Against the rules: collective and individual resistance on the Ferrocarriles Unidos de Yucatán, 1910-1935

Abstract

ABSTRACT The opening of the Mexican revolution in 1910 created opportunities for Mexico’s small industrial working class to push forward its demands and desires. Although the revolution came late and initially from above in the Yucatán, workers in the region’s Ferrocarriles Unidos de Yucatan (FUY), took advantage to create spaces of relative freedom and power for themselves through both individual and collective resistance. Using the company’s personnel records, the article traces both processes, the former through individual conflicts (mostly in the shadows), the latter through three great railroad strikes in different moments of the critical henequén market for the peninsula, movements that progressively shook the region, 1911, 1922, and 1935. Taking advantage of a favorable labor market with a scarcity of skilled workers, railroad workers won spaces of comparative freedom and increasingly powerful unions. Eventually they even won union control over the company, but they also lost some of their ability to control their own unions. On balance, the combination of individual and collective resistance gave Yucatecan railroad workers a much better life and work world than before the revolution, somewhat akin to other Mexican industrial workers engaged in their own labor struggles during this period.