The Threads of Class at La Virgen: Misrepresentation and
Identity at a Mexican Textile Mill, 1918–1935

CHRISTOPHER R. BOYER

In early September of 1927, the morning shift of loom operators at the "La Virgen" textile mill in west-central Mexico abruptly declared a sit-down strike (huelga de brazos caídos). As the day wore on, a group of workers at the plant, which was located just outside the town of Ciudad Hidalgo, Michoacán, decided to write a letter to the president of the republic. They complained that the factory manager had fired an operative without just cause and beseeched his help in the name of "Organized Labor."1 A federal inspector soon arrived, convened a delegation of strikers, and inquired about their grievances. A memorandum was drawn up and signed by both the inspector and the delegation, explaining that the strike broke out when the manager attempted to "remove" loom operator Santiago Soto "from his place of work" without first contacting the proper union stewards. According to the memorandum, the workers demanded that the company rehire Soto and grant official recognition to their union, a local affiliate of the Mexican Regional Confederation of Labor, or CROM. At the time, the CROM was Mexico's most powerful labor federation and a key supporter of the federal government. The controversy dragged on for ten days until the firm agreed to negotiate with the union and give Soto back his job.2 A thick packet of reports and official memoranda filed with the Department of Labor detailed every phase of what appeared to be a straightforward labor action. In fact, though, the strike was bound up with a more intimate set of conflicts.	1
Everyone familiar with conditions at the mill knew that the strike was yet another incident in an ongoing feud been two factions of mill workers, each from a different region of the country. Most of the pro-CROM strikers were longtime residents of Ciudad Hidalgo and worked the first shift at the mill. Their opponents had immigrated to Michoacán from a neighboring state and mostly worked the second shift. These newcomers belonged to the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), a nominally anarcho-syndicalist workers' central that vied with the CROM for control of Mexico's organized labor. For nearly a decade before the 1927 strike, the two factions of workers had clashed over such issues as whether to collaborate with the postrevolutionary state, as the natives of Ciudad Hidalgo did, or whether to rely on paternalist relations with the factory owner, as the newcomers did. The rival workers had expressed their mutual animosity by stoning each others' houses, voting for different political candidates, and, ultimately, forming competing labor unions. The regionalist rivalry was also carried out in gendered terms, particularly when questions of sexuality and family honor came into play. Indeed, a few strikers confided to a municipal authority that the walkout did not begin as a labor dispute at all; rather, they said, it was touched off by "unimportant personal issues involving [Soto] and a female worker with whom the factory manager has [sexual] relations."3	2
It has become something of a commonplace for historians to think of "class" as a multiform cultural identity reflected in and structured by language. Many labor historians would agree with Gareth Stedman Jones's dictum, "It is not simply experience, but rather a particular linguistic ordering of experience" that constitutes the consciousness of working people.4 Yet here we are confronted with a case in which workers produced two dissimilar though not necessarily incompatible linguistic orderings of events. One was an "official record" set forth in the memorandum and related documents signed by the workers. It described a labor action pure and simple, prompted by workers' sense of solidarity and outrage at the firing of one of their own number. This was a rendition of events that Mexico's postrevolutionary politicians could understand and to which they might respond.5 The other version came to light through the workers' assertion that the strike had to do with "unimportant personal relations" between factory operatives. Their words hinted at a concealed history of backbiting between workers of different regional origins, expressed in this particular instance through gender relations. How can we reconcile these two interpretations of the same event?	3
The workers who subscribed to the memorandum in September 1927 cannot have been ignorant of the pervasive regionalist tensions that triggered their strike. We can only conclude that the document's silence on these matters constitutes an attempt to create an official record that misrepresented the complex events at the mill. By "misrepresentation," I do not mean outright untruth. I mean instead the process of distortion that occurs when an event with multiple antecedents and many possible interpretations is more or less intentionally shorn of all but one particular meaning. Misrepresentation occurs when historical actors articulate a version of events or of their own actions that they know to be incomplete or misleading. In the case at hand, labor leaders at La Virgen repeatedly turned to political authorities in order to resolve what at root was a parochial conflict. If they hoped to gain the politicians' sympathies, they needed to portray events at the mill as part of a conflict between labor unions comprised of politically conscious workers, not a petty spat between two factions of operatives. As a result, the official record that purports to explain events at La Virgen is characterized by exaggeration, dissimulation, misplaced jargon, and the omission of pertinent information. Yet even though labor leaders went to extremes to tell politicians and bureaucrats what they wanted to hear, a close examination of the official record nonetheless reveals quite a bit about how workers' social identity was created. Workers found in due course that class-based discourse functioned very well to express a collective social identity. As time passed and they grew accustomed to the language of class (and once conditions within the mill had changed sufficiently), workers proved entirely capable of organizing around their common material interests. By then, the language of class functioned to promote worker solidarity rather than to misrepresent workplace factionalism.	4
I hope to achieve two purposes by elaborating a hermeneutics of misrepresentation. First, in emphasizing the misrepresentation of events, I want to signal the necessity of examining experience, in addition to discourse, in the construction of social identity. As Marshall Sahlins and, more recently, William Sewell have argued, some events are literally unprecedented. Such events unfold in unexpected ways that challenge established norms and thus cannot be apprehended within the existing frameworks of meaning through which people make sense of the world. As historical actors struggle to affix a coherent meaning to complex events that are difficult to comprehend, they must necessarily refashion and update these frameworks of meaning.6 I argue that misrepresentation has an analogous potential to restructure the way individuals understand their own actions. To take the present example, there is reason to believe that workers did not unambiguously conceive of the 1927 strike as a movement for union recognition until after they had walked out over the firing of Soto. They initially understood their actions primarily in terms of the feud between locals and newcomers. Once the workers met with the federal inspector and chose to portray their behavior as a labor action rather than a regionalist tiff, however, they found it difficult to back down until they had achieved such ostensibly class-based demands as union recognition and the reinstatement of the fired worker. This sort of post facto adjustment to the meaning of events occurred again and again at the mill and eventually made it impossible to distinguish worker mobilizations based on regional origin from those based on self-conscious labor solidarity.	5
Second, the study of misrepresentation can help to specify how social identity is transformed when one set of social solidarities becomes expressed in terms of another. Historians have recognized for years that working people's sense of class is articulated in historically specific ways with other identities built around gender, ethnicity, and (in some instances), regional origin and local culture.7 Latin America has proved a particularly fertile ground for such studies.8 But the mechanisms through which workers' various social identities become intertwined have yet to be fully explained. Misrepresentation lies at the core of one such articulative process. Misrepresentation creates a linguistic bridge between previously discrete social identities and functions to map one onto another. It establishes an analogy that taps into the emotional capital bound up with one social solidarity and links or even transfers it to a new one. At La Virgen, for example, workers constructed solidarities in the early 1920s based on their regional origin. Local union leaders then misrepresented this regionalist tension through the language of class. Over time and through repeated acts of misrepresentation, these local leaders succeeded in grafting new, class-based meanings onto workers' behavior. This new sense of class proved far more durable than the small-town schism during which it was first invoked.	6
The half-dozen buildings that made up the complex of La Virgen lay 5 kilometers outside the township of Ciudad Hidalgo, next to a river that meanders through foothills of northeastern Michoacán.9 A coalition of regional and international investors built the factory in 1894 in the midst of Mexico's late nineteenth-century industrial boom. Located far from the great textile manufacturing centers in Mexico City and the states of Puebla and Veracruz, Ciudad Hidalgo had no nearby stock of experienced workers on which it could draw. The firm had to recruit a contingent of one hundred veteran workers from Puebla to get the mill running and teach the local weavers their new vocation. During La Virgen's heyday prior to the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), it employed around a thousand people, a thin majority of whom appear to have been proletarianized textile artisans from Ciudad Hidalgo. Yet the local pool of skilled labor never fully met the mill's requirements in its first twenty years of operation, not least because shutdowns in 1902, 1907, and 1913 forced contingents of factory operatives to emigrate. When production returned to normal, the firm hired small groups of textile workers from other parts of Mexico and as far away as Italy.10	7
