From Registrations to Unions: Street Workers and the Politics of Patronage in Morelia, Mexico, 1890–1935

In the nineteenth century (and before), several urban occupations were mandated to register officially with the municipal government. In this paper, I suggest how these municipal registration systems and the patronage networks they reinforced factored into the subsequent unionization movement of the same workers. Specifically, by investigating the pre-1917 antecedents to the unionization efforts of street porters, shoe shiners, and newspaper sellers in the mid-1920s and 1930s, this paper suggests how the organizing efforts of poor, service workers in the city used nineteenth-century regulations and registrations as a springboard for revolutionary changes.  The corporatist politics of the consolidating postrevolutionary state in the 1920s and 1930s under regional and national labor federations in Michoacán echoed features of Porfirian paternalism, yet simultaneously created important platforms for popular activism and social change in the Mexican city.