvestment; meant that localized economies were disrupted and destroyed in foreign-investment-heavy regions of Mexico and access to land or sustainable employment declined in relation to the existing populations. This forced growing pools of redundant rural labor to migrate elsewhere for sustenance.

By 1910, it is estimated that 80 percent of the 15 million people in Mexico lived in rural regions (where agriculture and mining were prominent economic activities), and an estimated 98 percent of this population was landless.⁵⁰ While difficult to gauge out-migration to the United States among such a large and transient population, national estimates of out-migration to other parts of Mexico or to the United States range from 4 to 17 percent of the total population leaving their respective states to find work elsewhere, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Economic displacement, coupled with the outbreak of revolution, resulting inflation and rising prices, starvation, oversaturation of diminished labor markets, high unemployment, declining working conditions, and violence led an estimated one million people to move to the United States by 1920.⁵¹ By 1930, over 1.5 million Mexicans lived in the United States, with the great majority settling in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico.⁵² This sparked a mass population shift northward from within the heartland of Mexico that continued as US capitalism became structurally dependent on Mexican labor for its accumulation, sustenance, and growth. Between 1900 and 1940, for instance, the total population of the US and Mexican border states increased from 6 million to 14.5 million, with most of the growth coming from central and southern Mexico.⁵³

The depletion of the Mexican rural population coincides with the growth of the Mexican population in the United States and the expansion of capitalist production based on their labor in the Southwest. According to Arthur F. Corwin and Lawrence A. Cardoso:

The economic development of the American Southwest coincided with the northward drift of Mexico’s population. Railroads, using Mexican and other immigrant labor, integrated the Southwest into the nation’s industrial economy. Mining shifted from precious metals to industrial minerals such as copper and coal, as in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Oklahoma. Copper mines in the West increased from three in 1869 to 180 in 1909, and coal mining, heavily using Mexican labor, boomed in those states. Citrus and cotton cultivation in California, Arizona, and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas flourished because of rail facilities, cheap labor, and desert irrigation projects encouraged by the federal Newlands Act of 1902.⁵⁴

While emigrants poured out of Mexico, others joined revolutionary uprisings. The scale of US investment, ownership, and influence within Mexico reached a point that alarmed even the most sycophantic admirers of US capital in the Mexican bourgeoisie. In an effort to prevent the singular domination of US capital over the national economy, sections of the Mexican bourgeoisie, including Díaz himself, expedited partnership with German, French, British, and Japanese capital to serve as a counterweight.⁵⁵ Some contingents of Mexican capitalists that had profited from these arrangements, including northern landowning capitalists such as Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza, began to turn against the Díaz regime after popular uprisings against imperialist exploitation threatened to undermine the existing capitalist system as a whole.

Empire, Class Struggle, and the Mexican Revolution

Imperialism in Mexico contributed to rapid economic development, but in a way that accelerated an extreme inequality and polarization between social classes, eventually producing the revolutionary uprisings of the early twentieth century. American capitalists carved out for themselves large swaths of Mexican territory and natural resources and, in the process, created an asymmetric industrial base that subordinated Mexican national and social development to the needs of US and international accumulation and consumption. The patterns of development created a simultaneous process of integration and marginalization, where foreign-controlled markets within Mexico were linked by railroad to international markets, while large segments of the national economy were neglected and reduced to marginal backwaters.⁵⁶

Foreign interests formed relationships with Mexican políticos and used their money and influence to shape economic policy as well as draw on the repressive forces of the state to police local populations. Racism was also a mechanism of imperialist implantation and control, as European Americans carried with them their homegrown notions of white superiority into Mexico. Taken together, the forms in which US imperialism operated in Mexico retarded its development by siphoning wealth out of the country, precluding skill and technology transfer as well as local social development, and displacing millions of people, creating a vast and volatile landless proletariat.

