scholarly journals “Without Any More Law Than Their Own Caprice”: Cotton Textile Workers and the Challenge to Factory Authority During the Mexican Revolution

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Bortz
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Cotton Textile ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Work World ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The Revolution

SummaryMuch current literature argues that the Mexican revolution was not a revolution at all, but rather a series of rebellions that did not fundamentally alter the social order. Similarly, many scholars assert the changes in the Mexican work world during the Mexican revolution were the result of a paternalistic state rather than the product of the actions of workers. This article examines cotton textile workers' relationship to authority in the workplace during the most violent phase of Mexico's revolution, 1910–1921. The results suggest that revolution indeed gripped the country, one that energized the country's still emerging factory proletariat. There is compelling evidence that millhands throughout Mexico continuously and successfully challenged the authority of owners and supervisors, fundamentally altering the social relations of work. It is this “hidden” revolution in the factories that explains changes in labor law, labor organization, and worker power in the immediate post-revolutionary period. The effectiveness of the workers' challenge to authority is what explains: 1) the new regime's need to unionize; 2) the development of pro-labor labor law after the revolution; 3) the power of unions after 1920. In short, workers' challenge to authority during the revolution is what explains the labor outcome of the revolution afterwards.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

The Stabilisation of the Capitalist Order and Liberal Value Orientations in Serbia

Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-407
Author(s):  
Mladen Lazić ◽  
Jelena Pešić
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Value Changes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Normative Value ◽  
Value Dissonance

AbstractBased on research data from 2003, 2012, and 2018, the authors examine the extent to which capitalist social relations in Serbia have determined liberal value orientations. The change of the social order in Serbia after 1990 brought about a radical change of the basis upon which values are constituted. To interpret the relationship between structural and value changes, the authors employ the theory of normative-value dissonance. Special attention in the analysis is paid to the interpretation of value changes based on the distinction between intra- and inter-systemic normative-value dissonance. In the first part of their study, the authors examine changes in the acceptance of liberal values over the period of consolidation of capitalism in Serbia, while in the second part they focus on the 2018 data and specific predictors of political and economic liberalism.

Mortuary Practices and the Social Order at La Quemada, Zacatecas, Mexico

1992 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 298-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben A. Nelson ◽  
J. Andrew Darling ◽  
David A. Kice
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Mortuary Practices ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Ancestor Worship ◽  
Western Mexico ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Lines Of Evidence

Epiclassic occupants of the site of La Quemada left the disarticulated remains of 11-14 humans in an apparently sacred structure outside the monumental core of the site. Several lines of evidence are reviewed to generate propositions about the ritual meanings and functions of the bones. A comparative analysis reveals the complexity of mortuary practices in northern and western Mexico, and permits the suggestion that these particular remains were those of revered ancestors or community members. The sacred structure is seen as a charnel house, in which the more ancient tradition of ancestor worship expressed in shaft tombs was essentially perpetuated above ground. Hostile social relations are clearly suggested, however, by other categories of bone deposits. Recognition of the rich variability of mortuary displays leads to questions about their role in the maintenance of the social order.

Songs with Consequences?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Stirr
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Labor Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Exchange

This chapter focuses on the pragmatics of dohori singing in rural songfests. With a comparative focus on different types of songfest across Nepal’s rural hill areas, it addresses how songfests frame performances in ways that allow for particular pragmatic effects. These are based on forms of ritualized material and musical exchange that idealize the production of equality, yet often still reproduce inequality. It tells the history of dohori as a means of communication across social divides, often with significant material stakes in binding contests that could end in marriage. It discusses dohori’s historical connections with labor exchange and marriage exchange to show how this practice of singing is grounded in ways of producing equality and hierarchy. It gives examples of how binding dohori contests or song duels have been considered threats to the social order and how their outcomes have been reintegrated, changing aspects of individuals’ lives and social relations.

The Social Background of Contemporary Mexican Literature

PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 875-880
Author(s):  
Maurice Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Mexican Literature ◽  
Oil Companies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Mexican Literature ◽  
Rapid Transition ◽  
Historic Significance

No one would deny that contemporary Mexico, the Mexico of Lázaro Cárdenas, the Mexico of widespread agrarian reform, of militant trade unions, of advanced social legislation, of expanding popular education and expropriation of foreign oil companies, has entered an era of great historic significance. We who are close to the scene are acutely aware of the swift tempo which this peaceful phase of the thirty year old Mexican Revolution has assumed. However we may evaluate the direction in which Mexico's social order is moving, we are especially conscious of the fact that for the past half-decade, Mexico has been a nation in rapid transition.

Violent Imaginaries and the Beginnings of a New State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Oliver Chang
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ritual Violence ◽  
Chinese Individual ◽  
The Revolution

U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.

A Failure of Modernization: Police Reform, The “Common Good,” and Serfdom In Eighteenth-Century Russia

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-271
Author(s):  
Hugh D. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

For Russian subjects not locked away in their villages and thereby subject almost exclusively to landlord control, administration in the eighteenth century increasingly took the form of the police. And as part of the bureaucracy of governance, the police existed within the constructions of the social order—as part of social relations and their manifestations through political control. This article investigates the social and mental structures—the habitus—in which the actions of policing took place to provide a better appreciation of the difficulties of reform and modernization. Eighteenth-century Russia shared in the European discourse on the common good, the police, and social order. But whereas Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff see police development in Europe with its concern to surveil and discipline emerging from incipient capitalism and thus a product of new, post-Enlightenment social forces, the Russian example demonstrates the power of the past, of a habitus rooted in Muscovy. Despite Peter’s and especially Catherine’s well-intended efforts, Russia could not succeed in modernization, for police reforms left the enserfed part of the population subject to the whims of landlord violence, a reflection, in part, of Russia having yet to make the transition from the feudal manorial economy based on extra-economic compulsion to the capitalist hired-labor estate economy. The creation of true centralized political organization—the creation of the modern state as defined by Max Weber—would require the state’s domination over patrimonial jurisdiction and landlord control over the police. That necessitated the reforms of Alexander II.

Frank Tannenbaum and the Mexican Revolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Alan Knight
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Social Program ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Education ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis article examines Frank Tannenbaum's engagement with Mexico in the crucial years following the Revolution of 1910–1920 and his first visit to the country in 1922. Invited—and feted—by the government and its powerful labor allies, Tannenbaum soon expanded his initial interest in organized labor and produced a stream of work dealing with trade unions, peasants, Indians, politics, and education—work that described and often justified the social program of the Revolution, and that, rather surprisingly, continued long after the Revolution had lost its radical credentials in the 1940s. Tannenbaum's vision of Mexico was culturalist, even essentialist; more Veblenian than Marxist; at times downright folkloric. But he also captured important aspects of the process he witnessed: local and regional variations, the unquantifiable socio-psychological consequences of revolution, and the prevailing concern for order and stability. In sum, Tannenbaum helped establish the orthodox—agrarian, patriotic, and populist—vision of the Revolution for which he has been roundly, if sometimes excessively, criticized by recent “revisionist” historians; yet his culturalist approach, with its lapses into essentialism, oddly prefigures the “new cultural history” that many of these same historians espouse.

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