Autonomy Reconsidered: Industrialists and the State in Mid-Twentieth-Century Mexico

This paper seeks to reopen questions about the relationship of industrialists and the ruling-party controlled state in Mexico from 1940-1960.  Despite the fact that industry emerged as the motor of the Mexican economy in the 1930s and soon drove the processes by which Mexico shed its rural agrarian roots to become a largely urban and industrial country, industry and industrialists have received scant attention from historians in recent decades.  When scholars do consider industrialists, they tend to highlight the conservative turn of the PRI in the 1940s and the ways in which business and political elites colluded to fulfill their shared interests. 

Drawing on original research about industrial policy and organizations, my paper explores the heterogeneous foundations underlying the stability of Mexico’s mid-century state.  It goes in a new direction by considering the malleability of statist industrialism as a political project into the 1940s and beyond.  It seeks to “decenter” state power through capturing the varied responses of regional industrialists to shifts in state policy and authority.  For example, the emphasis on 1940 as a major point of reversal of the Revolution has meant that scholars have tended to overlook the historical continuities in the process of state formation after 1940.  Most notable was the ruling party’s ambition to create a stable political system that could survive enduring social and political opposition, including from a range of regional industrialists.  Moreover, while the ruling party incarnated dominant class interests in important ways by the 1940s, industrialists were neither necessarily contributory nor collusive in the construction of a centralized state.  In the end, I argue that statist industrialism was a nationalist project that often accommodated, or at least tolerated the eclectic strains of regional industrialist resistance to the state’s consolidating and centralizing pull.