Furthermore, despite the rapid growth of foreign investment in the Mexican economy during the Porfiriato, the wealth generated was distributed unevenly. Between 1850 and 1910, real wages in the industries remained relatively constant while worker productivity increased substantially.⁵⁷ Between 1900 and 1910, the general price indices for the majority of consumer goods increased 32 percent.⁵⁸ Furthermore, economic historian Aurora Gómez-Galvarri observed that the value of real wages actually declined 18 percent between 1907 and 1910.⁵⁹

The Porfirian alliance broke down by the first decade of the twentieth century, cracked by the rise of class struggle as capitalist crisis and pent-up opposition to existing arrangements came out into the open. The first manifestation of revolutionary agitation occurred from within a reinvigorated liberal opposition, in the form of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party; referred to by its Spanish-language acronym PLM and magonistas throughout the text). The radical middle-class left wing of the party, led by Ricardo Flores Magón, took direct action to topple the dictatorship in 1906. The development and progress of this movement, which evolved into a transnational, anticapitalist, and revolutionary organization with a working-class orientation by 1908, will be the subject of in-depth analysis in this work.

Several factors contributed to the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz after nearly forty years in power. First and foremost was a profound economic crisis that rattled the national economy in 1907 and 1908, intensifying the regional and political fracturing of the bourgeoisie that was by then already at an advanced stage. The high level of integration into the US economy made Mexico more vulnerable to economic convulsions in the United States, itself under stress from the 1907 world financial crisis. During the crisis, the cost of basic food necessities skyrocketed, while the banks raised interest rates and cut credit, and the government fell deeper into debt. Mining and agricultural production collapsed and numerous banks failed, cutting off lines of credit and throwing thousands of workers into unemployment. Reflecting a rapidly growing imbalance of payments, the country’s external debt increased fivefold, from $127 million in 1890 to $578 million US dollars on the eve of the revolution.⁶⁰ The crisis coincided with a substantial drought and crop failure in the north, and the first major spasms of revolt among the industrial working class as their standard of living plummeted. These strikes broke out in predominantly foreign-controlled industrial sectors, shaking the confidence of foreign investors in Díaz’s ability to continue his reign with more significant convulsion.

While the US government and capitalist class had long favored the continuity and stability of Díaz, the breakdown of the dictatorship led them to abandon the flagging leader. This was accelerated as the Mexican government began to curry favor with European capital to counter US control. In 1905, Díaz terminated the free-trade zone established in the border region in 1885, which gave primacy to US investors, granted oil concessions to the British, and began to aggressively nationalize the majority of national railroads.⁶¹ The rise of the wealthy Coahuila-based landowner Francisco Madero presented a palatable alternative to US investors, who were wary about the looming threat of destabilization of the Díaz government, and the regime’s shift in favor given to European capital. The US-educated Madero had partnership ties to US capital, was from one of the richest families in Mexico, firmly opposed land redistribution to the poor, and focused on moderate electoral reform.⁶² In a 1908 book entitled La Sucesión Presidencial en 1910 (The Presidential Succession of 1910), he presented himself to both the Mexican elite and foreign investors as the best hope to contain the agrarian and labor radicalism unleashed by the crumbling Díaz regime. In it, he proposed a liberal democratic system with universal suffrage, the right for workers to organize unions, public education, and an end to the costly and violent wars against the Indians.⁶³ Writing the book amid a series of national strikes, he communicated a subtle warning to his class that the repression and impoverishment of porfirismo was stirring the laboring classes into revolt:

With such motive, and with legitimate right, the workers have organized themselves aggressively, constituting a powerful league. They began by organizing their forces to engage the fight, and following the example of workers all over the world, they unite in order to not succumb in the incessant struggle between labor and capital.⁶⁴

Madero was the product of the aspiring northern bourgeoisie, itself a product of porfirismo, that now attributed some of the main obstacles of effective government to foreign economic domination and its attendant corruption and social underdevelopment perpetuated by Díaz.⁶⁵ Despite his conservative economic positions, his 1910 electoral campaign for president was violently repressed by Díaz.⁶⁶ After escaping arrest, he fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he was allowed by the US government to arrange his government in exile and proclaim his Plan de San Luis Potosí. With the tacit support of President William Howard Taft, Madero’s plan called for an armed revolution to begin on November 20, 1910, which temporarily united his supporters, with the radical magonistas into the maderista army.