Work in the mill paid well by local standards, but the labor was demanding, closely regulated, and dangerous. The turn-of-the-century electrical wiring constantly threatened to set fast-burning fires in the workshops, even in the 1920s and 1930s. Cotton fiber filled the air in some buildings, and people who worked in them constantly suffered from respiratory disorders or diseases such as tuberculosis.11 Apart from the physical dangers of textile work, foremen maintained strict discipline inside the factory. One operative later recalled that foremen locked the factory doors the moment a twelve-hour shift began. If a worker had not arrived on time, the foreman selected a substitute from the pool of men and women who always gathered at the entryway hoping for an extra shift. Any employee who missed three consecutive shifts was fired, no matter the reason.12	8
Despite harsh working conditions and the varied regional origins of La Virgen's prerevolutionary work force, no surviving evidence suggests that the operatives developed a particularly strong sense of regionalism or labor militancy before 1918 or so. This may have to do with the nature of mill work in Mexico around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the first place, textile workers numbered among Mexico's most mobile population, as a constant stream of experienced operatives, ex-artisans, and peasants-cum-workers moved among the great textile centers in central Mexico. Sometimes, they migrated to factories such as La Virgen in the more remote regions of the country as well. Many of these workers were unmarried, but entire families also migrated and sought employment together.13 This constant movement took its toll, particularly at the smaller mills. It sometimes splintered factory operatives into regional factions such as those that later arose at La Virgen, and it tended to undermine attempts to organize effective labor unions.14	9
Paternalist relations between mill owners and employees also dampened labor militancy in the prerevolutionary period. Paternalism sprouted deep roots in most nineteenth-century mills and probably permeated the shop floor at La Virgen as well. Mill owners throughout Mexico took it upon themselves to oversee the "moral development" of their workers by providing them with a modest education, foodstuffs, churches, and credit at the company store.15 Paternalism exercised a strong pull on workers because it derived from traditional, gendered family roles and established Catholic precepts that cast employers as the paterfamilias of "their" workers. Indeed, clerics often voiced support for non-confrontational industrial relations.16 Still, paternalist gestures could not always forestall labor discontent. The largest and most modern mills in the industrial heartland of central Mexico proved to be particularly infertile grounds for the development of personal relationships between workers and their typically foreign and absentee employers. Textile operatives declared more strikes than any other industrial workers during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), and the biggest factories of the textile sector were the crucible of some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most well-organized unions.17 One especially militant unionization effort in the region of Río Blanco, Veracruz, in 1906–1907 resulted in a strike followed by an acrimonious employers' lockout. The episode ended in a confrontation between mill operatives and the federal army that left scores of workers dead and revealed the brutal underside of the Díaz regime.18	10
The slaughter at Río Blanco echoed at La Virgen, where workers formed an organization to protest the killings and mounted a short strike of their own.19 Yet the protest appears to have been the mill's only major labor action before a devastating fire in 1906 and a revolution-induced cotton shortage drove its owners into bankruptcy. The tradition of labor quiescence at La Virgen evaporated in the postrevolutionary years, however. In 1918, Spanish-born financier Eusebio González bought the mill after a fire destroyed the textile factory he had owned in Salvatierra, a small town in the neighboring state of Guanajuato. In addition to giving La Virgen a new lease on life, he brought hundreds of skilled workers with him to Ciudad Hidalgo. Soon afterward, labor unrest associated with regional factionalism became a part of daily life at the mill.	11
The Salvatierran workers packed up their belongings, right down to dogs and cats, and trundled them the 60 kilometers to Ciudad Hidalgo. They soon made up around half the work force of the mill.20 They apparently concluded that their new home differed in key respects from Salvatierra, which was located in the heart of a region of Mexico known as the Bajío. The hacienda and the church had been the preeminent social institutions in the Bajío for hundreds of years. The region was a bastion of Hispanic traditionalism as well as of two major Catholic movements that affected most of western Mexico in the postrevolutionary years: the 1926–1929 Cristero guerrilla war fought by religiously devoted peasants and a smattering of middle-class Catholics against the federal government, and a reactionary social movement of the 1940s known as Sinarquismo. Both of these movements rejected the secular, modernizing, and class-based ideology that postrevolutionary politicians promoted.21 Salvatierra itself was the permanent seat of a parochial district and home to at least one major church-run development project, a peasant credit cooperative inspired by the social Catholicism associated with the 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII.22	12
Ciudad Hidalgo had a less traditional mien. Both geographically and culturally, the town was situated on the periphery of the Bajío. The impoverished haciendas around Ciudad Hidalgo employed only a handful of laborers and did not have the same influence on local society as their Salvatierran counterparts.23 La Virgen was the linchpin of the municipal economy, which also supported several small-scale logging companies, dry goods stores, and cottage industries producing everything from bottled mineral water to bricks.24 Likewise, the church cast less of a shadow over local affairs. To be sure, some of Ciudad Hidalgo's residents participated in the Cristero war and the Sinarquista movement, but the town lacked any notable social Catholic organizations such as Salvatierra's peasant cooperative. The parish church contended with a shortage of funds throughout the nineteenth century, and its religious confraternities had all but evaporated by 1900.25 Moreover, unlike the state of Guanajuato, Michoacán was a fountainhead of postrevolutionary populism. One of the revolution's preeminent intellectuals, Francisco J. Múgica, served as governor from 1920 to 1922 and helped to organize a self-sustaining agrarian movement made up of peasants who often dabbled with socialist rhetoric and anticlericalism.26 Lázaro Cárdenas, who eventually became postrevolutionary Mexico's most radical president (1934–1940), was governor between 1928 and 1932, during which time he tested out the brand of corporatist populism he would later use to transform the Mexican political system.27	13
Although the contrast between the local cultures of Ciudad Hidalgo and Salvatierra should not be overdrawn, González's management style brought regional differences to the fore. The mill owner offered his longtime employees some special inducements to make the move to Michoacán and treated them differently once they arrived. By 1921, 193 adult émigrés from Salvatierra (98 males and 95 females) lived in the small settlement surrounding the mill complex. He allowed these newcomers to move into the abandoned company housing adjacent to the factory.28 They were soon joined by a much smaller contingent of immigrants from the mill town of Atlixco, Puebla, who were almost certainly members of the CGT.29 González made sure that Salvatierrans received most of the top salaried positions at the mill.30 Finally, he boosted the little colony of newcomers by arranging for women from nearby peasant villages to set up a Saturday produce market next to the complex; that way, workers would not have to make the trip to the municipal market in Ciudad Hidalgo proper.	14
That González intended his conduct to fit within the framework of traditional paternalist relations was made clear by his promotion of religious institutions. In an uncommon procedure for the times, he channeled 10 percent of workers' salaries (the traditional diezmo tithe) to build a church near the mill and to contract the services of a priest. He also countenanced or actively encouraged the creation of a mutual aid society, which the Salvatierran workers probably brought with them from the old mill. Such "worker's circles," often inspired by social Catholic precepts, were intended to harmonize relations between workers and owners and act as a balm to class conflict.31 These policies had tangible advantages for the Salvatierrans. They received housing, education, easy access to commerce, and spiritual ministration right at the mill. It is not likely that González's actions similarly benefited the workers from Ciudad Hidalgo, most or all of whom lived in town and traveled 5 kilometers to work. The locals already had their own churches, schools, and markets in town, and they may well have looked askance at the garnishing of their wages to pay for such services at the mill. Nor did the locals have much of a voice in the workers' mutual aid society. Its secretary general was a foreman and Salvatierran native who continued to lead Salvatierran-controlled labor organizations during the contentious years to come.32	15
