Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (review)
After decades of histories of the Mexican Revolution written from regional, state, and local levels, la capital is again the subject of attention. John Lear examines the participation of Mexico City's urban masses—workers, neighbors, and citizens—in the revolutionary process. He locates the origins of the city's modern working class in the foreign-led economic growth of the Porfiriato, which created a small population of skilled, literate, urban-born and politically active male workers. These workers were vastly outnumbered by unskilled workers, largely illiterate and rural-born, whose ranks included a good many women. Porfirian modernization restructured urban space, bringing an end to traditional socially mixed neighborhoods by creating separate elite and working class districts and fomenting classconsciousness among neighbors. Lear also finds that the division between skilled and unskilled labor contributed to the formation of multiple working class cultures shaped by gender, religion, and paternalistic mutualist tradition, and politically by popular liberalism, nationalism, anarcho-syndicalism and socialism. In opportunity born of the crisis of the ancien regime, "men struggled with their employers and with political leaders over the terms of work, over participation in elections, and in the armed revolution, while women asserted their citizenship first in defense of their community, often taking over markets, tenements, streets, and the halls of government to demand the availability of food and a just exchange value for the product of their husbands' and their own work" (p. 362).