In a show of support for Madero, leading bankers in the United States cut off credit to the weakening regime, signaling their decision that Díaz’s time had come.⁶⁷ The US government then sent warships to the Gulf of Mexico and troops to the Texas border four months after the initiation of the revolution. The US also intended for the show of force to serve as a warning to Germany and Great Britain, which had their own interest in the outcomes of the conflict, as well as to the radical wing of the of the revolutionary movement, which began to articulate its own actions and demands. After the maderistas captured Ciudad Juárez, the revolutionary forces began to seize territory across the nation, and concurrent popular uprisings in Mexico City against the dictatorship threatened to topple the whole regime, the porfirista oligarchy withdrew its support from Díaz. As a result, Díaz capitulated and went into exile on May 31, 1911.⁶⁸

Hastily organized elections officially brought Madero into the presidency in October of 1911, and he quickly affirmed the continuation of the Díaz military and state bureaucracy, albeit under his authority. The federal army, the repressive arm of the Porfirian state, was understood as the essential guarantor of the land tenure system, and was left intact. At the same time, the campaign significantly raised expectations among the laboring classes for radical change. First and foremost was the desire for land redistribution, a demand first espoused by the magonistas and the PLM, followed by radical agrarian campaigns led by Emiliano Zapata in Morelos and Francisco Pancho Villa in Chihuahua. The ability to contain radicalism of this sort was critical for continued US support.

In response to his legalization of unions, socialists and anarchists in Mexico formed the Casa del Obrero Mundial (International Workers’ Center; COM), which began to organize the working class along militant and industrial lines with an orientation toward class struggle in the foreign-owned industries. Madero then turned against the nascent radicalism after worker self-activity grew beyond the limited scope he was willing to tolerate. (The experience of the COM, representing the most significant development of working-class radicalism and self-organization in the revolutionary period, will also be discussed in this work.) In the countryside, he unleashed the federal army to suppress the zapatistas. The federal army failed in its efforts to squash agrarian land seizures, which began to spread to other parts of the country.

By 1913, domestic and foreign capital was reeling from the threat of radical land expropriations as revolutionary armies began to take shape. Squeezed between radicalizing labor and revolutionary agrarians on one side, and anxious oligarchs, investors, and landowners on the other, the base of support for Madero collapsed. The imperial representatives from different nations, previously in a state of low-intensity competition, now closed ranks against Madero as they began to sense revolution. Led by the United States, they conspired with Porfirian military officials to carry out a coup.

From the very top of the US government, the orders were given. President Taft, his secretary of state, Philander Knox, and appointed ambassador to Mexico Henry Lane Wilson, engineered a coup led by porfirista general Victoriano Huerta to topple and murder Madero. The coup, orchestrated in February of 1913, brought together disparate elements who put aside their differences to unite against an existential threat in the form of a popular insurrection and to maintain the rule of capital over labor. Even on the eve of World War I, foreign powers, US and European investors and corporate representatives, the old porfirian-aligned oligarchy and Catholic Church, the Científicos, and the reactionary military hierarchy all supported the effort to bury the revolution.

Within one year, in April of 1914, the US invaded Mexican territory once again. While the previous administration had helped to topple Madero, the incoming government of Woodrow Wilson withheld recognition of Huerta’s regime as the revolution raged on, and refused to sell his administration arms. Reminiscent of Díaz and Maderos’s concerns over US imperial predominance, Huerta began favoring British over US oil interests and staking out diplomatic recognition and backing from European governments, purchasing arms and munitions from them as a means to consolidate his power.