The Salvatierrans appear to have responded to González's paternalism in kind. They often addressed him as "Papa Chevo" (the Spanish-language diminutive of Eusebio), thus casting him as their symbolic father. Even seventy years later, one ex-operative fondly recalled the company picnics he provided.33 Paternalist relations did come under strain when workers pressed for higher wages, but even then labor leaders cast their demands within the larger framework of paternalism. A 1923 missive that Salvatierran workers sent the owner in the aftermath of a minor wage dispute began on a deferential note by expressing "the hope that your benevolence will not weary [fastidie] of us" and ended with a filial "in anticipation of your favors as always."34 Such verbal cues placed the letter squarely within the idiom of paternal relations and may have helped to remind González that his symbolic duty to exercise forbearance and generosity occasionally needed to be expressed in material terms as well. The workers from Ciudad Hidalgo showed decidedly less enthusiasm for Papa Chevo. The locals apparently resented what they viewed as González's preferential treatment of the newcomers. By 1921, local authorities began to complain of worker factionalism at the mill.35 Instead of asking the factory owner to redress their grievances, however, the locals turned to the government.	16
In 1923, the two groups of operatives took diametrical positions during the first major labor dispute of González's tenure. The problem began during one of the frequent instances in which factory administrators idled the mill for economic reasons. As the stoppage stretched on, the locals decided to demand their constitutionally mandated severance pay, equivalent to three months' salary. The Salvatierrans wanted to relinquish their severance wages in exchange for train fares and letters of recommendation to the big mills in the distant states of Veracruz or Puebla.36 At this juncture, the Ciudad Hidalgo faction inaugurated the tradition of inscribing a spurious public record of events at the mill. According to Salvatierran labor leaders, a group of Ciudad Hidalgans circulated a petition that purported to ask González to reopen the mill. Nearly all the operatives signed. But instead of sending the document to González, the locals affixed the signatures to a petition that requested payment of the severance wages and sent it to the state labor arbitration board (junta de concliliación y arbitraje). The Salvatierrans angrily retracted their signatures as soon as they realized how their rivals had put them to use.37 The native workers' gambit failed, but the particular thrust of their trickery merits attention: they had used the familiar idiom of paternalism (a request for the mill owner's indulgence) to convince their counterparts to sign a document that misrepresented workers' attitudes to political outsiders.	17
Whereas the Ciudad Hidalgo workers regarded government officials as useful allies, the newcomers distrusted bureaucrats. Salvatierran labor leaders often complained that the municipal authorities of Ciudad Hidalgo catered to the native sons whenever troubles arose at the mill. The newcomers told a federal inspector who arrived in midst of the severance pay dispute that they "constantly had to endure abuse" at the hands of locals. They cited several instances in which municipal authorities refused to punish Ciudad Hidalgo natives who had stoned their houses. But it turned out that the inspector had no greater sympathy for their plight than the municipal officials did. He sided with the Ciudad Hidalgo natives and accused the Salvatierrans of colluding with the mill owner, reporting to his superiors that "the workers from Zalvatierra [sic] assent to the directives given by the company management, which upsets the group of workers from C[iudad] Hidalgo." He also wrote that the Salvatierran workers had "fallen under the influence" of the company priest, who "never misses an opportunity to lecture the workers and who used his sermon [last] Sunday to counsel the workers to reject the indemnity to which they have a right."38 Most subsequent labor inspectors shared his attitude. In the midst of the troubles of 1927, the Department of Labor sent a Michoacán native with socialist credentials to investigate labor strife at the mill. This was hardly the sort of individual who might treat the Salvatierrans impartially. True to form, the inspector accused the newcomers of collusion with the mill owner and characterized them as "the Company's toadies [instrumentos]," of manifesting an "utterly clericalist disposition," and therefore of being "enemies of the current Government."39	18
By 1923, a clear line of regionalist animosity divided the two cliques of workers at La Virgen. The natives of Ciudad Hidalgo believed that the newcomers colluded with the mill owner to sustain the paternalist status quo and win all manner of perks. They readily turned to the good offices of the postrevolutionary bureaucracy if they thought it would help their case. On the other hand, the Salvatierran leaders perceived an unholy alliance between the native workers and various government officials who, they thought, intended to threaten their relationship with the owner and perhaps their religious practices as well. The workers' growing regionalist solidarities were soon reinforced by gendered conflicts that erupted in the mid-1920s. At issue was the protection of women's honor and control of female sexuality.	19
Four years after the Salvatierran workers arrived at the mill, the elections for the Michoacán state legislature pitted a young revolutionary firebrand from a notable Ciudad Hidalgo family against an established, old regime politician from another nearby town. The newcomers from Salvatierra supported the old-guard candidate, much to the disgust of the native workers. One day as the elections neared in 1922, a group of rowdies from Ciudad Hidalgo forced the daughters of Salvatierran labor leaders to drive their car off the road. The assailants, who were partisans of the local candidate, pointed pistols at the young women and ordered them to shout hurrahs for their man. Afterward, they apparently let the women go with no further ado. In response, the Salvatierran labor leaders and their political allies published a handbill entitled "Announcement to the Nation: Is There a Movement Afoot to Drown the Popular Will in Blood and Filth?" The Salvatierrans qualified the roadside encounter as "an unspeakable assault committed against . . . a group of helpless women, who were nearly the victims of a scandal [desgracia] when they were accosted in the middle of a public roadway" and charged that their adversaries had turned to violence because their candidate lacked popular support.40	20
The Salvatierran union leaders' blustery characterization of the event seems a bit overstated, given the circumstances. The assailants had not physically harmed the young women, after all, yet the Salvatierran men nonetheless described the episode as "unspeakable" and, moreover, emphasized their daughters' feminized helplessness through their allusion to an unnamed but potentially sexual "desgracia." All in all, the handbill seems more like an attempt to make political hay against its enemies than an actual appeal for justice. Its title misrepresented the local toughs' attack on the young women as an exclusively political event—an assault on the "popular will" of the "nation"—even though the document itself implied that feminine purity and regionalism were the main issues at stake. In this way, the document's writers recruited powerful notions of sexual integrity and family honor and placed them at the service of the political exigencies of the moment.	21
Women comprised about 5 percent of the work force of La Virgen in the mid-1920s, and they belonged to both the CROM and the CGT-affiliated unions. They were concentrated in the early phases of the production process, mainly in drawing and spinning cotton thread into yarns and applying sizing to them. They also transported materials within the factory and trimmed the finished bolts of fabric.41 As a result, men and women, Salvatierrans and Ciudad Hidalgans alike, worked in close proximity with each other.42 In an atmosphere heavy with factionalism and intrigue, gender relations became a powder keg. Men came to regard the protection of women's honor and the surveillance of women's sexuality as a domain in which to perpetuate their respective group's integrity and to contest that of their rivals. As mentioned before, an overt contest over control of women's sexuality underlay the strike in September 1927. The confrontation took place at a critical moment in labor union politics at the mill. In the months preceding the strike, factory management had repeatedly refused to negotiate a labor contract with the CROM workers on the grounds that the CGT represented the entire work force. Shop floor tensions had risen apace.43	22
In the midst of this agitation, Santiago Soto, a leader of the CROM workers' faction, quarreled with Refugio Olvera, a woman who managed the bobbin dispensary. Olvera was a native of Salvatierra, a member of the CGT, and also the lover of plant manager José Giraud. According to the anarchists' version of the event, Soto (who was a native of Puebla but a member of the Ciudad Hidalgo clique) grew angry one day when Olvera could not give him a full quota of fresh bobbins for his loom. An enraged Soto was said to have pushed his way through the window to Olvera's compartment, paused "to insult her with obscene words" (no doubt some unflattering reference to her relationship with Giraud), and grabbed up the first bobbins he could find.44 The CROM workers' version had it that Olvera refused to give Soto the yarn he needed for his loom, so he merely picked up some bobbins that were lying on a nearby countertop. At another point, they alleged that Giraud tried to force Soto to leave the factory by sabotaging his loom and then ordering him to leave his post.45 Whatever the case, the firm fired Soto for his role in the fracas. The CROM workers refused to work the rest of their shift, and a tussle broke out the following day when Giraud refused to meet with a group of CROM partisans.46	23
