The Birth and Consequences of Industrial Paternalism in Monterrey, Mexico, 1890–1940

Abstract

For as long as the people of Monterrey, Nuevo León could remember, class harmony had characterized their preeminently industrial city. Local residents attributed this aura of industrial peace to the unique character of the region's workers and the inherent benevolence of their employers. They took special pride in both. Like all northerners, Monterrey's workers had a reputation for hard work, industriousness, and staunch independence. They manifested the last through their celebrated autonomy from Mexico's national labor federations. The industrialists, in turn, earned local renown for having built their companies with Mexican capital. Furthermore, such pillars of local industry as the Cuauhtemoc Brewery and the Fundidora Iron and Steel Works provided fringe benefits unique by contemporary Mexican standards. Since the 1920s, local boosters claimed, company paternalism had established the basis for Monterrey's industrial peace and prosperity. Then, just as General Lázaro Cárdenas assumed the presidency in 1935, class struggle seemingly engulfed the city. In a startling development, the steel workers broke from the Independent Unions of Nuevo León and affiliated with the national Miner-Metalworkers Union. Two weeks later, the operatives of Monterrey Glassworks, a Cuauhtemoc subsidiary, voted in support of militant unionism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.