This became a source of contention after Wilson publicly announced his opposition to Huerta, telling British diplomat Sir William Tyrell that he aimed not merely to force Huerta from power, but also to exert every influence [the United States] can to secure Mexico a better government under which all contracts and business concessions will be safer than they have ever been.⁶⁹ Historian Alan Knight contends that Wilson believed that Huerta’s incompetency and brutal dictatorship fueled destabilization and a more unpredictable outcome for the revolution.⁷⁰ Under manufactured pretenses, Wilson ordered a naval invasion and occupation of the Gulf port city of Veracruz.⁷¹ Of concern was the security of the US-controlled oil fields in the region, which was threatened by the advance of popular revolutionary armies. The occupation did not end until the United States received assurances from the dominant faction of Venustiano Carranza, who became president in 1914, that US interests would be protected.⁷² The threat of US intervention remained constant during the course of the revolution.⁷³

Bowing to US threats and beset by increasing military defeats from revolutionary armies in the north, Huerta resigned and fled shortly thereafter. The defeat of the counterrevolution transitioned to the second, social phase of the revolution. Between 1914 and 1920, revolutionary forces composed of different class forces fought it out militarily, in the factories and workshops, and over the control of land and natural resources.⁷⁴ While the proletarian leadership elements were unable to cohere an independent, class-based party and political program capable of uniting the urban and rural working class, they shaped, and were shaped by, every stage of the process.

Through their participation in the Mexican Revolution, a bourgeois democratic revolution, sectors of the laboring classes developed and refined their own class-conscious ideologies, grounded in anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, and various manifestations of socialist thought. The Mexican migrants carried these traditions with them into the barrios of the Southwest, where they came into contact and conflict, and in some cases converged with US working-class ideologies. The first and most dominant representative of these ideologies was the business unionism and racial exclusionism of the American Federation of Labor.

Empire and the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

The boosters of empire within the major political parties in the United States found an ally in the emerging conservative leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by the turn of the twentieth century. The AFL, the primary labor federation in the United States, had become a mostly white, craft-based, national labor body that had shed the Socialist pretenses of its early days and aligned itself politically with the aims of the US capitalist class on the questions of empire. The US territorial acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War raised a fundamental question of empire-building at the turn of the century: Would the US engage in old-style colonial administration or endeavor to control foreign economies without the enormous costs and conflicts associated with direct military occupation? The capitalist class within both major parties fragmented into rival camps over the issue, which became known as the Imperialists and the misnamed Anti-Imperialist League.

While majorities within both camps served the burgeoning capitalist appetite for international expansion under the framework of American exceptionalism, they differed on the specific methods of empire-building. Imperialists generally embraced annexation or direct rule along the lines of the European systems. The anti-imperialists promoted a vision of free markets, where the US could dominate from the outside by wielding its preponderant economic power and control the markets, exchange, resources, and trade policies of other countries. The inherent instability of this arrangement necessitated military buildup and geo-strategic positioning of US naval forces to maximize armed intervention and protect investments and aligned client regimes when necessary.⁷⁵

The craft unions of the AFL denounced old-style colonialism because it opened up the possibility for capitalists to export capital and production to captive labor at the expense of craft workers. They also opposed annexation as it would create a pathway of citizenship—and thus the right to migrate—for colonized people. This, they believed, enabled capitalists to encourage an influx of foreign workers into US labor markets to weaken union leverage. They supported the nonterritorial imperial expansion of US capitalism through the creation of free markets, as these endeavors opened up new territories and markets for manufactured goods and created access to cheaply attained raw materials. To facilitate expansion, they favored a buildup of the military, support for a US-created transoceanic canal, and the Open Door policy in China under the claim of equal trade rights . . . for all nations.⁷⁶ At the same time, they opposed the idea that the US was obligated to invest in industrial development abroad, as that would create international competition with US-based production and undermine their advantage. Through these positions, the AFL became more explicitly aligned with the Democratic wing of the ruling capitalist cliques.

As part of its imperial orientation, the AFL leadership became enthusiastically pro-war and increasingly receptive to white supremacist doctrine. The leadership supported the Spanish-American War, pledging 250,000 union volunteers to carry the fight to the decaying Spanish empire. In the aftermath, they opposed the annexation of Cuba and the Philippines based on the fear of an influx of semi-barbaric Filipino workers and black Cubans who lacked the Caucasian values of patriotism, sympathy, [and] sacrifice that made the modern trade union possible.⁷⁷ The AFL became supportive of military actions abroad, even while the military was being used to break industrial strikes at home. In fact, the military was used to break 328 strikes in 49 states and territories between 1886 and 1895.⁷⁸