A labor inspector who investigated the matter discovered that this was not the first time the Soto family had tangled with the plant manager over issues of women's sexuality. Before he became the lover of Refugio Olvera, Giraud had carried on an illicit sexual affair with Santiago Soto's sister-in-law. Once Santiago Soto's brother, Amado, learned about the liaison, he divorced his wife and pledged his undying hatred for Giraud. But the episode had already revealed Amado's inability to control his wife's sexuality. To make matters worse from his perspective, it was rumored that his wife took up with the manager at the suggestion of her mother.47 If this is true, it raises the intriguing possibility that the two women may have deliberately chosen to use Refugio's body—perhaps a woman's most negotiable asset in 1920s Mexico—to break away from an unsatisfactory marriage and move up in the world.	24
The history of bad blood between the Soto family and Giraud lay at the root of the 1927 altercation in the bobbin dispensary. Olvera clearly knew about the grudge between the various parties. According to a relatively impartial labor inspector, she had cultivated "ill-will and jealousy against the whole Soto family, and she always sought to make trouble for them."48 The inspector's observations suggest that Olvera knowingly exploited the insecurity that the Soto men felt at having one of their number cuckolded by a leader of the anti–Ciudad Hidalgo, anti-CROM contingent. A man's inability to control his wife's behavior was regarded as humiliating in its own right, and as the roadside confrontation between Ciudad Hidalgo men and Salvatierran women had demonstrated five years previously, regionalist solidarities were defined in part by men's attempts to safeguard "their" women's sexuality. Thus the sexual dynamic that underlay Soto's firing further politicized the limits of male workers' patriarchy and rearticulated family honor as yet another component of regionalist solidarity. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that the scandal took place against the backdrop of a fierce competition to determine whether the owner of La Virgen would tolerate the formation of the Ciudad Hidalgans' labor union and accept a national, CROM-brokered labor contract for the textile sector.	25
Two principal factors made it attractive for operatives at La Virgen to embed their feud within the discourse of union politics and class consciousness. First, there was a close symmetry between the schism on the shop floor of La Virgen and the trajectory of Mexico's organized labor movement in the mid-1920s. A rivalry had simmered for years between the nation's two largest labor federations, and it reached the boiling point at mid-decade when CROM leader Luis Morones was promoted to minister of Industry, Commerce, and Labor. Morones's cabinet post, in addition to his close personal ties with President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928), gave the CROM a decisive advantage over the anarcho-syndicalist CGT, whose membership had begun to dwindle even before that time. Second, to a far greater extent than any of his predecessors, Calles celebrated class struggle in his political oratory. His class-based political discourse set the ideological tone for his administration and molded the sorts of language workers might use to good effect when they communicated with labor inspectors and politicians.	26
The alliance between the president and organized labor had been a long time in the making. Calles belonged to the dynasty of revolutionary leaders from the state of Sonora who rotated in the presidency between 1920 and 1928. In 1915, his political mentor had forged a pact with what was then Mexico's largest labor organization, a gambit that led to the fielding of symbolically important but militarily indecisive "Red Battalions" of workers to fight Pancho Villa's legions.49 This relationship soon soured, but the revolutionaries nonetheless included in Article 123 of the Constitution of 1917 provisions for an eight-hour day, the right to unionize, a minimum wage, and the establishment of labor arbitration boards. Moreover, Calles himself believed that the controlled unionization of ostensibly class-conscious workers would both set the nation down the path of modernization and build a populist coalition to support his regime. Indeed, he had promoted organized labor for most of his political career. He arranged the alliance between Sonorans and the CROM in 1919, and he used the various ministries he held between 1919 and 1923 to pave the way for the organization's expansion. Calles protected CROM-affiliated unions and tolerated a low level of strike activity during most of his administration, though the relationship broke down in the end.50 His public discourse therefore made ample use of the rhetoric of class. In a campaign speech in Michoacán, for example, he declared that the "working classes" made up the "soul and nervous system" of the nation, albeit ones whose "material and intellectual level" left something to be desired.51	27
The CROM's style of business unionism was conceived in the mold of the American Federation of Labor. The organization's prime mover, Luis Morones, believed that the relative smallness of Mexico's industrial proletariat demanded ideological flexibility and a willingness to cooperate with the government in order to win political concessions for workers. He handled his station with a pragmatism that veered increasingly into corruption as the years went by. The organization grew rapidly, and in 1924 it claimed a (no doubt inflated) membership well in excess of a million workers, enough to make it by far the most important labor central in the country.52 Morones also espoused the extremist anticlericalism that pervaded the Calles administration. In 1925, a group of CROM-affiliated radicals founded a schismatic church intended to mitigate the hegemony of Roman Catholicism, much to the dismay of the clergy and a good portion of the Mexican populace.53 Morones's collaboration with Calles was cut short only in 1928 after it became clear Morones would not be named heir to the presidency. The CROM leader consummated his fall from grace by resigning his ministry only days after his political enemies accused him of masterminding the assassination of Mexico's president elect, whose death at the hands of a religious fanatic threw the nation into a severe political crisis. As the dust began to settle, Calles emerged as the éminence grise of national politics, making the CROM and Morones superfluous. The labor federation's fortunes waned along with those of its leader, although it never completely withered away and remained a force to be reckoned with well into the 1930s.	28
The CGT was founded in 1921 by anarcho-syndicalist and communist leaders in Mexico City specifically as a radical alternative to the CROM's accommodating and partisan unionism. The communists soon withdrew, leaving the CGT to wage an arduous and increasingly futile battle against its officially sanctioned rival. Textile workers from Mexico City and the state of Puebla formed its strongest core of supporters, followed by trolley operators and a smattering of other workers based for the most part in Mexico City. The central was established with a claimed membership of 50,000 and 43 affiliate unions and soon distinguished itself for political independence and a hardline stance against the religious right.54 Yet these early successes masked fundamental weaknesses in leadership, organizational capacity, and ability to withstand governmental aggression, all of which put the CGT into decline as early as 1923.55 In 1925, CROM supporters took advantage of the federal government's thinly veiled support and began to undermine the CGT on a number of fronts. Street fights became an almost weekly occurrence in Mexico City as the CROM tried to penetrate textile mills there. That same year, the government struck another blow by declaring that only unions that represented a majority of a firm's workers would secure official recognition. This meant in practice that the CGT lost its legal standing wherever it had a minority presence on the shop floor. Beleaguered on all sides, the CGT by the end of the decade had lost most of its membership, its union discipline, and its commitment to direct action.56	29
If workers at La Virgen hoped to gain ascendancy for their faction in this superheated political atmosphere, they had little alternative but to join one national labor federation or the other and to pitch their public rhetoric accordingly. Whichever group could claim to represent a majority of workers at the factory would theoretically win the exclusive right to negotiate labor contracts and govern the shop floor on behalf of the entire work force. The Salvatierran faction acted first. In August 1925, union leaders reorganized the internal statutes of the mill's mutual aid society, rechristened it the "Syndicate of Free Laborers," and affiliated with the CGT.57 Since the Salvatierran workers were devout Catholics with little interest in changing their comfortable, patriarchal relationship with "Papa Chevo," their alliance with a national anarchist labor central renowned for its dedication to anticlericalism and class warfare might seem like an odd choice. Nevertheless, by joining the anarchist CGT, Salvatierran workers could squelch allegations by labor inspectors and partisan journalists that they were ideologically retrograde simpletons who kowtowed to factory administrators. Like the Salvatierrans, the CGT's national leadership usually found itself at odds with the federal labor bureaucracy. Nor was national leadership in any position to place ideological restrictions on the Salvatierran workers. Although the CGT had originated as a radical alternative to the CROM, by the mid-1920s its directorate desperately needed as many new recruits as it could muster. The organization's national leaders made repeated trips to the mill, but they showed no inclination to discipline its La Virgen affiliate just because its members committed a few ideological peccadilloes. Finally, it appears that the factory administrators gave at least tacit blessing to the new anarchist union and willingly negotiated labor contracts with it. The relationship between the union and the factory owner was so cozy that González's opponents claimed he had organized it himself.58	30
