Railroaded: The Railway Strikes of 1959 and the Red Baiting of Demetrio Vallejo Robert Alegre, Ph.D. University of New England
In 1958 and 1959, railway workers spearheaded the largest labor unrest since the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Aided by teachers and workers in the electrical, telegraph, and petrol industries railway men and women went on strike three times in less than a year, securing a remarkable 16.6% pay increase as well as medical and housing benefits for the families of workers employed by the government-run Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México. However, just as workers and their families celebrated their victories, the government repressed strikers as they mobilized to extend their gains to colleagues employed at privately-owned railway companies.
I use the trial against Demetrio Vallejo, the leader of the strikes, as a window into Cold War politics and the decline of the Mexican Left. The paper argues that the case against Vallejo and other imprisoned labor activists reflected the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) Cold War policy of de-radicalizing the Left. I draw on never-before-used sources, such as Vallejo’s trial papers housed in the Mexican National Railway Archive in Puebla as well as the transcript of Elena Poniatowska’s interview with Vallejo, stored in Poniatowska’s private collection. I complement these sources with oral histories as well as company documents housed in the railway archive, Mexican government documents from the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City and U.S. State Department documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.