Review by Choice Review
In this important addition to the social history of modern Mexico, French analyzes class formation among workers in northern Mexican mining communities during the early 20th century. Drawn largely from regional archival records and those of American mining enterprises, this study departs significantly from recent labor histories such as Rodney Anderson's Outcasts in Their Own Land: Mexican Industrial Workers, 1906-1911 (CH, Jan'77), which have emphasized unionization disputes during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. French's analysis focuses on persistent and changing working-class cultural and social values in a period of unparalleled Mexican economic development, modernization, and political upheaval. The author attributes many new worker attitudes to the pressures exerted by local political leaders, middle-class reformers, and paternalistic American mine operators. Their efforts to transform rural migrants entering mining communities into productive and respectable participants in an emerging capitalistic economy were especially evident in policies and regulations intended to control alcohol consumption, gambling, and brothels in confined urban spaces. Carrying his analysis into the early 1920s, French delineates the extent to which the moral reform of laborers in northern Mexico succeeded during two decades of revolution and civil war. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. A. Gagliano Loyola University of Chicago
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