By 1910, economic expansion without direct colonization proved more successful and lucrative in the Caribbean basin (with the exception of Puerto Rico). Dollar Diplomacy, as capitalist expansion euphemistically became known, allowed for a gradual convergence of interests between the leadership of the AFL and the most ardent imperialists within the capitalist camp. In its coevolution with imperialism, AFL president Samuel Gompers and his loyalists in the leadership even began to support and promote the inherently racist and chauvinistic ideology being borne out of the structures of imperial conflict. This was inverted inward, as the labor federation became increasingly hostile to nonwhite workers, immigrants, and the unskilled workforce in general. As defenders of empire abroad, and increasingly insular, exclusive, and conservative at home, capitalists saw collaboration with AFL unions as a worthwhile trade-off to ensure stability and profitability. As labor historian Jack Scott explains:

Once convinced of the fact that the craftsmen were content to operate within the context of the established order, and satisfied that their profits would not diminish appreciably as a result of trades organization, employers showed a willingness to cooperate with the business unionists.⁷⁹

This relationship was also cemented by the AFL’s disinterest in organizing industrial workers, whom it perceived as a marginal and powerless segment of the workforce. Together, both groups fought vehemently against industrial unionism.

This arrangement served as a conservatizing force within labor, leading the crafts to pursue more aggressively the narrow interests of its skilled, primarily white European male workers and bureaucratic structures. While strikes did periodically occur in craft locals, they became decreasingly effective as industrial factories replaced workshops and mass production created an enlarging, differentiated, unskilled, and unorganized workforce that dwarfed the craft workers and diminished their leverage within the changing workplace. When industrial workers organized radical alternatives, the AFL leadership positioned themselves as conservative opponents to radical and anticapitalist labor, thereby gaining a position of privilege with employers. When radical labor movements involved nonwhite or immigrant labor, employers and the AFL worked together to promote, support, or defend racial and immigration restrictions to maintain a system of racial and national stratification and division within labor. This collaboration provided a bulwark against the formation of a radical or revolutionary left within the industries.

The control of foreign markets, export of capital, and control over foreign labor and natural resources did benefit craft labor in the short run. Nevertheless, craft labor was weakened by its own internal contradictions as the workforce expanded and differentiated, and as imperial relations led to the deindustrialization and destabilization of foreign economies that fueled out-migration from places like Mexico and the Philippines. For its part, capital came to rely increasingly on importing immigrant labor to expand the non-union workforce, but simultaneously decried excessive immigration as a means to align with AFL calls for immigration restrictions. The immigration policies that emerged further aligned the AFL and capital as they tended not to block entrance, but to restrict mobility and citizenship for various groups once inside the country. While employers benefitted from unorganized and segregated labor filing into the industries, the AFL crafts were content with the discriminatory outcomes that limited direct competition from these unskilled workers and fortified the stratification of the working classes.

Despite its inability to relate to the growing ranks of the industrial working classes, the AFL was periodically rehabilitated and promoted by the state and capital as an instrument of opposition to radical alternatives at home or as a way to export its brand of business unionism abroad, where US capital investments were sometimes threatened by anti-imperialist labor movements. Alliances of convenience with capital became a recurring feature of pure and simple craft unionism, as it was confronted from within its own radicalized sections or other external forces being created by class struggle and the periodic structural crises of capitalism.

Collusion between labor and capital toward shared goals of economic expansion became complete by the turn of the century. As Jack Scott explains,

The imperialist aim of economic domination, in place of territorial acquisition, with all its intendant problems gained the united support of the unions, including the minority anti-imperialist wing. Of course, the unionists were prepared to lend support to military intervention in the event of American investments, and American rights, being violated by some foreign power unappreciative of the blessings of American civilization. From 1898 on, it had been the . . . often articulated policy of the AFL not to oppose the development of our industry, the expansion of our commerce, nor the power and influence which the United States may exert upon the destinies of the nations of the world.⁸⁰

Once the leadership of the craft unions lined up with the general trajectory of empire, they were brought closer into collaboration with the governing administrations of the Democratic Party. AFL labor leaders would be called upon repeatedly to assist in efforts to rationalize production during war, to follow the flag of empire in establishing compliant labor group allies abroad, and to oppose the radical Left within its own ranks, which arose periodically to challenge the dominant arrangements. Radical Left minorities did develop within the craft unions (and later the industrial unions) as well as from within imperial holdings. Sometimes, these radical groupings were able to wield enough influence to challenge existing leadership and policies, especially during an upsurge of class struggle or, in the case of Mexico, a binational revolutionary movement.

