The construction of the minimum wage and nutrition in Mexico in the early 20th century

Abstract

Objective/Context: This article follows some of the debates around the creation of the minimum wage mandate in Mexico during the 1930s. I focus on how different actors used science to justify their demands, especially the need to use physiological and nutritional information to know the population’s requirements. As a result, the heterogeneous way to fix the wages at the local (municipal) level changed with the proclamation of a federal mandate in the 1930s, using the most recent cost of living surveys, which included the nutritional requirements for the workers. Methodology: Following the methods used by the history of science, this article gives a panoramic view of the problems that existed before the federal minimum wage mandate and concerning the use of science as a legitimizing tool of the post-revolutionary state. Originality: This article makes a brief historical reconstruction of the minimum wage in the 1930s, and its federalization, which is absent from historiography, and proposes to articulate the history of science and its influence on economic and social accounts. Conclusions: This article shows how political and social projects—like the definition of a minimum wage—depended on science to obtain authority and, in turn, how these social projects provided inputs for the construction of specialized scientific lines of research.