Only a few months after the formation of La Virgen's CGT affiliate (which the factory administration allegedly ordered all workers to join or face dismissal), the Ciudad Hidalgo natives decided to split off and form their own union.59 In December 1925, a number of workers calling themselves members of the CROM appeared before the state labor arbitration board to demand back pay after they had lost some shifts at the mill. This group soon declared a short and ultimately failed strike to demand company recognition for their union, even though they had no legal standing to negotiate on behalf of mill operatives.60 A few months later, a brief gunfight broke out between the rival factions that left one worker wounded on the shop floor.61	31
The unionization efforts at La Virgen soon attracted the attention of political outsiders, who had a vested interest in portraying the rivalry at the mill as an ideological battle between two factions of militant and ideologically sophisticated workers. Even though the CGT's weakness in the late 1920s hobbled its effectiveness as a political advocate, several of its regional affiliates wrote President Calles on behalf of the local at La Virgen complaining of the "brutal attacks" on "class-conscious workers" there.62 The CROM leadership was far more vocal in defense of its partisans. In early 1927, the CROM's official newspaper in Michoacán published a series of articles excoriating the mill owner and the pro-CGT workers. The paper charged that the "filthy Spaniard" (gachupín) González had "provoked" the split between workers.63 A few days later, it declared that the anarchists' actions were not those of "[class-]conscious workers" (obreros concientes) but rather of "pariahs and slaves who wish to kiss the whip that flogs them." The newspaper denounced the anarchists as the "unthinking instruments" of the mill owner and charged that their actions undermined the regional movement for workers' "emancipation and improvement."64 About this time, the CROM's national directorate wrote President Calles to allege that "communist" CGT workers in conjunction with the factory administration (an unlikely combination!) had undertaken a "formidable" effort to hobble "the genuine Representatives of the national workers' movement."65 Thus, while the two national labor federations differed on matters of doctrine, they agreed that the conflict at the textile mill revolved fundamentally around the question of how best to promote workers' class interests. Regional conflict simply did not fit within such an ideological schema.	32
It is in this historical context that the rhetoric and practice of labor unionization at La Virgen must be understood. The workers' subtle cultural differences, their incompatible orientations toward mill-owner paternalism, and, among the men, the battle for control of female sexuality had all become bound into a single, tightly interlaced matrix of regionalist contention. This essentially parochial schism was misrepresented to the outside world as an ideological conflict between competing labor unions, each of which claimed to represent workers' true class interests. Both groups of workers played along. In 1927, the Salvatierrans subscribed to a statement of principles declaring that "we accept class warfare as a fundamental principle and recognize that there is nothing in common between the laboring class and the exploitative class." Likewise, the CROM affiliate's founding principles included the somewhat ironic goal, given the circumstances, of achieving the "unification of all workers in order to empower [dar fuerza] the syndicate and thus mount an effective defense of the interests of labor."66	33
The Salvatierran workers wove the language of anarchism throughout their organization's official documents, in some instances reproducing verbatim segments of CGT's national statement of principals. Their bylaws pledged that the union would help mill workers "to defend ourselves and to educate ourselves, as well as to achieve [conquistar] the absolute emancipation of workers and peasants." The ultimate goal of the union, it said, was to achieve "Libertarian Communism."67 Even though it will never be possible to look into the hearts of historical actors, it is hard to regard these words as anything other than bald equivocations, at least to judge by the Salvatierrans' actions at the time. Yet we also know that the conflict among workers made it increasingly important to the Salvatierrans to preserve the structural integrity of their union. As factionalism deepened at the mill in 1927, the "anarchist" labor leaders wrote the governor to explain that the CROM workers—supported by a federal labor inspector—"have become frenzied in their efforts to usurp [our] freedom of thought and freedom of labor." They complained of "the continual difficulties that have arisen for our labor organization as a result of the bad faith [mala labor] of a certain group of workers . . . which is bent on [the] absorption [of our union]."68 Unlike workers' dubious declarations in favor of class warfare, this language elided workers' regionalist factionalism and their union affiliation, making it all but impossible to know where one identity ended and the other began.	34
Local CROM officials painted themselves as the bulwarks of "the noble cause of Organized Labor."69 They too needed an institutional expression of their group interests, and they too decried their competitors' attempts to "arrest the salutary activities" that the local affiliate had undertaken "on behalf of the working class."70 As the language and practice of national labor politics permeated everyday life at La Virgen, the leaders of the CROM faction took a further step and began to experiment with the rhetoric of revolutionary anticlericalism. In late 1927, as Cristero guerrillas began to take the field against government troops in western Mexico, the mill's CROM leaders complained that the anarchists were spreading disquieting rumors about them. It appears that the Salvatierrans had embarked on a campaign to broaden their union's membership by appealing to mill workers' religious sensibilities. Most if not all mill operatives were practicing Catholics, but both CROM leader Luis Morones and the government inspectors who visited the mill from time to time held notoriously anticlerical attitudes. Thus the CROM workers charged that the anarchists were "taking advantage of the religious fanaticism that exists in this region" in order to convince neutral workers at the factory that the CROM and President Calles intended to "do away with the Catholic religion." The anarchists must have enjoyed some success in their campaign, because the local CROM bosses asked the government to put a stop to their opponents' "unconstitutional" behavior.71	35
These crosscurrents of religious controversy apparently helped persuade the CROM clique to enfold anticlericalism into their political discourse a few years later. In late 1928 or early 1929, 44 workers in the anarchist union attempted to incorporate a mutual-aid fund under the unlikely moniker of "The 'Sacred Heart of Jesus' Cooperative Society."72 The name was incredibly provocative and ill-conceived, given the political atmosphere of the moment, and this suggests that the organization had existed for quite some time without its managers ever bothering to incorporate it formally. Whatever the case, municipal officials prudently declined to register the association using that particular appellation. But the damage had already been done. The CROM workers had just signed a pact of mutual cooperation with a new, statewide political organization established by Governor Cárdenas, who had taken office in 1928. Both organizations immediately seized on the anarchists' transgression of revolutionary orthodoxy. CROM labor leaders brought a motion before the state labor arbitration board requesting that the anarchist union be disbanded because of its religious affiliation. The board quickly ruled in their favor.73 The pro-CROM workers followed up this success by sending a delegation to present their case to the inaugural congress of Cárdenas's semi-official political organization. The CROM leaders argued that the mill's anarchist union should be quashed for its engagement in "political and religious issues."74	36
The matter did not end there. The firm ignored the state arbitration board's directive to abolish the anarchist union and pointed out that only federal officials had the authority to make such an order. Factory administrators then hired on a new contingent of anarchist sympathizers to assure that the pro-CGT faction (renamed "The 'Social Emancipation' Labor Union of Male and Female Workers of the 'La Virgen' Factory") maintained a numerical superiority in the mill.75 The coalition between Cárdenas and the now-decaying CROM meant it was quite likely that the state government would have continued to put pressure on the mill owner and the CGT workers, had the Great Depression not forced González to close the mill down in early 1930.	37
La Virgen's operatives clearly recognized, at least at some moments, that the invective spewed by the two unions during this period misrepresented events and social conditions there. We have already seen that some pro-CROM workers in 1927 reckoned that their union leaders had attempted to pass off the "personal" conflict between Santiago Soto and Refugio Olvera as a struggle between the union and factory management. Furthermore, the CROM partisans' repeated accusations that the anarchists collaborated with the mill owner suggests that they regarded their opponents' dedication to class struggle as politically expedient window dressing. The Salvatierrans also signaled their belief that much of the heated political rhetoric at La Virgen misrepresented social conditions there. In a meeting with the mayor of Ciudad Hidalgo in 1929, they argued that the CROM workers' alleged anticlericalism was nothing more than an artifice. Anarchist union leaders contended that "while it may be true" that some CGT members were practicing Catholics, "it would be childish to believe" that there were no Catholics in the CROM faction as well. In any case, they denied that the CGT had promoted a "religious conflict" at the mill, as their enemies alleged.76 In a letter to Governor Cárdenas that same year, they declared that the "nefarious" CROM leaders at the mill were simply trying to "recover their diminished union strength" through a campaign of "unfounded charges and calumnies . . . that create an atmosphere of mistrust at the mill."77	38
