Disability across Borders: Labor Law, Medicine, and the Pullman Company’s Transnational Operations between Mexico and the United States, 1920–34

The operation of the American railroads across national boundaries, both physically and in the procurement of labor, generated a series of questions centered on how to safeguard the health of workers in a transnational workplace.  This paper investigates how the promulgation of Mexico’s Federal Labor Law in 1931 made legible the rights Mexican Pullman Company employees had in the physical and emotional injuries they endured while working on the Pullman’s transnational sleeping car lines between Mexico and the United States.  Prior to 1931, the Pullman Company often found itself importing U.S. state workmen’s compensation laws, such as the Illinois and Texas compensation laws, to handle the injury compensation claims filed by Mexican Pullman employees who worked as conductors, porters, waiters, and cooks.  By the fall of 1931, the Federal Labor Law—viewed by many as a fulfillment of the 1917 Constitution’s promises to protect Mexican worker health—was being administered through Mexico’s Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the Pullman Company and the Federal Board had competing ideas about what constituted a disability, and what aspects of the injury—physical, emotional—required monetary compensation.  Drawing from the Pullman Company records of physicians, lawyers, and labor agents, I argue that Mexico’s Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration interpreted and administered the Federal Labor Law in such a way that not only defined disability, but also forged a connection between health security and Mexican citizenship.