Petroleum Laborers, Rural Land, and the Rhetoric of Resource Nationalism in 1930s Mexico

This paper is about the relationship that petroleum workers developed toward rural land in northeast Mexico. Studying land-petition cases by oil laborers in 1930s Veracruz, I show that they spoke a language of revolutionary justice that included requests for land not unlike those made by peasants during the same period. Mexico’s economic agenda after the revolution of 1910-1920 emphasized financial sovereignty and industrialization mainly through the development of the oil industry and a massive agrarian reform. To achieve these goals, the regime pushed individuals to demarcate their participation in the country’s political life by clearly defining their “economic sector.” Peasants and industrial laborers, each confined in well-established confederations with distinct rights and responsibilities represented the two main economic groups. Not only do oil workers’ land petitions belie this distinction, but they also show that laborers’ closeness to the oil fields being exploited by foreign companies influenced their conception regarding landownership and what constituted the patrimony of the nation. The rhetoric of resource nationalism that these laborers employed in their petitions for rural land begs for questions regarding postrevolutionary property regimes: How did industrialization change the patterns of land possession and property ownership in the postrevolutionary period? What did landownership represent for petroleum workers before and after the oil nationalization of 1938? This paper attempts to answer such questions and contribute to the expanding literature on the Mexican oil industry.