Yet the two factions' willingness to promote their group interests through the medium of union politics had repercussions far beyond the regionalist schism of the 1920s. No matter how cynical its initial motivation, the workers' participation in the organized labor movement exposed them to the practice of collective action and the postrevolutionary discourse of class. By the end of the decade, each faction of workers tentatively answered the calls to arms issued by their national directorates to mobilize around questions of national labor policy. As we have seen, the strike that broke out over the firing of Santiago Soto also became a struggle to achieve union recognition. The strikers soon added a second demand, that the mill abide by a national, CROM-approved convention that set salaries and working conditions in the textile sector. The company administration responded with a brief and ultimately unsuccessful lockout but eventually declared it would abide by the convention.78 Later that year, the CROM workers held a vigil to commemorate the "martyrs" of Río Blanco in conjunction with yet another futile strike for company recognition.79 At about the same time, the Salvatierran faction complied with a CGT directive to declare a strike in sympathy with a national walkout by an independent railroad workers' organization that the national CROM directorate intended to break. The CGT strikers at La Virgen managed to shut the mill down for a few days despite a government decree prohibiting any walkouts over the matter.80	39
Both of these episodes suggest that, at least at some junctures, mill operators were willing to expand their scope of action to coordinate with national labor movements. Moreover, the workers' increasing willingness to use the rhetoric of class indicates that to some extent they recognized its potential to advance their group interests. In fact, a group of CGT partisans sent their rivals a remarkable letter in 1929, after the CROM's general secretary had fallen afoul of the federal government. In it, the anarchist leaders invited their counterparts to join their union. They suggested that workers at La Virgen should put their "jealousies" and thirst for "vengeance" behind them, because "you know very well that our [mutual] antagonism makes it impossible to act in a way that benefits all the workers of this region, and the industrialist who presides over this factory takes advantage of that fact" to keep the work force divided and impoverished.81 Perhaps these individuals had developed an affinity for class-based politics after all.	40
If so, their conversion came late in the day. The Great Depression cut short the ferment at the mill and drove its owner once again into bankruptcy. La Virgen's machinery lay idle from 1930 until early 1935. In some respects, little had changed when the doors reopened. The mill's labor leaders again formed a local affiliate of a national labor federation. They continued to employ the language of class and to produce a politically palatable official record that purported to describe social conditions at the mill. They again wrote powerful politicians about such issues as their attempts to "oversee" the ratification of collective labor contracts and to "break the old molds and ensure that Revolutionary postulates become the reality of social justice."82 On the shop floor, unionized workers still threatened to strike when they felt that foremen's orders were intended to "mistreat this brotherhood [colectividad]."83 Yet social conditions at the mill had changed dramatically. Regionalist tensions had abated because half the Salvatierran workers, including most of the leadership of the old anarchist union, had left during the early 1930s to search for work elsewhere. The workers who remained behind had to struggle to make ends meet regardless of their regional origin. Most tried to find day jobs at nearby haciendas or timbering operations, although the founder of the CROM union managed to obtain a sinecure as a petty court clerk in Morelia.84 By the time the mill reopened, the national CGT had all but disintegrated, the CROM had fallen on very hard times, and the old mill owner, Eusebio González, had sold La Virgen to a distant relative.85 Finally, Michoacán's Lázaro Cárdenas had become president of Mexico, established a new national labor organization dubbed the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), and undertaken the programmatic support of organized labor that ultimately led to his dramatic nationalization of petroleum reserves in 1938.86	41
The radically changed context of work at La Virgen in the 1930s makes it impossible to detect the persistence of the sort of misrepresentation that so characterized the previous decade. Instead, several fragments of evidence suggest that workers engaged in collective action and employed the language of class in order to express the difficulties they faced as a group rather than to placate political elites or pursue an internal rivalry. For example, about 400 unemployed operatives organized a mutual aid society soon after the mill closed down. This group sent a missive to the governor of Michoacán in early 1934 asking him to help renew operations at the mill. The authors included both natives and non-natives of Ciudad Hidalgo who explained that the closure of the factory had impoverished "us workers as well as local commerce and the people [el pueblo] in general." They wrote that "we no longer have anywhere to earn the sustenance of our families" and suggested that they might run the mill as a cooperative if no entrepreneur could be found to reopen it.87 A few months later, the unemployed workers sent another letter that described their attempts to renew operations as "an important struggle on behalf of the workers and commerce" of the town.88	42
Just as the social context in which workers employed the language of class had altered, their reasons for undertaking collective action appear to have changed as well. Absent the regional rivalry, workers proved quite capable of cooperating with each other. At first perhaps, they had little choice. President Cárdenas himself told the workers that he would allow the formation of only one union at the factory, and that its statutes must be approved by CTM leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano.89 When the time came to organize the local chapter, a local bureaucrat arrived at La Virgen to guard against the establishment of any splinter groups.90	43
Although the operatives had some help in learning to work together, it also appears that they made a conscious effort to put regionalism behind them. Ciudad Hidalgo natives who had been affiliated with the CROM in the previous decade organized and led the new union, but they chose to give it a name associated with the old, anarchist organization.91 Workers' solidarity was further demonstrated when a strong majority chose to accept a reduction in their wages to ensure the mill's solvency. They restored contributions to the mill's chapel as well, much to the disgust of Cárdenas.92 In 1945, the union set up a health insurance cooperative that functioned continuously until it was replaced by the state-run social security agency in 1962. Finally, when the mill's economic fortunes took a downturn in 1969, the 216 operatives who still worked there, all of them men, formed a cooperative to take over ownership and day-to-day operations. The mill limped along like this for two decades more until it closed its doors for good in 1992, two years shy of its one hundredth birthday.93	44
Workers might have achieved this unity of purpose even had the regionalist schism of the 1920s not been transformed into an inter-union struggle. On the other hand, the workers' sense of solidarity no doubt received a boost when the language of class succeeded in translating deep-seated regionalist solidarities into the practice of labor union activism. The chief mechanism of this process was what I have defined as misrepresentation. The events of the 1920s that union leaders depicted as simple labor actions in fact had multiple and cross-cutting antecedents and indeterminate meanings. Only in retrospect do the workers' challenge to factory administrators, their efforts to gain union recognition, their inscription of missives to political elites, and their strikes appear to have forged "class consciousness." With the passage of time, however, labor leaders' repeated use of the language of class to "explain" events at La Virgen to the outside world slowly shifted away from misrepresentation and began to function as a discourse that galvanized workers to act in what some of them apparently had come to regard as their collective interests. The social memory of regionalist identity faded, and only that associated with class remained.	45
Some form of misrepresentation probably takes place whenever a new social identity is constructed, or at least whenever a determinate group of individuals sets about trying to attach novel meanings to events. Identity formation necessarily occurs against the background of historical actors' other preexisting identities. These older social identities are often recruited to help create the new one and become ramified within it. In the period before a social identity becomes relatively well set—and perhaps afterward as well—historical actors' other identities present multiple frameworks through which they can try to make sense of events. In such circumstances, an attempt to reduce a complex event to one privileged meaning must do so by what I have called misrepresentation. Sometimes, historical actors recognize this process for what it is: an effort to manipulate the meaning of events, often for "political" reasons. People may reject such obvious attempts at misrepresentation and therefore refuse to modify their outlook. In other instances, such as that of La Virgen, misrepresentation functions in more unobtrusive ways and produces a rendering of social reality that becomes more broadly accepted over time. In this fashion, a new and relatively unambiguous meaning is attached to behaviors and events that were anything but uncomplicated in the doing.	46