Jim Crow in the Southwest

The deeply rooted and historic role of state-sanctioned racism as a legal, political, and social mechanism to subjugate, separate, and marginalize African Americans in the period after the Civil War directly framed the experience of Mexicans in the United States as nonwhite labor.⁸¹ In the opening up of the Southwest to economic exploitation and colonization after the Civil War, waves of white migrants from Jim Crow states poured into the region, bringing with them established racial notions:

Throughout the 1800s, white southerners flowed west . . . pushing into Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, joining the California gold rush and every subsequent rush that filled the golden state. White out-migration grew especially heavy in the two decades after the Civil War . . . many [white migrants] supported a lively network of southern heritage clubs and Confederate veterans’ organizations. Altogether, census-takers at the end of the century counted over 1 million southern-born whites living outside their birth region . . . [increasing] in 1930 [to] more than 4 million.⁸²

Southern migratory expansion coincided with the appearance of the Ku Klux Klan across the Southwest. By the mid-1920s, chapters of the organization sprang up across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California, incorporating Mexicans alongside its traditional targets for committing racial terror.⁸³

Furthermore, US imperial machinations toward Mexico, from territorial conquest in 1848 to military intervention and occupation during the revolution, produced an outpouring of racist ideological froth aimed at dehumanizing the Mexican population as savage, incompetent, and inferior.⁸⁴ These factors influenced the racialization of Mexican labor and created the infrastructure of segregation that isolated Mexican workers within larger society. During the period of rapid Western industrialization (1866–1913), racism intertwined with the class system in its formative development.⁸⁵ Mexicans were subjugated within the industries for which their labor was essential, and paid less than other groups for the same work; especially in physically demanding occupations on the railroads, within agriculture, and in mining. The normalization of such practices was such that Mexican work and the Mexican wage became synonymous with the hardest type of work and the lowest paid wage.

Despite the historic presence of Mexicans in the Southwest, and the important role that their labor played in the incipient stages of industrial development, their political identity was erased and reconstructed as alien even as their labor was in demand. While racism was present in earlier forms of capitalism, its use evolved in the context of industrial development, where the formation of a mass working class drawing from different ethnicities and nationalities provided useful opportunities for capitalists to stratify and segment the labor force to keep it divided so as to thwart unionization. Racial subdivisions within labor were elaborated into immigration policy, which, under the pretext of exclusion from entry, determined which sections of labor already within the country could not exercise citizenship rights. While applied to different ethnic and national groups over time, these exclusionary statutes have been used most consistently against Mexican workers. The resulting stratified racial, ethnic, and national labor matrix has been further subdivided by sex and gender, with Mexican women drawn into separate and even more subjugated compartments of the labor force.

The primary mechanism for racializing and denationalizing Mexican labor resulted from the machinations of Anglo employers within the process of capitalist development. As a strategy for social marginalization, racist law was established to introduce rigid social divisions in all spheres of life. This was enforced through the elaboration of a state apparatus that used violence as the primary method of separation and control. The elaboration of a racist citizenship regime within the architecture of law further widened the space between immigrant and citizen worker. To further fragment the working class politically, capitalist strategists used Mexican labor (and other forms of nonwhite labor) as strikebreakers or divided them into distinct workgroups within industries, both horizontally and vertically, to inhibit communication, collaboration, and the emergence of a collective class consciousness that could transcend the immediate barriers. The success of preexisting forms of racism carried over into the industrial period in such ways that existing and subsequently formed labor organizations were incapable or unwilling to challenge the emerging racial and national class system.

The condition of Mexican workers was also undermined by their isolation from the rest of the working class, as they were generally neglected by organized labor and the early radical Left, which, to