The Politics of Frustration in Rural Mexico, 1938–52

This paper assesses relations between the post-1940s Mexican state, peasants, and industrial laborers by looking at the cases of two large-scale sugar production cooperatives in south-central Mexico.  The state adopted a top-down, two-pronged approach to negotiation with the two groups inside the cooperatives. While being more amenable to negotiation with workers and their representative organizations, the state saddled peasants with organizations that tended to be chaotic, politically compromised, and ineffectual. The state's actions represented a deliberate tactic to forge a more subservient rural proletariat class, and as a result, workers accrued substantial benefits while peasants saw little improvement in their status. In spite of their frustration, peasants used innovative strategies to make their voices heard at the regional and national levels. They formed their own autonomous organizations, skillfully manipulated patron-client relations, appropriated a language of economic modernization, and adopted increasingly radical political approaches.  Because peasants responded in a multitude of ways in the 1940s, they represented the vanguard of popular mobilizations that followed in subsequent years.