Christopher R. Boyer is an assistant professor of history at Kansas State University and an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Friedrich Katz. This article is an offshoot of his work on the agrarian movement in postrevolutionary Mexico. His forthcoming book on that subject is titled Fields of the Revolution: Land, Class, and Citizenship in Agrarian Michoacán, 1920–1935. He is now at work on a new project on the social history of forest use in Mexico from 1880 to the present. Notes Previous versions of this article were presented at the University of Kansas Seminar on Social and Economic History and at the 1998 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association. I would like to thank Margaret Chowning, Alex Saragoza, Michael Snodgrass, Amy Shannon, Drew Wood, and Sue Zschoche for their observations. I am particularly indebted to Matt Karush as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of the AHR, whose comments allowed me to correct some inaccuracies and conceptual shortcomings. Errors that have escaped these dragnets are the result of my own dogged determination. Funds for research were provided by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education and a University Small Research Grant from Kansas State University. 1 J. Carmen Ugalde to Plutarco Elías Calles, September 7, 1927, caja 1159, ramo Departamento del Trabajo, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter, DT/AGN). 2 "Acta," September 19, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN; "Informe del Presidente Municipal de Ciudad Hidalgo," October 25, 1927, 2.331.1 (13)-2, ramo Dirección General de Gobierno, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter, DGG/AGN). 3 Presidente Municipal to Enrique Ramírez, September 14, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 4 Gareth Stedman Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," in Jones, ed., Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 101. Other pathbreaking discussions of the role of language in structuring class identity are Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), especially the essay "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History"; and William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980). Synoptic discussions of the "linguistic turn" in labor history include Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana, Ill., 1993); Geoff Eley, "Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996); and Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990). See also the debate on class in Social History, in 17–20 (May 1992–January 1995). 5 My understanding of the "official record" is closely related to what James C. Scott calls the "public transcript." For Scott, however, the public transcript is the record of a discussion that takes place between dominant and subordinate actors. The official record I refer to is slightly different in that it is produced by two factions of workers (that is, two different groups of subordinate actors) who address their complaints about each other to politicians (that is, dominant actors). See Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990). 6 Anthropologists sometimes refer to these frameworks of meaning as cultural "structures." See William H. Sewell, Jr., "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (December 1996): 840–81. Sewell's article builds on Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), and its companion volume, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985). For a thoughtful application of this mode of thinking to the Mexican context, though in very different terms, see Alan Knight's discussions of "the logic of revolution" in The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986), 1: 301–09; and 2: 5. Of course, it can be hard to establish what actually occurred in any given event sequence and even harder to reconstruct how historical actors perceived it. One need look no further than the controversy between Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over the proper interpretation of the murder of Captain Cook. See Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J., 1992); and Sahlins, How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago, 1995). For an overview of this debate, see Robert Borofsky, "Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins," Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 255–65, as well as comments by Herb Kawainui Kane, Obeyesekere, Sahlins, and Borofsky in the same issue. 7 Historians often ignore regional origin as a social identity. For a notable exception, see Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); and her discussion of analogous findings by other sinologists in "Regional Identity, Labor, and Ethnicity in Contemporary China," in Elizabeth J. Perry, ed., Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 228. 8 Recent works that treat the intersection of gender and class in Latin America include Verena Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations in São Paulo Plantations, 1850–1980 (New York, 1988); Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (Durham, N.C., 1993); Carmen Cinira Macedo, A reprodução da desigualdade: O projeto de vida familiar de um grupo operário (São Paulo, 1979); John D. French and Daniel James, eds., The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box (Durham, 1997); and Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds., Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990: Creating Spaces, Shaping Transitions (Tucson, Ariz., 1994). Some recent studies on class and ethnicity include George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison, Wis., 1980); and Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison, 1991); Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton, N.J., 1985); and Winthrop R. Wright, Café con Leche: Race, Class and National Image in Venezuela (Austin, Tex., 1990). For studies that consider regional culture in addition to other identities, see Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham, 1998); and June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York, 1979). 9 The name "Ciudad Hidalgo" is in fact an anachronism. The present municipality of Ciudad Hidalgo was known as Taximaroa until 1908. That year, the Michoacán state legislature changed the name to "Villa Hidalgo" in homage to the nineteenth-century Mexican insurgent Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. The name changed again in 1922, when the congress elevated the municipality from a "township" (villa) to a "city" (ciudad). For purposes of clarity, I will refer to the municipality as "Ciudad Hidalgo" throughout. 10 José Alfredo Uribe Salas, La industria textil en Michoacán, 1840–1910 (Morelia, Michoacán, 1983), 144–58; Ramón Alonso Pérez Escutia, Taximaroa: Historia de un pueblo michoacano (Morelia, Michoacán, 1986), 336. 11 Uribe Salas, La industria textil, 169–70. 12 Isael Zaldívar, interview with the author, Ciudad Hidalgo, February 21, 1995. 13 Bernardo García Díaz, Un pueblo fabril del porfiriato: Santa Rosa, Veracruz (Mexico City, 1981), 30–41; Mario Trujillo Bolio, Operarios fabriles en el valle de México, 1864–1884 (Mexico City, 1997), 91–165; Carmen Ramos Escandón, La industria textil y el movimiento obrero en México (Iztapalapa, 1988), 72–77. 14 Bernardo Díaz, "Migraciones internas a Orizaba y formación de la clase obrera en el Porfiriato," in Victoria Novelo, ed., Historia y cultura obrera (Mexico City, 1999), 117. 15 Dawn Keremitsis, La industria textil mexicana en el siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1973), 212 and 212–15 generally. 16 On paternalism in Mexican labor relations, see Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 13–26; William E. French, A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1996), 63–85; and Michael Snodgrass, "The Birth and Consequences of Industrial Paternalism in Monterrey, Mexico, 1890–1940," International Labor and Working-Class History 52 (Spring 1998): 115–36. For a careful discussion of the intertwining of material and religious paternalism, see Todd A. Diacon, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil's Contestado Rebellion, 1912–1916 (Durham, N.C., 1991), esp. 37–43. 17 Rodney D. Anderson, Outcasts in Their Own Land: Mexican Industrial Workers, 1906–1911 (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), 68–97. 18 Anderson, Outcasts, 103–10, 137–71; García Díaz, Un pueblo fabril, 87–155; Moisés González Navarro, Historia moderna de México, Daniel Cosío Villegas, ed., Vol. 4: El Porfiriato: La vida social (Mexico City, 1957), 322–38. 19 Uribe Salas, La industria textil, 154, 185; Pérez Escutia, Taximaroa, 334–36. 20 The newcomers numbered somewhere between 175 and 250 of the 500 or so workers at La Virgen during the early 1920s. See "Informe" of Inspector de Trabajo Melitón V. Romero, March 10, 1923; and "Informe" of J. Rodríguez, April 16, 1923, both in caja 685, exp. 6, DT/AGN. 21 See Pablo Serrano Alvarez, La batalla del espíritu: El movimiento sinarquista en el Bajío (1932–1951), 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1992); D. A. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: Léon, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1978); Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; and Luis González, Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia (Mexico City, 1968). 22 Edmundo Contreras to Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra, May 22, 1924, caja 39, exp. 308, Fondo Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra, Archivo Histórico de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City. On social Catholicism, see Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, El Catolicismo social: Un tercero en discordía; Rerum Novarum, la "cuestión social" y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (1891–1911) (Mexico City, 1991); Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1973–74), 2: 212–31; and González Navarro, El Porfiriato, 360–68. 23 See Santiago Monterrosa to Departamento del Trabajo, Mexico City, November 29, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN; and "Informe" of Melitón V. Romero to Departamento del Trabajo, March 10, 1923, caja 685, exp. 6, DT/AGN. 24 Pérez Escutia, Taximaroa, 310–40. 25 Pérez Escutia, Taximaroa, 214–19, 227–33. 26 On Michoacán's agrarian movement, see Christopher R. Boyer, "Old Loves, New Loyalties: Agrarismo in Michoacán, 1920–1928," Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (August 1998): 419–55; Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Chicago, 1977); and Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham, N.C., 1999). On Guanajuato's, see Francisco Javier Meyer Cosío, Tradición y progreso: La reforma agraria en Acámbaro, Guanajuato (1915–1941) (Mexico City, 1993). 27 On Cárdenas's government in Michoacán, see Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; Christopher R. Boyer, Fields of the Revolution: Land, Class, and Citizenship in Agrarian Michoacán, 1920–1935 (forthcoming), chaps. 6–7; and Eitan Ginzberg, "Abriendo nuevos surcos: Ideología, política y labor social de Lázaro Cárdenas en Michoacán, 1928–1932," Historia mexicana 48 (January–March 1999): 567–633. 28 See list of residences of signatories of "Acta destacada notarial por receptoría, referente a la constitución del 'Sindicato de Obreros Progresistas de la Fábrica "La Virgen"'" (hereafter, "Progresistas"), February 28, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 29 L. Zingúñegui Tercero, Zinapécuaro: Sus riquezas, su historia, su porvenir (Mexico City, 1922), 91, 130; "Informe" of Santiago Monterrosa, November 29, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. The Atlixco workers arrived in 1922, the same year that a CGT-sanctioned strike in Atlixco led to massive layoffs of workers. See José Rivera Castro, La clase obrera en la historia de México, Vol. 8: En la presidencia de Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928) (Mexico City, 1983), 121. 30 The weaving room supervisor, chief security guard, and at least one shift manager were Salvatierran natives; a handbill noted that the daughters of mill administrators were Salvatierran natives, and several observers commented on the close affinity between the Salvatierran operatives and the white-collar workers of the mill. See "Copia . . . de la causa instruida contra el administrador de la Fábrica 'La Virgen' . . . ," caja 1159, DT/AGN. 31 Interview with Zaldívar; see also Marjorie Ruth Clark, Organized Labor in Mexico (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1934), 86–91. 32 "Acta 38: Constitución del Sindicato de Obreros Independientes de la Fabrica de Hilados y Tejidos 'La Virgen,'" September 9, 1925, portfolio entitled "Juez de 1a Instancia, 1925," Archivo Municipal de Zitácuaro; El Trabajador (Morelia) (March 13, 1927): 1. 33 Luis Martínez, interview by the author, Ciudad Hidalgo, February 21, 1995. 34 Carlos Rico, et al., to Eusebio González, February 14, 1923, caja 685, exp. 6, DT/AGN. 35 Presidente Municipal Vidalgo Francisco Patiño to Secretaría de Gobernación, July 7, 1921, B.2.51–198, DGG/AGN. 36 Inspector del Trabajo J. Rodríguez to Departamento del Trabajo, April 11, 1923, caja 685, exp. 6, DT/AGN. 37 Rodríguez to Departamento del Trabajo, April 11, 1923. See a similar case in Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt, 113–15. 38 "Informe" of J. Rodríguez, April 16, 1923, caja 685, exp. 6, DT/AGN. 39 Nicolás Ballasteros to Departamento del Trabajo, July 4, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 40 "Manifiesto a la Nación: ¿Se Pretende Ahogar en Sangre y Fango la Voluntad Popular?" June 20, 1922, B.2.74.1–13, DGG/AGN. 41 "Acta destacada . . . ," March 5, 1927; and "Lista General de los obreros de la Fábrica de Algodón 'La Virgen,'" November 14, 1927, both in caja 1159, DT/AGN. 42 See also Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, "Talking, Fighting, Flirting: Workers' Sociability in Medillín Textile Mills, 1935–1950," in French and James, Gendered Worlds. 43 "Progresistas" to Enrique Ramírez, June 28, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 44 For example, El trabajador, March 6 and 13, 1927; and "Progresistas" to Departamento del Trabajo, September 28, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 45 Carmen Ugalde to Plutarco Elías Calles, Ciudad Hidalgo, September 7, 1927; Presidente Municipal to Enrique Ramírez, September 14, 1927; and "Acta" September 19, 1927, all in caja 1159, DT/AGN. 46 "Copia . . . de la causa instruida contra el administrador de la Fábrica 'La Virgen' . . . ," caja 1159, DT/AGN. 47 "Informe" of Santiago Monterrosa, November 29, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 48 "Informe" of Santiago Monterrosa, November 29, 1927. 49 On the alliance between the constitutionalists and the Casa del Obrero Mundial, see John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin, Tex., 1978), 126–36; Barry Carr, El movimiento obrero y la política en México, 1910–1929 (Mexico City, 1976), 57–72; and Knight, Mexican Revolution, 2: 316–21. 50 Carr, El movimiento obrero, 82–86, 127 and following; Clark, Organized Labor, 45–147; and Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries in Mexico (Baltimore, 1976). 51 "Las clases trabajadores son el nervio de la nación," in Carlos Macías, ed., Plutarco Elías Calles: Pensamiento político y social; Antología (1913–36), abridged edn. (Mexico City, 1992), 95–96. 52 On the CROM, see Gregg Andrews, Shoulder to Shoulder? The American Federation of Labor, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1924 (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 82–123; Carr, El movimiento obrero, 108–34; and Rocío Guadarrama, Los sindicatos y la política en México: La CROM (1918–1928) (Mexico City, 1981). 53 Meyer, La Cristiada, 2: 143–66. 54 Rivera Castro, La clase obrera, 114–19; Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 159–77; Guillermina Baena Paz, "La Confederación General de Trabajadores, 1921–1931," Revista mexicana de ciencias políticas y sociales 83 (1976): 113–86. 55 Rivera Castro, La clase obrera, 133–37. 56 Rosendo Salazar, Historia de las luchas proletarias de Mexico, 1923 a 1936, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1938–56), 1: 191–210; Clark, Organized Labor, 83–85. 57 On the origins of the syndicate, see writ of amparo by Arturo Valenzuela, December 4, 1925, caja 233, exp. 7, ramo Amparos, Archivo Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Michoacán, Morelia (hereafter, A/AHPEM); and writ of amparo by Arturo Valenzuela, December 11, 1926, caja 253, exp. 7, and caja 257, exp. 10, A/AHPEM. 58 El trabajador (March 6, 1927): 1. 59 "Informe" of Santiago Monterrosa to Departamento del Trabajo, November 26, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 60 "Informe" of Presidente Municipal Pascual Abascal, October 28, 1926, caja 253, exp. 7, A/AHPEM. 61 Argos (Zitácuaro) (February 14, 1926): 5. 62 See, for example, Sindicato de Obreros y Obreras de la Fábrica "El Merino" and Trabajadores de la Fabrica "El Pilar" to Secretario de Gobernación, July 1927, 2.331.8(13)-3, DGG/AGN. 63 El trabajador (March 6, 1927): 1. 64 El trabajador, March 6 and 13, and May 19, 1927. 65 R. Treviño and Luis Navarro to Presidente de la República, July 30, 1927, 2.331.8(13)-3, DGG/AGN. 66 "Acta destacada . . . ," February 28, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 67 "Acta destacada . . . ," February 28, 1927. Compare this passage to the CGT constitution, found in Luis Araiza, Historia del movimiento obrero mexicano, 5 vols. (Mexico City, 1964–66), 4: 56–66. 68 "Progresistas" to Enrique Ramírez, June 28, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 69 "Progresistas" to Rafael Sánchez Tapia, March 2, 1936, 523.4/60, Papeles Presidenciales de Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter, LCR/AGN). 70 Emiliano Correa, Secretario General de la Federación de Obreros y Campesinos de Ciudad Hidalgo (hereafter, "Federación") to the Confederación Revolucionaria Michoacana del Trabajo, circa April 10, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 71 "Federación" to Luis Morones, December 30, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 72 "Informe" of Jorge Aguirre, May 23, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 73 "Informe" of the Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo, July 17, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 74 "Federación" to J. Jesús Rico, October 25, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 75 "Informe" of Jorge Aguirre, June 1, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN; Confederación General de Trabajadores to Pascual Ortiz Rubio, September 10, 1930, 2.331.8(13)-3, DGG/AGN. 76 Acta of "Progresistas," April 30, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 77 Antonio A. Galván to Gobernador de Michoacán, May 26, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 78 "Informe" of Santiago Monterrosa, November 29, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 79 Precepto Sánchez, et al., to Luis Morones, January 7, 1928, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 80 "Informe" of Monterrosa, November 29, 1927, caja 1159, DT/AGN; on the national aspects of the strike, see Clark, Organized Labor, 113–15. 81 Refugio A. Galván, et al., to "los componentes del grupo de Obreros y Campesinos de Ciudad Hidalgo, Mich[oacán]," August 1, 1929, caja 1159, DT/AGN. 82 Sindicato de Obreros Progresistas adh. a la C.T.M. to Rafael Sánchez Tapia, March 2, 1936, 523.4/60, LCR/AGN; J. Jesús Padilla to Lázaro Cárdenas, December 11, 1935, 703.1/243, LCR/AGN. 83 Sindicato de Obreros Progresistas adh. a la C.T.M. to Departamento del Trabajo, September 7, 1938, caja 258, exp. 15, DT/AGN. 84 Interviews with Zaldívar and Martínez; J. Jesús Padilla to Lázaro Cárdenas, December 11, 1935, 703.1/243, LCR/AGN. 85 Pérez Escutia, Taximaroa, 336–37. 86 Arturo Anguiano, El estado y la política obrera del cardenismo (Mexico City, 1973); Jonathan C. Brown, "Acting for Themselves: Workers and the Mexican Oil Nationalization," in Brown, ed., Workers' Control in Latin America, 1930–1979 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Adolfo Gilly, El cardenismo, una utopía mexicana (Mexico City, 1994), 243–52; and Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 216–41. 87 "Memorial de los suscritos obreros . . . ," May 25, 1934, caja 1, ramo Industria y Comercio, Archivo Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán, Morelia (hereafter, CP/AHPEM). 88 La Comisión to Presidente de la H. Cámara Nacional de Comercio, June 6, 1934, caja 1, CP/AHPEM. 89 Interview with Zaldívar. 90 Presidente de la Federación Agraria y Sindicalista to Lázaro Cárdenas, February 9, 1937, 433/14, LCR/AGN. 91 "Progresistas" to Rafael Sánchez Tapia, March 2, 1936, 523.4/60, LCR/AGN. 92 Presidente de la Federación Agraria y Sindicalista to Lázaro Cárdenas, February 9, 1937, 433/14, LCR/AGN. 93 Interviews with Martínez and Zaldívar.

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